While the nation digests the bombshell federal indictment handed down against the Southern Poverty Law Center on April 21, 2026, most Americans are rightly focused on the hypocrisy. But the SPLC’s giant and malign influence in U.S. “education” should be under the microscope, too.
A grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, just charged the self-styled “civil rights” outfit with 11 counts for secretly funneling more than $3 million in donor funds to key figures within the very groups it claims to fight. The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and even the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of America benefited from the largess.
Criminal charges so far include wire fraud, false statements to banks, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. In short, prosecutors say the SPLC defrauded donors by paying extremists to “infiltrate” and then promote the very organizations it publicly denounced. Longtime critics of the SPLC were not surprised.
In fact, in 2018, this writer wrote an extensive report for the Law Enforcement Intelligence Brief warning about the SPLC’s dangerous lies and deception tactics. The report went to every police chief and sheriffs in America. The SPLC repeatedly attacked this writer, too, most recently in a hit piece on Charlie Kirk published just a couple of months before Kirk was assassinated.
The irony is thicker than the SPLC’s own smear dossiers. For decades, the far-left organization has positioned itself as the nation’s moral arbiter, branding Christian conservatives, pro-family groups, and even concerned parents as “hate” organizations while raking in hundreds of millions from gullible corporations and foundations.
Yet as investigative reporting has long documented—and as the indictment now confirms in court filings—the SPLC wasn’t just funding hate on the side. That was key to what its mission as it worked to delegitimize, dehumanize, and destroy mainstream figures and groups standing for God, faith, and country.
But just as troubling, if not more, is the fact that the SPLC was using donor money to target the hearts and minds of children nationwide. Indeed, the disgraced group was systematically weaponizing America’s classrooms to advance the same radical, anti-American ideology that animated the Weather Underground bombers of the 1970s.
Consider its flagship “Teaching Tolerance” program, later rebranded as “Learning for Justice” after years of scandal. This radical program has reached hundreds of thousands of public-school teachers with free curricula, magazines, and training materials that amount to cultural Marxism dressed up as “anti-bias” education.
This is not speculation. It is the same pattern this writer has exposed for years in outlets like The New American: the deliberate infiltration of K-12 education by far-left extremists who view schools not as places of learning, but as indoctrination centers for “social change.”
The “Teaching Tolerance” materials, which the SPLC claims are used by schools and educators reaching “millions of students,” attracted quite a bit of scrutiny and outrage. Indeed, the propaganda would likely upset just about any parent, regardless of their political views.
Under the guise of promoting what the intolerant SPLC calls “tolerance,” students in kindergarten through second grade taught SPLC “anti-bias” propaganda learn, among other absurdities, to ignore their parents and become cross-dressers if they feel like they were born in the wrong body.
That lesson comes from the book 10,000 Dresses by Marcus Ewert, one of several SPLC-recommended texts for K-2 “teaching tolerance” lessons on “gender” highlighted by activists and media reports. The book’s description on retailer Amazon’s website reads:
“Every night, Bailey dreams about magical dresses: dresses made of crystals and rainbows, dresses made of flowers, dresses made of windows.… Unfortunately, when Bailey’s awake, no one wants to hear about these beautiful dreams. Quite the contrary. ‘You’re a BOY!’ Mother and Father tell Bailey. ‘You shouldn’t be thinking about dresses at all.’ Then Bailey meets Laurel, an older girl who is touched and inspired by Bailey’s imagination and courage. In friendship, the two of them begin making dresses together. And Bailey’s dreams come true! This gorgeous picture book — a modern fairy tale about becoming the person you feel you are inside — will delight people of all ages.”
The SPLC’s education arm has distributed its materials to more than 400,000 educators nationwide, embedding lessons that pit children against their own country, their faith, their families, and basic biology.
Victims of the SPLC’s propaganda are also taught that America’s founding was irredeemably racist, that Western civilization is the root of all evil, and that “equity” demands tearing down merit, borders, and even the nuclear family.
The program’s “Hard History” framework on slavery, for instance, doesn’t stop at facts—it frames the entire American experiment as a perpetual crime against humanity, complete with recommended texts that echo critical race theory without using the term. America is portrayed as irredeemably evil, with fringe leftwing activists playing the role of savior.
Weaponizing American children by turning them into activists is clearly stated as the objective in the SPLC’s “outcomes” students are expected to meet.
In grades 6 through 8, for example, we read: “I will work with friends, family and community members to make our world fairer for everyone, and we will plan and coordinate our actions in order to achieve our goals.”
By 9th grade, students should be able to “describe how my own identity is informed and shaped by my membership in multiple identity groups.” They also need to “understand that diversity includes the impact of unequal power relations on the development of group identities and cultures.”
Critical Race Theory and Cultural Marxist identity politics are embedded throughout the program. For instance, students are to expected to be “aware of the advantages and disadvantages I have in society because of my membership in different identity groups, and I know how this has affected my life.” Identifying “strategies and philosophies relevant to the history of social justice around the world” is also key.
In its “anchor standards,” the framework says children should learn to think of themselves as typical collectivists, based on their “identity” in various “groups” — race, class, gender, sexuality, and so on. “Students will develop positive social identities based on their membership in multiple groups in society,” says the first anchor standard in the “identity” section.
In the “action” section it adds: “Students will plan and carry out collective action against bias and injustice in the world and will evaluate what strategies are most effective.” In other words, schools should produce legions of radical leftist social justice warriors to go out and demand wealth redistribution, Big Government, “tolerance” at gunpoint, and more.
The crowning hypocrisy? The SPLC’s open embrace of unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers—the man who helped bomb the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, and a police station, who declared war on America in the 1970s as a leader of the Weather Underground, and who never expressed genuine remorse.
In the spring 1998 issue of Teaching Tolerance magazine and on its website, the SPLC interviewed Ayers and hailed him as “a highly respected figure in the field of multicultural education.” The piece, titled “An Unconditional Embrace,” portrayed the Cuba-backed-terrorist-turned-education professor as a visionary who “developed a rich vision of teaching that interweaves passion, responsibility, and self-reflection.”
No mention of his dedication of the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire to “political prisoner” Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. No reference to his role in the group that killed police officers and plotted to overthrow the U.S. government. Just glowing praise for his “civil rights organizer” credentials and his “radical anti-Vietnam War activist” past.
This wasn’t a one-off. The SPLC’s education project marketed Ayers’s books and invited him into the fold as a model for teachers. Gabrielle Lyon, a fellow with the program, conducted the fawning interview.
Ayers, who once famously said he didn’t regret setting bombs but wished he’d done more, went on to become a key figure in radical education reform circles—helping to launch the political career of Barack Obama while helping shape the very “social justice” pedagogy now flooding classrooms.
The SPLC knew exactly who he was, of course. Everyone did. It simply didn’t care, because Ayers’s brand of revolutionary “education” aligned perfectly with its own agenda: turning schools into factories for dangerous leftwing activists who despise the family and country that nurtured them and the God who created them.
This writer has chronicled the broader assault on American education for more than a decade. In books like Woke & Weaponized co-authored with Classical Conversations CEO Robert Bortins and Indoctrinating Our Children to Death, this writer traces the Marxist roots of today’s “woke” curricula. The pattern is unmistakable, and groups like the SPLC and its fellow travelers have been critical players at every step.
The SPLC didn’t invent the school-to-indoctrination pipeline, but it supercharged it. Its “Teaching Tolerance” materials push everything from gender fluidity and open-borders propaganda to the notion that capitalism and Christianity are inherently oppressive. Teachers are encouraged to facilitate “social-action projects” rather than teach phonics or civics.
The goal is and has always been, as Ayers himself articulated in that SPLC interview, using the classroom as a vehicle for “social change”—code for cultural revolution. That is not what parents or teachers or even students signed up for. But that is what the SPLC, Ayers, and other subversives were peddling.
Even with the indictment, the stench of those SPLC programs, still in use despite the indictment, lingers in schools nationwide today. It will take decades to undo the damage done by the SPLC’s extremist propaganda in government schools, forced into the impressionable minds of children from coast to coast. But it must be done.
The indictment provides the perfect lens. While the SPLC was apparently paying Klansmen and neo-Nazis with donor cash, it was simultaneously flooding schools with propaganda that labels any pushback against its subversive agenda as dangerous “hate.”
Its infamous “hate map” and “extremist” lists have been used to intimidate school boards, dox parents at school-board meetings, terrorize decent people who want to speak out, pressure corporations into blacklisting conservative voices, and even choose targets for assassination.
Would-be mass-murderer Floyd Corkins SPLC propagands as the inspiration when he walked into the Family Research Council with a gun planning to murder as many people as possible and then shove Chik-Fil-A sandwiches into the mouths of his dead victims.
When parents and groups such as Moms for Liberty revolted against critical race theory and transgender ideology in 2020-2021, it was the SPLC that smeared them as inheritors of the Klan. All while cozying up to actual terrorists like Ayers.
The damage is incalculable. Generations of children have been taught to loathe their heritage, question their God-given identity, and view dissent as “violence” by a dishonest hate group. Test scores in reading, math, and history collapsed even as “social-emotional learning” (SEL) sessions—often laced with SPLC-style content—proliferate. Mental health among the youth has hit rock bottom.
As this writer has documented repeatedly, this is not incompetence. It is the fulfillment of a century-old strategy, from Marx to the Frankfurt School to modern “cultural Marxism,” to capture the institutions that shape young minds. The SPLC was a key financier and enforcer of that strategy.
The April 2026 indictment may finally force a reckoning. Donors are already fleeing. Lawmakers should follow suit by stripping the SPLC of any tax-exempt status or government contracts. Law enforcement must never again rely on this hate group or any of its ideological fellow-travelers.
More urgently, parents and policymakers must root out its materials from every public school. “Teaching Tolerance” is not about tolerance — it is about submission to a radical worldview that hates the West, the family, and ordered liberty. The fruit is rotten to the core.
The SPLC’s mask has slipped. What it did in the shadows of its “hate-fighting” operations pales next to what it did in broad daylight inside America’s classrooms. The corruption of education was not a side hustle. It was a key part of the mission.
Until that mission is exposed and dismantled, no amount of federal indictments will restore the Republic’s future. America’s children are watching—and the future of the nation hangs in the balance.
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Great article. Thank you.
The long march through the institutions is working perfectly transforming our children into good little socialists who will grow up to be good communists.
Seems like we already have plenty of them in government already !!!