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July 14, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:45:34
20210714_critical-race-theory-and-how-to-effectively-fight-
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Beyond Race Theory 00:07:46
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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Today, critical race theory and the bans on teaching it state to state that have been popping up across our country.
We've got Rich Lowry and Camille Foster with the debate of debates on this.
These are two great guys who went at it, you know, punch for punch, and it was really illuminating.
I think we fleshed out all the arguments.
I'll leave it to you to decide who got the better of the other man, but it was enjoyable.
It was feisty and it was smart.
And I loved it.
And this is the big debate right now, right?
Like many, many states have banned the teaching of short form critical race theory, but it's, you know, some of this nonsense of trying to teach kids that they're defined by the color of their skin or by their sex, et cetera.
And states are finally trying to fight back against this.
It's growing and growing.
The teachers union has been open about the fact that they're on board and pushing it.
And they tried to lie about that, get into that.
So is it a good idea?
Because it's kind of divided the conservative movement andor the non woke movement is what I should say.
So Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
And also, he's one of the hosts of The Editors over on the National Review.
It's their podcast, which I highly recommend.
I love it.
Really smart talk.
And Camille Foster is one of the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast.
You guys know him.
He's been on the show along with his brethren, co hosts of that show.
And they actually had Chris Ruffo on for a debate on this very issue.
There's some backstory with Chris Ruffo that we'll get to in one second.
But, you know, Camille, he wrote an op ed about this, sort of opposing these bands, and he was joined in it by Thomas Chatterton Williams.
and some other authors in the New York Times that he's been supported in it by, Camille is black, he was supported by some other black well-known names and faces like Glenn Lowry in his position.
So these guys are ones who have pushed back on, you know, wokeness and all this making everything about color, but they think these bands go too far and they've got well-thought-out reasons for why.
So you'll hear the debate, get to the guys in one second, first this.
Organizing this outline for this debate has been super fun and super complicated.
This is one of those moments where I'm like, yay, I love to read for a living.
That's really what I do, is read and learn for a living.
And I've been neck deep in all these articles.
And what I've concluded before we even start is that I think all three of us agree on 90% of what we're about to discuss.
It's really just what is the solution that we're arguing over?
You know, what the problem, because I know I've talked to both of you guys before, I think we agree this is a problem, what they're teaching our kids right now.
And within the conservative movement, or even just not even conservative, but just sort of anti-woke America is debating what's the best way of putting an end to this nonsense, or at least fighting back against this nonsense.
So let's just start by defining the problem, okay, in quotes, the problem.
Critical race theory is a term.
Chris Ruvo has been putting it out there as just sort of a catch-all, but I do think it's important to note it's beyond just this one sort of theory about race.
You know, the academics would say, Look, this is just a postgraduate level legal theory.
It doesn't appear in K-12 classrooms.
It's basically just an acknowledgement that discrimination is not just about attitudes, but it's about institutions and how they create racist systems over time.
Okay, so they make it sound very white bread.
It's not.
It's so many things.
And I've lived it and I've talked to my audience about how it's manifested in our lives.
You know, I've got my six year old and my nine year old over the past couple of years being taught that white skin is problematic just by its nature, that the schools were talking about how in every classroom where white children learn, there's a future killer cop.
That's not part of critical race theory, but it's the messaging that's in schools today.
So, anyway, all this is deeply problematic.
And the short form is CRT.
So that's the problem.
And now, We're seeing efforts in several states to fight back.
We've got over 20 states that have passed or proposed laws preventing the teaching of CRT and other racially based ideologies.
Nine states have now actually passed restrictions Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, Idaho, Texas, Florida, New Hampshire, Arkansas, and Arizona.
And again, many other states considering it.
And the pushback from you, Camille, and David French, and Thomas Chatterton Williams, and others has been, yes, it's a problem.
Don't love this kind of teaching.
However, what about free speech?
And do we really want the government dictating what can and cannot be said in class and thought in class?
And haven't people who have been promoting free speech all along been saying the last thing we want is for government, like people like Joe Biden, to be telling us what must be said or thought in schools?
And is this an abandonment of that principle?
Have I summed it up, or I'll let you sum up your pushback?
Yeah, well, I want to be very careful here because I co authored a piece that appeared in the New York Times with Jason Stanley, David French, and Thomas Chatterton Williams.
And obviously, I can represent.
Our combined view to the extent I'm drawing directly from that editorial, but beyond that, I'm speaking for myself primarily.
And I think in the piece, what we tried to convey here is a general sensibility that, and now I'm kind of extracting from not so much the piece, but my speaking for myself in a sense, but that every school board drama need not become a statewide legislative scandal.
It is not obvious.
I mean, most of us have kids.
I think we all have kids, actually.
My daughter is not yet in sort of Big kids' school, she's in preschool, but I went to school myself.
And I can remember circumstances where there were things happening in the classroom that my mother had questions about.
And there are mechanisms for adjudicating that sort of problem, for dealing with those kinds of issues.
Even now, as we find ourselves kind of on the other side of this quote unquote, or perhaps in the midst of the throes of this racial reckoning, a lot has changed in the country.
A lot of the ways that we're talking about different issues have changed.
And a lot of that has seeped into various aspects of our lives and certainly active and alive in classrooms and in school board meetings.
And we've seen A lot of the worst examples of that get national news coverage, and a lot of the subtler examples of it aren't necessarily getting there.
The question becomes Are there ways to address this beyond haphazardly rushing to try and pass legislation in various states to ban something?
Something that really, when we talk about CRT, as you just laid out, Megan, I mean, this is an amalgam of different things.
And as a result, the way that folks go about trying to pass these bans, and I think it's something that Rich would acknowledge as well.
Is by drafting these pieces of legislation that try very, very hard to get at kind of precise, specific concepts that can't be discussed or must be discussed in a particular way or must be discussed along with something else.
And I think the net effect of that, our concern, drawing directly from the editorial here, is that we are actually creating a circumstance where it is going to be very, very difficult for teachers to understand how to teach important topics and really make it a circumstance where they have to wonder if they can teach it at all.
Banning Civics Debates 00:15:16
That there are elements of James Baldwin's work.
Of Martin Luther King's speeches and writings, that one has to wonder if they can be included.
Scathing critiques of the American project.
Of its defects and deficiencies, the way that it's failed, talk that is contemporary to those men in their lives of what it was like to be white or black in America or what the specific obligations of persons of different race were.
Again, from their lives and perspectives, even introducing historical documents like reading a speech from a Confederate leader, sort of talking about their perspective and experiences.
Under many of these statutes, those things would be banned.
At a minimum, one would have to wonder if they didn't face the possibility of some sort of legislative, not legislative, but some sort of prosecution and in some cases, substantial fines.
And that can't really be the way that we imagine we can take care of this situation.
As you said, I am deeply concerned about the presence of race essentialism in all aspects of our society right now and the degree to which we're not having productive conversations about race.
I don't, however, think.
That an approach to trying to ban something in a rather crude, again, this sort of haphazard way, this rush to do something, is necessarily going to get us an outcome that actually leads to less of this happening.
What I already see happening is the possibility that we can see people who are essentially trying to run afoul of these laws on purpose, people who are being brought up, potentially having lawsuits filed against them under questionable circumstances.
And eventually you're going to see pink slips.
And perhaps even, I mean, what?
Like arrests that result in, I mean, protests that result in arrests.
I mean, are those the kind of outcomes that people imagine are going to actually help us get through this to a much saner place where we can be more reasonable when we're thinking about public education in this country?
I just don't think that makes a lot of sense.
So there's so much to dissect.
And I do want to get to your statement that, you know, certain Confederate general speeches couldn't be taught, right?
Basically, racist speeches saying, Let me tell you why we need the situation to be as it is.
And black people aren't as smart as white people, and they're not as good as white people.
So, according to the way some of these laws are worded, you couldn't even read that.
And that's true.
The laws, a couple of them are written in a problematic way.
I think just from having read National Review and Rich, he's going to agree with that, that these are not all perfectly worded and could use some revising.
But before we get into the specifics of the laws themselves, a couple of them and how they They need revising.
Let me kick it to you, Rich, on the concept of this way to fight back, right?
As opposed to, because what David French has said and what your op ed in the New York Times said, Camille, was a meaningful way of getting back at this is by filing lawsuits.
And I'm all for that, by the way.
I've been saying this is part of the solution for sure.
It's currently not lawful to discriminate on the basis of race.
And so if you're dragged into some training session as a teacher and told that you're less than because you're white, Your school's violating the law.
So I'm all for the lawsuits.
But what the conservative movement and the non-woke people have said is it's not good enough.
We need these laws because we need immediacy.
It's not a free speech issue at all.
This is about the citizenry telling the government what it can teach their kids.
And that this is a useful tool in the arsenal that should be unleashed ASAP for the well-being of our children.
So let's start with that, Rich, on whether you agree that this is a, this is.
Without putting aside the wording of the laws, whether this is a good way of fighting back.
First of all, I appreciate the conversation.
And Camille, congratulations on the op ed.
There are not many op eds that people are discussing two or three weeks later, whatever it is.
All of us columnists are very jealous.
So, congratulations on that.
I think this is a worthy effort.
On the lawsuits, it just puts incredible pressure on individual teachers or parents to undertake what could be a years long effort to try to push back against this stuff through the courts.
And if we're admitting that actually that is in play, as the authors of this op ed do, we're admitting that this is poisonous and toxic.
And why should we tolerate that in our public schools?
And public schools are public institutions.
Teachers are state actors.
They're teaching state curricula in state owned buildings that parents, if they aren't pursuing some other alternative, have to send their kids to.
So they are profoundly small d democratic institutions.
And forbidding these poisonous concepts from being foisted on children is an appropriate democratic, small d democratic.
Action.
So I don't see, in theory, any problem with this at all.
In fact, I welcome it.
Again, Megan, as you've stipulated, the wording in some of these cases is problematic and could have been crisper and more clear.
But I just reject the idea that it is out there that this is going to stop the teaching of slavery or civil rights.
If you look at Tennessee, which the authors of the op ed spend some time on, That statute, what they forbid is the promoting of the concept that individuals should feel ashamed or discomfort because of their race.
So that's different than saying, oh, here's the Atlantic passage, which was this horrifying, nauseating human rights abuse, and you might feel uncomfortable learning about it because it's a terrible topic.
That's not it.
It's a teacher going out of his or her way to say, you should feel guilty because you are white.
Or you're black, or whatever it is, that is forbidden.
And it just seems to me with public schools, you know, which we don't need adventurous instruction in public schools.
That's something for colleges and universities when you're dealing with adults, when you have instructors who are engaging in academic research, where academic freedom is a core value.
This is different.
This is supposed to be between, you know, the 40 yard lines.
This is kind of consensus values and instructions.
In our society.
So these efforts strike me as worthwhile.
I wonder about the way that you just characterized that, though, Rich, because especially when you say, you know, this shouldn't be taught in schools.
Well, what is this?
I mean, we are talking about a sprawling catalog of practices and issues that people have serious concerns about.
And when we talk about K 12 education, we're talking about, you know, children as young as four and five and children as old as 17 and 18.
And in a high school class, there are certain things that young people ought to be exposed to.
It seems the way that this is talked about, even what you just said there about the Tennessee law, if your interpretation of this is correct, it might be the case that kids in a civics class couldn't watch a presidential debate because someone in one of those debates might talk about, say, white privilege, white supremacy, structural racism, or some of these other concepts, and might make an assertion to the fact, to the possibility that, or might make an assertion along the lines of, White people have unique, particular privilege.
It is a reality that people are talking about this now, that many Americans feel a particular way about these issues now, and finding constructive ways for students to be able to engage with these questions and issues in a classroom setting with one another.
It seems to me that it's urgently important that our institutions are kind of up to that task.
And one of the things that I want to point out here is that the editorial doesn't only suggest that we can go pursue lawsuits.
It also says explicitly that a better approach to trying to ban things, this kind of negative approach to curriculum, you can't do this, you can't do that, is to build better curriculum that is more thoughtful and is more constructive and affirmatively gives us a sense for how to navigate these complex issues together.
And not imagine ourselves as just kind of pushing approved knowledge into young brains, but equipping young people with the talent and the skills necessary to grapple with hard issues.
Let me ask you so that sounds nice, but what we're up against is a teachers union.
I mean, both of the largest teachers unions in the country are determined to teach this, despite their gaslighting of us now, right?
Saying, no, we're not.
I mean, they lifted the dress up this month.
We're in the National Education Association, that's the largest teachers union.
They had an annual conference this month.
This is a great story.
And they, because the official word sort of out of the left, right?
The media, the pundits, Democratic lawmakers has been, we're not teaching CRT in K through 12.
That's not happening.
And then the National Education Association at their annual conference is like, we have a six figure campaign we're unleashing to fund a team of staffers for members who want to learn more and fight back against those who are fighting our CRT rhetoric.
Basically, saying it's very reasonable.
They said it's reasonable to teach critical race theory, and we're going to fight back against those who are pushing against us.
They forgot.
They forgot about the official talking point.
And then the Heritage Foundation reported on it, and they promptly removed all the items on their website that mentioned CRT.
Like, whoops, we didn't say that.
You didn't see that.
But it was too late.
And the second largest teachers' union, American Federation of Teachers, that's Weingarten's union, they've said too, they're investing, I think it's $5 million into future legal fees to defend teachers who insist on teaching CRT.
Even though Weingarten is also insisting that CRT is not being taught.
Okay, it's being taught.
And even the polling, NBC had a report on this recently, it was over 50% of teachers that either want to teach it or admit privately that they are teaching it.
So it's, I would love to just build better curricula, but we're up against a group of people who really wants to shove this down our kids' throats.
Yeah.
And I think you raised an important point.
As I mentioned earlier, it would be wrong not to acknowledge one, that there have already been activist excesses in various schools across the country.
It is hard to quantify this problem.
I can't say how many schools this is happening in or where the worst things are happening.
And I think that's really important that nobody can really quantify this just yet.
So it's important to kind of keep our concern constrained in that way, but at least to be aware of this reality.
And you're right to point out what the teachers' unions have done.
Ibram Kendi was speaking at one of these events and they pledged to buy copies of his books stamped and to pollute schools with it all over the country.
That bothers me.
I have serious problems with that.
At the same time, One wonders about the appropriate approach to this.
And one has to also wonder about the degree to which the way that concern has been generated about these issues and the way that it's being focused at the moment, if that isn't contributing to just kind of a spreading of a brush fire as opposed to really constructive approaches to trying to address this problem.
I think what's not talked about often enough is the practical limitations of a strategy of trying to pass statewide bans on various things.
Like, how many states can we actually get these things passed in?
What percentage of states won't have this protection at all?
I imagine if you don't have a red legislature and a red governor's office, that's not happening.
And it's also the case that the most awful excesses seem to be concentrated in particular places.
Like, I've seen a lot of stories out of New York.
I've seen a lot of stories out of California.
I haven't seen quite so many out of Tennessee.
In fact, what I've seen out of Tennessee recently is a teacher who got fired who seemed to be kind of hankering for the opportunity to get fired over these things.
And it turns into a national news story.
And it seems to me that that isn't necessarily what we want.
I'm thinking, I think a lot about the missed opportunity here.
I imagine these angry parents going to these meetings, these.
These school board meetings and demanding something better, like, I don't know, school choice, for example.
Like, it is not as though the statewide ban initiative, this haphazard project, isn't one that will cost a tremendous amount of resources and energy.
And it's not as though there aren't meaningful risks associated with it.
And it's not as though it's guaranteed to work.
If these bans are sufficiently narrow so that they don't run afoul of the Constitution and so that they don't run afoul of making it difficult to teach complicated materials.
They're probably not going to be able to stop most of the things that people are concerned about.
The reality is that this is a cultural issue, that there is a broad societal issue here, and we have to be meaningfully engaged in our local school boards, going to meetings, meeting with teachers.
There are no shortcuts here.
And anyone who is telling you what there are is wrong.
So I've been working with a bunch of groups on this.
FAIR is one of them, and also Parents Defending Education, which is a nonpartisan group.
Just trying to represent parents who are struggling with all this.
And I know that one of the things that Parents Defending Education really wants is for concerned parents to run for school boards.
Yep.
You got to get on school boards.
You can't just sit at home and lament.
You got to get in the positions of power.
So, Rich, why isn't that the answer?
Like grassroots efforts, taking advantage of this enormous energy we've seen among parents who are outraged about this to get them on school boards and change the curriculum that way as opposed to at the state level.
Oh, it has to be a huge part of the solution.
So I disagree with Camille about these laws, most of them.
I think they're legitimate concerns about some of the wording.
But let's say we, and I take his point, this is only happening in red states with red legislatures and Republican governors.
Let's say we do this in 15 states, one that leaves a huge part of the country, right?
35 states where you haven't done it.
Two, if all we do, even if we pass these kind of laws in 50 states, just keeping teachers from making kids feel guilty over their race, that's not a huge victory, right?
That's a really minor and defensive victory when you think about it.
So, absolutely, these school board fights are essential.
Avoiding Legislative Panic 00:15:42
And developing curricula that teaches truthful versions of American history or protecting curricula that already do that is absolutely the ultimate.
Name of the game.
And the beauty of our system and having a highly localized system of education is you can be a parent in a small town somewhere or a suburban county, and you can go get 200 signatures on your petition to get on the ballot or whatever it takes.
And then you win 800 votes in a school board race, and you are hugely influential in how the education of your children and your neighbor's children is going to be carried out.
That's a beautiful thing.
And parents who are concerned about this should.
Absolutely take advantage of that.
And that's something that can happen not just in red states, it can happen in states all around the country because you look at a county by county.
A political map, and you know, there's swaths that the country, if you break it down that way, is mostly red because there's so many uh red localities, and so that's that's that should be the name of the game more than these state laws.
I defend these state laws, I think what they're trying to do is righteous, but again, it's really kind of a defensive and prophylactic action compared to taking over these school boards and preventing.
The education blob from imposing this stuff on our schools.
And I also take Camille's point that mostly, you know, you look at where this is happening, it's happening a lot of places, but, you know, it's Cupertino, it's Portland, as you point out, it's a lot of New York, but it's coming everywhere unless you stop it.
And this is the history of these sort of things.
Not that we want to get into trans, but, you know, we would have, a lot of us would have said, oh, look, 10 years ago, Berkeley says biological males should be able to go into female bathrooms.
Isn't that insane?
You know, that would never happen here, but it's spread everywhere.
So, I think while this debate can be won, and before it's too late, it's important to undertake these state measures and the places where you can pass them and fight school board race by school board race all around the country.
Because if you get control of the school boards, you can go as broad as you want.
I mean, one of the things about these laws is they don't stop the indoctrination on trans issues.
You know, all this stuff about letting your kid leave in the middle of the day to go get cross gender hormones without telling the parents and not looping the parents in if your kid decides.
One day to go from being a girl to being a boy.
They don't tell the parents.
Like, it's crazy how at our school, our all boys school that we left, they were literally asking the boys every week whether they still felt like boys.
That is what my son and his friends told me.
It was insane.
Like, gender is just something that's completely fluid.
It could change day to day.
And just checking back in at an all boys school with these boys to see whether that changed for them.
Like, could you just stop it?
Stop it.
If my kids got an issue, I want her to be supported.
You don't need to keep suggesting it, right?
It's like, Is anyone feeling suicidal?
Anyone today?
Anyone feeling it a little?
Like some of these things are suggestible.
We've seen evidence on that with the trans craze through Abigail Schreier and Lisa Lippman, who did the study and so on, especially with respect to girls.
Anyway, my point is none of these laws address any of that, but you get control of the school boards and you can.
You can.
So that I think we all agree that that would be a nice way of fighting back, getting more local control.
Moms for Liberty down in Florida, this group I spoke to, they're all about that and that's awesome.
But like it or not, for good or for worse, There is a push with the states, you know, more and more to do this.
I should point out, states on the other side have done it too.
Several states have mandated the inclusion of this CRT education into their education systems, like California, but several others as well, all blue states.
And now red states are doing it the other way.
And I do think it's worth noting they have discretion.
The states do have discretion to set the curriculum in their schools, they can banish texts, they can restrict teacher speech.
It's different from colleges.
You know, the K through 12 kids are a captive audience.
There's a great piece on National Review Rich by Stanley Kurtz saying there's a good reason that we can do more to silence or control K through 12 teachers than we can college professors.
They're a captive audience.
They're minors.
They're vulnerable to the authority of these teachers.
They're held in much higher esteem than college professors are.
And Stanley said, this is abuse, what's happening to them.
I've said that too.
I do think this is child abuse.
So, to you, Camille, what of the argument that this is an emergency?
Like, we wouldn't let schools all over the country say the KKK wasn't all wrong.
They had a lot of good points.
Hitler, he made some good points.
Like, we would never allow that.
And I think people view this kind of messaging.
You know, I mean, there's just one.
This is actually out of Oklahoma, Red State.
A teacher told his students to be white is to be racist, period.
You know, that we covered the public schools in Buffalo, teaching five year olds about racist police, making them watch videos of dead children allegedly sort of coming back from the grave to talk about racist cops and so on.
So you can see the feeling by folks who oppose this that this is an equal emergency to stop.
Well, again, my perspective on this emergency, however, is does a sledgehammer actually fix those problems?
And it seems to me that it does not, in fact, fix those problems.
That it is almost certainly the case that, with this local system that we have, a solution that does make a lot of sense is for parents to get involved in a circumstance like that, to go to their school board, to make the issue known to local officials, and to create a bit of a scandal at that institution.
And achieve the change that they want.
That's what makes sense here.
A statewide ban, again, it seems to me, is going to cause no shortage of problems.
And while I know Rich has some disagreement about this, the reality is that the way many of these pieces of legislation are written today, they're going to have a number of far reaching consequences that can't really be anticipated and could further politicize issues.
I have good reason to believe that the degree to which folks are actually kind of overreaching here.
And creating a bit of a panic is probably inspiring more controversy and will inspire more concern and will make the states that are more interested in these policies perhaps even go a bit further in kind of cementing their perspective here.
And to the extent folks who are interested in bans go too far in their attempts to try and restrain some of these things, it is entirely possible that they could turn public opinion against them very quickly and sort of cement some of these things in the institutions.
And create a great deal of sympathy for someone.
The last thing that you want, if you're someone who's concerned about creeping racial essentialism in public schools, is kind of a sympathetic victim who is fired for something that seems rather frivolous to people looking at it from the outside, that makes people very suspicious about these restrictions.
And I don't want to create the perception of Ibram Kendi's book being secret knowledge.
If 16 year olds have access to this book, what if they bring them from home?
You know, are you going to take those things away from them?
Are they forbidden in the library?
I mean, I think it's really important to just bear in mind the kind of limitations of what these schools can actually do.
It's not the worst thing in the universe if there is something in the library, say, at the school that is perhaps somewhat questionable from all of our shared perspective, but that a kid might have access to.
Like, there are going to be questions.
These conversations are going to happen.
It is impossible.
It is impossible that students won't have conversations about.
Black Lives Matter in their college, you know, government and politics, in their high school government and politics courses.
I mean, my wife in her second year in high school participated in a debate club and debated affirmative action back and forth.
These things will happen.
And I don't think it is an even realistic possibility that we can put the genie back in the bottle and sort of put a shield around ourselves and not have these conversations.
The question becomes how to do these kinds of things productively, not to try to ban them out of existence.
What about that, Rich?
Because there's, I think Camille's now sort of getting to the text of the law, the text of some of the laws and why it's problematic.
Like they're in Oklahoma and Texas, they prohibit K through 12 public school teachers from.
Making part of a course, any one of these banned concepts.
You can't make it even a part of the course.
You cannot be a part of the course to sort of discuss concepts that create division or resentment between races and social classes and so on.
And that's different.
That's different from, like I mentioned, Stanley.
He wrote a draft of these laws.
And even he has said, it should have said, you can't inculcate, you can't promote the idea that one race is.
Better or worse than another.
I think, I mean, that's already the law.
They're just not following it.
But they didn't go with inculcate.
They went with something much more generic and inclusive and, you know, broad.
Like you just can't even discuss it, basically.
Yeah.
Having talked to people in Texas, the intention is, again, as we were talking about Tennessee, is promoting these concepts.
So it's one thing to say, you know, John C. Calhoun thought that slavery was a benign institution that was good for whites.
For blacks.
You know, that's a historical fact.
It's another to say slavery was a good institution.
I'm here standing in the front of the classroom telling you that slavery was a good institution.
That's promoting.
But to Stanley's point, make it clear.
I mean, this is law.
Law should be precise and clearly worded so everyone knows what they're dealing with.
And inculcate would, I believe, I'm curious what Camille thinks, I believe would take care of the problem and make it clear what we're getting at, just to a couple of points that.
Um, Camille made we're not talking about you know banning books from school libraries, we're not talking about banning you know the topics that can be debated.
We're talking about stopping teachers and administrators from foisting these poisonous concepts on children.
Is there a panic about this?
Yes, should there be a panic about this?
Yes, absolutely.
And I just can't, I think you made this point uh earlier, Megan.
I just can't believe that if there's one school district in America where uh Teacher training materials or what's being taught to fifth graders was the KKK was right that there wouldn't instantly, you know, all 50 states wouldn't pass laws, so you can't do that.
And it would almost be universal assent.
So I don't get why it's not similar here.
And then finally, just in fomenting controversy, this controversy, if you're a reasonable, right thinking parent, this controversy is coming to you.
You might not be interested in this controversy, but it's coming to you.
So you got to be ready to.
To fight it tooth and nail.
And I mean, the teachers' unions, those resolutions passed by the NEA, I mean, they could have been drafted by Chris Ruffo to prove his point, right?
That's exactly what they did.
These are the people we're entrusting our children with.
We send them there six, eight, whatever hours a day, trusting that their minds won't be twisted and that they'll actually be taught straight history.
And we can't trust them.
And that's the bottom line.
Trust them.
And this is why we need the exercise of the small d democratic authority of the people in these various places to stop it from happening.
Can I speak to two things that you just mentioned there?
Thank you, Megan.
First, I mean, I think it's important to note that these bills, and I think it has been said already, but it's important to say again, these pieces of legislation are all over the place in terms of quality and the things that are actually being banned.
There was a proposed Kentucky legislation that included language that would have restricted classroom instruction or discussion, formal or informal, or the distribution of any printed or digital materials.
With the same sort of restrictions around these particular issues about race and how they're being discussed and what's being discussed and what's being promoted.
But again, we're talking about informal discussions in class being restricted by a bill.
That's crazy.
That becomes a huge problem.
So, my thing is should we panic?
No.
Panic is never good.
That's not a good strategy when you have a serious problem.
You don't panic, you develop a strategy, you develop a thoughtful plan, and you imagine what a good outcome looks like here.
And quite frankly, I just don't hear enough of those conversations.
And to put this into a framework that I think will be familiar since the Klan has been mentioned a few times, and I know one of Chris's favorite things to do is to ask, you know, what if the Ku Klux Klan was doing this?
Well, I think it's important to differentiate between that thought experience and the reality that we're facing.
Because if, in fact, the Ku Klux Klan was in a position to get something developed and instituted in our public schools anywhere in America, we would have a very severe problem.
And it would not be the sort of problem that anyone could have.
Yeah, they're messing with it.
Is repeated by CRT.
I mean, it's the thing, you know, the old who's saying it, right?
Is this something Robin DiAngelo said or something David Duke said?
And you can't always tell the difference.
Well, that is actually true.
Although I think I would love to take that in a different direction.
But I think what I'm saying is that to the extent that's the case, our problem is far more severe than the curriculums in schools.
Like there is a social issue, there is a cultural issue that actually has to be addressed.
And the notion that you can address that cultural, social issue with these bans is just, I mean, I find it laughable.
Like, you can't actually prevent teachers from finding a sophisticated way to get their own perspective into the classroom, and it will always happen.
This is the reality.
So, the thinking here is not that you can make, that you can sort of use my perspective, anyways, is that you can't use the law to make these places, these kind of pure cathedrals where there is no sort of political influence at all, where there is no.
Kind of ideological valence to these classrooms.
Like some of that is always going to be there.
The question becomes how do we strike a healthy, constructive, meaningful balance in these classrooms?
How do we make certain that kids are getting well rounded at educations?
Well, our school system has had a lot of problems for a very long time.
And post COVID, it would be great if we spent some time thinking constructively about how to fix those problems.
We've got problems with literacy, with math, all over the country.
Kids who are not learning in these schools already.
Balancing Classroom Ideology 00:04:31
And I think it's shameful that folks are interested in having this kind of ideological conflict.
And I'm not blaming the parents who are responding to activists who have done this to them, who have brought this fight to them.
But I am saying that the appropriate response, it seems to me, is to say, hey, slow down.
We know that we can sort of develop programs for these schools that work.
These are the solutions that make sense.
And it would be great if a lot of this activist energy, if a lot of the money that was being raised around these issues was being used to, one, yes, fund.
Lawsuits where necessary, where egregious things are happening.
You can, in fact, get some sort of action and remedy that doesn't take years.
You can get an injunction that will bring immediate relief to families.
And you can start to meaningfully develop curriculum.
And I know FAIR is doing some of that work, but it would be great to have more people doing that work as well.
And a lot of this energy that's going into legislation being directed in that way.
And of course, school choice is a really important goal as well.
Up next, what about all those states who are mandating the teaching of this kind of stuff, this critical race theory nonsense, divisive awfulness?
Why can they do it, but other states who oppose it can't ban it?
We'll get into that in one minute.
I love lawsuits.
As a former lawyer, I love using the law to shut this down because most of this stuff is illegal.
It's already illegal.
It's just they're ignoring it and getting away with it.
So, yes to lawsuits, but I also understand the point that they take a long time.
They're expensive.
Not every case will get picked up by parents defending education or by FAIR or by one of these groups that's trying to help.
So, it's frustrating.
And as a parent who was undergoing this with all three of my kids in their schools, you don't want to say, okay, I'm going to file a lawsuit.
I'm going to wait.
And meanwhile, your kid's being shamed every day for his race or his gender.
It's like, no, screw you.
We're out of here.
We're out of here.
You're not getting one more day of this abuse of my child.
Not one.
Right.
So that's what makes you go say, pass a law, do what you have to do so I can shove it down this teacher's throat when she tries to teach my kid that he's a racist because of pigmentation over which he has no control.
Right.
So I understand the emotion behind it.
But can I just make one point?
I don't, you know how you guys do at the end of the editors, Rich, you know, your, your, the piece that you recommend everybody read.
I didn't hear you guys mention this one, Megan.
I love it.
I actually do a lot of my reading based on the recommendations you do at the end of that.
But I want to make it on the, I want my recommendation to make it.
And it's the piece called What Happened to You by Andrew Sullivan.
It's dated July 9th.
It's a great one.
It's on a Substack.
And it's the subheading is The Radicalization of the American Elite Against Liberalism.
And I have to point this out because you correctly point out, Camille, and you've been railing about this too, there's something bigger wrong with the country right now.
Schools are a problem, no question.
And especially because of the things Stanley Kurtz raised, you know, they're minors, they're vulnerable, they're a captive audience.
But the problem is so much bigger than that.
And he writes in this piece, he kind of diagnoses it and he quotes Wesley Yang a lot.
And my eyes were opened.
I read this and I was like, oh my God, this is exactly right.
Here's just a sample.
He writes, we are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s.
This isn't coming from the ground up.
It's being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda.
And its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown.
It nearly lost the Democrats the last election.
And he goes on to basically say, What's happened here is the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites.
It's sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation.
I'm quoting here.
In essence, it is an ongoing moral panic against the specter of white supremacy, which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.
And he quotes Wesley Yang's coinage of the phrase, the successor ideology.
That's what's taking over liberalism in this country, you know, sort of this where people used to be, where people used to stand up for due process and free speech.
And now all those things are considered planks of an oppressive system, right?
You can't be for due process anymore.
You're a racist.
You can't be for free speech or objectivity because that's racist and sexist and so on.
Anyway, you got to read the whole piece.
Free Speech vs Indoctrination 00:08:08
But to your larger point, Camille, we do need to spend some time on that and how you fight that.
Because people who are on the left are on our side in fighting that.
And Andrew Sullivan's one of them.
Yeah.
I think you could potentially lose some of those people if you are engaged in a legislative battle nationwide that produces, in some instances, really bad laws that run afoul, not necessarily of the First Amendment, but run afoul of our general principles of having a cultural.
Sort of appreciation for the importance of respecting diversity of thought and creating curriculums that are sufficiently diverse and complicated.
What about, Camille, how about like California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois?
They mandate CRT.
In California, if I'm not mistaken, it's not a statewide mandate.
They've developed a curriculum and schools can decide whether or not they want to utilize it.
But I think you do raise a good point there.
And the question is, what can be done in those states?
Well, in those states, one, you can't pass a ban.
So the things that are left to those people, and I think it's important to equip them with let them know what their options are.
Go to your school board meeting, be involved in the classroom, engage with teachers there.
And if there is a serious violation of your civil liberties, get a lawyer, reach out to one of these fine organizations that are helping people to file these civil rights lawsuits.
And yes, it does take some time for these federal cases to run their course, but you can secure an injunction, and that can happen in as little as a month.
And once you do, that can bring some immediate relief.
And even the specter of injunctions, and quite frankly, I think I'd love to see these things flying like all over the place, just get a bunch of them filed.
You will scare a lot of these school boards straight.
You will scare a lot of these school systems straight.
And that is what needs to happen here.
I think it's important to enter into the record.
One of my co conspirators on this piece, David French, who was formerly at FIRE, and FIRE currently, Greg Lukianov is the head over there.
They've had profound success.
And they fight for free speech rights on college campuses.
Yes, on college campuses in particular.
And they've had profound success using legislation to get these universities to get rid of their speech codes.
Like incredible success.
You mean using lawsuits?
Yes, using lawsuits to induce universities to effectively stop using these speech codes, to pull back on them, and have seen marked improvements in the quality of the sort of survey results that they've been doing year over year.
And it's the sort of thing that can be achieved here if folks are sort of constructively and thoughtfully approaching these issues.
I worry about this being sort of analogized to the Tea Party movement.
I don't know that the Tea Party movement was terribly successful.
If I remember correctly, the principal issue that the Tea Party was concerned about was the debt.
How did that work out?
You had a panic, you had a furor, you got people excited, they were energized, they showed up at some meetings, but they didn't really accomplish much.
And it would be a damn shame if we didn't really accomplish much now, because I actually think it matters.
I think it matters that our schools already weren't doing a very good job.
And I think it matters now that in some schools, yes, we are seeing kind of a push for kind of ideological indoctrination.
And at a moment when the country is so weirdly fractious and so many things are politicized in unhealthy ways, it would be a real shame if we missed the opportunity to find constructive ways to navigate around these problems.
So let me respond to Camille, what you're saying, just the answer just prior to this one about this vast cultural tide and we can't kind of use laws to fight back against it.
Again, K 12 education is public K 12 education is a state.
Institution.
And yes, having state rules about how you teach kids doesn't stop this vast cultural tide, but it can establish a bulwark against that cultural tide in a very important area.
And when you advocate people running for school boards and influencing what their schools do that way, school boards, and this is public action.
So you're really just making a distinction between certain levels of.
Of state authority.
You're not actually defending a kind of a libertarian principle.
And I just object to maybe I misunderstood what you were saying earlier, but K 12 teachers, they shouldn't just be these free floating people who show up in the classroom.
They've read the New York Times Magazine, but they're going to that day say the United States is a racist society.
Of course not.
Beginning to end.
And in the classroom, they do not have free speech rights.
You can't control what they say once they're out of the classroom.
So they should teach what the people through their representatives, whether it's a state level or local school boards, what they are told to teach.
That is their.
But these are prohibitions on race.
They're going to be influenced, as the NEA resolutions suggest, by this hideous doctrine that's very fashionable and influential now.
That has to be stopped.
And these kind of state laws don't take care of the issue.
It's more important to get the curricula right.
But it's also worthy to say nope, you're not teaching our kids that they're inherently racist.
You're not teaching them they should feel guilty because of their race.
You're not doing that.
And then we'll go on the school boards and we'll tell you more about what you should specifically teach them.
Yeah, again, I think we're still talking about restrictions on specific concepts.
And in some cases, we imagine that we're talking about restrictions on specific statements, effectively, that you can't tell a person that they should feel shame.
In practice, though, because we're talking about restricting material in addition to restricting sort of statements that can be made, and because the reality in practice, again, is that you're usually going to have a circumstance where a child is coming to their parents and saying, hey, I felt bad.
What the teacher said in class made me feel bad.
And on account of my race, there is a tremendous amount of subjectivity in all of these circumstances.
And I don't know that it's important to imagine not only the possibility that you might be able to sort of remedy this problem in this way, but the reality that you're going to introduce into these classrooms a kind of chilled climate, the possibility of the kind of punishment and censure for things that.
Maybe we don't want there to be punishment and censure over.
And we're denying ourselves the opportunity to do this in a more productive way.
I think there is a material difference between passing these restrictions statewide on particular concepts and ideas and around feelings and sentiments, as opposed to having school boards that are working on people getting elected to school boards if necessary, working on developing curriculums that make sense, and working on enforcing.
The same sort of standards against discrimination and rights violations that we have on the books already, that we have, that we can respect at the federal level and making certain that those things are happening in our schools.
Like you actually have to have a federal level.
Well, I'm saying you have this already, you have this already, and you have these bodies that are there.
You can use those things in order to achieve this goal.
And again, I do think at some level, like it has to come back to durable solutions.
And I do think that school choice.
Is a much more durable solution than any of these other things, and I think it is a profound error to waste all of the energetic interest and activism that's happening and to not be pushing for that in a more serious way.
Chilling Teacher Speech 00:09:30
A couple things one, you've said parents should use lawsuits in part to chill to make all these people scared they're going to get sued.
So, are you for or against?
I'm saying the existing civil rights lawsuits.
There's we've got decades.
Well, yes, we've got deputies to scare them.
Well, I'm saying scare them straight, the activists who are going too far.
When there is a legitimate violation, Yes, file a lawsuit, get these people to stop doing it.
But I don't want to have frivolous lawsuits being filed at the state level all the time because someone says something that made me feel uncomfortable.
I don't think that's really the same fuzzy line.
I think we can make it fuzzier.
And once you're saying we should sue over this, and I believe earlier you did say you wanted people to get brushback pitches and be worried about this.
So I don't see what the principal distinction between making people afraid of getting sued and Writing a ban on this sort of instruction into state law.
And then also, as a practical matter, these provisions relate to other state laws.
So, in Florida, for instance, I won't blame you for this one, Camille.
This was another New York Times piece, but there's a big New York Times Magazine piece by this guy, Timothy Snyder.
This was amazing.
Timothy Snyder, I read your rebuttal to this online, Rich, and it was, I'm shocked by how horrible his piece was.
Go ahead.
Sorry to interrupt.
Well, thank you.
But anyway, he quotes this.
Provision that was passed by the state school board saying you can't inculcate, you know, kind of 1619 project that the U.S. is inherently racist.
And so, oh my God, see, they banned teaching slavery.
But the immediate prior sentence in that rule was make sure that you are faithfully and accurately teaching the history of slavery, the history of Jim Crow.
And the sentence after that in the rule says make sure you're teaching, you know, the Bill of Rights and all the amendments to the Constitution, obviously, including, you know, The amendment eliminating abolishing slavery, et cetera.
And then this rule doesn't stand alone.
It is a way to let teachers know how to interpret the state statute that sets out the standards for what students are supposed to learn in Florida.
And of course, that includes African American history, includes slavery, includes Jim Crow, includes Martin Luther King.
So these places, even with the problematic laws, they don't exist in isolation.
They'll be interpreted.
In the context of existing state standards that everywhere include teaching slavery.
And it's just not the case.
I'll bet you a dinner, Camille, at Gavin Newsom's favorite restaurant, French Laundry, if there's not a school district that's going to stop teaching slavery.
No, I think that's.
Yeah.
Well, sorry, last thing to go to the administration and say, okay, so what can I and can't I teach?
And if the administration's doing its job, it says, don't tell kids to feel guilty because of their race.
Do let them read Frederick Douglass.
Douglas, you know, what is July 4th to a slave?
Yeah, what to the slave is the 4th of July?
Yeah, which is just beautiful.
And if people haven't read it, they should.
Listen, I will say again, I think these laws are of variable quality.
Some of them are less egregious than others.
Some of them are perfectly fine and are perhaps a bit redundant in the sense that they're totally consistent with the tradition of civil rights litigation that we have in this country.
And that is.
That is one category of issue.
I think the other category of issue, though, is again the limitations of a campaign to achieve these bans broadly, perhaps nationwide, and the energy that's being directed towards that and the energy that's not being directed towards other issues.
The sentiment that's being, I think, pushed in many instances that these bans can, in fact, quote unquote, save us or save millions of kids.
When in fact, as you acknowledged, Rich, the reality is that.
People have to get involved and stay involved and remain involved.
And I think a third thing to keep in mind, just to kind of put this all into perspective, there's a sense in which.
We can allow ourselves to become overconcerned about some of these issues.
The reality is that even if there is a classroom where Ibram Kendi's book is on offer or something like that, it's not as though every single public school program that is ever introduced has this profound social consequence.
And there's a sense in which I think I do want people to be concerned about this, I do want them to be involved.
In their classrooms, I do want them to be engaged with their teachers and asking serious questions about the way we're approaching these issues.
But I also worry about hysteria.
I worry about imagining that the worst possible thing is happening in every circumstance because I do think that that could create sort of a cycle of panic and could induce people to behave in bad ways.
I am in a panic because it's horrifying what they're teaching these kids.
It's not generic.
It's not like, okay, 10th graders read Kendi and then we'll discuss in the school.
That's fine.
You know, you can.
Hit it, you can support it, you can do what you want in most classroom settings, although everyone knows the teacher is going to be on Kendi's side just because they tend to lean left.
It's about the littles for me, the littles being told that they need to be ashamed, right?
These kindergartners, it's absurd being shamed for the color of their skin.
And it's happening in places like Iowa.
You know, we had on, and in Wisconsin, we had on former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker talking about a case out of Iowa that was deeply disturbing.
So it's spreading.
It's already spread.
We've already been derelict and letting it get a hold of too many.
Classrooms in too many school districts, and now there is a bit of a panic on stopping it and doing what we need to get these teachers off of their pedestals, teaching the wrong message, teaching messages that have been illegal for quite some time, and you need only switch the races in the discussion to know that on on a guttural level, but I will say this is one for you rich on the language of the laws.
There's another problem.
It's not just the ones that, instead of saying inculcate, you can't inculcate these views with the students, but just you can't even include these concepts.
That's not, that's not okay.
You got, you got to Revise those laws in like Oklahoma and Texas.
But some of these laws say, and I'll quote this is sort of a standard clause for these laws.
It would be unlawful for teachers to include in the classroom material that promotes division between or resentment of a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people.
Okay, so they're trying to say don't teach the black kids to resent the white kids or vice versa.
But my mind went to what about, let's go back eight years when we had all those.
ISIS offshoots attacking various pockets of the United States.
And we did a lot of talking about radical Islam and what they stand for and what they were doing, right?
Could we discuss what that religion or creed believes under this law?
Because you could definitely make the argument that it promotes resentment of a religion or a creed.
And I could see a lawsuit based on that in these very states saying, what?
Again, I mean, it goes to what the meaning of promote is.
I think we wouldn't want any teacher in America saying Muslim kids should feel badly because of ISIS.
But it's material that promotes resentment.
So you're presenting the material.
Is a teacher promoting it or is a teacher saying ISIS is a radical?
But it still says material that promotes.
I think there's a distinction there that you're making that isn't in the law.
Is it the teacher promoting it?
Look, I think the wording of some of these things is problematic.
I'll readily concede that.
I just don't think there's good reason not to have well crafted laws in this regard.
And I just don't think there's not a choice between having these state laws and having action in the school boards.
Texas passed this law at the same time.
The parents of South Lake rose up against this effort in their schools to impose kind of a radical anti racist regime.
You can walk and chew gum at the same time.
So it's not a choice.
And the Texas law is messy in all sorts of ways, partly because of the procedure of what happened.
They kind of ran out of time and it wasn't what they wanted the final version to be.
And it will be cleaned up in the special session.
And to Camille's point about panic, I do think parents should be panicked.
You should.
Be panicked.
But legislatures shouldn't be writing in a fit of hysteria.
They should be carefully considering things like Stanley Kurtz's model law, which was not written in a panic.
This is something he's been pressing on and focused on for years and making it airtight.
Coming up, we're going to get into whether the Department of Education is a meaningful resource to people who don't want this stuff being taught in their schools.
Here's a hint good luck.
Legislating Without Hysteria 00:03:20
Before we get to that and what they're doing, We're going to bring you a feature we have here on the show called Asked and Answered, where we try to address some of our listener mail.
And for the question, we have our executive producer, Steve Krakauer, who goes through all the mail, both on our social media and on our secret account where you can email us, Steve, which is.
That's right.
Yeah.
Questions at devilmaycaramedia.com.
We've been getting more and more of these every day, which is great to see.
Also, getting a lot on social media.
Always make it some noise on those social media accounts.
But this one came to us from that email address, Molly.
Wants to know, do you still get nervous before interviews?
And she wants to say, thanks again for being such a strong woman with a strong voice, literally and figuratively.
Thank you, Molly.
I don't really anymore.
I have, you know, as recently as being in the prime time of Fox, I remember I've referenced this interview before with Dick Cheney where he came on.
It was very contentious.
He had tried to blame the Iraq war on Barack Obama, which is so, so weird for Dick Cheney to be doing that.
And I knew it was going to be contentious.
And Dick Cheney's kind of scary.
So.
Yeah, I was a little nervous before that.
And I know if you go back and look at it, you'll hear my, I was running out of breath on a couple of the questions.
And I remember talking to my therapist about it later.
I'm like, I think there might be something wrong with me.
I was running out of breath in some of these questions.
And he's like, he asked me, who are you talking to?
What's going on?
He's like, you were nervous.
Like, oh, oh, you know what?
That makes perfect sense.
Because it's not, I'm not that used to getting nervous.
So it was unfamiliar to me, but now I see.
And then before that, you know, now famous, infamous, depending on your point of view, Debate with Trump and the woman question.
I was, I guess, a little nervous, like in the weeks, like in the days before the debate, because he was already really circling around me and calling attention to me behind the scenes.
And, you know, I was on his radar in a negative way.
But as you may have heard that day, for whatever reason, I had a terrible stomach issue.
And that was not nerves, that was either a stomach bug or something more nefarious.
Go ahead and read my book, settle for more.
And I spent the whole afternoon throwing up in my hotel room.
And I did not know whether I was going to make that debate at all.
And Abby was with me in the hotel.
Like she looked terrified, terrified.
I wasn't going to make it.
But she got some sort of a medication from my doctor.
And he said, if you can keep it down for 30 minutes, you won't throw up anymore.
And I did.
I managed to keep it down for 30 minutes.
And I went out there that night.
And the last thing I was thinking about was my nerves.
All I could think about was do not vomit on national television.
We had the whole plan.
I was going to throw up in the bucket.
The cameras were going to cut away.
They were going to cut the mics.
The bucket was right with me.
I had a blanket on my legs.
We had the plan for me to vomit in front of 20 million people.
And so when you got that going, you know, sort of like when you have to go get a shot and they pinch you on your other arm.
It's kind of what was happening there.
On the podcast, not at all, because it's, I don't know, it's all within my control.
You can have longer, fleshed out discussions.
So if something goes wrong, I don't know, it's just nicer because there's room for exploration, nuance, emotional highs and lows.
So I just find it less nerve wracking and more fulfilling on many levels.
Teaching Nuance Over Facts 00:15:59
I don't know, nothing else coming to mind.
Vladimir Putin, maybe a little.
Not really, though.
I kind of, that was exciting.
So anyway, long and short of it is, I'm in a good business because nerves don't really hit me too much.
I would say all my years of practicing law very much helped.
So, you know, like anything, if you're afraid of public speaking, do more public speaking and it gets better.
And, you know, being on my feet, making arguments in front of courts of law, being pummeled by nine times out of 10 male judges on my logic, my reasoning, basically being treated like an idiot by opposing counsel, that's all good for you.
It's not pleasant in the moment, but it's good for you long term.
So, anyway, thank you for the question, Molly.
I appreciate the shout out and the kind compliment.
And to all those of you out there who would like to do something challenging that may cause you some nerves, Just whatever it is, do it and then do it again and then do more of it and then do more of it still.
And you two will cross over to the other side where Dick Cheney no longer scares you.
Am I there?
I don't know.
Maybe we'll have him on someday and figure it out.
Now, back to our guests in one second.
One of the things that's jumped out at me in just researching all the various back and forth on this is the feds have stuck their nose in here in a way that makes the states.
Reaction more defensible.
You know, the Department of Education is now trying to push through a rule that will funnel grants to schools that teach critical race theory, that offer grants to U.S. history classes that teach CRT, the 1619 Project, Ibram X. Kendi, et cetera, several million dollars.
And so I can see the argument that number one, the feds are already sticking their nose into this.
So each state, you know, it being a federalist system is trying to fight back saying, oh, no, no, no, no, you will not do that.
And secondly, that normally you might be able to complain to the Department of Education if this were happening, if the KKK messaging, Hitler was not all wrong, that kind of thing.
You could go to the Department of Education and say, yo, help us out.
This is not okay.
But they're planning on imposing CRT in American schools.
The Department of Education is the one that's funneling these grants out.
So you can't complain to them.
You have no help other than some private lawyer who may or may not take your case.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think you make.
A really good important point.
The sort of cultural valence of the current administration is certainly more in favor of a more kind of fundamentalist approach to teaching about systemic racism and making certain that these things are kind of inculcated throughout the curriculum, or at least that there are incentives for folks to embrace this at the state level.
And that's something that's worth drawing attention to and something that's worth pushing back against.
And there's a context in which that ought to happen.
But again, I just don't think these bans actually address that in any sort of meaningful way.
They certainly don't prevent it in most instances.
So it still returns to this question of exactly what do the curriculums look like?
What does a good approach to teaching about these complicated issues look like?
What is a good approach to teaching about systemic racism that isn't overly politicized actually look like?
And I don't think we're having a lot of those constructive conversations right now.
We are imagining that.
The appropriate remedy is to stop things.
Don't you feel like we were getting close to that?
Now, I don't argue that we were doing it perfectly in the United States, right?
Like the whole Tulsa thing.
I think there was a point that a lot of this stuff hasn't been taught or highlighted, and I get that.
So you can always do better.
But I feel like we were doing this.
You know, it's not like any classroom in America, at least most, we're skipping over the civil rights movement, MLK, Jim Crow.
We were teaching all that.
And like we, the way the messaging is right now, going back to the Andrew Sullivan piece, is as if like you've missed the whole story.
It's that the country itself is racist.
Every institution is racist.
And unless you're teaching, we don't, they don't want to teach about Jim Crow.
They want teaching the 1619 Project.
This country was founded to promote.
Slavery, a proposition that's been roundly criticized and derided as completely not factual by Nicole Hammond Jones in the New York Times.
They want a different way of teaching that is not fact based and is really just based in a far left opinion and view of America that is not supported, I would argue, and certainly not shared by most Americans.
So the frustration is the system was working okay, not perfectly, but okay.
And they've changed it to a way that's really racist.
And that's what people are trying to fight back against.
Like they've screwed it up.
They haven't improved it.
I think it's a question of the degree to which those changes have actually happened and the degree to which, I mean, the reality is that the 1619 Project exists.
It is when Pulitzer Prize, that people like Tani C. Coates have been writing for a number of years about these issues and are, you know, revered, celebrated authors, journalists, wordsmiths.
And their work is almost certainly going to be analyzed by young people in class.
Again, the question is, you're not saying you agree with the 1619 project.
You're saying it's there.
It's there.
It is absolutely there.
And again, I think that, and this is really a profound misunderstanding by many people, including, I think, Chris Ruffo, who read the New York Times editorial that we pulled together and was, I guess, profoundly offended by it and took a great deal of it personally, despite the fact that it never mentioned him at all.
But the reality is that I think we were trying to do a number of different things in that piece, as you do when you have a bunch of different people contributing.
It's like kind of trying to posit an affirmative vision for what our schools can be.
I mean, that first paragraph or second paragraph ends with a sentence that says that, you know, that the bad version of a public education system in our society is one where, you know, you're practicing indoctrination.
And that was those words.
I know when I saw them and we were including them, like they have particular meaning to me.
It certainly doesn't allow for, you know, a critical race theory indoctrination program.
You know, the same editorial pushes back.
Against the notion that parents don't have reason for concern, that they don't have reason to wonder whether or not the sort of stewardship of their children's education is sort of in good, trustworthy hands.
I think there are reasons to be concerned.
The question becomes, what do we do from a policy standpoint to try and improve things?
And I think you're absolutely right.
There's a sense in which I have many, many challenges with our public education system.
There are many things that I would like to see happen.
I think we do need profound reforms.
But I also think you're right in the sense that I don't know that there was a profound efficiency when it comes to sort of the curriculum and the approach to sort of slavery and discrimination and the values that we want to get students to understand, at least from my own experience.
But in 2021, like there are going to need to be conversations and there are necessarily going to be conversations about issues that are live balls today.
There is no universe where schools are going to be able to avoid.
Discussions about the kind of issues that Black Lives Matter had raised about, again, systemic racism, about racial justice, more broadly, and quite frankly, like white supremacy and the new way that it's utilized.
Like these things are going to come up.
And I think putting one's head in the sand and imagining that you can essentially just kind of make all of the conversations safe via fiat is just, I think it's a mistake.
This is going to be a hard problem to fix.
I just go back to the concept of kind of the 40 yard lines for public education.
And Matt Iglesias, former writer at Vox, now has a very popular substack, progressive but a heterodox one.
A week or two ago, wrote this piece.
I didn't agree with a lot of it, it criticized me.
Personally, but it made the point, you know, Nicole Hannah Jones in 1619, that's not what should be taught in the public schools.
The public schools are like the basic consensus in between the 40 yard lines.
1619 projects over on the 20 or the 30, wherever, wants to be the 50, but it's not the 50 now.
It's not even close to the 50 yard line.
So why would you?
We need kids, I mean, they barely know about 1776, and we're actually going to go back and say, no, it's 1619.
It's insane.
And we need to defend.
In large parts of the country, just what's already being taught.
Why does it need to be distorted by these fashionable concepts that, in important respects, aren't even factual or good history?
That should be excluded from the K 12 education.
By all means, let's debate it when they get to college and they're going to be indoctrinated in college.
That's what happens now, unfortunately.
And the point about how successful in my friend David French's Lawsuits have been, yeah.
He's won many, many lawsuits, but talk to a college kid, ask them whether they're scared of speaking their minds in college campuses now.
They are, they almost all are.
That has a lot more to do with the culture than the speech codes.
Just rely on lawsuits to protect us from the stuff invading K 12.
I just don't think it's realistic.
Can I just make clear in the future, please, please avoid sports references?
You know me better than that, Richard.
That was beyond the pale.
I'm not going to talk about baseball metaphors, but I'll see some.
Take it away, Camille.
Yeah, I just wanted to ask a clarifying question.
1619 Project, some of these laws have specifically prohibited it from being used in classrooms.
Is that something you would support?
Is that, you think, a good model?
I'm with Stanley.
I think you'd want to say you can't inculcate it.
I don't see why it has to be in history classes.
I think it shouldn't be in history classes.
I can see how it be in some contemporary issues course.
But if a high school student can get an excellent education with And needing learning everything she or he needs to know to have a good foundation in American history and civics without reading Nicole Hannah Jones.
That, I think, is a fact.
Yeah.
Especially because she's, you know, the New York Times has been quietly erasing all of her assertions on, you know, the country actually being founded on slavery since they got hit by all those historical scholars.
So if they won't even stand by it, why would we be teaching it?
I have a question for you, Camille, about your op ed in the Times.
You guys, I guess I should say, write.
The laws differ in some respects, but generally agree on blocking any teaching that would lead students to feel discomfort, guilt, or anguish because of one's race or ancestry.
And you go on from there.
But that's not exactly what the laws say.
And it's an important distinction.
The laws do not agree on blocking teaching that would lead the students to feel discomfort or guilt or anguish.
The laws don't want you to, they say you cannot teach that an individual Should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, et cetera, solely because of your race or sex.
That is an important distinction.
And do you think you should have been more careful on that one?
Well, I think that the language that we used probably could have been more careful in saying that the implication of the law could be that you have a difficult time sort of talking about various issues because once a student feels that they are perhaps, you know, made to feel upset or guilty because of the way a concept is introduced, like there are sort of significant questions there.
I think the language that we utilized was supposed to lean into the fact.
That these are kind of a degree of subjectivity.
And I think a lot has been made about the use of the word could in the editorial, where the law itself probably uses the word should in a couple of instances, as you just alluded to.
But I think in practice, we're not talking about just the one line.
If it were just a matter of what the teacher is saying to the student and should, then I suppose you might have a better argument.
But in this particular case, we're actually talking about materials that are being introduced and utilized in class.
It just becomes a lot more arbitrary whether or not what's happening here is clearly a matter of someone being directed to feel a particular way, or if the general kind of premise of a particular storyline or article kind of suggests that someone ought to feel a particular kind of way.
It's interesting that it's come to a point where conservatives are now pushing for legislation to police.
Speech to police conduct in classrooms in order to kind of preserve feelings.
Because so much of the concern that had been kind of animating folks on the left for a very long time has been concern about feelings, the notion of kind of words being inherently dangerous, of ideas being inherently dangerous, of words being quote unquote violence.
And I think that that kind of universalizing of this kind of safetyist culture is something that.
Probably ought to concern us and might be a very strong indication that perhaps the approach to trying to address this problem is going in the wrong direction.
I, for one, think it is a bad idea that we're placing kind of subjective feelings kind of at the heart of our approach to trying to have constructive, well informed curriculum in classrooms and as the sort of standard for whether or not we're doing the right thing in classrooms.
Okay.
I'm going to let Rich take it.
But just to clarify, so this is just one bill by example, Tennessee.
So the laws do not say it's a problem if anyone winds up feeling discomfort, guilty, anguished, or distressed.
They do not say you may not teach anything that makes somebody feel that way.
That is definitely not what they do.
But some critics, I mean, you guys, I read what you wrote.
There's some other critics like Snyder and others in the New York Times Magazine who really hit that. and basically say this is all about a feelings law.
And that's not true.
What the laws basically say is you can't teach that one race or sex is inherently superior to another, that you can't teach that an individual by virtue of their race or sex is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive.
You can't teach that an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of their race or sex.
Can't treat that their moral character is determined by their race or sex.
Can't teach that an individual by virtue of their race or sex bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by others of the same race or sex and so on.
The only thing I say about feeling specifically is what I just read.
An individual, you can't teach that an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual's race or sex.
So I give it to you on that, Rich, and ask Does he, does Camille have a point?
That he thinks, in essence, even if the wording is not what he's saying, these other provisions basically come down to one's feeling in sitting in class.
Do they feel distressed?
Do they feel like somebody's teaching one race is inherently superior to another and therefore upset and more likely to file a complaint?
Yeah, sorry, I feel like I'm a little repetitive now.
History and Lived Experience 00:05:24
I think it's clearly aimed at teachers promoting the idea that students should feel these ways.
I would have written the Tennessee law differently.
I think the Texas law should be revised.
I think it will be.
But this seems to me categorically different than a speech code on campus that says speech is violence and certain things can't be said.
And you have to run into a room to play with stuffed animals if you can't hear them.
That's not what we're talking about.
And two, there's this loose idea that conservatives are being contradictory here.
Because we oppose speech codes on campuses, but here we're supporting these laws.
Again, K 12 education is a different thing.
These teachers are only supposed to be teaching what the state broadly tells them to teach.
So it's an entirely different area than college education, which should be more free flowing and academic freedom is well established as a practice and in the law.
Yeah, I have to say.
So the piece you took issue with, Rich, by this guy Snyder, and people really should read it and your rebuttal because it's fun.
You went off on Twitter, but the guy's name is Timothy Snyder.
He's a professor at Yale.
He's a totalitarianism scholar.
And the piece was in New York Times Magazine, not New York Magazine, but New York Times Magazine.
And I was laughing out loud at some of these points because he was saying, look, the aim of these laws is to protect people's feelings over facts.
And my first reaction was, the left loves to do that.
What aren't they the ones who have been lecturing us on?
Well, my lived experience is what it is, right?
Like Meghan Markle's lived experience is that her kid's not getting a title because he happens to be part black, even though none of the facts supports that.
But we're supposed to accept it because it's her lived experience.
The hypocrisy.
The other thing they say he says in this is, look, history, he's saying history needs to be taught.
Well, it will be taught.
But he's saying history is not therapy and discomfort.
Is part of growing up.
Tell that to the statue topplers, to the folks who don't want the founding fathers mentioned in the class because it's too, quote, triggering, to those who want Hamilton canceled, right?
They want Winston Churchill banned.
They want the Teddy Roosevelt statue removed from the Museum of Natural History.
Tell them history's not therapy and discomfort is a part of growing up.
I mean, to me, it's a bit rich.
But strong feelings should be evoked by the teaching of American history.
You should be excited by it, you should be inspired by it, you occasionally should be embarrassed by it, you occasionally should be disgusted by it.
And again, I don't think anyone is saying that you shouldn't teach these things that would evoke all those feelings.
The purpose of the law is just to say teachers shouldn't go out of their way to say people should feel guilty because of their race or one race is superior than the other.
And I don't know why that's not common sense.
And Timothy Snyder, I think this piece is a journalistic malpractice in the extreme, and that he hasn't even bothered, or the New York Times, to Look back and see whether what he said was accurate or there hasn't been a clarification or correction, I think really speaks poorly to the New York Times.
He is a serious historian, I will say.
I mean, he's written really well regarded, appropriately well regarded.
Books, but this is just blood blood bands as a spectator.
Talk about a moral panic saying that Florida is no longer going to teach slavery or Jim Crow is the definition.
Yeah, he says it's banned.
He says Jim Crow seems to be banned in Florida schools, which is 100% not true.
He misrepresents the text of the Oklahoma law as well.
And so there are factual errors in here that are just obvious in addition to these weird statements that left me with my jaw hanging.
Like he's talking about people like you, Rich, and Stanley and Chris Ruffo, who are in support of these laws, saying, authoritarianism is infantilizing.
We should not have to feel any negative emotions.
Difficult subjects should be kept from us.
Oh my God, that is what the whole woke movement is about, right?
You can't have any negative negativity.
You have to steer clear of anything difficult.
I just told this story the other day, but my daughter's school, they opened up a discussion about the Derek Chauvin verdict.
Okay, she's 10.
This is in her fourth grade school.
Now we're in summer, but so it was a couple months ago.
Derek Chauvin verdict.
They give him a New Zilla article.
They say, okay, let's talk about the verdict.
And the teacher stands up and says, there is a massive problem in America of police officers killing unarmed black men.
Now, you guys know that's not true.
That's, that is a total exaggeration.
And one of the girls in the class said, well, wasn't George Floyd resisting arrest?
Now she's read this in the article they handed out.
And the teacher says they always blame the victim.
And my daughter says, wasn't he on a lot of drugs?
And the teacher says, this conversation is making me uncomfortable and I am shutting it down right now.
Well, Megan, Megan, that's such an interesting story.
Risks of State Bans 00:09:03
I mean, but this, I think, kind of brings me back to the point that I was raising earlier.
Like what's being sold, what's being promoted by Rich, by Chris, is that, well, Chris Ruffo, is that these bands are going to address many of these problems.
That conversation, You know, well, certainly the proposed legislation I mentioned earlier, where discussions about certain things, even casual discussions, are perhaps prohibited, that might have something to do, that might limit it.
But a properly worded piece of legislation here, one that, again, respects the classroom and the ability of folks to have exchanges, like none of them are going to prevent that conversation from happening.
No, no.
And the only problem.
Yeah, the only way to deal with the kind of cultural issues that are happening here is to get meaningfully engaged.
And to develop better approaches to discussing these issues and to really just address the cultural defect.
But it's not either or, but it is often difficult to do multiple things at once.
And at the moment, we are just pushing out a bunch of kind of haphazardly designed bills in many instances.
The Texas piece of legislation, as you mentioned, has to be scrubbed, I think was the word that you used a moment ago, or perhaps recalibrated is a better word.
The Tennessee legislation you've acknowledged needs to be redrafted.
There are various other ones that.
Have some material defects and proposals that are making their way through state houses that have some serious defects.
And all at the same time, these things don't actually fix the problem and aren't actually actionable in most of the states in the union.
And it does seem important to acknowledge the limitation of this strategy.
Yeah, it's unrealistic to say there's one piece of legislation you should fix everything.
I agree.
Prophylactic measures against kind of the most extreme expressions of this.
But the idea that, you know, the Texas legislature shouldn't do this because it distracts us from fighting back against this more broadly, no, that Texas legislature writes laws.
Governing what's in the public schools.
And then I, meanwhile, I can write about what Texas is doing.
I can attack Ibram Kendi's philosophy.
The local parents in South Lake can do their thing.
It's a big country with a lot of different points of influence.
And the idea that all of America is like consumed with what a state legislature is doing, so nothing else can happen, which I know I'm caricaturing a little bit, but.
In the idea that you're promoting this is either or, you can't do one, you can't do the other.
I think it's all additive.
I think it's good to have state guardrails.
Let's write them carefully.
Absolutely have the school board fights, write the solid curricula.
Those of us who have platforms, let's push back against this broad cultural campaign that's behind this stuff.
All that is good and necessary, in my view.
But, Rich, what about Camille's point that This could backfire.
As a tactical measure, he has objections saying, you know, the public is sort of on the same page as I think the three of us are, which is they don't like this CRT being taught in schools.
In fact, just pulling a couple numbers for you, there was a heritage poll, 79% of voters say children should be taught about the American dream instead of the idea that their destiny is tied to their skin color.
61% reject the idea that America is fundamentally racist.
A YouGov poll, 64% of Americans know about critical race theory, 58% view it unfavorably, including 72% of independents who do not want it in schools.
So, the tide is on the side of, you know, I think the three of us who don't like this, not necessarily in favor of bans, but his point is going after teachers individually, stories making the news somebody lost their job because they, you know, misstepped, that could turn in an unhelpful way.
Well, I agree.
We're basically winning this fight at the moment, which is one reason why the advocates of CRT are kind of backpedaling and say, oh, no, it's not CRT.
What are you talking about?
That's only in law schools.
But yeah, there's a potential of poorly drafted laws backfiring.
So let's write them appropriately.
But I think it's kind of wrong headed to say, oh, we have really, really a strong public backing on this.
So let's not do anything.
Let's no one is advocating for doing that.
Let's take that and make it concrete across all these various spectrums I've talked about.
Let's have appropriately written state bans.
Let's have the school board fights.
Let's write better curricula.
We can't be frozen in place for fear of some misstep that is going to make people in favor of critical.
Race theory and sort of the same principle applies.
Okay, so if we're just going to rely on lawsuits, guess what?
There are going to be frivolous lawsuits.
There just are.
And there's going to be a victim of a frivolous lawsuit.
So should we not file lawsuits either?
If we take this as a logical conclusion, it's just a prescription for letting this wash over us because someone might go too far in some realm and the country flips into all of a sudden in favor of this stuff.
Of all the arguments against me, that's the one I dislike the most.
The assertion that.
I am suggesting that it should take me an hour and a half.
Well, I hear it all the time.
I am not asserting in any way, shape, or form that people should not do anything.
I am actually suggesting that this is a hard problem and it will not be addressed and remedied easily.
And that these bans, in many instances, will not materially impact the problem in the way people imagine.
It will not make the sort of disconcerting conversations that Megan just referred to, those won't go away.
That is going to continue to happen.
Right.
So the question becomes how do you actually resolve this in a way that makes everyone feel more comfortable inside of our schools?
That makes That sort of satisfies this broader universe of concern.
Can you do it by banning concepts?
Can you do it by outlawing or prohibiting the use or exploration of the 1619 Project in your school system?
And the answer to that question is emphatically no.
And working on curriculum, leveraging the decades worth of civil rights tradition, law, and legal tradition that we have in this country, where there are egregious things happening.
And quite frankly, yes, the journalists doing the important work, and I've I've credited Chris for this as well.
Like when you see horrible things happening, like making certain that people can find out about this.
And oftentimes, ridicule is a better weapon than regulation.
But my point, though, I didn't mean to suggest.
I know when I got my rhetorical flight of fancy there, I might have.
I didn't mean to.
I don't want to do it.
But I was on a run.
Okay.
I was on a run.
Because you're feeling it.
Yeah.
I think my point, though, is okay, you want to do lawsuits.
Of course.
Of course.
Their child is going to come home and give them a misleading account of what happened in school, and they're going to sue.
So, you should oppose that as well.
It's just less likely with the civil rights law because these laws are mature, they have been around for a while.
We have a history of adjudicating these cases.
And these newfangled pieces of legislation, which, as you acknowledge, are often poorly written, the possibility for them to be interpreted in ways that are going to have an unwelcome impact on the way classrooms operate.
Is very real.
And the possibility of getting that negative news story that Megan referred to earlier, it's not just a matter of it being likely to happen.
It's already happened.
You're going to see more of them.
And the question is, how many pink slips are you willing to write in service of trying to do this?
And at what point do you think that has a backlash?
And my suspicion is it won't take much.
It won't take much.
It would be nice.
Go ahead, Rich.
Sorry.
I was just going to say the lawsuits have the potential for abuse as well.
Libel law is fairly well established.
Defamation law, my magazine was still sued for seven or eight.
Through a meritless lawsuit.
So there is no precisely clean way to deal with this.
And I think we should use every tool we can.
Let's be as careful as we can about how we use them.
But this is a massive threat.
And I just go back to we've kind of batted around the concept of panic.
And this is something that's coming.
It's already arrived at the shores of some schools, and it must be stopped for the good of our kids, for the good of our society, for the good of our national unity.
It has to be stopped.
So, I'm more concerned about that threat than I am about poorly drafted legislation that I think should be fixed.
Avoiding Overheated Rhetoric 00:08:25
In Texas, I have every confidence it will be fixed.
But this is something that we just can't, that can't be tolerated, shouldn't be tolerated.
Well, we didn't have enough time to really get into it because it's a whole other issue the notion of school choice.
But as Camille points out, this does underscore the need for it.
And this has been something that's just been impossible when we have Democrats in.
In power.
And even frankly, when we've had Republicans in power, we haven't made that much progress on it.
But I think that if there's one benefit of COVID, it may be the weakening of the teachers' unions in the eyes of the American people.
The jig is up.
We know they're for themselves and not for our kids.
And so hopefully, school choice will make some inroads, if not under President Biden, then under whoever comes after him.
Thanks for staying with us this far.
The end of the episode and who's coming up on our next show is right after this quick break.
Can I just ask?
I don't like to make the show about the show, but since It was pretty well publicized that Chris Ruffo was originally going to debate you on this, Camille, even though I absolutely adore Rich Lowry and would have him on every day if he would do it.
He bailed.
He didn't want to debate you and was pretty open about that, even though he had come on your show, The Fifth Column, which I recommend to everybody.
And then he bailed and you kind of gave him some jazz on Twitter and he came back and said, Okay, I'll do it.
This is all, I have not spoken to Chris Ruffo.
I know what I know from Twitter.
He said he would do it and then bailed again.
And I wonder why you think he didn't want to come on and debate you in this forum.
Well, I mean, there's probably some personal issues there.
It's actually, I think that the fallout, like, kind of from this editorial being written, has been really, really unfortunate.
You know, Chris and I have known each other for some time.
We're not great friends, but we at least had been more than cordial.
You know, last week we talked a couple of times after the publication of the article.
We had very, like, Friendly conversations.
And he kind of went dark on me.
And then I discovered this screed that he wrote about me and the rest of the folks who are associated with this piece, in which he made a number of assertions that we really don't make in the piece.
But we suggested that these laws were totalitarian.
That isn't what we said.
That we were sort of scaremongering about these laws, bringing about the end of democracy.
That isn't what we said.
We defended, I think, a culture of pluralism as like the guiding principle for whether or not.
We want to pursue reform through these bans versus getting people involved in classrooms and in their school boards in a different sort of way.
And I think it's really unfortunate that he's taken so much of it personally.
I suspect that part of the challenge for Chris is he has a great toolkit for confronting people who have diametrically opposed politics to his, who won't acknowledge, exactly, who won't acknowledge that there are meaningful abuses taking place.
That there is a cultural shift that's happened that is having repercussions and ramifications in classrooms and schools.
Like, I'm willing to acknowledge all those things.
What I challenge is the wisdom of this national strategy.
What I challenge is, in some cases, some of the overheated rhetoric that I see Chris using in different contexts.
And quite frankly, I mean, we just have differences in style.
I'm more than the MLK to his Malcolm X by any means necessary.
I don't use, you know, sword emojis and kind of talk about this in terms of, you know, a holy war, a crusade.
I think igniting a wildfire is easy.
Building a cathedral, doing something durable, something that lasts is hard.
And getting a bunch of people agitated is important and valuable.
And you can direct that energy in constructive ways.
But again, passing rafts of laws that aren't necessarily well constructed, that will have unintended consequences, and that are, I think, amplifying both the level of concern on all sides and intensifying a culture war and perhaps inspiring a panic.
I think that is meaningfully different than having a really constructive project here that is building kind of meaningful coalitions across party lines so that you can get things done in a bunch of different places.
And I will continue to say that I think working on durable solutions like Trump's, like hysteria, the hysteria can be good for some people and not so good for others.
I could just say that this is how out of touch I am.
I was unaware of all this until I checked Canel's. Timeline to make sure I wasn't missing any killer arguments he was going to use against me.
This is why I keep on getting canceled and rescheduled on podcasts.
If I could just say, you're no man's second choice, Rich.
Honestly, I know about that.
Well, I will say, I listened to the Fifth Column podcast with.
With you guys and Chris, and it was.
I felt a little uncomfortable because he's a little irascible, and it was a little just I don't know, something about it made me a little uncomfortable.
I could sense that there was a tension there, which is not exactly what I want to bring to my audience anyway.
I think this is a very gentlemanly debate.
Can I say though about Chris, it it Camille, you said igniting a brush fire is easy.
No, it's not.
This is a huge contribution he's made to this.
Well, I say that's that's fair, that's fair.
He's he's talented, he Chris is talented, he's charismatic.
Sure.
I just don't think he's always careful.
He set off this movement.
That's right.
I think it should be used in constructive ways.
I think he obviously believes it should be used in constructive ways.
But this is kind of a rare accomplishment for any journalist.
Most of us, you know, we find it.
It's because he's not.
Let me weigh in on this.
Chris Ruffo, with all due respect, he's been on the show and I admire him and I'm with him on most of what he's pushing.
Chris Ruffo is the one who called attention to what was happening at the federal agency level with critical race theory.
And he is the one who sort of pushed that term to encapsulate all the stuff that's been happening.
But there have been a lot of people, Rich, and I've been working with a lot of them.
So I know that they've been grassroots efforts to call attention to what's happening in these schools.
You know, there have been parents coast to coast taking massive risks.
There have been people organizing big groups like the ones I mentioned earlier.
And I like Chris, but I do think it's slightly irritating when he talks about himself as like the sole person responsible for this entire movement on Twitter.
Because he's not.
He's played a really important role, but the self promotion is an off putting thing about him.
And I think he'd do better to be more inclusive of the people who don't get accolades for joining this fight and sort of give them credit as opposed to continuing to promote himself.
And as a personal matter, I think it's exceedingly unfair and disingenuous to suggest that myself, Thomas Chaddington Williams, David French, people who have talked about These same issues and raise severe concerns about them, that a disagreement about the strategy and approach to trying to address that problem makes us quote unquote enablers.
The piece, the editorial that we wrote was reposted and promoted and endorsed by the likes of Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter.
I believe Andrew Sullivan also tweeted it and directed some attention to it and gave it some praise.
Is he suggesting that they are all enablers as well?
There's something really disreputable about that.
And there's something really disreputable about leveling charges and allegations like that, broadcasting them to the universe, and then not showing up to essentially have a conversation with the person who you've made those allegations about.
And I suspect that part of his concern was that one of my co authors, Jason Stanley, posted something that I think is beyond the pale, something along the lines of suggesting that Chris was like a white nationalist.
And I told him that I thought that was completely unacceptable.
He did take it down, he didn't apologize.
That I'm not responsible for what Jason Stanley does.
He didn't want to debate you.
And then I think you guilted him back into it.
Somehow he agreed to do it again.
The Carson Debate Fallout 00:02:23
I did.
And then he bailed again after the Stanley tweet, which was beyond the pale.
And that was out of line, Stanley's tweet.
So again, I support what the guy is doing.
I just think that if you're going to get that in somebody's face on what they've written, right?
Like he did with you, then come on and defend it.
Don't, you know, Rich doesn't have a very admirable job on it, but he should have been here defending.
I feel like the taxi launch center, Megan, because you just asked me to come on.
I say yes, no matter what.
That's what I love about you.
You have to be more exact.
And what did I say when you asked me on National Review?
Hell yes.
When can I show up?
This is true.
But I just say about Chris, I don't think.
Denies credit for other people who fought that.
But I do think you've had a whole huge role crystallizing it and catalyzing it.
Yeah, he has for sure.
All right, guys.
Well, thank you for all of that.
And I guess we're going to leave it for the audience to decide, which is just exactly the way I like the show to be.
We report, they decide.
But I think we've had a thorough fleshing out of the issues, and I appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
Thank you, both.
Do not miss Friday's show.
Dr. Ben Carson is coming on.
Yay.
I love him.
He launched his campaign on the Kelly file.
With us, we did this long backstory piece on him.
It was fascinating.
He's fascinating.
He takes such a beating, doesn't he, by the press?
But he's brilliant and fearless and really damn smart.
So don't forget to tune into the show for this Friday and go ahead and subscribe now so you don't miss it and download.
And while you're there, go ahead and give me a five-star rating and a review.
I'd love to know where you stand on these critical race theory bans.
Are they a good idea or are they a sacrifice principle?
Are they the wrong choice?
in coming up with the right weapons to fight against this nonsense.
Let me know your thoughts.
You can go to Apple Reviews or wherever.
You can go to our social media, but love hearing from you and don't miss Friday.
Ben Carson.
Boom.
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
The Megyn Kelly Show is a devil-may-care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.
Thank you.
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