The left’s obsession with race is driving a wedge between generations and tearing at the social cohesion necessary for any nation to succeed.
President Trump’s executive order banning critical race theory from federal agencies is a great first step in stopping the Marxist infiltration of government but if he wants to make a real and lasting difference, Trump will turn his focus to the nation’s public schools.
Here, he will find a cesspool of leftist propaganda being drummed into the heads of students and their teachers.
This is where the foundational views of America’s next generation of leaders are being formed, and right now the most fashionable thing on the menu is critical race theory. It’s being served up in mega-doses and any teacher who complains faces the threat of discipline or termination.
Critical race theory can best be summed up as anti-American hatred dressed in the garb of scientific scholarship.
Ever wonder how the left gets so many young people to take to the streets on a moment’s notice, before any of the facts related to a situation are known? George Floyd was killed and mobs formed immediately. Same with Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, Jacob Blake in Kenosha, and now they are threating to burn down the country because Trump is fulfilling his constitutional duty to name a replacement for deceased Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Critical race theory is your answer. It’s been a staple of social studies courses for at least a decade in K-12 public schools and longer than that in the universities.
Critical race theory is an offshoot of Herbert Marcuse’s more broadly applied critical theory. Marcuse, a German sociologist and political theorist, was one of the many neo-Marxists who moved from Germany to America before the outbreak of World War II and set up shop at Columbia University, Harvard and other top-shelf universities. They developed what has since been coined “Cultural Marxism.”
Cultural Marxism was an updating of Karl Marx’s revolutionary theory. Marx saw the overthrow of capitalism as an economically driven event.
Well, that turned out to be a flop. Factory workers in the 20th century actually liked capitalism, as it offered an avenue into a fine middle-class lifestyle. The last thing they wanted was to overthrow the system that transformed them from peasant paupers into self-sufficient homeowners who drove shiny new Ford automobiles. So Marcuse and others associated with the so-called Frankfurt School saw the need to revise and rescue Marx’s failed theory.
Instead of pitting workers against their capitalist overlords, the Frankfurt School advocates put their focus on cultural institutions and the need to subvert them from within. The first institution targeted reformers influenced by Marcusian Marxism was the education establishment.
Marcuse’s theory of repressive tolerance taught that revolutionary Marxists should have no tolerance for freedom of speech among their political opponents, whom they conveniently identified as oppressors. Only the oppressed deserved to have their free-speech rights respected. This marked the birth of the modern political correctness movement, which started on college campuses and now dominates every sector of American life, including the workplace, schools, churches, the legal and professional fields.
Critical theory tailor-made for America evolved into critical race theory, as race relations was early on identified by the communists as America’s weak spot [See former American communist Manning Johnson’s excellent book on this topic, Color, Communism and Common Sense.
Proponents of critical race theory see America as an illegitimate nation guilty of war crimes – first against the Native American tribes and then against African slaves.
The purveyors of critical race theory conveniently ignore the fact that nearly every nation has skeletons in its closet. Most nations were formed when one people group invaded, conquered and subjugated another people group.
The Native American tribes, for instance, fought bloody wars between themselves before the Europeans arrived, and the Africans often sold opposing tribes into the slave trade. This is not because one racial or ethnic group is inherently more evil or virtuous than another but because human nature has a proclivity toward sin. We are fallen creatures. Just as individuals are capable of falling in and out of sin throughout their lifetimes, so do nations. Japan is a classic example, having tried to conquer its neighbors and even the United States through offensive wars in the 1940s, it is now one of the most peaceful nations on Earth, a threat to no one. China, once peaceful, is now an existential threat to its neighbors and the United States.
America, which like every nation had to overcome mistakes, went on to be leader of the free world and a bulwark against fascism and communism, all at great cost in terms of blood and treasure.
So critical race theory is not only fused with divisive hate mongering, it is flawed science, not backed up by historical evidence.
That brings us back to the issue at hand: How to remove this scourge from our schools.
Parents are the key, and they can’t fight what they don’t understand.
Parents looking for evidence of this insidious theory in their child’s curriculum will not find it unless they understand the vernacular used by the hard-left players who dominate today’s teaching colleges and professional development, also known as “teacher trainings.”
The difference between equality and equity
The purveyors of critical race theory are masters of hiding their agenda, making sure to keep it shrouded in ambiguity.
They use nice-sounding terms like “equity,” which most parents think is a reference to equality. No, it’s totally different.
Equality means every child is treated the same, each receiving the same opportunity to succeed in the classroom.
Equity is very different. It assumes that kids from certain “privileged” backgrounds must be treated differently than those from underprivileged backgrounds and the goal shifts from equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes.
Those pushing racial equity believe, in their own words, that every decision should be made “through the lens of race.” They instruct teachers to “understand your whiteness,” to “own your racial identity” and “root out your implicit bias” against students of color.
If your racial identity is Caucasian, you are taught that you come from a shameful background of exploitation and oppression of others. You got where you are because your ancestors invented a system that rigs everything in favor of white people. You must show remorse, accept your guilt and hope this gets you off the hook for punishment. It’s even better if you publicly repent in front of some colleagues or students who had the disadvantage of growing up black, brown, Muslim or gay.
This creates hatred and division that leads to unrest – that’s step one. Then, in step two, these ideologues sitting in their ivory towers organize their thugs on the street to publicly shame, humiliate and intimidate those who dare to speak out against the violence. Even staying quiet is a sin because “white silence is violence,” they say.
Remember, critical race theory is a tool of Marxism, so it is designed to divide and conquer. The oppressors are viewed as people who tend to be white and Christian. The oppressed are the people of color who tend to be Muslim or pagan.
Training kids to be militant activists
The video below is from Frost Lake Elementary School in St. Paul, Minnesota, where parents found out the shocking extent to which their children were being indoctrinated in Marxist activism.
The 2-minute video, from June 3, 2019, starts out showing children marching outside the school while shouting “No Justice, No Peace!” Listen for the teacher yelling “I can’t hear you!”
Using inner-city schools as training centers for political activism is actually as racist as it gets. The Democrats who run these schools apparently don’t think the kids are capable of learning academic content so they reduce them to politically charged robots, notes the watchdog group Deplorable Housewives Midwest:
These children are being taught to be social-justice warriors and professional protesters in a public school on your tax dollars. And a school like Frost Lake Elementary really should be concentrating on educating the kids instead of indoctrinating them, given their dismal school rankings.
What is most concerning is that this elementary school is training children how to protest instead of teaching these students essential skills they will need to succeed in life like reading, writing and arithmetic.
Frost Lake Elementary ranks 830 out of 847 elementary schools in Minnesota according to the website School Digger, which gets its data from the Minnesota Department of Education.
In 2018, Frost Lake Elementary School ranked worse than 98% of the elementary schools in Minnesota.
In Edina, Minnesota, the school district manual includes new definitions for racism.
Interpersonal Racism: “When a white person takes their misinformation and stereotypes towards another group and performs an act of harassment.”
Racism: “A system in which people of color as a group are exploited and oppressed by white people as a group.”
An assignment handed out to students at Eden Prairie Middle School in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, asked “How Privileged Are You? See worksheet below:
The exact same survey was given to high school students in Saratoga Springs, New York, according to a Feb. 15, 2019 report by WNYT Channel 13.
“My reaction was wow, is this a joke,” said parent Michelle King about her daughter getting the survey in a marketing class. The survey grades students’ privilege based on everything from their skin color and religious affiliation to how “attractive” they are.
But it’s no joke.
Lynn McHale, of Parents for District 112 Schools, has been working for years to root out critical race theory from Minnesota schools.
“There’s a girl who came home from school and cried and said to her mother ‘I wish I wasn’t white’ after she was exposed to this ‘equity’ stuff,” McHale said.
She often finds herself up against a group called Reimagine Minnesota, which provides the academic and political cover for the far-left race hucksters posing as scholars and consultants.
McHale sees a connection between the recent unrest in the streets of Minnesota and what is taught in the classrooms.
“Unrest in the streets is coming from what they’re teaching the kids in the schools. They aren’t acting out because they come from bad families,” she said. “We’re trying to fight against these kids in the streets when we should have been fighting cultural Marxism in the schools.”
While far-left politicians call for defunding the police and “reimagining law enforcement,” they have been “reimagining” education for years.
The inspiration behind such reimagining comes from consultants like Dr. Muhammad Khalifa, who authored a paper published by Indiana University School of Education under the title, Islamophobia and Christian Privilege: What Educators Must Know.
In this paper and in his teacher-training seminars, Khalifa, a Muslim, instructs teachers to “Identify discourses and practices of Christian privilege and White privilege.”
To eliminate “Christian privilege,” Khalifa recommends school districts that hire him implement the following regimen:
- Institutionalize ways of gauging or measuring Muslim student belongingness and anti-Muslim bigotry in your school; Complete annual equity audits.
- Similar to race work that some schools do, have Muslim student speak-outs, or other in-school spaces where they can express their identities, and speak about experiences of Muslim life.
- Recognize that Islam is not a religion in the sense that Western Europeans separated faith from other aspects of life; It is a way of life.
- Accommodate aspects of Muslim life in school, including daily prayer spaces, prayer washing (ablution) spaces, and Friday prayer spaces, or fasting.
- Infuse curriculum and school activities with intellectual traditions that originate in the Muslim World; Acknowledge the origin of knowledge that came from the Muslim World.
Critical race theory, once it establishes a foothold, erodes social cohesion and tears at the fabric of families. Cultural Marxists know that without strong families and social cohesion, no nation can survive. It will have neither the desire nor the stamina to defend its culture against those seeking its destruction. In the face of relentless attacks — in the media, schools, churches, and corporate workplaces — it will ultimately wither and die. Mission accomplished.
Journalist Christopher Rufo has done yeoman’s work in exposing the level to which critical race theory has become ingrained in all agencies of the federal government, including the military. He explains in his article for City Journal, titled Against Wokeness, that “critical race theory treats ‘whiteness’ as a moral blight and maligns all members of that racial group as complicit in oppression.”
Whether parents are aware of it or not, this poisonous ideology – which is the true racism of our day – is firmly embedded in most school districts across the U.S. If it is not rooted out, America will die. No nation that hates itself can survive.
President Trump has been making a lot of noise about critical race theory, citing the New York Times-created 1619 Project as an example of a popular curriculum used in many schools that was developed on the basis of critical race theory. Trump has announced the formation of the 1776 Commission to create a more truthful history curriculum that doesn’t bash America and its founders.
“It will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding,” the president said in announcing the project on Sept. 15.
But wait. The question Americans should be asking is this: Why has Trump’s education secretary, Betsy Devos, not taken action against this perversion of history before now? Surely she was aware of it.
And, further, even if Devos is able to root out every instance of critical race theory in the schools, how would she go about deprogramming the teachers? After years of this type of racist, anti-American training many have no doubt become true believers.
In order to rid our schools of this evil a good housecleaning is needed. The removal of school superintendents, principals and assistant principals pushing this disgusting ideology on teachers and replacing them with qualified professionals who love this country would seem the only way to protect our kids from years of infiltration by socialists and neo-Marxists.
Until this question gets answered by Devos and other Republican leaders, it is hard to imagine how any right-leaning Christian parent, once informed with the reality of the corruption within the public education system, could continue to send their children to one of these schools. They are living examples of culture rot.
That brings to mind a comment from the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In a 1978 speech at Harvard University. He said:
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days.”
One of the hottest, most lucrative fields for consultants right now is as an “expert” in racial justice and diversity training, which includes “equity,” “social change,” “implicit bias” and so-called “cultural competency.”
When you hear these buzzwords you know the person using them is not only a neo-Marxist advocate of critical race theory, but an ideologue doing everything in their power to push forward the ongoing revolution in the streets of America’s cities.
With America and its founders reserved for ridicule and disdain, students in today’s K-12 schools and universities are taught to devalue their American citizenship and choose instead to be good “global citizens” under the United Nations and its agenda for sustainable development, climate change and open borders.
Race-baiting the churches
Critical race theory hollows out a nation from within. And, sadly, it has crept into not only the schools but many corporations and even the churches.
The Southern Baptists, once one of the most conservative Christian denominations, embraced critical race theory at their 2019 convention, following the Episcopalians, Methodists and other mainline denominations.
The Catholic Church has also embraced it. At a mass earlier this month at St. Xavier in New York City, the priest stood behind the altar and led the congregation in a “pledge” against white privilege. See video here.
Barack Obama openly boasted in 2007 that progressives planned a “fundamental transformation of America,” but few took him seriously. As a professional community organizer schooled by radical communist Bill Ayers [who was influenced by Cultural Marxist Saul Alinsky], Obama envisioned a post-Christian society where everyone looks at themselves, not as individuals created in the image of God but as a member of a “racial identity” or “sexual identity.” A society where biological boys are allowed to declare themselves girls, use girls’ bathrooms, engage in girls’ athletic competitions and then, after beating the girls on the field with an unfair biological advantage, showering with the girls in the school locker-rooms.
In this new social order, white children are not only taught that they come from an evil heritage, but they are taught how to diminish and denigrate those who haven’t bought into the “white is evil” narrative.
Since Black Lives Matter took the nation by storm following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, an army of race-baiting consultants have descended upon corporate HR departments, local police departments and cities of all sizes. They were already in our schools and many of our churches. It’s up to us to stop them.
Leo Hohmann is a veteran investigative reporter and author. He has spent decades researching and writing about education, immigration, crime, politics, and religion.
