Nicholas Giordano writes for the Federalist about a story behind the headline of a recent federal indictment.
The real Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) scandal isn’t just the indictment. The deeper scandal is that the FBI used a highly partisan activist group as an unelected, unvetted intelligence wing of the federal bureaucracy. For years, the bureau didn’t just consult the SPLC. It folded the group’s ideology into its threat assessments and other work products, then used those products to brand Americans as hateful or flag them as potential domestic violent extremists.
I warned in June 2021 that the Biden administration’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism” provided the blueprint for this institutional capture. Specifically, Pillar 1 of the strategy formalized public-private partnerships and relied on “non-governmental analysis” to identify threats. That framework greenlit a backdoor around the Constitution. By treating the SPLC’s partisan analysis as a substitute for sworn evidence, the government laundered ideological narratives into official federal threat assessments. This shadow intelligence partnership was not an accident.
The FBI’s Richmond memo, better known as the anti-Catholic memo, showed exactly what that pipeline looked like in practice. The FBI used the SPLC’s analysis to define so-called “radical-traditionalist Catholics” by their opposition to abortion, LGBT ideology, and adherence to traditional family values. Sen Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed that one Richmond analyst produced a slide presentation that equated Catholic beliefs in “[c]onservative family values/roles” with ideas “[c]omparable to Islamist ideology.”
Despite former FBI Director Christopher Wray’s claim that the anti-Catholic memo was the work of “a single field office” with limited distribution, the records tell a different story. Multiple field offices were involved, the memo was distributed to more than 1,000 agents and employees, and congressional investigators uncovered at least 13 more documents using similar SPLC-driven “anti-Catholic terminology.” Ideological narrative laundering became the FBI’s standard practice.
FBI officials themselves recognized the problem.
