The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine, Patel wrote. He reserved criticism for the centre's interactive hate map, which identifies groups associated with hate and antigovernment activity and maps their bases of operation. 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 said.
It's definitely something worth looking into and I think anyone who denies that at this point is being wilfully ignorant. The administration is taking it seriously, all causes of violence, and why these people would be driven to such evil and such hatred, and there's probably many answers to that question. The administration is focused on all of them. For individual cases, of course the FBI and the Department of Justice are leading those.
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, called on the government agency to add what it called "Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism" to its list of domestic extremist groups in an effort to "detect, disrupt, and dismantle" groups it considered a threat. In its petition, the organisation cited the death of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk as an example of what it is calling "TIVE extremism," despite there being no definitive evidence that Kirk's death was related to trans people or issues.
On Monday night, Trump became the first US president to sue the New York Times, for defamation to the tune of $15bn. Where does he even come up with this? wondered Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday evening. These are like numbers my children make up when they're talking about money. I thought he said the New York Times was failing, he added.
The degradation of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships under Kristi Noem highlights how governmental efforts to combat domestic extremism under Trump have substantially diminished.