by Roger Kimball
The FBI once chased Catholics and parents with the SPLC’s “hate map.” Now, under Trump, the grifters are exposed and America’s institutions are being reset.
Remember the good old days when the FBI would hang out in the parking lots of Catholic churches where the traditional Latin Mass was celebrated? The Bureau claimed that such churches were a breeding ground for what the Biden administration called “domestic extremism” and offered plenty of scope for what the FBI called “mitigation opportunities.” Hence, they jotted down the license plate numbers of the parishioners who just got done reciting really dangerous things like “Sanguis Christi custodiat me in vitam aeternam.” “See? See? They’re talking about blood!”
Those were the days. You could go to a school board meeting and watch hapless parents being tackled and hauled off by the police for complaining that they didn’t want little Johnny battened on books like Gender Queer or, come to that, they didn’t want that bloke Jack, who called himself Jill, moseying about the girl’s bathroom or playing touch football on the girls’ team. Wot larks!
That’s all over now. Sure, here and there, you will discover some pasty-faced feminist festooning her classroom with pride flags and banners instructing us to “globalize the intifada” or whatever. But those pathetic eructations are like the twitching of a frog’s legs after the dissection has begun: vestigial motor movements produced by stimulus, not life.
The magnificent address by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth last week was evidence of the new dispensation: “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses,” Hegseth said to the hundreds of senior officers he had summoned. “No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris.”
Whence this Novus ordo seclorum? Why, from Donald Trump, of course. It was he, barely inaugurated for the second time, who banned all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives from any organization that received federal (i.e., taxpayer) funds and then went on to remake large swathes of the apparatus that governs us and the narratives through which we understand our identity and obligations as Americans.
The whirlwind that is Donald Trump has not slackened. If anything, it has picked up force and velocity since the heady days following his resumption of office on January 20, 2025. Eventually, we will be able to provide an inventory and assessment of Trump’s activities as the 47th president of the United States. That moment has not yet come.
Still, we can minute the results of individual initiatives. Pete Hegseth’s welcome call for warriors to be warriors, not social justice warriors, was one such result. So was FBI Director Kash Patel’s decision to cut all ties between the FBI and such racist, though putatively anti-racist, organizations as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Time was, the SPLC was the scourge of all manner of conservative organizations and individuals. The FBI would regularly consult its notorious “hate map” to see which Catholics, concerned parents, and Trump supporters they should monitor and harass. In a wide-ranging anatomy of the SPLC from 2019, the former DOJ lawyer J. Christian Adams summed up the SPLC as a “denunciation machine.” The founders of the SPLC, Adams noted, “built an effective fundraising machine that could raise hundreds of millions of dollars by exaggerating claims that America was filled with Nazis and dangerous conservatives. They succeeded in marginalizing groups that enjoy broad respect and espouse views that were mainstream only a decade ago.”
In the bad old days before Elon Musk extracted Twitter from its bondage to an Orwellian commitment to censorship and rebaptized it “X,” the social media platform relied in part on the SPLC to inform its “Trust and Safety Council,” a darkly comic effort to police speech and enforce ideological conformity on its platform. The left-wing online reference site Wikipedia continues to this day to rely on the SPLC’s “hate map.” Its entry on the David Horowitz Freedom Center, for example, bluntly informs readers in its opening paragraphs that the organization is “designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.” The world awaits the advent of “Grokipedia,” Musk’s promised alternative to “hopelessly biased” Wikipedia.
The commentator who described the SPLC’s “hate list” as “really a hit list” got it exactly right. Last May, Charlie Kirk noted that “The SPLC has added [Kirk’s organization] Turning Point to their ridiculous ‘hate group’ list, right next to the KKK and neo-Nazis, a cheap smear from a washed-up org that’s been fleecing scared grandmas for decades.” Somehow, Kirk noted, they
still rake in over $100 million a year peddling their “hate map” nonsense, sitting pretty in their Montgomery “Poverty Palace” while crying about “hate” to line their pockets. Even former staffers called their racket a “con.”
Their game plan? Scare financial institutions into debanking us, pressure schools to cancel us, and demonize us so some unhinged lunatic feels justified targeting us. Remember the Family Research Council? An SPLC-inspired gunman went after them. They’d love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs.
But it’s 2025, and nobody with a functioning brain buys their garbage anymore. The SPLC is a laughingstock, a hollowed-out husk of an organization that’s been exposed as a grift time and time again. They’re not just irrelevant—they’re a cautionary tale of how to torch your own credibility.
How dangerous is the SPLC? The commentator Jack Posobiec notes that “One day before Charlie was shot and killed, he was featured in the SPLC’s ‘Hatewatch’ newsletter.” I am inclined to agree with Musk’s observation: “SPLC is guilty of incitement to murder Charlie Kirk.”
Back in 2023, in a column about the SPLC’s attack on traditional Catholics, an author for the Heritage Foundation cut to the chase. “The FBI,” he wrote,
has no business citing the SPLC’s discredited “hate map,” which inspired a terrorist to target the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., in 2012. The gunman told the FBI that he intended to shoot everyone in the building and smear Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches in their faces, sending a clear ideological message at a time when Chick-fil-A’s foundation had come under fire for funding socially conservative organizations.
Kash Patel is right to cut the FBI’s ties with the SPLC. It is part of the more general Trumpian reordering of the way our government does business, which is also a rewriting of the script directing our national self-understanding. We must wait a while for the denouement to reveal itself, but the route there has already shown us what civilizational recovery looks like. It is a pleasing and uplifting spectacle.
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/05/trumps-second-term-resets-washingtons-playbook/
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