CV NEWS FEED // New reports show that a senior member of the Biden administration’s Department of Education (DOE) met with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) less than a year before the SPLC branded parental rights organizations as “hate groups.”
The Daily Signal Managing Editor Tyler O’Neil reported Monday that “Dietra Trent, executive director at the White House initiative on historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), met with [SPLC] staff on July 5, 2022.”
O’Neil noted that the discredited far-left activist group added pro-parent groups such as Moms for Liberty to their so-called “hate map” the following June.
“Taylor Emerson, then a confidential assistant to [Education Secretary] Miguel Cardona … organized the meeting,” O’Neil reported:
Nina Patel, then a senior policy counsel at the SPLC, reached out to Trent on May 10, 2022. “The SPLC has tracked extremist groups for over 50 years and has offered institutions and government officials practical, evidence-based recommendations and resources to understand and deal with these types of threats,” Patel wrote. “If we can be of any assistance, please do not hesitate to reach out.”
In his article, O’Neil provided photographic evidence of email correspondence between Patel and Trent.
Moms for Liberty co-foundress Tiffany Justice spoke with The Daily Signal about the revelations. “It is shocking to see in writing the evidence that innocent parents were harassed and targeted by their own federal government for exercising their right to free speech,” she said.
“We have known for some time the Biden administration has made it their mission to attack parents who publicly advocate for their children’s education,” Justice added. “Though the Biden administration would like to believe otherwise, parents are the only people that should get to make decisions on behalf of their children.”
Trent’s boss, Cardona, is a self-professed Catholic, despite openly supporting the LGBTQ movement.
>> REPORT CLAIMS SPLC MET WITH BIDEN WHITE HOUSE 11 TIMES <<
Earlier this month, CatholicVote’s McKenna Snow reported that a pro-parent group “recently found evidence that the Biden White House hosted the [SPLC] ‘at least 11 times in an effort to demonize concerned parents.’”
“The SPLC is a far-left activist group known for its labeling of many mainstream conservative nonprofit organizations as ‘hate groups,’” CatholicVote indicated in October.
“In doing this, they have placed groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), Family Research Council (FRC), and Moms for Liberty on the same list as the Ku Klux Klan,” added CatholicVote:
The SPLC has also been widely panned for its addition of so-called “radical traditionalist Catholicism” as a category of alleged “extremism.” It claims that the loosely defined group of Catholics “may make up the largest single group of serious antisemites in America.”
The infamous leaked Richmond memo from [early 2023] was directly attributed to this categorization by the SPLC. The memo, which was later revealed to have originated from at least three Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field offices, exposed the Bureau for targeting American Mass-going Catholics.
>> SPLC FACES DEFAMATION SUIT <<
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-KY, noted last month: “The SPLC has weaponized its designation of ‘hate group’ to target conservative persons, organizations, and non-profits who hold opposing viewpoints or policy positions.”
The SPLC’s hate map was linked to a 2012 domestic terrorist attack on the Family Research Council’s (FRC) Washington D.C. office.
“Trapped on the sixth floor, we knew someone had been shot,” Jessica Prol Smith recounted in a 2019 USA Today op-ed. Smith worked for the FRC at the time of the attack.
“We knew we couldn’t leave yet. We knew little else,” she continued:
It was the type of violent incident that one could expect a group that purportedly monitors “hate,” like the [SPLC], to notice, research and decry. In fact, we were on the center’s radar but for all the wrong reasons. The assailant acknowledged later in FBI testimony that he had selected our office precisely because the SPLC had labeled my employer a “hate group.”
>> TEACHERS UNION BOSS CITES SPLC TO ATTACK PARENTS <<
In a September 2013 press release, the Obama administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) stated that the gunman “entered the [FRC office] building with the intention of shooting and killing as many employees of the organization as he could.”
Due to the heroic intervention of FRC security guard Leo Johnson, no fatalities resulted from the attack. Johnson was shot in the arm in the process of confronting and disarming the attacker. Both survived the altercation.
The terrorist was eventually sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.
Again from CatholicVote:
In a 2019 tell-all piece published by The New Yorker, former SPLC employee Bob Moser said he and his coworkers often felt like they were “pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.”
