It was with those words that the amazing thing happened: Maher’s audience applauded. Over the years, Maher’s audiences have always been trained seals, reliably clapping at every hard left, anti-George Bush, anti-Trump, pro-Obama statement the host utters. But this time, he said that the BLM rap pushing Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) on American society is dangerous insanity – and the audience clapped.
The headlines were about the fact that, when Megyn Kelly appeared on Bill Maher’s HBO show on Friday, she complained about the way her children’s pricey private schools in New York were indoctrinating them with pro-transgender values and anti-white animus. Bill Maher to his credit, agreed with Kelly that matters are getting seriously out of hand, at least when it comes to the anti-white hatred that’s becoming the norm in education. Maher’s always been a bit of maverick, though. The real surprise was the enthusiasm his audience showed for that sentiment.
For conservatives, nothing that Kelly said about her children’s experiences in New York’s toniest private elementary schools came as a surprise. Kelly said that, while she and her husband identify as “center-right,” she was okay with the fact that the schools were on the left side of the political aisle. That changed, though, when “they went hard left, and then they started to take a really hard turn toward social justice stuff.”
One of the hot-button issues was the schools’ efforts to normalize transgenderism, a form of body dysphoria that’s recognized as a mental illness when the subject is anorexia, not sex. Kelly told Maher that, when one of her sons was in third grade – that is, 8 years old, the school “unleashed a three-week experimental trans-education program.”
Not only did the children find it terribly confusing, but Kelly also said that what was going on was more like coercion than teaching tolerance. Thus, she said, “It wasn’t about support — we felt that it was more like they were trying to convince them. Like, come on over.”
The same pressure was applied to her other son who, in kindergarten was made to participate in a class project that saw the children writing to the Cleveland Indians to complain about their mascot. “He’s six,” she said. Can he learn how to spell Cleveland before we activate him?”
That’s when Kelly dropped a line that should be at the forefront of every single parent’s brain as he or she fights the school’s efforts to coopt American children: “If he’s going to be activated, Doug [Kelly’s husband] and I should do it.” It’s up to the parents, not the schools, to set values for the children – but of course, that’s not how leftists see it.
Maher then chimed in that he’d been hearing from parents – leftist parents – about the relentless anti-white activism the New York schools, both public and private, are pushing.
And this is what I’ve heard from parents – and these are all liberal, by the way – who say, “My kids are not ready to be told they’re white supremacists.” You know, I’m not ready to be told.
[snip]
You talked about this letter the school put out. … Can I read some of the things that are from this letter, lest people think I’m losing my mind?
“There’s a killer cop sitting in every school where white children learn. White children are left unchecked and unbothered in their homes,” one sentence starts. Well, how old do you have to be before you can just be unchecked and unbothered. You know, what age to you get bothered?
“I’m tired of white people reveling in their state-sanctioned depravities, snuffing out black lives with no consequences.” You know, “go reform white kids.”
You know, it bothers me so much that I have to be on this side [Kelly’s side] of this issue. Because I’ve always been a civil rights advocate. You know, don’t make me Tucker Carlson. You’re the f***ing nuts. This is insane.
“As black bodies drop like flies around us by violent white hands.” There is racist problems in this country. But this is hyperbole, and this is making people crazy.
It was with those words that the amazing thing happened: Maher’s audience applauded. Over the years, Maher’s audiences have always been trained seals, reliably clapping at every hard left, anti-George Bush, anti-Trump, pro-Obama statement the host utters. But this time, he said that the BLM rap pushing Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) on American society is dangerous insanity – and the audience clapped.
When evil or crazy people — that would be the BLM, CRT crowd – take the bit in their mouths, there is no stopping the extremes to which they’ll go. Perhaps the reaction from Maher’s audience is telling us that the American people are finally ready to rein them in. After all, a leftist audience realized, as Kelly and Maher did, that the left’s anti-white racism is going to destroy America.
Are you dissatisfied with the November 2020 elections? If you value constitutional liberty, the results may actually give reason for hope.
I don’t care much about party labels, but during the campaign season one of our major parties seemed to embrace large doses of socialism in practice if not in name: Medicare for all, free college, government takeover of economic activity in a “Green New Deal,” etc. Some of their most prominent candidates practiced race-based identity politics and peddled a “woke” view of America as congenitally unjust.
Their presidential candidate may have won the popular vote. But voters did not ratify his party’s posture. Instead of gaining, his party lost seats in the House of Representatives, and the other party—the one that, despite its faults, vociferously rejected woke socialism—held statehouses and governorships across the country and may likely hold its U.S. Senate majority. The blue wave was a ripple against a red crosscurrent.
Moreover, the siren song of identity politics rang false to many. African-American and Hispanic voters gave the Democratic candidate a lower percentage than in any recent election. To be sure, 80% of Black men voted Democrat. But this was down from 95% support for Barack Obama in 2008, 87% for Obama in 2012, and 82% for Clinton in 2016. Forget the partisan dimension: it is healthy when citizens reject race-driven identity politics.
Election results held surprises even in California, supposedly the bastion of Big Government. Even while they voted two-to-one for the Democratic presidential candidate, California voters rejected measures he endorsed on the state ballot. They rejected expansion of rent control (Proposition 21), race-based affirmative action (Proposition 17), increased property taxes on businesses (Proposition 15), and the essence of California’s Assembly Bill 5 restricting independent contractors (by supporting Proposition 22).
The Independent Institute had something to do with this. We had already won key arguments in the court of public opinion. For example, our “Open Letter to Suspend AB-5,” signed by 153 Ph.D. scholars across California and widely promoted, successfully made the case against California’s war on the “gig economy”—thus enhancing momentum for Proposition 22.
Likewise, we argued against a state-mandated “ethnic studies” curriculum, which would have taught high-schoolers that “capitalism is racist” and accused Jews, Koreans, the Irish, Armenians and other minorities of “white privilege” for simply working hard and succeeding. Our arguments in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other outlets, influenced Gov. Gavin Newsom to veto the mandated curriculum. And, this victory against racialism carried over into voters’ rejection of Proposition 17.
In California, as elsewhere, Americans were not sold on woke, nor on socialism. Most Americans like America—including individual liberty and the rule of law. This is good news indeed and shows the power of good ideas over bad ones!
An elementary school in Cupertino, California – a Silicon Valley community with a median home price of $2.3 million – recently forced a class of third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”
Based on whistleblower documents and parents familiar with the session, a third-grade teacher at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School began the lesson on “social identities” during a math class. The teacher asked all students to create an “identity map,” listing their race, class, gender, religion, family structure, and other characteristics. The teacher explained that the students live in a “dominant culture” of “white, middle class, cisgender, educated, able-bodied, Christian, English speaker[s],” who, according to the lesson, “created and maintained” this culture in order “to hold power and stay in power.”
Next, reading from This Book Is Antiracist, the students learned that “those with privilege have power over others” and that “folx who do not benefit from their social identities, who are in the subordinate culture, have little to no privilege and power.” As an example, the reading states that “a white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman.” In some cases, because of the principle of intersectionality, “there are parts of us that hold some power and other parts that are oppressed,” even within a single individual.
Following this discussion, the teacher had the students deconstruct their own intersectional identities and “circle the identities that hold power and privilege” on their identity maps, ranking their traits according to the hierarchy. In a related assignment, the students were asked to write short essays describing which aspects of their identities “hold power and privilege” and which do not. The students were expected to produce “at least one full page of writing.” As an example, the presentation included a short paragraph about transgenderism and nonbinary sexuality.
The lesson caused an immediate uproar among Meyerholz Elementary parents.
“We were shocked,” said one parent, who agreed to speak with me on condition of anonymity.
“They were basically teaching racism to my eight-year-old.”
This parent, who is Asian-American, rallied a group of a half dozen families to protest the school’s intersectionality curriculum. The group met with the school principal and demanded an end to the racially divisive instruction. After a tense meeting, the administration agreed to suspend the program. (When reached for comment, Jenn Lashier, the principal of Meyerholz Elementary, said that the training was not part of the “formal curricula, but the process of daily learning facilitated by a certified teacher.”)
The irony is that, despite being 94 percent nonwhite, Meyerholz Elementary is one of the most privileged schools in America. The median household income in Cupertino is $172,000, and nearly 80 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher. At the school, where the majority of families are Asian-American, the students have exceptionally high rates of academic achievement and the school consistently ranks in the top 1 percent of all elementary schools statewide. In short, nobody at Meyerholz is oppressed, and the school’s high-achieving parents know that teaching intersectionality instead of math is a waste of time—and potentially dangerous.
One parent told me that critical race theory was reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
“[It divides society between] the oppressor and the oppressed, and since these identities are inborn characteristics people cannot change, the only way to change it is via violent revolution,” the parent said.
“Growing up in China, I had learned it many times. The outcome is the family will be ripped apart; husband hates wife, children hate parents. I think it is already happening here.”
The small fight at Meyerholz reflects a larger development: for the first time, Asian-Americans on the West Coast have become politically mobilized. In 2019, Asian-Americans ran a successful initiative campaign against affirmative action in Washington State; in 2020, Asian-Americans ran a similar campaign in California, winning by an astonishing 57 percent to 43 percent margin. In both cases, they defended the principles of meritocracy, individual rights, and equality under the law—and roundly defeated a super-coalition of the states’ progressive politicians, activists, universities, media, and corporations.
The stakes are high for the Asian-American community. For progressives insisting on the narrative of “white supremacy” and “systemic racism,” Asian-Americans are the “inconvenient minority”: they significantly outperform all other racial groups, including whites, in terms of academic achievement, college admissions, household income, family stability, and other key measures. Affirmative action and other critical race theory-based programs would devastate their admissions to universities and harm their futures.
At Meyerholz Elementary, the Asian-American families are on high alert for critical race theory in the classroom. Since their initial victory, they have begun to consider campaigning against the school board.
“We think some of our school board members are [critical race theory] activists and they must go,” said one parent.
The capture of our public institutions by progressives obsessed by race and privilege deserves opposition at every level. The parents of Cupertino have joined the fight.
This article is part of an ongoing series on critical race theory in American schools.
But whereas a previous generation of anti-racists challenged the social significance attributed to biological differences to argue that there was one race, the human race, and emphasised universal traits that create a common humanity irrespective of skin colour, critical race theorists argue that, once constructed, race becomes an incontestable fact. As Robin Di Angelo explains in White Fragility: ‘While there is no biological race as we understand it, race as a social construct has profound significance and shapes every aspect of our lives.’ (1)
2020 has been shaped by two things. Coronavirus – and our response to it – has dominated every aspect of our lives. But something else has gripped us this year, too: anti-racism. In May, shocked by the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, people all around the world emerged from lockdown to participate in Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. In the UK, statues fell, public figures knelt in solidarity and many people blacked out their social-media posts for a day. Schools, universities and workplaces stepped up diversity training and anti-racist initiatives.
There have been protests against racism in the past, of course. But this year has been different. Never before have people on every continent, in countries and towns facing their own unique problems, turned out in such huge numbers to support the same cause. Never before have books like White Fragility, Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race and How To Be An Antiracist become international bestsellers. And never before has a protest movement had such establishment backing. In the UK, BLM has been publicly endorsed by the royal family, the football Premier League, and senior politicians. Multinational corporations have got in on the act, too. Ice-cream maker Ben and Jerry’s has pledged to do all it can to dismantle white supremacy, while elite universities have issued statements denouncing their own institutional racism.
The mainstreaming and elite-backing of anti-racism initiatives speaks to a new understanding of racism. Critical race theory (CRT) used to be a minority pursuit, an obscure academic interest. In 2020 it provided the rationale for protests, books, diversity workshops and school lessons. In June, Channel 4 screenedThe School That Tried to End Racism, a documentary series that followed the progress of children made to undergo an anti-racist re-education programme based upon principles of CRT. New phrases entered our vocabulary. Terms like systemic racism, unconscious bias, white privilege, cultural appropriation, reparations, microaggression and intersectionality migrated from academics and activists to newspapers, radio discussions, charity campaigns and school lessons. President Trump and Kemi Badenoch, the UK’s minister for equalities, made speeches explicitly naming CRT and calling out its perniciousness.
What is Critical Race Theory?
CRT begins with a challenge to the ‘scientific’ racism of the 19th and early 20th century. In the days of empire, colonial exploitation and slavery were justified by a belief that white people were physically, mentally and morally superior to the people they ruled over. This view extended to the working class at home, who were portrayed as genetically distinct from and inferior to the upper class. This biological understanding of race began to be called into question after the Second World War, although its legacy continued to play out in Apartheid-era South Africa, Jim Crow laws in the American South and discrimination in the UK.
Critical race theorists are not the first to point out that race is socially constructed; that is, it is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but created and made meaningful by people collectively, over time and place. Few today disagree with this point. But whereas a previous generation of anti-racists challenged the social significance attributed to biological differences to argue that there was one race, the human race, and emphasised universal traits that create a common humanity irrespective of skin colour, critical race theorists argue that, once constructed, race becomes an incontestable fact. As Robin Di Angelo explains in White Fragility: ‘While there is no biological race as we understand it, race as a social construct has profound significance and shapes every aspect of our lives.’ (1)
Protesters hold placards in Parliament Square during a demonstration on 20 June 2020 in London.
When race is seen in this way, racism is understood as systemic; that is, built into the very fabric of societies designed by white people, for the benefit of white people. Proponents of CRT argue that ideas of white superiority and black inferiority are intrinsic to our language, culture and interpretations of history. Every aspect of our daily lives, from education, policing, the health service and employment assumes a white norm, they argue, and this makes a mockery of equality before the law and the liberal notion of equality of opportunity. As Reni Eddo-Lodge explains in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race: ‘If you’re white, your race will almost certainly positively impact your life’s trajectory in some way. And you probably won’t even notice it.’ In an inescapably circular argument, race is constructed and made meaningful through racism; it is people’s everyday experiences within a racist society that create the reality of race.
The Origins of Critical Race Theory
CRT is newly fashionable and highly influential, but it has a long and complex history. Its origins can be traced back to a divide within the US civil-rights movement. Free speech, democracy and legal equality were initially considered integral to the fight for civil rights, but by the end of the 1960s, with progress appearing to have stalled and both racism and poverty still major problems, groups within the movement began to question the efficacy of these principles. Many arrived at the conclusion that legal equality not only left social inequality intact but actually provided the context and justification for its continuation. As the authors of Words That Wound, a key CRT text published in 1993, point out:
‘It became apparent to many who were active in the civil-rights movement that dominant conceptions of race, racism, and equality were increasingly incapable of providing any meaningful quantum of racial justice.’
Having come up against the limits of formal, legal equality, the question facing the civil-rights movement at this point was how best to achieve social equality. As Helen Pluckrose and James A Lindsay point out in Cynical Theories, more materialist activists focused on housing, schooling, employment and income. For some, this led to championing black nationalism and segregation over universal human rights. At the same time, some began to find a home within academia where, to quote Words that wound:
‘individual law teachers and students committed to racial justice began to meet, to talk, to write, and to engage in political action in an effort to confront and oppose dominant societal and institutional forces that maintained the structures of racism while professing the goal of dismantling racial discrimination.’
These academic activists argued that ‘majoritarian self-interest’ was ‘a critical factor in the ebb and flow of civil-rights doctrine’; in other words, a white-majority society would be unlikely to cede its power voluntarily (1). A key text to come out of this period was by Derrick Bell, Harvard’s first African American professor. In Race, Racism and American Law, published in 1970, Bell argued that white people only concede rights when it is in their interests to do so. By 1987, his views had crystalised further and he was able to explain that, ‘progress in American race relations is largely a mirage obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously, to do all in their power to ensure their dominion and maintain their control’.
Black scholars found common cause with professors engaged in critical legal studies who sought to formulate a radical left-wing critique of dominant liberal approaches to the law. Together, they drew from ‘liberalism, Marxism, the law-and-society movement, critical legal studies, feminism, poststructuralism/postmodernism, and neopragmatism’. A key aim was to examine ‘the relationships between naming and reality, knowledge and power’ (2). This marked a splintering from the materialists and a distinct turn towards subjectivity. It led to racism being understood not just as legal and economic inequalities, but as social, cultural and psychological practices. At this point, as Matsuda et al tell us, ‘Scholars of colour within the left began to ask their white colleagues to examine their own racism and to develop oppositional critiques not just to dominant conceptions of race and racism but to the treatment of race within the left as well’. Their conclusions presented racism, ‘not as isolated instances of conscious bigoted decision-making or prejudiced practice, but as larger, systemic, structural, and cultural, as deeply psychologically and socially ingrained’ (3).
In 1981, Kimberlé Crenshaw, then a student of Derrick Bell’s, led a protest against Harvard Law School when it refused to hire a black professor to teach Race, Racism and American Law following Bell’s departure. Crenshaw, along with others, invited leading academics and practitioners of colour to lecture on a course aimed at ‘developing a full account of the legal construction of race and racism’. Bringing people together in this joint intellectual project crystalised the ideas underpinning critical race theory. By the end of the 1980s, Crenshaw’s work led her to devise a framework she labelled ‘intersectionality’ to describe how multiple features of a person’s identity can combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Her 1991 essay, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Colour, has been especially influential.
Protesters gather near the White House, 22 June 2020 in Washington, DC.
Pluckrose and Lindsay point out that the concerns of materialists dominated the critical race movement from the 1970s to the 1980s. However, by the 1990s, a more identity-focused and postmodern understanding of CRT, driven primarily by radical black feminists such as Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins and Angela Harris, was becoming increasingly popular. Today, CRT is mainstream and terms like ‘structural racism’ now refer to structures of thought far more than any structural, material analysis of society. Activists have taken the subjective, identitarian and psychological understanding of racism developed within universities and transformed it into a list of commandments all must obey.
Joanna Williams is currently researching hate crime in her role as director of the Freedom, Democracy and Victimhood Project at the think tank, Civitas.
The MAA ventured beyond its comfort zone when it argued that critical race theory is “an established social science inquiry which is grounded in decades of scholarship.” Then, with incredible arrogance and hypocrisy, it criticized the banning of these teachings inside of US federal agencies as “an encroachment on science and the academy.”
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge
Not even the rules-based world of mathematics is safe from the PC inquisition, with the Mathematical Association of America claiming it is inherently racially biased. This madness threatens to halt progress in its tracks.
This month, Americans got another bitter taste of ‘progressive’ insanity from one of the most unexpected of places. The Mathematical Association of America (MAA), which prides itself as “the world’s largest community of mathematicians, students, and enthusiasts,” came out and declared that “mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases.”
The MAA’s revelation came in its October newsletter, which reads more like a fiery political manifesto than any mundane briefing on the math scene. It continued, “Reaching this potential in mathematics relies upon the academy and higher education engaging in … uncomfortable conversations about the detrimental effects of race and racism on our community.”
Perhaps in no other period of human history could otherwise intelligent people speak with alarm about mathematical inquiry and the racial background of the problem solvers. What next? An angry throng of mathematicians protesting in the street, while getting in the faces of passers-by and patio diners demanding that they publicly confess to their mathematical heresies? Perhaps make them accept some new-fangled ‘ethno-mathematic’ system in its place? Will engineers, architects and other math-based professionals be accused of fomenting ‘racism’ for adhering to the models of dead white mathematicians? Where exactly will this insanity lead us?
On a personal note, I have never been very fond of mathematics, but I can readily appreciate the pleasure that mathematicians speak of when, after hours of arduous contemplation over a single problem, they finally arrive at the one and only indisputable answer. To quote the legendary British wit, Samuel Johnson, “You may have a reason why two and two should make five, but they will still make but four.”
And therein lies the problem with mathematicians attempting to hop aboard the social justice train: like it or not, mathematics is undoubtedly the most intensely objective field of study, where the results are not open for debate. In fact, it is nearly impossible to understand what the MAA even means by “human biases” when speaking about a science that is closed to personal interpretation and ‘feelings’, the byword of these emotion-fueled woke times.
For example, if it is discovered that a renowned white mathematician, who solved a long-standing math problem, was at the same time a slave owner, this regrettable news would do little to refute the veracity of his (or her) findings. Unlike the world of literature, for example, which regularly bans period novels that contain racial stereotypes and slurs, it would not be possible to ‘ban’ a mathematical solution due to the personal faults of the discoverer. Incidentally, I used the example of a white mathematician intentionally because, unfortunately, that seems to be where the focus of the MAA appears to be heading.
Indeed, even before the newsletter apologizes for the “inherent biases” of mathematics, it speaks out on behalf of ‘critical race theory’, a highly controversial concept which postulates that America is a country where, to quote a seminar hosted by none other than the US Department of the Treasury, “virtually all white people, regardless of how ‘woke’ they are, contribute to racism.” Due to their supposed “privileged” status and skin color, white people in America are characterized as “white supremacists” and natural-born “oppressors.”
Much to the consternation of the MAA, President Donald Trump banned these teachings at the federal level in an executive order, which, among other ideas, says the idea that meritocracy is “racist or sexist” is a “divisive concept.”
The MAA ventured beyond its comfort zone when it argued that critical race theory is “an established social science inquiry which is grounded in decades of scholarship.” Then, with incredible arrogance and hypocrisy, it criticized the banning of these teachings inside of US federal agencies as “an encroachment on science and the academy.”
As if injecting political vitriol into the field of mathematics during an election year were not bad enough, these academics fail to understand that they themselves are encroaching on the government with unproven ideas of an extremely divisive nature. At a time when the country remains on edge over the killing of a black man at the hands of a white cop, a tragedy that seems more symptomatic of poor police training than any institutional racism, the MAA is simply fueling street protests as well as unprovoked violence against innocent white people.
At this point, it seems fair to ask about the situation inside the world of mathematics, dominated – as the MAA would have us believe – by knuckle-dragging oppressors of minorities. Consider the tragic case of Lisa Piccirillo, for example, a graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin. In the course of her studies, Piccirillo learned about the ‘Conway knot’, a problem that had baffled mathematicians for half a century. By the week’s end, the graduate student had already solved the riddle.
The young female ventured to present her findings to Cameron Gordon, a white professor at the university. So how did Gordon respond? Not by locking up the woman in the college dungeon and stealing her discovery, as one might suspect would happen by the alarming MAA newsletter. Instead, Professor Gordon promised to have her finding published in the Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s top journals.
“He started yelling, ‘Why aren’t you more excited?’” recalled Piccirillo, now a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University. “He sort of freaked out.”
Or how about Philip Emeagwali, the Nigerian-born computer scientist who was educated at none other than George Washington University. Despite the “inherent biases” allegedly plaguing the math community, Emeagwali won the Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance computing applications using a novel mathematical formulation. Today, he is ranked as one of the most influential computer scientists in the world, and is said to be worth $250 million.
In closing, it seems that mathematicians like Piccirillo and Emeagwali, and countless other minorities, would not have had the opportunity to excel as they did if their fields of study were truly bastions of white oppression and racism. Instead of espousing what amounts to another form of racism, this time aimed at white people, the MAA, in the spirit of true mathematicians, should be required to provide proofs for their arguments lest they produce tragically wrong answers to the detriment of everyone.
CRT is a philosophy of hyper-racialization that looks to radically transform our “inherently racist” society, including children. Under CRT, Martin Luther King’s dream is abolished, as racial identification is mandatory, and white children are taught self-loathing and black children to embrace victimhood. Like a religion, it is unfalsifiable, elevates subjective experience above objective reality, and crumbles under intellectual scrutiny.
Michael McCaffrey is a writer and cultural critic who lives in Los Angeles. His work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog. He is also the host of the popular cinema podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota. Follow him on Twitter @MPMActingCo
Woke teachers and school administrators are waging a culture war for the minds of kids as young as five, by inculcating them with toxic social justice teachings.
This summer, I got an unpleasant initiation into the culture war when, in the wake of the George Floyd killing, my five-year-old child’s elementary-middle public charter school here in Los Angeles went from being an academic institution interested in preparing students for the workplace and college to an ideological hotbed devoted to promoting Critical Race Theory (CRT) over all other subjects.
CRT is a philosophy of hyper-racialization that looks to radically transform our “inherently racist” society, including children. Under CRT, Martin Luther King’s dream is abolished, as racial identification is mandatory, and white children are taught self-loathing and black children to embrace victimhood. Like a religion, it is unfalsifiable, elevates subjective experience above objective reality, and crumbles under intellectual scrutiny.
A shameless example of CRT indoctrination in action is that the very first lesson taught to my child’s kindergarten class this autumn was “how to be an activist.”
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines activist as “a person who uses or supports strong actions (such as public protests) in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue.” My child’s school decided to perniciously redefine “activist” as “someone who notices that a system is unfair to another person, group of people, or animals, and then creates a new system that ensures fairness for every person, group of people, or animal.”
Redefining “activist” is as Orwellian as it gets. Words have meaning and meaning matters. Calling an ass an eagle doesn’t make it sprout wings and fly. But the mendacity doesn’t stop there. The school also teaches the four traits of an “activist,” which they claim to be “Observe. Ask questions. Have empathy. Show compassion.” But these positive traits are more defining of a good neighbor or a good friend, rather than an “activist.”
Contorting the meaning of “activist” to suit an ideological need, and claiming that all “activists” have “empathy” and “show compassion” is the kindergarten equivalent of teaching “war is peace,”“freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.”
Do the “activists” of the Westboro Baptist Church, Antifa, or KKK “have empathy” and “show compassion”? And what about Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Osama Bin Laden? None of these were profiles in empathy and compassion either, but they, too, started out as what one might call “activists.”
George Orwell wrote, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” It seems obvious that CRT has corrupted the language used by my child’s school, and that this corrupted language is intended, in turn, to corrupt the thoughts and minds of young students.
This intentionally deceptive “activist” lesson runs throughout the school year and is accompanied by the “activist song,” that’s sung everyday to the tune of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’. The lyrics are… “I am an activist, I look and I observe, I ask questions and find out, what has been unheard / Having empathy, helps me understand, I can make a change, working hand in hand.”
This isn’t education – this is blatant indoctrination. The school isn’t teaching children how to think, but rather what to think.
The school claims its mission is to develop “critical thinking” but does misinforming children about the definition of “activist” spur critical thinking? I’ve asked the leadership of the school this question, as well as for their specific definition of “equity” and “anti-racism” – terms they frequently espouse. Does “equity” mean “equality of opportunity” or “equality of outcome”? Does “anti-racism” mean “opposing discrimination in all its forms” or “discriminating to benefit minorities”? These questions have been entirely ignored.
I also asked if my child would face discrimination at the school, and the principal and CEO steadfastly refuse to answer that question too, which, unfortunately, seems like an answer unto itself, and one that may carry legal liability.
That this taxpayer-funded charter school – which, according to reports, just received between $2 million and $5 million in pandemic-related Paycheck Protection Program loans from the federal government – refuses to say it won’t discriminate against a five-year-old, is quite an indictment. It reveals the ethical rot at the center of CRT, and the catastrophic error the American education system is making by embracing it.
At best, CRT is an intellectually flaccid and insidiously vacuous ideology that focuses on “unlearning” alleged “implicit bias” at the expense of learning the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. At worst, it is a malevolent, mendacious, and cancerous cult that demands discrimination against some children under the guise of “equity.”
Parents should be in charge of their children’s moral and ethical education, and if parents want CRT taught to their kids, let them teach it at home. Just as I wouldn’t impose my Catholic faith on other people’s children, I don’t want their CRT cult imposed on mine.
Many parents privately tell me they’re horrified that CRT is being taught in kindergarten, but are reluctant to speak out for fear of being labeled ‘racist’. This is part of the ‘social justice’ game, in which people are shamed into silence and compliance by scurrilous labels. But parents must screw their courage to the sticking place and fight back now, because the war for children’s minds is being waged, and teachers’ unions, school boards, and woke faculty members and administrators are moving fast and pushing hard to make CRT the default foundation for all education in America.
Indoctrinating children with CRT is akin to systemic child abuse, as it steals innocence, twists minds, and crushes spirits. Parents must move heaven and earth to protect their children, and they can start by coming together and rooting out CRT from their schools by any and all legal means necessary.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Most Americans are too removed from reality to be aware of the peril that they are in.Critical Race Theory, an anti-white doctrine designed to produce revolution in the United States in order to overthrow “white rule,” has long held sway in the universities and public schools.
Stay with the remaining 30 minutes of Carlson’s show.You will learn that a Democrat experienced at stealing elections says that is what voting by mail enables.
Dear Readers: It is September and my quarterly request for your support. The media tells you nothing of what really is going on. The presstitutes constitute a propaganda ministry. I do my best to show you what is really happening. For example, the Covid thing is overstated and we are prevented from effective treatment by HCQ and zinc because Big Pharma wants to make billions of dollars on a vaccine. Our economy is wrecked because high-productivity, high value-added jobs were offshored to Asia. We are undergoing a revolution from above by deconstructing white Americans’ sense of themselves and their culture. And so forth. Where else can you get the information I provide?
It is becoming harder and harder to tell the truth. Censorship is tightening, and the cancelling of truth-tellers by smears and accusations is rising. Smears and accusations scare off easily intimidated readers.
This website has a large domestic and international readership, reaching as many as 109 countries. In the first eight months of this year, the site has had almost 4 million visits. If support matched readership, I could do much more research and field investigative reporters, a disappearing breed.
Keep in mind that truth is not free and is becoming ever more expensive.
Now for today’s column:
Revolution Is Being Institutionalized in the Federal Government
Paul Craig Roberts
Most Americans are too removed from reality to be aware of the peril that they are in.Critical Race Theory, an anti-white doctrine designed to produce revolution in the United States in order to overthrow “white rule,” has long held sway in the universities and public schools. On an Executive Order from former President Obama, critical race theory now has infiltrated the Federal government cabinet agencies including the Treasury and FBI within the Department of Justice. US government employees, if white, are required to attend Soviet-style self-denunciation “sensitivity training sessions” and acknowledge their inherent racism as a white person.One wonders that no one has told President Trump about this. Our taxpayer dollars are paying for indoctrination sessions that make white people unable to defend their race and their rights to equality under the law.
In no previous country in history that was overthrown had the rot reached the inner sanctums of the government itself.
Tucker Carlson, the only TV journalist remaining in the US, and his guest, a researcher into the undermining of the US government under Trump’s nose by critical race theory, show in the first nine minutes of Tucker’s show (soon to be taken down by the censors at YouTube)—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK5mtY6twTQ —the extent to which the US government bureaucracy is being brainwashed against White Americans.
What you need to understand, although it will be difficult for you, is that in the Trump administration itself, revolution against white people is being institutionalized within the US Government.
Stay with the remaining 30 minutes of Carlson’s show.You will learn that a Democrat experienced at stealing elections says that is what voting by mail enables.The Democrats already know that they have lost the election.They intend to steal it by throwing out mail-in ballots from Trump areas.Even postal employees are participants in the theft. No Trump vote that is cast by mail will be counted.
Mayor Wheeler also serves as the city’s police commissioner, but he apparently forgot to notify the department that something might require their attention down there on SW Third Ave. The Feds were on their own. Mayor Ted made his way to the front of the mob, pulled on his chin while surveying the colorful scene and then — surprise — the mob discovered he was among them and turned its ire on him, crying, in Antifa vernacular, “Fuck you, Ted” and “Resign, asshole!” As a few bottles and gobs of suspicious liquid flew his way he began to comprehend that his grandstanding wasn’t appreciated, and he withdrew to the safety of his nearby mayoral aerie with his security detail.
And is it possible that Governor Kate Brown approves and encourages it, too? She has not used the Oregon State Police to restore order. Maybe it’s time to just bypass the game-playing before any more people get hurt and charge these politicians with assisting insurrection under federal law (18 U.S. Code § 2383). And put them on trial in the same building that their Antifa mob is trying to burn down.
When Portland, OR, Mayor Ted Wheeler dropped in to check out the “peaceful protest” action down at the Federal courthouse Wednesday night in his spiffy REI riot casuals and dual purpose Covid-19 / riot mask with matching riot goggles, he seemed a little surprised to find himself in the midst of… a riot. Perhaps he had not been following all the Twitter videos of what looked like a Road Warrior free-for-all, what with the Antifa soldiers ripping down fences, banging wrecking bars through the ground-floor protective barriers, shooting roman candles and laser-beams at the pitifully small crew of federal officers, and hurling rocks, bottles, human waste, and anything else at hand at them in their determination to bum-rush the entrance and burn the place down.
Mayor Wheeler also serves as the city’s police commissioner, but he apparently forgot to notify the department that something might require their attention down there on SW Third Ave. The Feds were on their own. Mayor Ted made his way to the front of the mob, pulled on his chin while surveying the colorful scene and then — surprise — the mob discovered he was among them and turned its ire on him, crying, in Antifa vernacular, “Fuck you, Ted” and “Resign, asshole!” As a few bottles and gobs of suspicious liquid flew his way he began to comprehend that his grandstanding wasn’t appreciated, and he withdrew to the safety of his nearby mayoral aerie with his security detail.
Afterward, in a press release, he observed: “What I saw last night was powerful in many ways. I listened, heard, and stood with protesters. And I saw what it means when the federal government unleashes paramilitary forces against its own people.”
Yes, it was a “teachable moment” for Mayor Ted, as so many acts of violent idiocy are supposed to be in this summer of social justice, a national struggle session à la Mao Zedong to re-educate the obtusely privileged multitudes to the insidious menace of “systemic racism.” How’s it working? Well, those multitudes are taking it all in, for sure, and perhaps concluding on their own that a teachable moment is not exactly the same as a leadership moment, and that this phantom of systemic racism may not be all that it’s cracked up as.
Anyway, Mayor (and Police Commish) Ted soon hurled his own thunderbolt at the Feds —a citation for obstructing a city bike path by placing protective fences on it. There’s leadership for you! Take that, Donald Trump, you big Hitlerscheiss! Perhaps Mayor Ted is thinking his exemplary valor may put him in a position to replace the mentally-disabled Democratic Party front-runner, Joe Biden, as the nauseating task of actually daring to nominate him approaches in just a few weeks (and if She-Whose-Turn-Was-Cancelled stands aside).
As for the Antifas, a tiny corner of one’s moral sensibility must be reserved to pity their plight. Nobody can say for sure how many are drawn from the student body of nearby Portland State University — a hothouse of Wokesterism — a few blocks from Riot Central. But I bet a lot of them. There, they have been rigorously trained in critical race theory, intersectionality, gender studies, and all the other preparations for a fruitful adulthood in Wokesterdom, and now, alas, the diversity departments all over the land are not hiring! What to do?
The global economy is in a tailspin from corona virus, actually close to augering clean into ground-zero, and their services may not be required… for anything! I’d be demoralized, too, were I twenty years old. To make matters worse, the cafes, craft beer joints, and twee little vegan lunch bars are shut down, along with the music halls and every other arts venue, and who has any money? Their intersectional bodies are roiling with youthful hormones, with an assist from weed and other stimulants. What better way to work off all that energy on a warm summer night than to riot in the streets against a society that has actually prepared them for nothing except protesting the unfairness of life.
Back in what’s left of the real world of adults ‘n’ stuff, though, there is the age-old question of public order. Evidently, the Democratic-brand mayors and governors think they see a political advantage in chaos, the destruction of property, and bodily injury to citizens, including murder. What exactly was Mayor Ted Wheeler doing at the riot down at Portland’s Federal Building on Wednesday night? Was he showing support for the action? Sure looked like it. And is it possible that Governor Kate Brown approves and encourages it, too? She has not used the Oregon State Police to restore order. Maybe it’s time to just bypass the game-playing before any more people get hurt and charge these politicians with assisting insurrection under federal law (18 U.S. Code § 2383). And put them on trial in the same building that their Antifa mob is trying to burn down.
Not only did the children find it terribly confusing, but Kelly also said that what was going on was more like coercion than teaching tolerance. Thus, she said, “It wasn’t about support — we felt that it was more like they were trying to convince them. Like, come on over.”
by Tyler DurdenFriday
MCViewPoint 