The parent rebellion

 Peter Wood:

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The burghers in places as far-flung as Loudoun County, Virginia, Fort Worth, Texas and Langley, Washington have turned out in recent days at local school board meetings to protest the CRT-inflected curricula that their districts have been inflicting on students. The protesters — mostly parents of enrolled students — regard the emphasis on critical race theory as state-sponsored propaganda aimed at indoctrinating children in racial grievance, allegiance to authoritarian leaders and hatred of their own country. As if to prove these accusations well-founded, supporters of CRT have been rounding up children to stage counter-protests....

... Among the more widely watched videos is one of a citizen opposing his school board’s pro-CRT stance: the T-shirted, tattooed British expat Simon Campbell sticks it to the Pennsbury, Pennsylvania school board. The audience cheers as Mr Campbell charges the school board, ‘It seems to me that you think you can supersede the United States Constitution.’ As the cheers die down, he continues, ‘I’ve got news for you school board president Benito Mussolini, your power does not exceed that of the US Constitution and the First Amendment Rights of the citizens of this great nation.’ His five minute bravura performance needs to be savored in the original.

Mr Campbell was moved to speak by an email from the district’s director of ‘Equity, Diversity & Education’ in which she advised the superintendent on how to censor public comments she disagreed with — and the president of the school board agreed with that proposal. This is a good place to pause on the terminology. The defenders of critical race theory frequently create a maze of distinctions. If you challenge the 1619 Project as an instance of CRT, they loftily inform you that you don’t know what you are talking about. CRT is an exquisitely refined doctrine that has been crafted by law professors over the years — and has nothing to do with Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times’s confected fantasy about the slave origins of American society. Or if you challenge the Ibram X. Kendi’s virulently anti-white ‘anti-racism’ agenda, the proponents of CRT sneer that Kendi’s approach differs entirely. In schools, the rubric under which CRT is most commonly deployed is ‘DEI — Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’. And once again, school officials intone from Olympian heights that DEI and CRT are as different as apple pie and applejack.

Marc Lamont Hill, host of UpFront on Al Jazeera English, and Joy Reid, MSNBC national correspondent, have been the most conspicuous figures in the left’s effort to diffuse public ire against CRT by drawing opportunistic distinctions among the various embodiments of the basic creed. Both have had CRT’s most celebrated critic Christopher Rufo on their shows in efforts to cut him down to size. The don’t-let-him-get-a word-in-edgeways style of interview has pleased CRT partisans but only further infuriated the general public. That public fully understands that the basic message of CRT is that America is ‘systemically racist’, that white people hoarding their privileges is the engine of systemic racism and that nothing short of a total transformation of American society can bring about ‘racial justice’. The 1619 Project, anti-racism and DEI are just euphemistic variations on this theme.

When someone like Simon Campbell summons the US Constitution and the First Amendment to his side of the table, he has a point. CRT and its progeny are a doctrine aimed at delegitimizing America. These doctrines aim to unseat the US Constitution as a racist document. They see the First Amendment as protecting white supremacy by giving white people exclusive control over public speech. And they treat the whole dynamic of the county as a contest over ‘power’. In that contest, censorship by the proponents of CRT is fully warranted, since they are battling the unfair advantages of the white racist regime.
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‘They caught you red-handed with an enemies list to punish opponents of critical race theory. You’re teaching children to hate others because of their skin color,’ declared Dick Black of Ashburn, Virginia, addressing the school board in Loudoun County, Virginia before the board abruptly adjourned the meeting and called the police to arrest the protesters for trespassing. Among the other speakers was Xi Van Fleet, a woman who survived the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, only to find critical theory back on the educational agenda in the US where students are being taught ‘to loathe our country and our history’.

‘You talk about critical race theory which is pretty much teaching your kids how to hate each other, how to dislike each other,’ averred Tie Smith addressing the Bloomington Public School Board in Illinois on June 9. Smith explained that CRT was taking away his accomplishments as a successfully self-educated black man.

In Southlake, Texas, voters by an overwhelming margin and with record turnout replaced the entire Carroll school board with a slate of candidates opposed to the district’s ‘Cultural Competency Action Plan’, another DEI scheme. They denounced the plan as creating ‘diversity police’ and ‘reverse racism’.
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There is more.

The CRT proponents are True Believers" in the racist garbage they spew and if you don't agree with them then they call YOU a racist.  They try to cover their racist agenda by calling it "anti-racist." They have an expansive definition of "white supremacy" and other racist jargon they use.  Many of them have brainwashed themselves into believing this crap.