The FBI trained personnel on countering extremism with material from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), according to former special agent turned whistleblower Steve Friend.
In an interview with the Tennessee Informer last month, Friend recalled his experience at the FBI Academy in 2014: “We were shown a video that was produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center.” The film, Friend said, “ranked people who oppose abortion, pro-life activists, as a greater threat than Islamists.”
“I don’t know if they still show that,” Friend added, “but that’s what we were shown.”
The FBI still relies on SPLC material a decade later, leading a pair of top Republican senators to demand the agency sever ties with the leftist hate group that routinely smears right-of-center associations as “hate groups.” SPLC’s false “hate group” designations led to a domestic terrorist attack in 2012 on the offices of a pro-family organization.
“The SPLC is known for disseminating its ‘hate group’ list, which contains at least 1,225 organizations, to Democrat allies in Congress, Big Tech, and woke corporations on a regular basis,” The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported last fall. “The activist hub recently aided the Biden regime’s quest to target concerned parents by sullying a dozen grassroots groups, including Moms For Liberty, as ‘anti-government extremist groups’ in its 2022 ‘hate and extremism’ report.”
The FBI also cited the SPLC to target traditional Catholics with counterterrorism resources, according to former agent Kyle Seraphin.
“The FBI should not lend credibility to an organization that labels traditional values as ‘hate,'” wrote Sens. Chuck Grassley and James Lankford last fall, adding “any use of SPLC data by the FBI” is “inappropriate and should be stopped immediately.”
More recently, the SPLC refused to answer Federalist inquiries about whether the SPLC would add Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Socialists of America to the list of “hate groups” following the far-left’s positive response to Hamas’s October terrorist attacks on Israel. The SPLC eventually responded to the attack, from which hostages are still being held and raped, by claiming Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian children.
The SPLC also lists the first Amendment legal non-profit, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) as a “designated hate group.” ADF has won cases at the Supreme Court 15 times, setting significant precedents in favor of Americans’ constitutional rights.
Friend was asked on the Tennessee Informer whether students at the FBI Academy pushed back at the use of a leftist hate group to train agents that pro-lifers are a worse threat than Islamic terrorists.
“There was some eye rolling,” Friend said, because his peers at the time were a group that “leans more conservative, more libertarian. “It’s probably very different now,” Friend added.
“When you’re at the Academy for the FBI, a lot of people are a little bit older,” Friend said. “Now the FBI is actually recruiting young people so they can indoctrinate them further.”