More and more we are hearing and seeing the canard of “Critical Race Theory” as a bogeyman by the right — attacking and indoctrinating our schools with the “Marxist" idea that this country is fundamentally corrupt and bigoted to its core. The idea is that CRT teaches White children to hate themselves, it teaches them that they are irrevocably racist and evil beyond their ability to withstand or control. Anti-discrimination is discriminatory. Anti-Racism is Racism. Up and down. Inside is out. They have this ridiculous pollyanna-ish view that racial ignorance is the only pathway to racial equality.
They tried the issue of Transphobia, they've tried “Cancel Culture" with Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, then they tried to champion the Border Crisis - now they've settled on Critical Race theory. This is exactly how they intend to grab and retain power. Scaring people over the issue of Race.
This is where we get Rep. Matt Geatz attacking the Military over CRT and getting his ass handed back to him folded and gift-wrapped.
And yet, they are undeterred.
They believe that white resentment and white backlash - even against a completely phony issue — is the key to GOP success in 2022 and 2024. Ironically this view - that racial issues are vital to the functioning of our democracy and society - is exactly the central point made by Critical Race Theory.
We have to realize that this is not part of a recent phenomenon. The GOP has been waging a not very sub-rosa race war for decades. During the 90’s they pushed against the idea that balancing college admissions with Affirmative Action — after over 100 years of discrimination — was “unfair” to White and Asian students who had grown up with every possible economic and social advantage. This racial divide has been strategically stoked since the OJ trial and the Rodney King Riots. It was pushed when Barack Obama was elected over two “Good White Men.” This war has continued right to the point where Trump slithered down the escalator and proclaimed that “Mexicans are rapists” and that Muslims should be banned from the country.
And now the argument is “Critical Race Theory" and basically even more importantly - Voting Rights.
Multiple states around the nation have passed laws that ban the teaching “Critical Race Theory" — or frankly anything substantive about race — in public schools.
A slate of new bills proposed by Republican legislators this session attempt to regulate how teachers can discuss racism, sexism, and issues of equality and justice in the classroom. And some state boards of education have adopted rules that would similarly dictate teachers’ practice.
Many of these lawmakers say their proposals are designed to keep
critical race theory out of schools. The academic framework, created by legal scholars in the 1970s and 80s, posits that racism isn’t just the product of individual bias—but embedded in legal systems and policies.
As of June 29, 26 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an Education Week analysis. Nine states have enacted these bans, either through legislation or other avenues.
Over the past year, the idea of critical race theory has become a political flashpoint. While in office, former President Donald Trump pushed for “patriotic education” and accused teachers who discussed racism and bias with students of “left-wing indoctrination.” Last fall, he issued an executive order banning certain types of diversity training for federal employees. Seventeen of the state bills recently introduced use language from this order.
The topic has seen continued attention at the national level, as well: In June, Republicans in Congress introduced legislation that would cut federal funding for schools that use lessons based on the 1619 Project, a New York Times series that reframes United States history by centering the enduring effects of slavery. Later that month, Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Republican from Wisconsin, introduced a bill that would dictate how D.C. public school teachers can discuss racism and sexism.
Twenty Six states have introduced this legislation when the fact is that Critical Race Theory -- in total — is not taught in any of these schools.
There is little to no evidence that critical race theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students, though some ideas central to it, such as lingering consequences of slavery, have been. In Greenwich, Connecticut, some middle school students were given a “white bias” survey that parents viewed as part of the theory.
Republicans in North Carolina point to the Wake County Public School System as an example, saying teachers participated in a professional development session on critical race theory. County education officials canceled a future study session once it was discovered but insist the theory is not part of its classroom curriculum.
“Critical race theory is not something we teach to students,” said Lisa Luten, a spokeswoman for the school system. “It’s more of a theory in academia about race that adults use to discuss the context of their environment.”
CRT is very simply put, not what they claim that it is.
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
[...]
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.
This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.
This is literally a case where parents, school boards and state legislatures have risen up to stop the teaching of the Hogwart's spell “Expeliaramus” in public schools when no such thing is taking place. It's a fantasy. It's lunacy. It’s a phantasm. But the fact that their paranoid fantasies are not actually real has not slowed them one iota.
It's not just they have what CRT actually is wrong, it's what it is that they imagine that it is. They seem to think that U.S. History itself is their enemy. That the only thing that can be learned within America's racial history is hate, resentment and guilt for White people. They seem to have indicted, charged and prosecuted themselves in eyes of history. And admittedly when you encompass the entirety of slavery and servitude, Jim Crow, strategic school Segregation, voter suppression, one hundred years of terrorism by the KKK, the Trail of Tears, the Asian Exclusion Act, Operation Wetback, Japanese Internment, excluding Blacks from the G.I. Bill and Social Security, The Tuskegee Experiment and racial redlining in housing and lending — there's probably a stronger case against whites than even they realize.
However, all white people in America were never racist. All white people in America did not support slavery, segregation, Jim Crow or ongoing discrimination. They seem to feel that there were no abolitionists, that they and their children have nothing valuable they can learn, that there are no lessons available to them to discover. Nothing that can be gained of value, nothing that can be learned to be avoided. There's nothing useful within the Abolishionist novel “Uncle Tom's Cabin," there's nothing that can be gleaned from the story of Sojornour Truth, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, from the white members of the NAACP and the Freedom Riders, from John Brown or for that matter from Abraham Lincoln.
They argue there is nothing to leaern from the 1619 project, in fact that learning itself is dangerous.
The prevailing conservative view is that America’s racial and economic inequalities are driven by differences in effort and ability. The work of Hannah-Jones and others suggests instead that present-day inequalities have been shaped by deliberate political and policy choices. What appears to be an argument about reexamining history is also an argument about ideology—a defense of the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.
The 1619 Project is a particularly powerful part—but not the cause—of a Black Lives Matter–inspired reevaluation of American history that began in the waning years of the Obama administration. Many Americans were struggling to understand how a nation that had elected a Black president could retain deep racial disparities not only in the rate of poverty, access to education, and health care, but also in matters of criminal justice and political power. The election of Donald Trump, a president who understood American citizenship in religious and ethnonationalist terms, accelerated that process of reevaluation.
Like all the works this period of reevaluation has produced, the 1619 Project has its flaws—although fewer than its most fanatical critics would admit. But the details of its factual narrative were not what conservatives found most objectionable. Rather, they took issue with the ideological implications of its central conceit: that America’s true founding moment was the arrival of African slaves on America’s shores.
Hannah-Jones’s conservative detractors cast this claim as an argument that America is a fundamentally and irredeemably racist country—indeed, as NC Policy Watch notes, a columnist at the right-wing James G. Martin Center complained that the 1619 Project “seeks to reframe American history as fundamentally racist.” A different columnist at the same organization fumed that “young people—the white ones, at least—are even taught to hate themselves for the unforgivable sins of their ancestors.” The idea that ugly aspects of American history should not be taught, for fear that students—white students in particular—might draw unfavorable conclusions about America, is simply an argument against teaching history at all.
Just as they refuse to admit these deluded fantasies, they also continue their delusions about the 2020 election — where they accuse "massive" voter fraud occurred only in areas populated by voters of color — but those are not real either. The fact that their concerns are fake and phony has not stopped gutting voting rights across the nation, systemically and deliberately starting years ago.
In Shelby County v. Holder, a 5-4 majority mothballed the law’s Section 5, which required states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get certification in advance, or “pre-clearance,” that any election change they wanted to make would not be discriminatory. The Supreme Court did this by holding that the formula used to determine which states and localities had to follow the Section 5 protocols was out of date.
For nearly 50 years, Section 5 had assured that voting changes in several states — including Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia — were transparent, vetted, and fair to all voters regardless of race.
Prior to Shelby, Brennan Center warned that without the protections provided by Section 5, states might seek to reinstate or push a wave of discriminatory voting measures that were previously blocked or deterred by the law, threatening the rights of minority voters across the country to cast a ballot.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what has happened.
And this has dramatically accelerated following the 2020 Election.
In a backlash to 2020’s historic voter turnout, and under the pretense of responding to baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, state lawmakers have introduced a startling number of bills to curb the vote. As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states. footnote1_5kjwwhx 1 That’s 108 more than the 253 restrictive bills tallied as of February 19, 2021 — a 43 percent increase in little more than a month.
These measures have begun to be enacted. Five restrictive bills have already been signed into law. footnote2_9jbbset 2 In addition, at least 55 restrictive bills in 24 states are moving through legislatures: 29 have passed at least one chamber, while another 26 have had some sort of committee action (e.g., a hearing, an amendment, or a committee vote).
Most restrictive bills take aim at absentee voting, while nearly a quarter seek stricter voter ID requirements. State lawmakers also aim to make voter registration harder, expand voter roll purges or adopt flawed practices that would risk improper purges, and cut back on early voting. The states that have seen the largest number of restrictive bills introduced are Texas (49 bills), Georgia (25 bills), and Arizona (23 bills). Bills are actively moving in the Texas and Arizona statehouses, and Georgia enacted an omnibus voter suppression bill last week.
And now today, the Supreme Court has established yet another blow to voting rights by further restricting Section 2 of the VRA arguing that methods that restrict voting that have a racially disparate impact are still allowed.
July 1 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday made it easier for states to enact voting restrictions, endorsing Republican-backed measures in Arizona that a lower court had decided disproportionately burdened Black, Latino and Native American voters and handing a defeat to Democrats who had challenged the policies.
The 6-3 ruling, with the court's conservative justices in the majority, held that the restrictions on early ballot collection by third parties and where absentee ballots may be cast did not violate the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal law that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
This growing bigotry, this simmering anger where they perceive that the “great victims” of this nation are white people for being told that “some of them, sometimes, have been potentially racist”, is leading them to twist the government into an authoritarian regime or else threaten the implementation of violence to achieve their goals.
They continue to argue that if they don't get what they want — there will be a "Civil War.”
The question remains, as so many Trumpist argue, that when the Arizona #Fraudit completes in the middle of August — presenting its bogus results — will this cause them to stage military-ish militia attacks on the Arizona State House or perhaps again, on the Capitol?
This is an even larger concern since Domestic Terrorists have infiltrated our military.
"USMC Private First Class Travis Owens and his partners in the unrealized murder plot were influenced by Timothy McVeigh, the former U.S. Army soldier behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead and injured nearly 700," the Daily Beast reported about the story. He has ties to the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen.
Speaking on MSNBC Wednesday, Righteous Media founder Paul Rieckhoff, who served in Iraq as a member of the 3rd Infantry, explained that Owens isn't the only one who idolizes domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who was executed in 2001. According to him, it's prevalent across the military.
"I read this with horror," confessed MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace. "Is this flashing red? Not to overuse that term that I've come to use for the threat of domestic violent extremism. Is it flashing red inside the military?"
Rieckhoff answered, unequivocally, it is.
"Yes, and it was flashing red a year ago, two years ago," he explained. "This is the number one national security threat in America. I've been saying that for years, others have been saying that for years. Domestic extremists, who can plan to attack not just the federal government, but local government and American citizens — this is the new war on terrorism. We used to fear al Qaeda or ISIS bombers. Now we fear guys like this. It only takes one. It just takes one Timothy McVeigh. It takes one active duty marine to inflict mass casualties and serious damage. So, this is something the military was slow to recognize. Policies were slow to change. And folks have fallen through the cracks. We'll never know how many others we don't know about. The FBI, CIA, whoever else has caught some of these guys and gals, maybe they're behind bars somewhere else. It only takes one. The FBI is still hunting many of them that were part of Jan. 6th. This is the number one flashing red light for the Pentagon, for the president, and I hope for all Americans."
At this point, I don't see a clear and obvious target for yet another mass delusional event like the January 6th Insurrection against the Capitol, but this does not mean that other attacks against the government — and perhaps individuals as we've seen with the assaults against Asians and Jews as we’ve seen recently — aren't still likely and probable.
There's not nearly enough of them who are part of the current or former military to actually overthrow the government, but there are enough of them to do some significant damage and destruction either in a single event or in multiple stages of events. They are as dangerous as they are deluded.
Bogus arguments. Phony claims. It would be a Civil war literally over nothing. If we all lived in the same factual reality we might be able to debate and discuss our way out of this nonsense into a better, stronger vision of America.
Unfortunately, that isn't possible.