Southern Poverty Law Center suddenly shoves lesson plans for school children down the memory hole

One of the plot elements of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four was the “memory hole,” a chute leading to an incinerator, down which the regime’s Ministry of Truth would dump embarrassing news stories that had been rewritten to cover up official misdeeds and humiliations.

Click over to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s classroom resources page and you will get a 404 error. Next, try the archive lesson plan builder, where teachers can build themed units based on the SPLC’s lesson plans. Same thing, error code, and access is denied. Hundreds of lessons that were freely available to teachers last month, lessons that made their way into public school classrooms across the country, are now locked away or scrubbed entirely.

The SPLC’s memory hole sure has been getting a lot of use recently.

Last week the SPLC was indicted on federal charges of fraud, money-laundering and making false statements. They are accused of essentially promoting the same groups whose alleged bigotry and racism SPLC was claiming to fight against.

And alongside this their lesson plans disappear? Are they hiding? We need some accountability for an organization that operated in the dark for decades.

I spent fifteen years as a public school teacher in California. I know how those lessons ended up in front of kids. These SPLC-produced lessons were even included in the official curriculum for English Learners in my district. Learning for Justice is SPLC’s educational arm, formerly called Teaching Tolerance. I believe they abandoned that original name because these lessons were no longer about “teaching tolerance” but building resistance movements in our public schools.

The SPLC distribution model was simple. Teachers are exhausted and always looking for free, ready-made material. The SPLC provided it. In 2021 alone, more than half a million educational resources were downloaded from the site. Six hundred thousand copies of its magazine went out to teachers and districts nationwide.

What their lessons actually contained is what I wrote about three years ago: ready-made lessons for teaching radicalism in public schools. To be clear, for those who already have direct links to SPLC’s previous lessons, like me, they can still access them. But with the central lesson plan pages removed, the general public wouldn’t be able to find them easily.

A lesson named “Digital Activism Remixed: Hashtags for Voice, Visibility and Visions of Social Justice” teaches students to build social justice hashtag campaigns. “The Color of Law: Developing the White Middle Class” tells children that pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is a myth and the American Dream is a lie, or only for white American males. Lessons are built on the premise that the color of your skin determines your destiny in this country.

I saw these messages poison students. The SPLC called this educational material. I call it indoctrination, and it was funded by a nearly billion-dollar nonprofit.

The SPLC is a tragic example of what happens when a nonprofit is allowed to operate in the dark for too long. For decades, researchers at Capital Research Center documented the SPLC’s Civil Rights fundraising machine built on purposely exaggerated narratives of widespread (and possibly manufactured) racism.

Considering the SPLC’s many controversies, their accumulated wealth had no business sitting in a supposed charity’s bank account. Its most recent publicly available IRS Form 990 for 2024 showed $786.7 million in net assets. CharityWatch rated it an “F,” the lowest grade, because SPLC was hoarding enough assets to operate for more than five years without raising another penny. (This didn’t prevent the SPLC from sending out urgent “emergency” donation appeals to small-dollar donors.)

The SPLC’s notorious Hate Map lumped actual neo-Nazis alongside pediatricians who raised concerns about gender surgeries on children, mainstream Christian legal organizations, and conservative policy groups. The map wasn’t a public service, but rather a target list and a fundraising tool. More “hate groups” on the map meant more urgent appeals, more alarmed donors, more cash. Meanwhile, the SPLC was funneling millions offshore with documented transfers to the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.

That sounds a lot like the same kind of fat-cat billionaire behavior these leftist orgs pretend to oppose, all while presenting SPLC to donors as a lean, scrappy defender of the vulnerable.

Big donors never asked hard questions. JPMorgan Chase, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and George Clooney’s foundation all wrote checks, many of them after the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally that sent SPLC donations surging from $51.8 million to $133.4 million in a single year. At the time, nobody outside of SPLC’s leadership knew where the money was really going.

A potential answer arrived on April 21, 2026, when the SPLC was indicted on 11 counts of wire and bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege the organization secretly funneled more than $3 million to leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance. These are the very groups SPLC was publicly raising money to dismantle.

Perhaps most jaw-dropping: one SPLC informant, paid $270,000 over eight years, was allegedly a member of the leadership group that planned the Charlottesville rally. This is the same rally that triggered the flood of celebrity and corporate donations to the SPLC. Spending a quarter million to boost donations by tens of millions is quite a nice return on investment.

The SPLC calls the prosecution politically motivated. Maybe. As with all criminal defendants, they are innocent until proven guilty.

But the following facts are not political.

The SPLC’s own IRS filing reveals that the group with “poverty” right there in the name has banked away $787 million in net assets. It has done so by repeatedly hitting up donors for “emergency” cash yet paid its president nearly half a million a year in salary. And now, just as the spotlight started shining hot on what they really might have been doing with the loot—potentially funding their own racist boogeymen for financial gain—they scrub the lessons they have been feeding to schoolkids for years.

What else is hiding in their memory hole?

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/southern-poverty-law-center-suddenly-shoves-lesson-plans-for-school-children-down-the-memory-hole/