A year ago, the media declared a “racial reckoning,” and Democrats began promoting Critical Race Theory in every agency they controlled. But parents revolted as they began to learn about the anti-American, racial-determinist views being promoted in some school districts. Now that polls show a majority of Americans have a negative view of Critical Race Theory, the media have engaged in a variety of tactics to gaslight the American people into disengaging, reconsidering, or diverting their gaze while public schools teach CRT to the next generation.
CRT Doesn’t Exist
Faced with the unpopularity of their dominant intellectual theory, several leftists have strongly implied that there is no such thing as CRT and that it’s entirely a creation of the Republican Party.
CRT is nothing but “another right-wing conspiracy,” said Terry McAuliffe, the former governor and current Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia. “This is totally made up by Donald Trump and [Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate] Glenn Youngkin. This is who they are. It’s a conspiracy theory.”
Chuck Todd seemed to join the ranks of Critical Race Theory deniers on the June 20 “Sunday Meet the Press” saying, “It’s manufactured, and then sort of seems to have been lit, the fire was lit.”
Attempting to dismiss a decades-old theory detailed by numerous academic scholars proved difficult, so many shifted gears.
Banning CRT Means No One Will Learn About Slavery
Since several states have banned public schools from teaching curricula based on Critical Race Theory, some myth-makers claimed the bills would forbid teachers from instructing students about racism, Jim Crow, or slavery.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid said on the June 17 edition of “The ReidOut” that “Republicans claim they support the holiday [of Juneteeth] while simultaneously passing laws to make sure your kids can’t learn about it in school.” She repeated the allegation a day later, saying:
While Juneteenth will now be commemorated nationwide, there’s a catch: In some red states, it could soon be illegal to teach what the holiday is about. That’s because Republican state legislatures in a dozen states are now aiming to dictate how historical and modern racism in America are taught. That includes the state of Texas, where Juneteenth was first celebrated. Governor Abbott signed a law this week intended to ban Critical Race Theory from being taught in public schools, even though it’s not being taught in any K-12 curriculums anywhere, including in Texas.
Heartless Republican lawmakers could actually put innocent school teachers in danger, claimed Chuck Todd. He argued that teachers now wonder, “Can they not teach American history correctly? There’s a real fear among civics teachers that they are going to the front lines, and the Tucker Carlsons of the world will character assassinate them,” on the June 15 episode of “MTP Daily.”
In reality, Florida regulations signed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis specify that educators “may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country.”
CRT Exists, But Only In Law Schools
Joy Reid again muddied the waters when she claimed CRT is never taught in K-12 schools, only in the nation’s law schools. “I hate to have to reiterate this every time we talk about this,” she said on June 10. “There’s no teaching of it in elementary school. It’s in law school.” Similarly, on June 21, she interviewed one of the intellectual pioneers of CRT, Kimberlé Crenshaw, who said, “Classic critical race theory is a law school course.” When the CRT-influenced 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize, the Pulitzer Center noted that it had “connected curricula based on the work of Hannah-Jones and her collaborators to some 4,500 classrooms since August 2019” and that “[t]ens of thousands of students in all 50 states engaged with the curricular resources,” which are still available on the award agency’s website.
The Backlash Is Not Grassroots; It’s Led By National Conservative Organizations
Unable to deny that CRT exists and that it infests a growing number of elementary schools, its opponents then claimed that the parents expressing tearful opposition in school board meetings nationwide are a mirage: The opposition is really being led by deep-pocketed conservative think tanks. In an NBC News story dated June 15, journalists said that school districts are “almost held hostage” as local parents follow “the playbook of seasoned GOP activists.” One of its authors, Brandy Zadrozny, claimed on MSNBC that the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC, and other “national and just hyper- and fast-growing local organizations … use onerous public records requests … and then that is used to, sort of, frame, again, the school board as paying for CRT. Which, again, is just not the case.”
Did you ever think we would see so-called “reporters” like @BrandyZadrozny bemoaning FREEDOM OF INFORMATION and demanding the public only believes the official government line on everything?
WATCH THIS state propagandist who sounds like a valley girl. pic.twitter.com/7Jvox2r5me
— Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) June 17, 2021
In reality, parents of all racial backgrounds have risen up to denounce CRT: White parents because they do not want their children to be told they are inherently racist because of their skin color; black parents because they do not want their children taught that they are oppressed and incapable of succeeding without massive political changes to the system.
Lying About Anti-CRT Activists
The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo has uncovered much of the worst racially themed CRT sensitivity training at work and curricula in the schools, putting a target on his back. The Washington Post published an article on June 19 targeting Rufo as the puppet master behind anti-CRT activism, beginning with then-President Donald Trump’s executive order banning such training for the federal workforce. The article was so riddled with errors that the Post ran a retraction within 48 hours.
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These sorts of denials and character assassination reveal a political establishment deeply worried that it’s losing its most critical tool in advancing its government-expanding agenda, despite its ironclad grip on the legacy media. For that, conservatives should take a bow — then put their shoulders right back to the grindstone. The fight to preserve America has only begun.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.