What if you found out your child was being taught in school that the police should be “reformed, transformed or abolished”? That Georgia’s new election laws that seek to restore election fairness and prevent fraud instead “restrict and suppress voting across the state”? Or that states must out of fairness allow transgender males to compete in girls and women’s sports? What if your four-year-old daughter was reading books suggesting that she may actually be a lesbian?
These are just some of the “lesson plans” in an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) program called “No Place for Hate” (NPFH) that is being taught in about 16,000 schools across the nation.
The ADL was formed in 1913 with the worthy goal of combating antisemitism, but has become a militant activist engine fueling the radical indoctrination of school children in the extreme left’s wish list – anti-police; damning laws for honest elections as “voter suppression”; promoting transgender males competing in girls sports; and confusing children not very far out of diapers with the LGBTQ claim that they may not in fact be their “assigned gender.”
In Douglas County, Colorado, where I live, this ripped-from-the-headlines extremist agenda was implanted by district administration into 34 schools (out of 89) -- primary, secondary and high schools -- in the 2020-2021 school year according to documents I obtained through several Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) requests. And it’s not just an agenda – it’s deliberate, highly-focused training designed to enlist young people from elementary school to high school into a radical army of woke social justice warriors.
The NPFH Resource Guide dispels any misapprehension that NPFH is about promoting kindness, harmony, or even “inclusion.” The section titled “Move on From Kindness. Schools Need to Foster Social Justice” uses as an example, students who marched against gun ownership after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school massacre. The Guide instructs teachers: “If we want young people to understand how to engage in changing systems and society, it is critical that adults encourage them to do so by providing opportunities to practice while imparting the necessary skills and knowledge. The first step is to facilitate students’ learning about the issues in a rigorous and complex way, and then to get them involved in action, advocacy and/or activism.”
How do schools get transformed into activist training camps for kids? Selling itself as a compassionate, altruistic, anti-bullying program to fight racism and “help your school create a more equitable and inclusive climate” which has become a dominant theme in the Strategic Plans implemented by state Boards of Education as well as individual school districts nationwide, No Place for Hate, like Critical Race Theory, instead peddles the left’s divisive political catechism known as “equity.”
Typical is the “Equity Policy”, passed unanimously by the Douglas County Board of Education in March. It pledges to give students and staff “equitable educational opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity, religion, national origin, marital status, disability, socio-economic status, or eligibility for special education services.” Further, “the Board of Education commits to …if necessary, restructuring of current curricular and instructional resources…to ensure representation, accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion within all School District-approved curriculum.”
In panicky response to scores of parents speaking out at school board meetings, protesting what is in essence Critical Race Theory coupled with “gender identity” (the LGBT etc. agenda) the superintendent assured one and all there will be no curriculum changes, a pledge clearly contradicting the Policy itself. But the District doesn’t really need to alter the curriculum because No Place for Hate is doing all the indoctrination for them. Pretty clever.
The real intent of NPFH is easy to discern in the devilish details. This is from a high school lesson plan titled “Why are states trying to ban transgender student athletes?” which sidesteps the real issue - biological males who call themselves female stealing girls’ sports trophies and scholarships by unfairly competing with them on female teams. Instead, the lesson claims that transgenders are being denied participation in ALL school sports, a blatant lie.
“In 2020, twenty bills in eighteen states were introduced by state legislatures to limit athletes who are transgender from competing on sports teams. ..if the bills pass, these students would be restricted to playing sports based on their sex assigned at birth, not their gender identity…” Never discussed is the right of girls and women to take their places on the winner’s podium instead of defeated by the unfair male testosterone advantage.
The specific rallying call to deputize young transgender “rights” activists is in this “Learning Objective”:
Students will explore actions they can take about these bills or transgender rights in general.
Here’s a look at one of the NPFH’s “10 phenomenal books to read for lgbtq pride month” titled “Jacob’s New Dress” introducing four-year-olds to gender dysphoria Jake. Yes, four-to-eight- year-olds. “Jacob loves playing dress-up, when he can be anything he wants to be—a pirate, a bird, a firefighter. But he also wants to just be himself and wear his favorite thing… a dress! Now Jacob has a new dress that he made himself and what he wants most of all is to wear it to school. Will Mom and Dad let him?”
This isn’t education, its LGBTQ recruitment training outrageously inappropriate for young children in a classroom setting. Every child is different, and only parents know when and if it’s time to introduce homosexuality to their children – and it’s probably not at age four. At the same time that it usurps parents’ right to teach values, this radical training also sets up an emotional conflict for the child between his parents and his often-revered teachers who are actively shaping the youngster’s mind for four to eight hours a day.
Every book on this list promotes gay and lesbian programming and even transgenderism for students of all ages. Here’s “George” – a book recommended for eight to 12- year-olds: “When people look at George, they think they see a boy. But she knows she's not a boy. She knows she's a girl. George thinks she'll have to keep this a secret forever. Then her teacher announces that their class play is going to be Charlotte's Web. George really wants to play Charlotte. But the teacher says she can't even try out for the part ... because she's a boy. With the help of her best friend, Kelly, George comes up with a plan. Not just so she can be Charlotte—but so everyone can know who she is, once and for all.”
Tearing down the traditional family by vying with parents for their children’s loyalties doesn’t stop with lessons in gender dysphoria. The NPFH curriculum also aggressively parrots the left’s standard dogma on controversial political issues like BLM, policing, election integrity, and more.
The opening page of a lesson on “The Future of Policing in the U.S.” depicts a fence plastered with posters promoting BLM’s protest slogans: “No justice no peace,” “Rise Up BLM,” “End Police Brutality,” “Racism is a Pandemic,” “Black Lives Matter” and other activist tropes.
The lesson begins with a description of George Floyd’s killing and then notes “following Floyd’s murder, one of the largest protest movements in U.S. history took place.” Nowhere is the Antifa and BLM torching of cities like Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and Chicago, the savage street beatings, the looting and destruction of millions of dollars in often black-owned businesses, or the murders committed by these violent radicals even mentioned. Students are told to discuss whether the police should be “reformed, transformed or abolished” – and the incendiary BLM signs covering the fence graphically display the proper cop-hating response.
Another lesson, “Let’s Talk About Voting” (for ages 10 and up) observes “At various times in history, different groups of marginalized people were prevented from voting,” ignoring that the racists who created the poll tax and literacy tests to deny blacks the vote for decades were Democrats. The lesson claims that today state laws “restrict voting and highlight discriminatory practices” by requiring voter ID laws or proof of citizenship. The lesson also condemns “voter purging,” meaning the cleaning of voter rolls as required by law to eliminate dead people and those who have moved. This NPFH dogma is straight from the far-left Biden Senate 1 and House 1 bills that would legalize anything-goes voter fraud and ban voter ID.
A follow-up lesson teaches “about the law Georgia passed that restricts and suppresses voting across the state.” More lies and indoctrination from the left’s greatest hits.
ADL contends these lessons “promote critical thinking and learning around historical and current events topics through the lens of diversity, bias and social justice.” But the real agenda is turning kids into a leftist social justice army, outlined in “10 ways Youth Can Engage in Activism” – a section labeled for educators, not for parental review. In the photo a group of young people wearing “Dreamer” t-shirts are staging a sit-in on a street with police cars nearby. The section encourages teachers to give students ways to “do something about the injustice they see in the world…by bringing social activism into the classroom and outside of the school walls.”
Many of the examples urge left wokery action, such as writing letters protesting toys “gender-role stereotypes,” becoming involved in the “Gay-Straight Alliance,” holding bake sales to fight injustice “like racial disparities in the criminal justice system.” And political protesting – creating posters, songs and chants for “marching in the streets,” which of course is “uplifting and empowering” and never dangerous, parents.
Or how about this for social justice activism - telling hundreds of powerful executives at a World Federation of Advertisers meeting that they must pull their ads from the Tucker Carlson show -- and in fact demand FOX to fire him. That’s the so very inclusionary, non-biased and anti-bullying tirade that ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt unleashed recently, accusing Carlson of being a white supremacist because the FOX host had opined that Democrat open-border policies may be designed to dilute the voting power of Americans. Seems Greenblatt may have flunked No Place for Hate.
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado based journalist and author who has written for Townhall, American Thinker, The Washington Times, The Federalist, the Daily Caller, and others. Follow her on Facebook and on Twitter @joyoverbeck1.
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