Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Nov. 1, 2022 - Epoch Times

18:31

How 3 Billionaires Pushed 'Critical Race Theory' Into America's Schools

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Good evening, and boy do we have a special episode for you today.
	Because if you've been following the news, or if you happen to have any kids in school, well, then you're likely well aware that a certain trend of ideology has been creeping its way into our nation's education system.
	For a while it was under the surface, but lately, at least in the last several years, it's become more and more overt with more obvious surface-level manifestations.
	These are things like a kindergarten over in Washington, D.C. having their kids march around the school with BLM signs, a school district over in Seattle claiming that math is actually racist, you have school districts taking kids on field trips to drag shows, and of course you have more and more curriculum teaching history from a, you can say, revisionist lens.
	And so, in order to understand how the shift actually took place, who funded it, and what it will ultimately lead to if it doesn't change, well, I took the opportunity to sit down and speak with Mr.
	Luke Rosayek.
	He's an investigative reporter with The Daily Wire, and he's also the author of a great new book called The Race to the Bottom.
	And so, strap yourselves in, smash that like button, and take a listen.
	Luke, thank you so much for joining us.
	Maybe to start with, can you please introduce yourself and maybe what initially motivated you to get involved in researching CRT? Sure.
	I'm an investigative reporter at the Daily Wire, and back in 2019, which seems like ages ago in the context of schools, I noticed that there was 10 Democrats on my local school board, and none of them had kids in the school system.
	And I was just so kind of shocked by that.
	I mean, not a single one of them had kids.
	What are they doing on the school board?
	And it turns out that they were all there for their own weird political pet causes, which were oftentimes very radical and not only had nothing to do with education, but oftentimes came at the expense of rigorous academics.
	And at that time, you know, I had focused all my career on writing about the federal government, and I was involved in all these big stories that I thought were very, you know, important because they're at the national level, and no one was talking about school board.
	It sounded like, you know, small-time stuff that no one cared about.
	But I realized that precisely because so few people were paying attention, it had created this vacuum into which...
	These highly mobilized and kind of obsessed and extremely radical activists had filled that void, and they were the only ones going to the school board meetings and organizing the teacher trainings and things like that.
	And, you know, shortly after that...
	I worked on a story out of Seattle where there was a lady who was in charge of the equity programs there, and she was telling black kids in Seattle that math is racist.
	Math isn't for them.
	And I was just so saddened and struck by that because Seattle is where Amazon and Microsoft are headquartered.
	And you hear about the...
	You know, the employment rates, unemployment rates, poverty rates of blacks.
	And then you think about how there are high-tech companies that very much want to find qualified people and pay them huge salaries in Seattle.
	And all they have to do is be good at math.
	And here we have these extreme radical activists who are actually telling kids, math isn't for you.
	And so I started realizing before anyone was focusing on schools, before anyone knew what critical race theory was, that something had gone very wrong in the school systems and it had the potential to really derail our entire country because these kids are going to be adults in just a few years and part of the workforce and part of the voting base and things like that.
	So having looked into it, what did you find?
	What were the roots of this kind of CRT, critical race theory curriculum?
	The roots of it are these completely garbage academic papers in the early 1990s by a bunch of black feminists.
	And it's the kind of papers that they're total nonsense.
	It's like the kind of thing that an eighth grader would write and turn in.
	And people say, oh, you know, especially in the left, they like to say, oh, you just don't understand critical race theory.
	I worked on this book Race to the Bottom for well over a year.
	I read all the papers.
	I do understand them.
	It's just kind of shockingly inane what they say.
	It's just a hammer that goes around looking for nails and And basically by exercising critical race theory, you can just look at any situation and try to find the racism that's supposedly hidden somewhere in there.
	And it doesn't propose any solutions, it just says everything is racist.
	It also redefines whiteness as anything that's dominant.
	So it's really just a way to overthrow society, because anything can be dominant.
	Anything that works, they say the scientific method is dominant, and so it has to be dismantled.
	Asians are actually white because they do well in math and they're dominant there.
	So they have to be kind of taken out of these magnet school and these rigorous programs.
	What I was really interested to kind of discover and chronicle in this book is how it went into the schools in the 1990s really single-handedly by this one guy named Glenn Singleton who made a ton of money As a consultant, taking these academic theories and just printing out stupid little workbooks and holding teacher trainings based on them.
	And he was actually a guy, he's a black guy, but he went to a Jewish day school where he was head of the horseback riding club, and he loved show tunes.
	There was nothing about this guy that was from the streets.
	He went to an Ivy League college, worked on Madison Avenue, lived in Beverly Hills.
	This guy lived a charmed life.
	And when he reached adult years, he had this chip on his shoulder.
	He literally said, what if I, Glenn Singleton, am not black enough?
	And so he decided to take out his weird identity crisis on millions of children by telling them, well, if you really want to be black, part of our culture is we don't really care about reading and writing.
	We don't show up on time.
	We don't listen to rules.
	And it was just like absurd stuff.
	None of your black friends would have ever said anything like this.
	Really no one even in the inner cities is talking like this.
	It's just like one weird guy working on his identity crisis.
	And the schools are just inviting him in and paying money and even laying off teachers to put this weird training onto their staff.
	And so basically one of the other things that I've found is that In the early 2000s, there was No Child Left Behind, which was an academic policy that basically started publishing graduation rates and test scores online.
	And at that point, the school administrators really wanted to rig the stats.
	They didn't want you to see, like, these poor graduation rates.
	And so they started lowering standards.
	And so in early 2001, as an A sort of ironic and unexpected reaction to this pretty non-partisan transparency policy.
	What you saw is what I call a race to the bottom, where they started using racial rhetoric as an excuse to stop doing testing, to make it easier to graduate, so that basically more kids graduate and the spreadsheets look better, but it's not because anyone is smarter.
	They've just made it easier to graduate.
	And so, at the end of the day, what I found in this book is that For all the crazy politics stuff we see, the critical race theory, the equity, transgender, at the root of it is the fact that our schools are not teaching our kids reading, writing, math, science, and they're just using these radical politics as a way to hide that objective data, because at the root of it, critical race theory explicitly rejects objectivity.
	Alright, the sponsor of today's episode is a phenomenal company called AMAC, that's A-M-A-C, and it stands for the Association of Mature American Citizens.
	They are quite literally one of the fastest growing conservative organizations in all of America, and you should consider joining for three main reasons.
	The first is the money-saving benefit, because as a member of AMAC, you get access to a ton of discounts at many different verticals.
	Things like vitamin stores, restaurants, retail shops, and so on and so forth.
	If you want to check out the full list, it's pretty exhaustive, you can do so over on AMAC's website.
	The second benefit is that you get exclusive access to the AMAC magazine.
	It'll be delivered directly to your doorstep and it contains phenomenal coverage as well as deep analysis.
	And then the third benefit, the one that people say is their favorite, is that AMAC fights for your values over on Capitol Hill.
	In fact, you can check out the online version of this on their website.
	It's the AMAC Action Advocacy Annual Report, and it shows exactly what they're doing on Capitol Hill in terms of fighting what they call the socialist storm that's brewing in this country.
	So head on over to amac.us forward slash facts matter and sign up today.
	I'll also throw a link down in the description box below.
	You know, I remember, so you mentioned the 1990s.
	When I was in, I think, either third or fourth grade, I remember one day we had a substitute teacher come in, and she told us, I forgot the main thrust of the lesson, but in the lesson, she told us that black people can't be racist.
	Because the society is set up in a way that they don't have the power and therefore they can't be racist just by definition because the definition of racism is you need to have power in order to qualify as being racist.
	And the reason I remember that episode is because even though I think I was in the third grade and I must have been like eight or nine years old, I remember thinking like, that can't be true.
	You can redefine the words, but I just remember sitting there in class thinking like that doesn't make any sense, right?
	That doesn't make this objective sense.
	How did it come to be that, from this man, from Glenn Singleton that you mentioned, how did it come to be that other teachers began to teach this curriculum?
	Was he holding courses?
	And for instance, that substitute teacher of mine likely went to that course, or were they teaching it in the teaching schools, and then they went off to teach at individual school districts?
	How did that actually play out?
	Yeah, you know, he has this train the trainer model, so it's basically a pyramid scheme where you get their roots, you know, you get your tentacles into a school district and you embed it so that all, then after you leave this, there's some head teacher that's teaching all the other teachers out of this workbook.
	But yeah, I love your anecdote because people really do think, oh, in 2019 there was George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and we started hearing about racism all the time, so it makes sense that it also went into the schools at that time.
	And that's not what happened.
	What happened was because schools were closed because of coronavirus and the teachers' union refusing to go to work, parents just got a glimpse of what had been in schools for many years.
	And so it's really the tail wagging the dog here.
	I mean, I think it's the schools in places like Minneapolis not teaching the kids math, but affirmatively teaching that they are oppressed, that you then had these young people setting fire to their own cities.
	And the truth of the matter is, if you want income inequality and things like that, if you want, rather, if you want to, you know, improve...
	The best way to do that is to help them learn math and science and reading and writing and they will go on to be highly successful people and that's the one thing that the school districts are not doing.
	The other way that it really embedded across, you know, 13,000 school districts beyond just this one guy, Glenn Singleton, is the philanthropic foundations like Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation.
	If you think back to the last time that people really actually paid attention to schools, which is kind of a crazy thing, right, because they play such a big role in our lives and we spend a trillion dollars a year on them, it was probably Common Core that whole debate around 2008, and it was kind of widely documented at that time that the Gates Foundation was single-handedly responsible for it.
	And so fast forward, You know, 15 years.
	And what you see is the same philanthropic foundations are the ones embedding critical race theory, not only in schools, but also in society at large.
	And so, you know, you hear about things like Soros and things like that on the right.
	You rarely hear about Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford.
	In my view, those are the most radical and powerful political entities in the country.
	And the fact that they're operating under the radar only makes them more effective.
	What is the goal of these foundations?
	Is this the worldview that they subscribe to, they believe in it, and they therefore think kids should be taught this?
	Or do they have some kind of end goal in mind and that's why they're teaching it, or is it kind of both?
	You know, if you look at the philanthropic foundations, these are people that, these foundations started in the early 1900s with the wealth of these, you know, monopolists like Carnegie, right?
	And Kellogg, you know, the brothers behind the breakfast cereals.
	And they made a ton of money and they were capitalists certainly, but they were also, to be frank, they were racists and they were creeps.
	And the philanthropic foundations like the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller, Carnegie, they were created to do eugenics.
	They were created to, it was basically this liberal view that we're elite and we're smart and we're going to use social science to improve society.
	But from the beginning, the way they wanted to improve society was to get rid of minorities and to target blacks and to sterilize Hispanic women.
	And so at one point in the 1940s, the philanthropic foundations had a five-acre compound on Long Island that was just a warehouse of the genetics of all American families.
	And they were using that to see which people are desirable, which have desirable genetics, and which should not be procreating.
	So I think it's racist.
	The foundations have arguably been racist for 150 years, and the critical race theory they're doing now is the same kind of racism that they were doing in 1910.
	But another way to look at it is that there is a compulsion among the liberal elites to engineer everything, and they kind of think they're making the world a better place.
	But the problem is when you try to play God and manipulate everything, you really can't, and it oftentimes leads to these unintended consequences.
	And we can't really know what their intentions are now, if they really want to help minorities now, but the result of it, I think, is the same as it is before.
	You're telling minorities that math isn't for them and you're putting them into poverty.
	So it's a creepy sort of God complex that these philanthropic foundations have.
	In your view, if this continues down the road that it's going down, if it's not stopped or altered in any way, what will happen to society, let's say, 10, 20 years from now when the kids going through school come into adulthood and enter the workforce and enter, you know, the levers of society?
	You know, I think if we don't address the school issue in the short term, what we're looking at is civilizational collapse.
	When you look at the federal data on the academic proficiency of 12th graders, who of course are basically adults, they're going to be working potentially the next year and voting in their very same year, only a third of them can read.
	And we're talking about 12th graders.
	24% are proficient in math.
	The figures are even worse in American history and science.
	And so we just can't have, you know, how are we going to compete with China that way?
	How are we going to compete with Russia that way?
	How are we going to develop technology that makes life better for poor people?
	And then, of course, there is the voting thing, too, where, you know, basically, yeah, these are fellow citizens, and they don't have the ability to even make rational decisions because they've been rendered so, you know, sort of incapable of thinking by these school systems.
	And so I think we're going to see a very...
	Bifurcated society where very much like the 1910s when these philanthropic foundations existed because there was this, you know, billionaire collusion, you know, monopolist society and like, you know, Great Gatsby style, like a bunch of peasants and then a bunch of rich people.
	That's probably what we're going to see in the future because there's going to be a huge impoverished class of people.
	I think we're good to go.
	We're not talking about a problem that's limited to kids here.
	This is, in quite the short term, going to be a problem for all of us.
	And by the way, even if you withdraw your own kids from public school and put them into private school or homeschooling, they're going to still have to live in the world as adults that's populated largely by public school graduates.
	Now, that was not the full interview because of the regime of censorship here on YouTube.
	I unfortunately can't publish the full thing here.
	And so if you'd like to check out the entirety of that awesome interview between Luke and myself, the link will be right there at the top of the description box to Epic TV, our awesome no censorship video platform where you can find the entirety of not only my interview with Luke, but also a ton of other great episodes.
	I usually publish at least two, sometimes even three episodes per week over at Epic TV. Plus, we have a ton of great documentaries on there, great programs on there as well.
	It's a great resource if you're looking for uncensored information.
	And so again, if you are a truth seeker and looking for great content, the link to Epic TV will be right there at the very top of the description box.
	I hope you check it out.
	And until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times.

▲