It’s been simmering for a few years now, maybe longer. Way back when, before I was even born, the Beatles lampooned the wokes in the song “Revolution” — “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.”
“Revolution” was a culturally conservative response to the drive at that time to overthrow America and make her Maoist. Its thesis: If you want a revolution, we’d all love to see what you revolutionaries have in mind (because the way things are, while not perfect, are actually pretty good and getting better on the whole). It disappointed hard-core leftist Beatles fans, but otherwise provided a great little bag of riffs.
Revolutionaries tend not to reveal their plans until they’re in power, at which point it’s too late. Texas has direct experience with such a revolutionary, Santa Anna, who tossed civil rights aside and sparked the 1836 revolution that made Texas.
Today’s revolutionaries don’t like to discuss their plans, preferring to focus on everyone else’s sins. But their playbook is a little red book. And today, they have the high ground — not morally, but factually.
The Maoist moment went away for decades, the Soviet Union’s fall discrediting communism for a time, but rearrived with a vengeance when the COVID pandemic struck. Too many Democrats in office, from Gavin Newsom to Gretchen Whitmer to Andrew Cuomo at the state level and Bill de Blasio and Lina Hidalgo on the county and city levels scratched their Maoist itch with draconian lockdowns on one hand and mass jail releases on the other. Critical race theory swiftly went from academia, such as the mini-revolution at Evergreen College, and radical Twitter straight into the American bloodstream. Like an injection of fentanyl, it is rapidly altering America’s mindset. We’ve quickly gone from a nation that was proud of our history as a republic to damning ourselves because a staff reporter at the New York Times says we were founded not toward freedom, but toward perpetual bondage. Historians debunked the 1619 Project, but facts don’t matter to the Maoists if they get in the way.
The federal government is now pushing this toxin into our schools, though it may not even need to. Many local school district superintendents and teachers are itching to indoctrinate kids with it whether doing so attracts federal grants or not.
The latest battle in this Maoist war is in Texas. The legislature and Gov. Abbott are set to ban critical race theory outright, not by name but by principle. As I argued on Chris Salcedo’s radio show Monday morning, this is a sound approach. Banning it by name would merely elicit a rebranding while the underlying toxins would be taught anyway. The legislature approached it from the point of view of attacking CRT’s ideas instead. You can listen to the entire segment here. The discussion of CRT is in the second half.
In Fort Worth, parents are rising up against the Maoist moment, telling school administrators — who work for the parents, in case they have forgotten — that they do not want critical race theory taught in their schools.
Earlier this month, Fort Worth Superintendent Kent Scribner, along with Dallas ISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, signed a joint letter on behalf of the Texas Urban Council of Superintendents opposing the legislature’s bills banning critical race theory.
In it, they argue that both Senate Bill 2202 and House Bill 3979 are “too broad” and would both suppress “critical classroom conversations” and “discourage civic engagement” by students.
It adds “our districts view the current rhetoric concerning critical race theory as misguided and unnecessary considering our state’s actual history curriculum.”
“He wants microaggressions, implicit bias and anti-racism to be taught in schools,” said parent Traci Jenkins. “I posit that these ideals themselves are racist at their very core.”
English teacher Ale Checka initially intending to discuss class size but quickly switched gears to address the parental outrage over critical race theory.
“I don’t know what y’all think we’re doing in classrooms right now,” she said. “We’re totally focused on your students.”
Checka says educators must include all aspects of history, even those that may be uncomfortable.
“That’s what we’re talking about here is the totality and the richness of our country’s history,” she said.
That is not what many are seeing. Even the “richness of our history” is being used to smuggle in critical race theory, which posits that your race literally defines — inescapably and for all time — your lot in life. This is the opposite of the American ideal, which insists that anyone has the opportunity to succeed.
If you observe teachers and school administrators in meetings such as the one in Fort Worth and on social media, many — certainly not all, but many — are eager to teach CRT in their classrooms whether they teach social studies or math or music. They’re itching to preach instead of teach. Others are just ready to go with the flow, and will teach whatever their district or the state tells them to teach because their paychecks and retirement are depending on it. That may be fine for now in Texas, where the legislature takes a dim view of CRT, but in California the curriculum there will teach kids that even seeking the right answer in math, which doesn’t care about your feelings or your race, is racist.
Or it would have, had parents not risen up and defeated it.
Teaching critical race theory in any of its guises is wrong and will damage children. It will prepare them for nothing but hating other people and becoming leftwing activists, not for real life in a real world.
The Maoist moment commands the heights with Joe Biden in the White House. The U.S. State Department, Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration — all have come under the sway of Maoist critical race theory. The damage being done to the American self-image may be permanent. What will future Americans come to believe when all of our schools, our museums, and our entertainment denounce our country? How long can a republic retain legitimacy if it’s focused on destroying its own foundations? This is what the revolutionaries want, though they have yet to divulge their plans for the aftermath.
But at least some parents are rising up, and some states including Florida, Oklahoma, and now Texas, are resisting. It’s going to take courage and it’s going to take guile to turn the Maoists back. The consequences of not getting and keeping critical race theory out of our system are unimaginably catastrophic.
