When I read that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had slammed the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA), for banning the use of its materials, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of schadenfreude. 

That’s because in July 2010 after I had published an op-ed for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution objecting to the ADL posters lining hallways of about 200 Atlanta area public schools and announcing they were “No Place for Hate,” I learned that my teaching days as an adjunct instructor at an Atlanta area community college were over—even though the director of freshman composition had just begged me to take on an extra class for the fall semester.

Too many people today, even reporters for Fox, still believe that the ADL adheres to its founding mission of combating anti-Semitism. Instead, today’s ADL is on a mission to combat “hate”—which it defines in the typical leftist fashion as “colonialism” and “white supremacy” or whatever can be associated with the West that it decides is objectionable. In the process, the ADL has affirmed NEA delegate Stephen Siegel’s doubts about the ability of that organization to determine “what constitutes antisemitism.”

Back in 2010, to pick up where my story dropped off, the ADL was not concerned as much about anti-Semitism as it was about gaining mind control of first graders. The larger effort at the time, by schools, nonprofit organizations, and governmental entities, to control people’s thoughts and feelings (as distinct from their actions) was the subject of my attack in that op-ed.

It began in a jocular way with my opening line, “I tell my college students to feel free to hate.” I pointed out that the then-assistant deputy secretary in the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, Kevin Jennings (also founder of the in-school gay advocacy group, GLESN), had expanded the concept of safety from one establishing an environment free of drugs and weapons to insisting on one free of “uncivil behavior, verbal threats, hate language, and social rejection.”

As The New York Times reported, parents were telling their children they could not have best friends and were encouraging non-exclusivity by scheduling group activities. I quoted from C.S. Lewis’s “Four Loves” on why “Authority” disapproves of friendship: because it takes away their power.

When I returned from my vacation that summer, I was the talk of the faculty break room. The college president knew my name. A memo had gone out advising all faculty henceforth to refrain from putting their institutional affiliation on op-eds. The one other conservative in the department got a lawyer friend to send a letter to the administration, however, and that guidance was retracted.

But, for me, there was no relief. I was to have no more classes to teach—ever. Eight days after my op-ed appeared, the then ADL Southeast Regional Director, Bill Nigut, a longtime fixture in Atlanta media (mostly leeching off taxpayers via Georgia Public Broadcasting), sent a letter to the editor complaining about my “cynicism” and “lack of knowledge.” The ADL’s aim, he claimed, was to “create an atmosphere” that would end the “taunting and bullying that take place in many schools.” He characterized my words as advancing a position I never took, when he said that I have a “disturbing belief that young people should feel free to unleash the hatred she contends they are being taught to suppress.” (I had limited my discussion to thoughts and feelings; at the same time the Obama administration, in ordering schools to count suspensions by race, was forcing schools to keep students who were violent and disruptive in classrooms.) Nigut then used the example of a girl who had been called “‘a dirty Jew’ on a social media site” or students who are “taunted mercilessly” for their sexual orientation.

I called Nigut. I had a follow-up question. But before I could ask it, Nigut began shouting, telling me I had no right to criticize the ADL and that he did not have to answer my questions.

After his stint with the ADL, Nigut returned to NPR. In 2023, he began co-hosting the “Politically Georgia” radio show, a collaboration between the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the public radio station, which lasted until January 2025.  He also wrote columns for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Like Maureen Dowd, whose Fourth of July weekend column this year attempted, she said, to bridge divisions in “a world of coarseness and cruelty, where Donald Trump and JD Vance excel,” by visiting the Monticello Jefferson-Adams letters exhibit, Nigut pretended to seek amity in similar fashion. In in an Oct. 21, 2024 column where he charged the then Republican candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance with spreading “disinformation” and “demoniz[ing] undocumented immigrants,” he also noted that the flawless Kamala Harris was challenged by those who opposed her because they were unable to accept a “woman of color—sitting behind the Resolute desk.”

Nigut, in his roles as journalist and ADL director, showed that he cared more about Democratic Party partisanship and advancing leftist causes than he did about reporting news or fighting anti-Semitism.

Like so many leftist tropes, the ADL’s campaign in the 2010s was implicitly aimed at white children. I recall strolling down the hallway of one suburban Atlanta school festooned with the group’s “No Place for Hate” posters. Also on prominent display were depictions of the symbols and victims of white supremacy movements, as though hate only moves in one direction. A decade later, the implicit became explicit when DEI programs and educational materials like The New York Times’ revisionist “1619 Project” further divided schoolchildren by race into oppressors and oppressed.

Today, “Hate Is Not Welcome Here!” signs festoon the lawns of my neighbors in the college town of Clinton, New York. I suspect, however, that I would get a Nigut-like response were I to show up on one of their doorsteps wearing a MAGA hat.       

The ADL continues to offer its trademarked lesson plan, advertising “No Place for Hate®” as “a self-directed program,” which promises to enable students, educators, and family members to “help your school create a more equitable and inclusive climate.” On-Demand Learning offers mini-lessons to help combat “bias and bullying as a means to stop the escalation of hate.” In 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term, the introduction to ADL’s impact report stressed the importance of such measures at “a time when some of our nation’s most visible leaders seem intent on fostering division and intolerance.”

Yet, as Philadelphia is discovering, documented cases of anti-Semitism are on the rise as the “No Place for Hate” program takes off in their schools. Ironically, the ADL recently was one of the groups appealing to the Philadelphia school district, objecting to Director of Social Studies Curriculum Ismael Jimenez’s rationalization of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attack, among other similar disturbing statements. According to Clifford Smith of the North American Values Institute, the “wider narrative” of this curriculum includes hatred of the United States and our founding principles—which is really the point.

According to the ADL’s “Primer on the New White Supremacy,” Western Civilization is code word for “white identity.” But anti-Western animus informs the idea of “settler colonialism,” which is the basis for today’s anti-Semitism and the majority of anti-Israel sentiment on campus. The ADL, in short, embraces the ideology that is responsible for the kind of hate they were originally established to combat. Any college campus protestor sticking up for “Palestine” can likely provide a classroom disquisition on why colonialism, the West, and whites are to blame for all the evils they see in the world. So can Democrat primary winner for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, who learned at the knee of his Columbia University professor father.

Maybe the ADL should have been more focused on terroristic threats against Western Civilization by non-Western civilizations than on thought crimes committed by elementary school students.