The Right's New Boogey Man - Critical Race Theory | Weekender Teaser
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Jared and Nick discuss a new document created to instruct conservatives how to push back against teaching critical race theory in schools. This continues to tickle the mental unwellness that exists in many of the far right cultists that threaten to take hold of the country.
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I'm Nick Hauselmann and this is an announcement to let you know that we are going to be doing a new series called The Weekender over on Patreon that will appear every Friday.
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Good for them.
Yeah, that's how it's done.
That's how Trump won the presidency, right?
There you go.
So I'm Jared Yates Saxton here enjoying a nice, cool, frothy beverage as we're starting the weekend.
I'm here as always with Nick Halsman.
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This is a good show.
Hang out with us a little bit longer.
Do you agree with that?
I'd like nothing more on my Thursday than to fire up the old Skype and hang out with you.
I love it.
I love it.
Unfortunately, we are the Montclair podcast, which means we have to talk about some gnarly shit.
Did you tell people if they didn't, if they're not patrons, how they find us?
Yeah, they can go to patreon.com slash Montclair podcast.
So head on over there so you can hear us have this Conversation about... Nick, I don't like this.
As an educator, as a member of the United States of America, as a conscientious citizen, I don't like what we're getting ready to talk about.
Fifteen years ago, I can remember people complaining about safe spaces, which you would probably know all about.
Did you have your own safe space on campus?
Well, you know, actually, campus is all about actually having really difficult conversations.
Right.
People really enjoy that.
And it's like this laboratory of existence and intellectualism and shared society.
And when people say safe space, actually, they imagine kids in a room like with Bean bags and kittens and stuff.
But it actually means being in a space where people feel comfortable having hard discussions.
And you can feel like you're having a good faith argument with somebody.
That is not what we're talking about today.
We're not talking about good faith arguments.
We're not talking about free speech.
We're talking about oppression and control today.
Well, it's interesting.
Okay, we talked a little bit about the right or a lot about the right and certain patterns of psychosis.
It's not psychosis, it's personality patterns that we see.
Sure.
One of them tends to be this, this immutable ability to frame Conversations.
Frame information the way they see it, which is very revealing, but it's like, for instance, I'll even give up the Colin Kaepernick thing.
When he was kneeling, they get to decide, no matter how many times he would tell everybody, in earnest, why he was doing that, they would decide what it meant, why it was so bad, and why it has to be eliminated across the entire country.
And with this critical race theory, which probably was that term, I think, is invented by the people who actually mean good, right, who want to try and actually help educate our youth and into the adulthood.
I think that what they've done with CRT now is directly ripped from that same lineage.
But it's a little bit scarier.
This seems to be a little bit more concerning to me.
Yeah, so we're going to get into the nugget of where this came from and why this is so important to talk about.
But before we do that, let's go ahead, let's make some concessions.
Let's get on the same page.
Let's understand that the conversation we're getting ready to have is good faith.
So I am an academic.
I'm an educator, right?
I happen to teach writing.
We talk about power, we talk about relationships, we talk about those types of things.
I teach people how to express themselves.
I am not indoctrinating people towards a political ideology, right?
We can talk about how to portray human beings interacting with one another, even within systems of power.
It's not indoctrinating.
But we do need to talk about something which is critical race theory or the social sciences or any of these things that we are actually having a discussion about.
These are actual investigations of power.
It is an actual breaking down of the way that power is distributed and used.
And so when you are talking about critical race theory, you are You are troubling white supremacy.
You are troubling exploitation of people.
But that's only because they're real.
Makes sense?
Like oppression and cruelty and exploitation and racism, patriarchal misogyny, those things are actually real.
And they need to be discussed.
So what we are actually having a conversation about is not what's happening in a classroom per se.
The classroom is the battlefield.
Of a larger ideological contest.
And so we need to make it very, very clear, very, very quickly.
We are not necessarily having a conversation about education.
We are having a conversation about power, as we always are.
This isn't about necessarily teachers in the classroom.
It's how you vote on elections, whether or not you embrace growing fascism and exploitation and white supremacy.
We're having an actual high stakes conversation here.
Sure.
Well, we know that it's a lot easier to teach people to be racist, for instance, when they're young.
When people are young, when we have kids, they are impressionable and you have a chance there to really mold and shape, which is your job as a parent.
So this is sort of what's getting under the skin.
What you said is interesting, though, because It sounds like, you know, you are saying that these issues are real, but the people who are creating these PDFs that want to rail against critical race theory are under the assumption that they're not real, right?
None of this really does exist.
And so as a result, these radical leftists are creating the racism that they're trying to eliminate, I suppose.
And you hear the same words, destruction and elimination and all these sort of biblical focus on what's going on here.
Again, it's all signaling, right?
Even if it's very, what's the word?
Subconscious.
But it's there to like kind of trigger and get those triggers going in the brain of some of these people.
And it sounds like it's catching on. - And this is what Trumpism is about.
And by the way, to go ahead and start the conversation here, and we'll get deeper into it as we go through this article and we talk about this situation.
For anybody who wants to read the article, this is over on foxnews.com.
It's under the headline, Conservative Think Tank Creates A-to-Z Guide for Stopping Critical Race Theory in Schools.
Now, this is based on the work of a fellow named Russ Vought.
And if that sounds Familiar for some reason maybe that name is sort of like jumping around in your head a little bit He was a member of the administration of a man.
Let me check my notes Donald J. Trump He he was in the he was in the administration of Donald Trump And he is actually part of a think-tank called the Center for American Restoration Which sounds great?
I mean who wouldn't want to restore America until you realize it is a far-right extremist Trumpist focused think tank.
And what good old Russ and the people over at the Center for American Restoration have done is that they have put together a program that can be easily rolled out to school districts around the country.
And what is actually happening, and I'm just going to read a little bit of what Russ has to say in the background of this stuff.
Russ says, we're asking people to go into the arena in a situation where they're going to be called a racist.
They're not.
They've got the moral high ground, but no one wants to be called that.
And then you start looking at this, which is, and I'm going to read to you a couple of examples here.
In South Lake, Texas, which, Nick, how would you describe the political situation in Texas right now?
Wow.
Not good?
Not good!
Not good!
And one of the reasons why the situation in Texas is not good is because Texas is trending towards Democratic We've even heard from the Republicans in Texas that they might have went blue in the last election if they didn't disenfranchise people, right?
So Texas is in trouble of turning blue.
In South Lake, Texas, a political action committee recently was formed to support candidates opposed to critical race theory.
Candidates backed by the group called South Lake Families PAC won two school board seats in the landslide election.
In Loudoun County, Virginia, parents have started a petition to recall school board members they say support a critical race theory curriculum.
Now listen to what Voudhouse has to say.
We think of our work as winning the national debate, educating at a national level, and as you have a national debate on the issue, you will have an outpouring of legislative activity at the county level, the school board level, the state legislature level, and who knows, we may have a leverage point to get something done At the federal level.
How's that make you feel, Nick?
This is all part of the, you know, eliminating the 1619 Project and creating, what was the, what was it called, their project?
The 1776 Project.
Yes, you know, and again, this is just propaganda then, right?
Now, here's the thing, it's interesting, because this is the same thing they did with Black Lives Matter, or I'm sorry, Antifa.
To them, right, Antifa is some sort of centralized group that is organized and has an office somewhere with the headquarters and whatnot.
111 Antifa Drive.
Yeah, exactly.
You can dial 888 Antifa.
And so, you know, this is the same kind of thing.
It feels to me, and I have plenty of quotes that I had yanked out of here to read.
We don't do the whole thing.
There's a lot to go over.
But it feels like, and I just want to read one of them because it feels to me as if, again, they think that there is some sort of federal nationalized movement of curriculum that's going to like, you know, completely and utterly warp our children's brains.
Well, certainly it's the white children's brains because they don't care, right?
They're not worried about anybody of color at all.
Well, they want two things to happen there.
They want to make sure that white kids will grow up to vote Republican.
Right?
They want to make sure on that front.
But they also want to ensure that people of color and also that women don't get crazy ideas about changing things.
They've got it pretty good, Nick.
And tell me if this language sounds familiar.
They want them to be grateful.
You know what I mean?
Like whenever they go out with a sign or they say that something's not great, they're not grateful.
They want everybody swimming in a soup where American exceptionalism is everything that you know.
You never learn anything that could ever actually question power and white supremacy in America, but you're exactly right.
It is with the intention of controlling the education, and when you control the education, you control the reality.
You know, all of a sudden, yeah, I'm sorry that this is whoever's behind all of this.
It's not Trump is is diabolically genius, because first we see them rigging the the elections or trying to voter suppress.
And that's been pretty organized across the board for 10 years.
And that included gerrymandering before that.
And that was it was like it took mind power to come up with this stuff.
But then they realize, OK, that's not working so well.
We still see trending everything toward blue toward the Democrats.
So now we got to do what?
Well, now we got to try and convince the kids that we have to maintain, you know, this Republican ideology.
That I, you know, hadn't even really thought about until today, until you just said that.
This is a multi-pronged discipline that they're going through.
Can I, I got to read, can I just read part of this?
Because it's just more of, it illuminates more of what we're talking about.
Oh, yeah, because the roots on this thing go deep.
This is a really large, large thing.
Absolutely.
So here I'm going to do it as quickly as I can, because what they start to focus in on originally before we get to critical race theory is critical social justice.
So, and this is what, and this is what, and they get to frame it again in this PDF, which by the way is very well written for the most part.
It has an air of, you know, I don't, I can't say academia, but there's some, somebody who wrote this is not like your typical idiot, uh, you know, with all the, you know, syntax problems.
This is where to, to go ahead and put in people's minds because not everybody understands what these think tanks do.
And we're going to talk more about this in the second episode of our audio documentary.
These think tanks, Are the intellectual wing of the right.
These are the ones that figure out how to win.
These are the ones who determine how to do the debate.
They hand out the talking points.
I mean, this is in part, and by the way, I know this is gonna shock you, Nick.
He used to be part of the Heritage Foundation.
No!
Which, by the way, when you get elected as a Republican president, they're like, congratulations, sir.
Here is how you govern, right?
We're also going to take over the judiciary, which is what they're doing here.
It's the educational takeover that they did with the judiciary.
It just so happens to be a different project.
These are not lightweights.
These are the people on the right who have their heads on and they understand how to get shit done.
Right.
So here's what they say.
Remember, we talked about this already, how they frame it to their own, you know, needs and means and ends.
So here's what it says.
According to critical social justice, straight white people, especially men, are the oppressors and have systematically rigged society for their own benefit.
Ding, ding, ding!
Ding, ding, ding!
Did you write this?
OK, whether the education system, the economic system or the transportation system, all of society is rigged for the benefit of straight white men.
Again, this is like we could agree on this.
And this is what's funny about this.
They nailed it dead to rights.
They're exactly right on all of those fronts.
So let's get to the critical part here.
Recognizing the flaw of this philosophy is not to say that racism does not exist.
OK, that's good.
That we should not teach that racism is wrong.
OK, that's good.
Or that we should not teach an honest assessment of our history, the good and the bad.
OK, hey, we're on it.
Oh, yeah.
This is bipartisan here, we're going to shake hands in a minute.
It is to say, however, that CSJ will not do so in an appropriate manner, and that carried out, it will harm the intellectual and psychological development of children in our schools.
Okay, so there is the whole, it's going to make them Democrats.
Right?
Because our children are our society's future.
Cue the music.
I believe the children are our future.
This will have a devastating impact on our nation as well.
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