The FBI appears, at least briefly, to have joined the Southern Poverty Law Center’s attempt to demonize Roman Catholics who follow the church’s teachings on marriage and who celebrate the Latin Mass, in a move one traditional Catholic leader calls both embarrassing and foreboding.
Michael J. Matt, editor of The Remnant newspaper and producer of Remnant TV in Forest Lake, Minnesota, said he was surprised to see his organization on a leaked FBI memo in February, alongside other groups he described as “defunct.”
The memo demonstrated the “FBI phoning it in,” he told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Friday. He said the list of “radical-traditional Catholic hate groups” in the FBI memo reminded him of the SPLC’s list tracing back to 2007, when Heidi Beirich, then head of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, and Rhonda Brownstein, then an SPLC lawyer, discovered his newspaper.
“They took Heidi Beirich and Rhonda Brownstein’s word for it, from 2007?!” he asked, incredulous.
“There has been an explosion of traditional Catholic groups since Pope Benedict XVI brought back the Latin Mass. None of the new groups who are in positions of real influence are targeted in the memo,” Matt explained.
As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has branded mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Former employees have condemned the “hate” labeling as a “highly profitable scam” tracing back to the co-founder’s talents as a fundraiser. In 2019, the SPLC fired that co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal, the full truth of which has yet to be revealed.
The FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, office cited the SPLC in a January memo, which the national FBI office publicly rescinded in February. That memo listed nine organizations, most of which the SPLC first added to the list of “hate groups” in 2007. The SPLC suggested that those organizations espouse and support antisemitism, and it has kept most of them on the list and the “hate map” for nearly two decades.
Matt went through the list and told The Daily Signal that many of the organizations are defunct. He said the SPLC attacked the groups in the memo due to their founders, most of whom are now deceased.
Robert Sungenis, founder of Catholic Apologetics International, told Matt that “the organization is done now.”
“Christ or Chaos, I think, is completely defunct,” Matt added, noting that it only ever amounted to two people. E. Michael Jones, who runs Culture Wars, “is not a Latin Mass Catholic at all and regularly attacks The Remnant.”
As for Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Town of Richmond, New Hampshire, it is a convent full of nuns.
“They just sat up there and said their prayers,” Matt told The Daily Signal. The SPLC targeted them because they followed the now deceased Father Leonard Feeney, who “was very serious about the doctrine that outside the church there is no salvation. They were serious about converting Jews.”
The only traditional Catholic groups on the list that remain “fairly active” are Tradition in Action, Catholic Family News, and The Remnant, he said.
Much of the attack comes down to a mistaken view of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Matt argued. “The SPLC are huge defenders of the Second Vatican Council, saying the Catholic Church was antisemitic, full of hate,” he said. “So, anybody who likes the old Latin Mass, that’s just code for hate, especially antisemitism. That’s the broad brush that they paint traditional Catholics with.”
Matt said the SPLC brands Catholics “extremists” if they “still accept traditional church teaching on faith and morals,” describing Vatican II as an “updating of the church’s moral teachings, even though the teachings of the church haven’t actually changed at all. If you look at a Catholic catechism now, it’s as opposed to gay marriage as it ever was. But they’re trying to say there’s this huge awakening or coming of age in the church, and traditionalists are dangerous because they still accept the pre-Vatican II teachings.” (The SPLC brands many conservative organizations “anti-LGBT hate groups,” due in part to their stances on traditional marriage.)
The SPLC has repeatedly attacked the Society of Saint Pius X, a traditional international priestly society that comprises almost 700 priests and supports the Latin Mass, accusing it of supporting antisemitism.
“The SSPX has priests from many races and ethnicities among their ranks, and welcomes anyone of any race or ethnicity to the treasures of the Catholic Church maintained in their chapels,” James Vogel, the SSPX director of communications, told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “Any claims of the SSPX espousing racial or ethnic hatred, by any group, are so clearly refuted by this reality that any further commentary seems absurd.”
“The SSPX also continues to reject antisemitism as anti-Catholic, as we say in no unclear terms,” Vogel added, citing the society’s statement on antisemitism.
“The Catholic Church teaches its members to pray that the Jewish people will recognize Jesus Christ as the Messiah and convert to the Catholic faith for their salvation,” the statement reads. “This perennial teaching of the church is motivated by supernatural charity, not hatred. The Catholic Church desires the happiness of all people, both in this life and the next.”
The Society of St. Pius X had a notable break with the Vatican in 1988, when its leader, Archbishop Marchel Lefebvre, consecrated four bishops without the approval of Pope John Paul II. Lefebvre was subsequently excommunicated, although the excommunication was later reversed. The SSPX remains unreconciled to the Roman Catholic Church. Cardinal Raymond Burke, archbishop emeritus of St. Louis. told podcast host Matt Fradd that “at the present moment they [Society of St. Pius X] are not part of the one Roman Catholic Church throughout the world.”
Similarly, Matt noted that it would be spiritually destructive for him to espouse hate.
“To hate anyone or to encourage anyone to hate would be a mortal sin. It damns your soul,” he said. He fondly recalled sitting down for an interview with a journalist at the Minneapolis newspaper City Pages back in 2015. He said the journalist, who was in a same-sex marriage, enjoyed his company and later called him up to talk about religion. The May 2015 article notes that of the eight “hate groups” the SPLC found in Minnesota, most appear defunct.
“The SPLC never cleans up,” Matt said.
Despite the many hits to its credibility, the SPLC still carries a great deal of weight. Many prominent Democrats cited the SPLC’s 50th anniversary in 2021, and President Joe Biden has nominated an SPLC attorney to a federal judgeship. Amazon used the SPLC “hate map” to screen applicants for its charity donation platform for years, and Apple CEO Tim Cook donated $1 million to the SPLC in 2017. The center has an endowment of more than $700 million and offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands.
In 2012, a gunman used the “hate map” to target the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., planning to shoot everyone in the building. He pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and is serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Matt recalled getting “spooked” when the SPLC first put him on the “hate map.”
“Our deal is the Latin Mass, and all of a sudden, we’re accused of hate and violence,” he said. “My wife was freaking out. We put security systems in our house. It is serious what they do to people.”
He described the FBI’s short-lived decision to cite the SPLC as foreboding.
“I have this suspicion that the SPLC was just laying the groundwork so that when the government gets far enough to the Left, they can start using these resources like the hate map to silence people,” he said.
At least one state government has done something similar. In 2019, Michigan Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel announced a “hate crimes unit,” referencing the SPLC’s “hate group” accusation. The Judeo-Christian law firm American Freedom Law Center responded with a lawsuit, which has been in limbo for years.
Neither the SPLC nor the FBI responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment by publication.
Article cross-posted from The Daily Signal.
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.