(The Daily Signal)—The FBI has confirmed that it severed all ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left activist group that puts conservatives and Christians on a “hate map” along with Ku Klux Klan chapters. The “hate map” has inspired at least one terrorist attack against a conservative organization.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “Their so-called hate map has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence.”
“That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership,” Patel added.
The FBI confirmed that it has no intelligence products from the SPLC and does not engage in contact or information sharing with the SPLC.
The statement comes days after Patel told Fox News Digital that the FBI had severed ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish nonprofit that opposes antisemitism but also leans left and condemns critics of transgender ideology.
How SPLC Inspired Violence
While the SPLC began as a public interest law firm focused on civil rights cases, it gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy and developed a decades-long relationship with law enforcement combatting real hate. After the Klan largely disappeared, the SPLC started targeting mainstream conservative and Christian groups, putting them on a “hate map” alongside Klan chapters.
In 2012, a domestic terrorist used the “hate map” to target the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian think tank in Washington, D.C. He planned to kill everyone in the building. A building manager largely foiled the attack, but suffered lifelong injuries in the process. The SPLC condemned the attack, but kept the council on the “hate map” ever since.
The man who opened fire at a Republican practice session for the Congressional Baseball Game in 2017, nearly killing then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, had “liked” the SPLC on Facebook. The SPLC condemned that attack, as well.
The SPLC added Turning Point USA to the “hate map” mere months before an assassin with a transgender boyfriend allegedly murdered Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
The SPLC condemned the attack, but has not removed Turning Point USA from the “hate map.”
A bureau official told The Daily Signal that the FBI was aware that the “hate map” included Turning Point USA before the shooting.
Patel’s Previous Criticism
Patel noted that he had previously criticized the SPLC at a panel on anti-Christian bias.
“In April, during our Anti-Christian Bias Panel, I made it clear that the FBI will never rely on politicized or agenda-driven intelligence from outside groups—and certainly not from the SPLC,” the FBI director told The Daily Signal. “Under this FBI, all ties with the SPLC have officially been terminated.”
At that April event, Patel slammed the FBI under President Joe Biden’s administration, particularly for the notorious memo in which the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, office (working with other field offices) urged agents to develop sources inside traditionalist Catholic churches and to target “Radical Traditional Catholic hate groups,” citing the SPLC.
Critics have long accused the SPLC of being anti-Christian, and the group responded to these claims by noting that it does not put all Christian groups on the “hate map.” For years, the SPLC cited its decision not to put the organization Focus on the Family on the “hate map” as evidence it wasn’t anti-Christian. This year, it added Focus to the map.
In 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions pledged that the Justice Department would not partner with groups like the SPLC. The Biden administration reversed that, however.
SPLC’s Impact
The SPLC has tremendous impact inside and outside of law enforcement.
Then-SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged in a 2021 donor meeting that “many agencies in the new Biden administration” reached out to “solicit our expertise” to “help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat.” That wasn’t hyperbole. The Justice Department received a briefing from the SPLC shortly after it added Moms for Liberty to the “hate map” in June 2023.
Big Tech companies like Amazon have used the “hate map” to screen recipients for its former AmazonSmile program, where customers could designate a portion of their purchases go to support certain charities and other nonprofits. Companies like Eventbrite, PayPal, and Hyatt Hotels have relied on the SPLC’s “hate” accusations to decide who they will allow to use their platforms and facilities. Donor networks worth billions have pledged to keep charitable funds from going to SPLC-labeled “hate groups.”
The SPLC enjoys this impact despite multiple scandals. The center fired its co-founder and saw its president resign in a 2019 racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal. Amid that scandal, SPLC staff created a union that is part of a union organization that represents the radical anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace. And amid a round of layoffs last year, the SPLC Union accused the center of engaging in “union-busting.”
Despite its penurious name, the SPLC has an endowment of more than $700 million, compensates its leaders handsomely, and possesses more than $30 million in offshore accounts, according to IRS filings.
Finally, the SPLC has troubling ties to Antifa, the loosely-organized movement of far-left agitators that President Donald Trump recently declared a domestic terrorist group.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.