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The Manufactured Panic Over Critical Race Theory and the Billionaire-Funded Campaign to Weaponize Racial Anxiety
What began as an obscure legal theory taught in law schools for nearly half a century suddenly became a Republican rallying cry in 2020. This investigation exposes how conservative operative Christopher Rufo, Koch-funded think tanks, and Fox News manufactured a moral panic over critical race theory to divide Americans and distract from economic inequality. The reality? No K-12 school teaches CRT. Instead, billionaire-backed propagandists weaponized racial anxiety to win elections while hiding their true agenda: protecting corporate power and preventing working Americans from uniting across racial lines to demand economic justice.
The Data Void Strategy: Manufacturing Fear From Nothing
Parents around the country began speaking out against critical race theory as schools supposedly started embracing this ideology. But something wasn't adding up. Critical race theory has been taught in American law schools for almost half a century, yet public interest remained virtually nonexistent until suddenly exploding in 2020.
This represents a classic propaganda technique: exploiting data voids by finding a topic nobody is discussing and then talking about it incessantly. When people search for information about this scary new concept, they find not expert analysis or academic sources, but content from conservative outlets like Prager U and Ben Shapiro, along with commentary from people who had never heard of critical race theory until moments before discussing it publicly.
The result is what can be called a dipshit feedback loop, where algorithms recommend garbage content to feed audiences, and content creators produce more garbage to feed the algorithm. YouTube's top results on critical race theory feature random musicians declaring their hatred for something they clearly don't understand, their videos picked up by algorithms and transformed into entire content strategies built around manufactured outrage.
What Critical Race Theory Actually Is
Critical race theory emerged from critical legal studies, an intellectual movement started by law professors in the 1970s who argued that the law is never truly neutral. The legal system appears to be an objective, rational rulebook, but in reality it's messy, full of contradictions and gray areas that humans must resolve based on their own values and biases.
When the Supreme Court makes a 5-4 decision with justices looking at identical facts and reaching wildly different conclusions, it's not because half made a mistake. It's because skilled lawyers can use the law to justify nearly anything. Terms like due process, probable cause, and equal protection don't have inherent meaning; they're interpreted by judges, juries and lawyers who bring their own perspectives.
Critical legal studies argued these biases aren't random. Because the legal system is maintained by privileged elites who attend expensive law schools, work prestigious clerkships and get appointed to high office, the law tends to reflect their interests. The American legal system prioritizes trademarks, contracts and property rights, but says little about rights to food, housing or healthcare. Not because property rights are divinely ordained, but because those creating and interpreting rights care more about protecting their assets than preventing others from starving.
Critical race theory began when nonwhite law professors examined this work and recognized that the law's reflection of powerful interests manifests clearly in how it treats race. These professors lived in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and noticed that despite legal victories like the Civil Rights Act and Brown v. Board of Education, life for Black Americans wasn't changing quickly.
The Detroit Case: How Colorblind Policies Perpetuate Segregation
After Brown v. Board, the Detroit Public School System was legally required to desegregate. The problem was it couldn't. Detroit's white population had already started leaving through white flight, preferring suburban life over living alongside Black neighbors in the inner city. Black families couldn't make the same move due to less money from years of racist zoning and redlining practices, and those who did move faced harassment from police and city officials.
The result was integrated schools but segregated school districts, with white students clustered in wealthier suburban districts and nonwhite students in poorer Detroit schools. In 1970, a district judge recognized this violated Brown v. Board's purpose and ordered a bussing program to send some Black students from the inner city and some white students from the suburbs to each other's schools.
White families protested vigorously. The KKK blew up school busses. White activists argued on television that the bussing program itself violated Brown v. Board, claiming they were taught to be colorblind and bussing for race alone drew attention to racial differences.
In 1974, the Supreme Court sided with white families in a 5-4 decision, claiming that because school districts weren't explicitly drawn with racist intent, they didn't violate Brown v. Board and the bussing program had to end. Justice Thurgood Marshall, the court's only Black justice, wrote in dissent that under such a plan, white and Black students would not attend school together. Black children would continue attending all-Black schools, perpetuating the very evil Brown aimed to cure.
Nearly 70 years after Brown v. Board, America's school system remains deeply segregated, with Detroit having some of the most clearly segregated school districts in the country.
The Core Principles of Critical Race Theory
Critical race theory argues that reforms like the Civil Rights Act and Brown v. Board succeeded at stopping obvious displays of racism, but for most Black and brown Americans, racial inequality is more subtle, baked into decades of legal decisions, economic policies and policing practices that appear neutral but treat racial groups differently.
The civil rights movement placed too much faith in anti-discrimination laws and the legal system's ability to correct its own biases. If society is serious about addressing racial inequality, it's insufficient to adopt colorblindness and hope for the best. Instead, there must be critical thinking about how laws and institutions might impact people of color differently, even while claiming to be colorblind.
CRT focuses less on individual intent and more on systems of power. Many white families leaving Detroit wanted to escape Black people, but some followed friends, and others sought the best schools, which happened to be in all-white suburbs. Critical race theorists argue society spends too much time worrying about who privately holds racist beliefs. Instead, the focus should be on systems of power and why they treat racial groups differently.
Why are Black people much more likely to be charged for drug possession despite using drugs at similar rates as whites? Why are Black families much more likely to be denied home loans? Why do major highways keep getting built through Black communities that get too close to white suburbs? And isn't it concerning that the legal system answering these questions is still overwhelmingly run by people who've never experienced racial discrimination?
CRT is not a set of solutions. Black activists in Detroit disagreed about whether bussing was the best approach to segregation, with many arguing the city should simply invest more in majority-Black schools. Critical race theorists often disagree about addressing racial inequality because CRT is not an answer to a problem, but a lens for understanding it. It's a way to pay attention to what has happened in America and how that history continues creating different outcomes, so the country can become what it claims to be.
Christopher Rufo and the Birth of a Moral Panic
The phrase critical race theory barely appeared on Fox News over the past decade until September 2020, when conservative operative Christopher Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Rufo is a right-wing political operative who poses as a serious journalist, chasing gimmicks and pseudo-scandals for attention.
In 2017, he sued Seattle over its tax on the ultra-wealthy despite being too broke to qualify himself. In 2018, he launched a brief Seattle City Council campaign, complained about homelessness, then quickly dropped out claiming online leftists were bullying him. But in September 2020, Rufo pulled off his biggest stunt: warning the public about critical race theory infiltrating the federal government.
Rufo's evidence consisted of anti-racism trainings at places like the Treasury Department and FBI designed to teach employees about concepts like white privilege and microaggressions. Standard corporate diversity trainings that most office workers have experienced. But Rufo claimed these trainings were part of a radical anti-white agenda, an existential threat to the United States.
There are two obvious problems with this claim. First, racial sensitivity trainings are not critical race theory; they're essentially the opposite. CRT argues society focuses too much on individual biases and not enough on systems of power. Many critical race theorists are deeply skeptical of these trainings, not just because they're ineffective, but because they distract from bigger issues.
The bigger issue is that Rufo is a liar. The Washington Post investigated his reporting and found claims were either unsupported by evidence or stretched beyond the facts. The Treasury Department didn't tell employees all white people are racist. The FBI didn't tell employees straight white men are at the top of a pyramid of evil. These were boilerplate voluntary HR workshops. Rufo made things up and called it critical race theory to scare white people.
That night, Rufo had a specific goal: calling for the president and White House to immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government. The next morning, Rufo got a call from Trump's chief of staff. Days later, Trump issued an executive order banning federal contractors from offering racial sensitivity trainings.
The Koch Brothers Propaganda Machine Takes Over
After Trump lost the election, mentions of CRT on Fox News dropped. Rufo got quiet, tweeting about being at the barbershop and calling it one of the last domains of traditional masculinity. For a brief moment, critical race theory seemed ready to fade from the news cycle.
But starting around March, right-wing think tanks all funded by the billionaire Koch family began publishing piece after piece about CRT, warning that critical race theory was infecting America's schools and indoctrinating kids with radical anti-American ideas. Not a few clickbait posts, but dozens of articles, podcasts and web videos, all using the same language Rufo used in September.
Rufo himself was featured in webinars by groups like the Heritage Foundation, ALEC and the Manhattan Institute. These groups had never mentioned CRT before, but now it was all they could talk about. An average of five pieces per week dropped from late March to June 30, 2021.
In April, Rufo was hired by the Manhattan Institute to direct a new initiative on critical race theory. Weeks later, he published a briefing book laying out talking points the right would use to fight CRT in schools. What started as one man's gimmick had been adopted by the Koch brothers' massive propaganda machine. Fox News got the memo, and by mid-spring, the panic over critical race theory returned using Rufo's briefing book talking points.
The Astroturf Campaign: Political Operatives Posing as Concerned Parents
No K-12 school anywhere teaches critical race theory. The average American student doesn't even learn about slavery until fourth or fifth grade. The idea that kids are being taught graduate-level legal analysis is absurd.
Every example in Rufo's briefing book fails to show kids learning CRT. What they show is schools teaching basic lessons about race and inequality, then Rufo lying about those lessons to make them seem scarier. Stories about students being told to atone for white privilege never happened. Stories about students chanting to the Aztec god of human sacrifice were total fabrications, debunked by fact checkers and curriculum creators.
Most stories fall apart when you simply read the article. Rufo claims students are forced to celebrate Black communism, but his article just says they were asked to define communism during a lesson about Angela Davis. Rufo claims students are separated into oppressor and oppressed, but that language doesn't come from any teacher or lesson plan; it comes from an anonymous parent complaining their kid was being taught about identity.
There's no theory connecting these stories unless you think just talking about race is a theory. Early complaints about CRT actually came from a couple of parents at elite New York private schools like Brearley, Grace Church and Dalton. These parents were upset their kids were learning about systemic racism after the George Floyd protests and started writing emails to hundreds of other parents claiming there hasn't been systemic racism against Blacks since the 1960s and that Black Lives Matter is a Marxist, anti-family organization.
Fox News started interviewing parents claiming their kids were being taught CRT. But these weren't everyday moms and dads. They were political operatives working for Koch brothers organizations. The concerned mom was actually Jennifer Stefano, vice president of the Commonwealth Foundation and former vice president of Americans for Prosperity. The mother of five was Kerry Lucas, connected to the Cato Institute. The Virginia father was Ian Prior, a Republican communications person who worked for Karl Rove and Jeff Sessions.
Everywhere you look, concerned parents turn out to be political operatives. A Florida mom was a Republican consultant who worked for the RNC. A Virginia parent was a longtime Republican activist at a GOP consulting firm. A Little League dad was a former senior adviser to the Trump campaign running a Republican consulting firm. A former school board member was an activist for the Virginia GOP. A Florida mother of three was a right-wing activist and member of seven Florida GOP groups. A father of three was a pro-Trump podcaster selling ugly CRT merchandise.
This is classic astroturfing: a propaganda strategy where billionaires pay political operatives to create the illusion of a grassroots movement. Many early CRT stories came from New York and Virginia because that's where the consultants live.
School Board Protests and Legislative Overreach
As Fox's coverage of CRT picked up, public anxiety grew. Parents across the country started showing up to school board meetings protesting this scary theory they heard about on TV, despite having no idea what critical race theory actually is. They were repeating what they saw on Fox News.
Even at these meetings, evidence of bad faith appears. A woman described as a concerned teacher on Fox actually used to work at Right Side Broadcasting and is listed as an activist partner at Turning Point USA. A woman identified as a concerned mom after speaking at her school board meeting is actually a longtime political activist hosting her own right-wing radio show. An Illinois father who became a viral sensation after his rant against CRT was tweeted by Turning Point USA isn't really a concerned parent; he's a YouTuber who posts clickbait reaction videos and specifically recorded himself knowing it would go viral.
Local news outlets showed up to these protests asking about critical race theory, publishing vague headlines suggesting something nefarious might be happening. These reporters don't know what CRT is either. Poor school district employees had to explain repeatedly that they aren't teaching graduate-level legal theory.
By mid-summer, most protests weren't even about curricula anymore. They were about school equity and diversity policies aimed at helping minority students feel more welcome in majority-white schools. In Kentucky, they protested plans to hire more diverse teachers and carry more books with nonwhite characters. In Georgia, they protested plans to help minority students in classrooms and ensure they aren't unfairly disciplined. In Virginia, they protested a student equity ambassador program to collect complaints of racism and injustice, which came after kids said they were being called slurs and threatened with having their hijabs ripped off.
No decent human finds these policies controversial, but these people have been convinced that any attempt to address racial inequality is a cover for an anti-white agenda. When no one can explain what critical race theory is, who's to say what it isn't?
State Bans and the Expansion of Government Censorship
By summer's end, critical race theory became an official Republican Party talking point. CRT showed up in Republican campaign ads. Dozens of school districts faced GOP ballot initiatives to recall school boards. Over two dozen states introduced legislation to ban teaching critical race theory in schools.
The problem is it's hard to ban something when you don't know what it is. These bills are all over the place. In Iowa, it's illegal to teach that someone is inherently racist or sexist based on skin color. In Idaho, it's illegal to blame an individual white person for actions committed in the past by other white people. In South Dakota, they introduced a bill banning lessons that promote overthrowing the United States government.
Most laws are less funny. In Montana, teachers are banned from teaching lessons promoting controversial concepts like racial privilege and identity. In Wisconsin, they introduced a bill limiting teaching of concepts including anti-racism, cultural awareness, equity, marginalized communities, patriarchy, racial justice, social justice and systems of power and oppression. In Florida, schools are banned from teaching that racism is embedded in American society or legal systems and must instead teach that American history is the story of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.
The party of Don't Tread On Me now wants to ensure no one speaks ill of Big Brother. The facts don't care about your feelings crowd now wants to ban lessons that might hurt white parents' feelings. Those who complain about cancel culture and thought police are cheering laws so severe that teachers are canceling lessons on race out of fear of government crackdown.
Rufo's Admission: The Quiet Part Out Loud
As critical race theorist David Theo Goldberg wrote, CRT functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier for any talk of race and racism at all, a catch-all specter lumping together multiculturalism, wokeism, anti-racism and identity politics. Any suggestion that racial inequities in the United States are anything but fair outcomes from choices made by equally positioned individuals in a free society.
Rufo basically admitted this on Twitter: "We have successfully frozen their brand, critical race theory, into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all of the various cultural insanity under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans."
This was never about critical race theory. They just needed a boogeyman, some race-baity catchphrase to scare white people with.
The Real Motivations: Attention, Money and Power
The freak out over critical race theory represents a moral panic: a situation where the public is tricked into overreacting to something that isn't actually dangerous. Like the Salem witch trials, the point is not to warn about a real threat but to manipulate people, taking advantage of their fear and anxiety to get what you really want.
For many grifters, it's attention. Random YouTubers went from a few thousand subscribers to over 45,000 when they started posting about CRT. There's always a market for stirring up racial anxiety, and if you're a nonwhite person willing to say what rich conservatives want to hear, even better.
For professional grifters like Shapiro, Owens and Pool, the rationale is the same. These people made careers saying what their audience wants to hear every single day, so they have to agree with whatever moral panic is trending, even if they haven't done the reading. Shapiro went to Harvard Law, the birthplace of critical race theory. He absolutely studied CRT as a student and knows how ridiculous this is. But if he says that, his audience will turn on him.
Not everyone lying about CRT is doing it for attention. They're also doing it for money. Rufo got a cushy think tank job, a donations page to fund his fight against critical race theory, and became Fox News's resident expert on something he made up. Critical race theory became a fixture in right-wing fundraising emails for politicians and think tanks. Local political action groups raised hundreds of thousands of dollars campaigning against school boards that discuss racial justice.
Many people lying about CRT are doing it because they're racists. Tucker Carlson is a soulless grifter, but he's also a sincere bigot who wants a white ethnostate.
The Billionaire Agenda: Divide and Conquer
Behind these grifters, behind Tucker and Rufo and Shapiro, are billionaires: corporate oligarchs, oil barons and Republican kingmakers who spent enormous time and money ensuring people fear critical race theory. What's in it for them?
Derrick Bell, the father of critical race theory, saw this coming nearly 30 years ago: "Racism, ever since slavery, has provided the stabilizing influence. It is what those on top have used to keep those on the bottom, if not satisfied, at least quieted. And it works very well."
The panic over critical race theory really only started after Republicans lost control of Congress and the White House. The party that had done nothing for four years but pass corporate tax cuts, give away billions to weapons and oil companies, and cut government aid during a pandemic suddenly found itself out of power with no serious policy agenda. Moral panics, especially about race, are a reliable way to win back voters, to convince them you're on their side even when all you've done is sell them out.
The strategy goes back to the fight over bussing. In 1970, before the Supreme Court made its decision in Detroit, Richard Nixon's political strategist explained how Republicans needed to use racial anxiety to convince white Democrats to vote against their own interests: "For a long time, the liberal conservative split was on economic issues. That favored the Democrats. In the future, the liberal conservative division will come on social issues. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans."
This strategy appears in old Republican campaign ads, where candidates quickly pivot from talking about bussing to talking about cutting social services. In the 1980s, as Reagan cut taxes for the ultra-rich and made radical cuts to government programs for the working class, his aide explained how Republicans used racial rhetoric to sell trickle-down economics to white Americans: "You start out by saying certain things. By 1968 you can't say that anymore, it hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced bussing, states rights and all that stuff, and you get so abstract... you're talking about cutting taxes, and all of these things are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites."
Republicans are already working to make CRT a centerpiece of the 2022 midterm elections, part of a broad strategy to run on culture war issues rather than campaigning against economic agendas that have proved popular with voters.
The Path Forward: Intersectionality and Solidarity
What happened in Detroit is not just a story about race. It's also a story about class, about how the wealthy abandoned the poor and how lack of funding for schools and affordable housing keeps working-class people trapped in cycles of poverty lasting generations.
That statistic about racial disparities in drug arrests isn't just about racist cops. It's about how the privileged play by different rules and how police departments target neighborhoods they know can't afford to defend themselves in court. That report about racial disparities in the tax code is literally also a report about how the economic system caters to those already wealthy and how the ruling class manipulates the law to avoid paying their fair share.
As is often the case, the problems minorities complain about are instances of injustices visited across much of the population based on class. Critics accuse CRT of being obsessed with race, but the whole point of CRT is that focusing on race alone is not enough. As long as America's institutions allow the powerful to exploit the powerless, that exploitation will have a racial component.
Kimberle Crenshaw, one of CRT's founders, coined the term intersectionality: the idea that categories like racial inequality and economic inequality cannot be fully separated. They often reinforce each other. While segregated school districts are bad for Black and brown kids, they're also bad for young people, retirees and workers who quickly find themselves priced out of fancy white suburbs. While the collapse of labor unions hurts all workers, it especially hurts Black and brown workers who are uniquely at risk for employment discrimination.
It's not a coincidence that states banning critical race theory are the same states with the lowest minimum wage rates and weakest unions. While immigrants, people of color and working-class whites are exploited in different ways and for different reasons, they're often exploited by the same powerful elites and have reason to look out for each other, to treat racial justice and economic justice as part of the same struggle.
Maybe that's why billionaires are so intent on banning critical race theory, banning anything that gets people to think about systems of power or question whether America is really as free and fair as they claim. Not because CRT divides us, but because being honest about what happens to Black and brown people in this country means becoming aware of all the ways the deck can be stacked against everyone. It means considering the ways that you too might be playing a rigged game, and imagining viewing each other not as enemies in an endless fake culture war, but as potential allies.
The problem of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.
Video Transcript
Shut up, Chadwick.
Parents around the country are speaking out against woke curriculums as more
schools begin embracing critical race theory, critical race theory,
critical race theory. CRT for short.
What exactly is critical race theory? Well, if you work in the
government or in corporate America, you probably already know what it is.
It is a Marxist ideology that they are trying to now put in the classrooms
and put into the workplace. Critical race theory says
every white person is a racist. Critical race theory says America is
fundamentally racist and irredeemably racist. Critical race theory seeks to
turn us against each other, make black people and white
people hate one another, hate each other. It's a tragedy in that way. Whether or not that's the
working definition at Yale Law, it doesn't matter.
I don't care. We don't care. They are indoctrinating our children
trying to teach our children to hate our country.
This is child abuse. It's abuse of everyone, really.
You're not imagining this. And no one loves your children more than you.
It is now up to you to fight for it. Not only do parents want it
out of their kids curriculum, they want to oust the school board
members who are pushing it on them. W've seen yelling, screaming, protesting and
even some arrests. So far, nine states have officially banned critical race theory,
and Gillian this summer is still young. This is probably a lost cause.
One thing that conservative media is really good at
is taking advantage of data voids, which means finding a topic or subject
that no one is really talking about and then talking about it incessantly.
Critical race theory has been taught in American law schools for almost
half a century at this point. But look how much people cared about it before
and look at it now. This is a smart propaganda trick because
it makes it so that anyone looking for more information
about this scary thing they saw on Fox News is just going to find
more bullshit that confirms their fears. Search for critical race
theory on YouTube right now, and the top results are not
from experts or academics. They're from Prager U, Ben Shapiro
and dipshits who'd never even heard of critical race theory until five minutes
before they went on stage to talk about it. I'm going to say this as bluntly
and as honestly as I can. Critical race theory is the most racist thing
that is being spread in popular life in America. It is no different than the teaching of the KKK.
Sure, why not? That creates what I like to
call a dipshit feedback loop, where algorithms start recommending
garbage to feed their audience and grifters start producing
garbage to feed the algorithm. One of the top results on YouTube
right now is a video from this random musician titled Why I Hate Critical Race Theory.
I hate critical race theory because I hate racism. Sure, why not?
This woman very obviously does not know where critical race theory is, but
her video got picked up by YouTube's algorithm. So now everything she makes
is about critical race theory. It's become her whole schtick.
Bullshit breeds more bullshit. Also, this weird thing keeps happening where she gets interrupted by her meatloaf
timer while she's recording. There goes my meatloaf again once again.
Girl, are you mainlining meat loaf over there? Edit that out.
You look like an amateur. To make matters worse,
critical race theory is kind of the ideal target for a right wing smear campaign.
I mean, talk about bad branding. Can you imagine three words more terrifying
to the average Fox News viewer than critical theory
race? Plus, CRT was created by law professors who
were writing for other law professors, so if you want to look at the original
documents explaining what it is, you're going to have to read through articles like
Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma,
or Race Reform and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation In Anti-discrimination Law.
Do you want to read that shit? Do you think Meatloaf Girl read it?
Uh oh. The result is a media environment where
the people talking the loudest about this topic are the ones who know the least about it.
If you're watching this video, I imagine you’ve already heard
or maybe even internalized a pretty wild first impression of what CRT is.
So when someone comes along and tries to tell you that that's not what critical race theory is,
that most of what you've heard is utter bullshit and that these people are intentionally
lying to try to scare and manipulate you, It probably sounds hard to believe.
And it doesn't help that that someone is a Mountain Dew-covered wood
nymph who’s experimenting with wearing dangly earrings in his mid-thirties.
Is this the face of someone you can trust? Is it? Like I said, at this point,
this is probably a lost cause. But I promised this dead guy that I
would keep fighting losing battles. So for all you free thinkers
out there, here goes nothing. Critical race theory. What is it? Who has it?
And most importantly, which lever do I pull to be crushed by a safe?
I first learned about critical race theory when I was
a freshman in high school, getting ready for the Florida State Novice Debate Championship.
And please. Do not masturbate to this photo unless you absolutely have to.
I was after school one day digging through this closet of research that had been left behind by
former debaters. And in the back of that closet, I found this old haunted
expando folder titled C L S, Critical Legal Studies.
I know, pretty sweet! Critical legal studies is an intellectual movement
started by a group of law professors in the 1970s who came together to argue that
the law is never truly neutral. We think of the legal system as this objective, rational rulebook, but in reality,
it's much messier than that. Full of contradictions and gray
areas that humans have to resolve. When the Supreme Court makes
a 5-4 decision, for example, looking at the same exact facts and coming to two
wildly different conclusions, it's not because half of the justices have made a mistake.
It's because a smart lawyer can use the law to justify just about whatever they want.
terms like due process, probable cause, equal protection -
they don't mean anything on their own. They are given meaning by
judges, juries and lawyers who interpret those terms based
on their own values and biases. And CLS argued that those biases are not random.
Because the legal system is maintained by privileged elites,
people who can go to expensive law schools, work fancy clerkships and
get appointed to high office. The law tends to reflect their interests.
The American legal system, for example, cares a lot about trademarks,
contracts and property rights, but it says very little about your
right to food, housing or health care. Why? Not because property
rights were given to us by God, but because the elites who
create and interpret those rights are much less worried about
you starving on the street than they are about you trying to take their shit.
The primary function of the legal system, then, is not to fairly resolve disputes.
It's to protect those who are already in power. To normalize exploitation and inequality
by dressing it up in fancy court decisions, precedents and legal doctrines.
You're not mad that corporate billionaires are buying up local elections.
You just hate the First Amendment. You're not mad that your boss can
fire you for no goddamn reason. You just hate the freedom of contract.
Why do you hate the freedom of contract? Why do you hate America?
CLS concluded that the law is not a constraint on politics.
The law is politics. A way for the ruling class to exert power
while appearing neutral. That's critical legal studies.
Now, in the back of that haunted expando folder, there was a second, even
smaller folder labeled CRT: Critical Race Theory.
Sweet. Critical race theory began when a group of
nonwhite law professors saw the work that CLS had done and said:
Yeah, no shit. The law does reflect the
interests of the powerful. And one great example of that
is when it comes to, uh, race. These professors were living in the
aftermath of the civil rights movement, and they were noticing that
despite legal victories like the Civil Rights Act and Brown v. board, life for Black Americans was
not changing all that quickly. And the example that really
helped me understand this when I was a teenager is what happened in Detroit.
United we stand, divided we fall! After Brown v. Board, the
Detroit Public School System was legally required to desegregate.
The problem was it couldn’t. Detroit's white population
had already started leaving, preferring to move to the suburbs rather than
live alongside their black neighbors in the inner city -
A phenomenon often referred to as white flight. Black families in Detroit
could not make the same move. They often had less money
thanks to years of racist zoning and redlining practices, and those who did move to the suburbs
were frequently harassed by police and city officials
to stop them from staying. As the mayor of Dearborn,
Michigan told a reporter: Black people can't get in here. We watch it.
Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire.
It's known among our people and it's known among the Negroes here.
It's fine. I'm sure he was just a bad apple. He was mayor for 35 years!
The result was a system of integrated schools but segregated school
districts, with white students clustered in wealthier districts outside the city
and nonwhite students in poorer schools in Detroit's center.
Separate and unequal. In 1970, A district judge saw what was happening and said,
“All right, all right, nice try, ya dick tits.” But this obviously violates
the purpose of Brown v. board. The judge ordered the
creation of a bussing program that would take some black
students from the inner city and some white students from the suburbs
and send them to each other’s schools. If the parents won't integrate, the kids will.
Problem solved. But as you might imagine, the
Whites were not thrilled about this. Tomorrow morning, my daughter
will not be on that bus, She will not be in a parochial school.
She will be home! Protests broke out across the
state, with white families arguing that the bussing
program violated their rights. The KKK started blowing up school busses
to deter people from using them, and white activists started going
on TV and arguing that actually it was the bussing program
that violated Brown v. Board. You see, we are told on one hand to be colorblind,
and this is how I have lived and how I have raised my children.
To bus them for race only is simply again drawing attention
to the differences in the races, and I disapprove of this.
You kind of have to admire the chutzpah of this lady.
She is literally using the logic of Brown v. Board to defend segregation.
I mean, who would buy this argument? Who would buy this argument? In 1974, the Supreme Court intervened,
and in a 5-4 decision, sided with the Whites, claiming that because the
school districts were not explicitly drawn with racist intent,
they did not violate Brown v. Board and the bussing program would have to end.
In his dissent, the one black justice on the court,
Thurgood Marshall, wrote: Under such a plan, white and Negro students
will not go to school together. Instead, Negro children will
continue to attend all Negro schools. The very evil that Brown was
aimed at will not be cured, but will be perpetuated.
He was right. Nearly 70 years after Brown v. Board, America's school system remains deeply segregated,
and Detroit in particular has some of the most clearly segregated school
districts in the country. Critical race theory saw what was
happening in places like Detroit and said, see, this is exactly
the kind of shit we hate. Reforms like the Civil
Rights Act and Brown v. Board were good at stopping really
obvious displays of racism, but for most black and brown Americans,
racial inequality is much more subtle than that, baked into decades of legal
decisions, economic policies and policing practices that look neutral on paper,
but end up treating racial groups very differently.
The civil rights movement, CRT argued, had put too much faith in things
like anti-discrimination laws and too much faith in the legal system’s ability
to correct its own biases. If we're serious about dealing
with racial inequality, it's not enough to say “don't think about race”
and pray for the best. Instead, we have to think critically
about how our laws and institutions might be impacting people of color differently,
even while they claim to be colorblind. Two more things about critical race theory
and then I promise class is dismissed. Chadwick stopped packing
your shit before the bell. No!
One: CRT is not super interested in individual intent.
Many of the white families that left Detroit were doing it to get away from black people,
but some of them were probably just following their friends,
and others were probably just trying to put their kids
in the best possible schools, which just happened to be
in the all white suburbs. Critical race theories argue that we spend
way too much time worrying about who is or is not privately holding racist beliefs.
Instead, we should focus on systems of power and ask why they might be treating
racial groups differently. Like, why are black people so much more likely
to be charged for drug possession despite using drugs at a similar rate as whites?
Why are black families so much more likely to be denied a home loan than other racial groups?
Why do major highways keep getting built right down the middle of
black communities that get too close to white suburbs?
And isn't it weird that the legal system in charge of
answering these questions is still overwhelmingly run
by people who've never experienced racial discrimination?
Remember, CRT was created by nerdy law professors, so they're less interested in “is Karen racist?”
and more interested in “why do Karens tend to experience the legal system so differently than
their nonwhite peers?” Two: CRT is not a set of solutions.
Many black activists in Detroit believed that bussing
was the best way to deal with segregation. But many of them did not, arguing that the city
would be better off just investing more money into majority black schools.
Critical race theorists often disagree about what to do about racial inequality.
And that's because CRT is not an answer to a problem,
it's just a way of understanding it. Or to borrow a grad school
term, it’s a LENS through which we can better understand how inequality works
and why quick fixes might not. Critical race theory just says let's pay attention
to what has happened in this country and how what has happened
in this country is continuing to create differential outcomes
so we can become that country that we say we are. Chadwick…
Eat shit. That's basically it.
I don't mean to sell critical race theory short, lots of brilliant people have done incredible work documenting how the legal system treats
black and brown people differently. And over the past 50 years,
the lessons of CRT have expanded beyond the law into fields
like economics and sociology. One area it's been especially
influential is in education, where teachers and school
administrators have taken the lens of CRT to ask how
their own policies might be affecting their black and brown students.
Like, why are black kids more likely to be expelled
for the same behavioral issues as white kids? Why is it that school dress
codes are so often used to punish girls with
traditionally black hairstyles? And isn't it weird that so many of our textbooks
are written by white historians who teach us that racial
discrimination basically ended in the 60s? I mean, we were all taught
about Brown v. Board, right? But were you ever taught about the
Detroit case that basically overturned it? You think Meatloaf Girl was?
But whether it's in the law or education, the basic lesson of CRT is the same:
as much as we may want to be colorblind, America's institutions often aren't.
And if we're able to acknowledge that we'll be better at finding
solutions that make sure everyone actually does get a fair shot.
Oh my nip was out? Now at this point,
you're probably having one of two reactions to critical race theory.
Some of you are probably thinking, This is bullshit.
Nobody actually cares about race anymore. Liberals want to make everything about race so
you can guilt white people into voting for you. If black people are struggling, it's
because black people are making bad choices. This is just cultural Marxism
disguised as Black Lives Matter so you can sneak in your true
plan for an anti white revolution. And honestly, if that's how you feel,
I guess all I can really say is... You're right. We don't believe a word of this shit.
We know racism ended in the 60s, we're just making this up as we go along.
Pulling decades of legal research and peer reviewed academic articles
directly out of our asses. Why? Because we're bored. That's why.
And we want to spend the rest of our miserable lives
on this dying planet. Arguing about reverse racism with Ben Shapiro fans
who skipped their intro to sociology class because they thought it sounded gay.
We have spent the past 40 years using critical race theory
to teach Americans to hate white people, and somehow nobody noticed until
one month before the 2020 election. But I fear you're too late, freethinker.
For now, I have the orb. And with it, nothing can stop me from building
the culturally Marxist utopia of my dreams. Behold whitemen, and let me
show you the true meaning of playing the victim.
The rest of you are probably wondering what is the big fucking deal?
How did CRT go from an obscure legal theory to “theyre teaching our kids to hate white people?”
It's a good question, and one that I thought it would be fun to answer together,
but if we're going to do this, I should slip into something a little bit more comfortable.
It's called fashion, bitch, look it up. Sorry, I called you a bitch, I’ve been
in a really weird headspace lately. Welcome to my living room, the place where I like
to get obscenely stoned and see up to four in the morning watching Chopped reruns.
It's never going to set. Put it in the blast chiller!
Is she making meatloaf? Unfortunately, today's activities
will be a bit less relaxing because for the past few months and
against the clear recommendations of the CDC, I have been plummeting
down the right wing rabbit hole to make sense of the panic over CRT.
And having returned to the surface, I would like to
present my findings to you now. Fair warning. What I'm about to
show you is unbelievably stupid. So if at any point you start to
feel hopeless or overwhelmed, just know that this ride
only stops for emergencies. And in 2021, despair over the
collapsing state of American Empire is not an emergency.
Let's roll. So as you can see from this ugly ass chart,
the phrase critical race theory basically never appeared on Fox News
over the past 10 years. But that all changed in September of 2020,
thanks to an appearance from this little guy, a man named Christopher Rufo.
Who is Christopher Rufo? I'm glad you asked. Rufo is a right wing political
operative who likes to pretend to be a serious journalist.
The kind of grifter who'll go after any gimmick or pseudo scandal
he thinks will get him attention. In 2017, he sued the city of Seattle
over its tax on the ultra wealthy, despite being too broke to
qualify for the tax himself. In 2018, he launched a Blink
and You'll Miss It campaign for Seattle City Council,
during which he complained about the homeless and then
almost immediately dropped out, claiming he was being bullied by online leftists. But in September of 2020, Rufo
pulled off his biggest stunt yet. Appearing on Tucker Carlson tonight to
warn the public about the spread of a dangerous new ideology.
Tucker, this is something I've been investigating for the last six months,
and what I've discovered is that critical race theory has become the default
ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized
against the American people. Pretty shocking, huh?
If truuuuuue. Rufo’s evidence that CRT was
infiltrating the federal government was a handful of anti-racism
training at places like the Treasury Department and FBI,
which were designed to teach employees about concepts like white
privilege and microaggressions. Today is Diversity Day. Someone's going
to come in and talk to us about diversity, something that I've been pushing
and corporate mandated it. If you've ever worked in a corporate office,
you’ve probably sat through one of these trainings before.
They're usually pretty boring. But according to Rufo, these trainings were
part of a much more radical anti-white agenda. Conservatives need to wake up that this is
an existential threat to the United States and the bureaucracy, even under the Trump
administration, is now being weaponized against core traditional American values.
Now, even if you're a straight up racist, there are two obvious problems with this segment. For one, racial sensitivity trainings
are not critical race theory. They're kind of the opposite.
One of the main arguments of CRT that we focus too much on individual biases
and not enough on systems of power. So many critical race theorists, including me,
are deeply skeptical of these kinds of trainings, not just because they're
cringy and don't really work, but because they can distract from bigger issues.
Like who cares if the FBI is hosting an anti-racism workshop
while their agents are targeting and harassing Black Lives Matter activists?
Who cares how woke the Treasury Department is while the tax code still caters
to wealthy white taxpayers? Obviously Rufo’s target audience
does not care about any of this. But if your issue is really
with woke sensitivity trainings, critical race theory probably agrees with you.
The bigger issue, though, is that Rufo is a goddamn liar.
The Washington Post looked into Rubio's reporting and found that his claims were either
not supported by the evidence or stretched beyond the facts.
The Treasury Department did not tell its employees that all white people were
racist, as Rubio had claimed. Nor did the FBI tell its
employees that straight white men are at the top of a pyramid
of evil for Christ's sake. These were boilerplate voluntary H.R. workshops.
Rufo was just making shit up and then calling it a critical race theory to
scare gullible white people. And on that night, he had a very
specific goal by a white person in mind. I'd like to make it explicit.
The president and the White House to immediately issue an executive order abolishing
critical race theory trainings from the federal government. Tt's time to take action and
destroy it within his own administration. You can probably guess what happened next.
The next morning, Rufo got a phone call from Trump's chief of staff,
and a few days later, Trump issued an executive order banning federal contractors
from offering racial sensitivity trainings. Critical race theory teaches
that America is an evil country. I will not allow federal taxpayer dollars to
be used to spread anti-American propaganda. This is how most Americans first heard about
critical race theory, not from a law professor in a classroom, but from one con man copying another
con man in a desperate attempt to get reelected. And thankfully, it didn't work.
Trump still lost. America had a quick little race riot,
and for the most part, people moved on. You can see a big dip in Fox News's mentions
of CRT in the weeks after the election. And Rufo got kind of quiet, too. The most
noteworthy thing he did in December was tweets I'm at the barbershop, one of the
last domains of traditional masculinity. Blue collar men, macho talk, slick fades,
sleeve tattoos, turn of the century prints, lady trouble and anti-lockdown sentiments. The
haircut is the rationale, but not the meaning. It’s a little gay, Chris, can everybody
just grow up and be gay already? I'm sick of it. For a brief moment there, it
really seemed like critical race theory was going to fade from the news cycle.
I remember noticing it and thinking, Oh, thank God, I won't have
to make a video about this. But while I was slipping into
a false sense of security, something weird was happening. Starting around March, a group
of right wing think tanks all funded by the billionaire Koch family,
began publishing piece after piece after piece about CRT,
warning that critical race theory was infecting America's
schools and indoctrinating kids with radical anti-American ideas.
I don't mean a few click baity shitposts, I'm talking dozens of articles,
podcasts and web videos, all using the same language
that Rufo had used in September. Rufo himself was featured
in webinars by groups like the Heritage Foundation, ALEC
and the Manhattan Institute. It's hard to overstate just how weird this was.
Most of these groups had never mentioned CRT before,
but now it was all they could talk about. These articles came out in a trickle last year,
but then suddenly became a flood. An average of five pieces per week dropped
from late March to June 30th of 2021. In April, Rufo was actually
hired by the Manhattan Institute to be the director of a new
initiative on critical race theory. And a few weeks later, he
published a briefing book laying out the talking points the right would
use to fight the spread of CRT in schools. If people in these fourteen
thousand school board districts don't have the courage to fight back,
we're not going to win this fight. What started off as one man's
cotton had been adopted by the Koch brothers massive propaganda machine.
And pretty quickly, Fox News got the memo. If you look at these charts, you can actually see
a link between when the think tanks are publishing their CRT pieces and when Fox News
starts talking about it again. So by mid-spring, the panic over
a critical race theory was back using the very talking points that
Rufo had laid out in his briefing book. These kids are not learning
science, not learning mathematics, they’re learning how to hate white people.
They're learning how to hate their country. What's happening in schools is they're trying to
turn every kid into part of some identity group. Turn groups of children into
oppressors and oppressed. Speaking of deadly pathogens, critical
race theory is spreading. A new website will tell you if it's in your kid's school.
Now, let's just get the obvious out of the way. No K-12 school on the planet
is teaching anybody's kids critical race theory.
The average American student does not even learn about slavery
until fourth or fifth grade. The idea that kids are being
taught a graduate level form of legal analysis is [eldritch screaming]. I went through every example
in this goddamn briefing book, and not a single one of them
shows kids learning CRT. What they do show is schools
teaching basic lessons about things like race and
inequality, and then Rufo lying about those lessons
to make them seem scarier than they actually are.
This story is about students being told to atone for their white privilege.
It never happened. Bullshit. Debunked for months by local
reporters and the school district. This story about students chanting
to the Aztec god of human sacrifice. It's a total fabrication.
More bullshit. Deemed largely false and misleading
by fact checkers and the people who created the curriculum.
Most of these stories don't even need a fact checker, though.
They fall apart if you just read the article. Rufo claims that students are being forced to
celebrate black communism. But his article literally
just says they were asked to define communism during
a lesson about Angela Davis. Rufo claims that students are being separated
into oppressor and oppressed, but that oppressor and oppressed
language does not come from any teacher or lesson plan.
It comes from an anonymous parent who was complaining
that their kid was being taught about identity. It's tempting to call this cherry picking,
but these aren't even cherries. There's no theory that connects
any of these stories together. Unless you think just talking
about race is a theory. Which is why when people on Fox
try to define what CRT actually is, the end up sounding like this.
It’s liberal mumbo jumbo for if you're white, you should be treated terribly.
Basically racist. Incorrect, though I don't
know what I was expecting from a guy who thinks you make lemonade
by putting lemons directly into the blender. There also wasn't any evidence that these lessons
were causing a lot of controversy. Many of the early complaints
about CRT actually came from a couple of parents and
a handful of elite New York private schools.
Schools with names like Brearley, Grace Church and Dalton.
You know, places that really hate white people. Nothing says kill Whitey like a lesson on a race
from the Dalton Academy warblers. These parents were pissed
that their kids were learning about systemic racism in the
aftermath of the George Floyd protests and started writing deranged
emails to hundreds of other parents saying shit like:
we have not had systemic racism against blacks in this country
since the 1960s. By adopting critical race
theory, Brearley is advocating that blacks should forever be
regarded as helpless victims. Black Lives Matter is a Marxist,
anti-family, heterophobic, anti Asian and anti-Semitic organization.
Now is this funny? Yes. Is it camp? Absolutely.
But is it newsworthy? For as long as schools have existed,
there have been dumb ass parents writing dumb ass emails
claiming that their precious angels are being indoctrinated.
Who gives a shit that a couple of entitled dummies are upset
about their kids curricula? I'll tell you who gives a
shit. Fox News gives a shit. Because pretty soon we're
getting interview after interview with other parents claiming that
their kids are being taught CRT, too. To tell them that they're bad people
because of the color of their skin. It's sick, it's emotional abuse, and that's what
we see people around the country standing up. This wasn't just Rufo anymore.
These are everyday moms and dads speaking up about the dangers of this radical woke ideology.
But wait a second. Look at this woman's background.
Creepy statue. Tea Party propaganda.
A book called I Love Capitalism. Wait a damn minute.
God damn it. That's not a concerned mom at all. That's Jennifer Stefano,
vice president of the Commonwealth Foundation and former vice president
of Americans for Prosperity. She works for the Koch brothers.
That's not just the mother of five. That's Kerry Lucas, a Koch brothers lapdog
with ties to the Cato Institute and IWC. That's not just a Virginia father.
That's Ian Prior, a Republican comms person who’s spent his career
working for Karl Rove and Jeff Sessions. Everywhere you look, these concerned parents
turn out to be political operatives doing the same bullshit as Rufo.
This Florida mom, a Republican consultant, most
recently worked for the RNC. This Virginia parent, longtime Republican activist
who currently works at a GOP consulting firm. This Little League dad, former
senior adviser to the Trump campaign, who runs, you guessed it, another
Republican consulting firm. But wait, I have more.
This former school board member is a current activist
for the Virginia GOP. This Florida mother of three is
also a right wing shit starter and member of seven different Florida GOP groups. This father of three is a
pro-Trump podcaster who wants to sell you some of the ugliest
CRT merch you have ever seen. Oh my god. What is that?
What is that? What the fuck? And before launching a parents
against CRT group in January, this concerned mom was
actually working for a bunch of Koch funded think tanks,
including Cato, FreedomWorks and IDW, a fact that some of those think tanks are now
trying their hardest to scrub from the internet. You can't hide from me,
Nicole. I am fucking crazy. The more you look into the panic over CRT,
the more it looks like a classic case of astroturfing,
a propaganda strategy in which a handful of billionaires
pay a bunch of political operatives to create the illusion of a grassroots movement.
Which probably explains why so many of these early CRT stories
came out of New York and Virginia, because that's where the consultants live.
But if the Tea Party taught us anything, it's that with enough money and Fox News coverage,
even Astroturf will start to grow. You can see that as Fox's coverage
of CRT started to pick up again, so did public anxiety about it.
We've obviously created a movement here. So before long, parents across the country
start showing up to their local school board meetings
to protest this scary theory they just heard about on TV.
I am against CTR. It's a divisive method which is going to actually
divide people more than they already are. What do you mean teaching race?
What is their to teach about race? There is no systemic racism in this
country, in the state or in this country. I think the Board of Education and
those sitting on the panels are thieves. I think they're liars and have
committed treason against our children. Stop indoctrinating our children.
Fuck those kids. Stop teaching our children to hate the police.
Stop teaching our children that if they don't agree with the LGBT community
that they're homophobic. Hold on pause this shit.
Why can't we let the public know that you're teaching our children to go
out and murder our police officers? Do you want the proof? I have the proof. And as long as I'm standing here
on this good ground earth of God, I will fight.
This is not the last of me you will see. I'm retired.
I have nothing else better to do. Girl, we know.
By the way, that woman absolutely got invited on Fox News in case you're
wondering if God is still dead. It goes without saying that most
of the people at these protests have no idea where critical
race theory actually is. They're just repeating what they saw on TV.
Can you name any critical race theory scholars? Probably not.
Can you name any critical race theory concepts? I don't know what the
concepts are. I think I think. When did you first hear
about critical race theory? Sometime around last year.
Where did you see it? On Fox News
But even at these school board meetings, you can see evidence of bad faith shenanigans.
This woman was described as a concerned teacher when she appeared on Fox,
but she actually used to work at right side broadcasting and is still listed as
an activist partner at Turning Point USA. This woman was identified as a concerned mom
after she spoke at her school board meeting, but she's actually a long time political activist
who hosts her own right wing radio show. And then there's this guy. An Illinois father
who became a viral sensation after his rant against CRT
was tweeted out by Turning Point USA. So when you talk about critical
race theory, which is pretty much going to be teaching kids how to hate each other,
You going to tell a white kid, Oh, the black people are all down suppressed. How do I have two
medical degrees if I'm sitting here oppressed? Sure, that's not really how oppression works,
and it's not what's being taught in school. And it's definitely not CRT, but you've got to
admit, still sounds pretty compelling, right? If true.
But he's not really a concerned parent, is he? He's a goddamn YouTuber who
post click baity reaction videos and who specifically recorded and uploaded himself
because he knew it would go viral. He's a grifter.
It's Meat Loaf girl all over again. It doesn't matter.
Because by this point, it's not just a Fox News story anymore.
Now, local news outlets are showing up to these protests
to ask about this critical race theory everyone’s screaming about,
publishing these vague headlines suggesting that something nefarious
may be happening in a school district near you. The district says it's an ethnic
studies plan, but parents say: no, it is a critical race theory plan.
These reporters don't know what CRT is, either. So instead, you get these poor
school district employees having to explain over and over again that
they aren't teaching a graduate level legal theory.
Unified school district is not teaching critical race theory.
We have said for months now we are not teaching critical race theory in our schools.
We are not teaching critical race theory in K through 12.
We are teaching kids to respect and value their diversity and the diversity of others.
It's too late. By mid-summer, most of these protests aren't even about the curricula anymore.
They're about school equity and diversity policies,
which are policies aimed at helping minority students feel
more welcome in majority white schools. In Kentucky, they're protesting a plan to
hire more diverse teachers and carry more books with nonwhite characters.
They're trying to skirt under critical race theory, that they're not
teaching it. They will be teaching it, but they're calling it the equity program.
In Georgia, they're protesting a plan to help minority students in the classroom
and make sure they aren't being unfairly disciplined for behavioral issues.
The DEI program is a Trojan horse that will bring in critical race theory, white repentance
and the McDonaldization of America's students. And in Virginia, they're protesting
a student equity ambassador program to collect student complaints
of racism and injustice, which came after kids said they
were being called the N-word and threatened with having their
hijabs ripped off their heads. I think it is word salad when
you hear words like equity, phrases like equitable, equitable outcomes,
and it's it's, you know, if it walks like a duck and acts
like a duck, it's a duck quack quack. No decent human actually finds
these policies to be controversial, but these people have been
convinced that any attempt to even address racial inequality
is just a cover for some nefarious anti-white agenda.
And of course, they think that. When no one can explain what
critical race theory actually is, who’s to say what critical race theory isn't? Can you describe to me what
critical race theory is? So in layman's terms, I'm
I don't know the academic definition off the top of my head for you,
but specifically like privilege plus power Whiteness
Minorities white, traits of whiteness would be
specifically like hard work scheduling. I'll tell you, I'll tell you this.
The tenants of critical race theory, though I have definitely done segments on the
overly academic definition of it, I don't have it pulled up.
But when they put out a list that says whiteness, they say things like down with whiteness.
Oh, she doesn't know the words. And it still doesn't matter.
By the end of the summer, critical race theory has become
an official Republican Party talking point. Critical race theory
critical race theory critical race theory
Critical race theory is racism. CRT starts showing up in Republican campaign ads.
Dozens of school districts face GOP ballot initiatives to recall and
remove their school boards, and over two dozen states introduce
legislation to ban the teaching of critical race theory in school.
Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not
worth one red cent of taxpayer money. The problem, of course,
is that it's hard to ban something when you don't know
what the hell it is. So these bills are all over the place.
In Iowa, They've made it illegal to teach that someone is inherently racist or sexist
based solely on the color of their skin. Literally, nobody was teaching that. But OK.
In Idaho, they've made it illegal to blame an individual white person
for actions committed in the past by other white people.
Again, that's not critical race theory, but go off, I guess.
In South Dakota, they've introduced a bill that would ban lessons that promote the
overthrow of the government of the United States. Try and stop me.
Most of these laws, though, are a lot less funny. In Montana, teachers are now
banned from teaching lessons that promote controversial
concepts such as racial privilege and identity.
In Wisconsin, they've introduced a bill that would limit the teaching of
concepts like, I shit you not: Anti-racism, cultural awareness, equity,
marginalized communities, patriarchy, racial justice, social justice and
systems of power and oppression. And in my garbage home state of
Florida, schools are now banned from teaching that racism is embedded
into American society or legal systems and must instead teach that American
history is the story of a new nation based largely on the universal principles
stated in the Declaration of Independence. I could scream forever about
how fucking ironic this all is, how the party of Don't
Tread On Me is now the party that wants to make sure no one
dares speak ill of Big Brother. How the facts don't care about your
feelings Crowd now wants to ban lessons that might hurt white parents feelings. And how the same dipshit who
complain about cancel culture and the thought police are now cheering on laws
that are so draconian that teachers are canceling their lessons
on race out of a fear of a government crackdown. But.
What's the point. If you still think conservatives
actually give a shit about free speech, you are either a Joe Rogan fan or a CNN employee.
Either way, it's too late for you. The bigger point is that none
of this has anything to do with fighting some radical left wing theory.
As actual critical race theorist David Theo Goldberg wrote,
CRT functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier
for any talk of race and racism at all. A catch-all specter lumping
together multiculturalism, woke ism, anti-racism and identity politics.
Or indeed any suggestion that racial inequities in the United States are
anything but fair outcomes, the result of choices made by
equally positioned individuals in a free society.
When I first read this quote, I was like, Damn. Empty signifier. I'm going
to use that in the video. But it turns out I don't need to, because Rufo
basically just admitted it on Twitter. We have successfully frozen they're
brand, critical race theory, into the public conversation and are steadily
driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all
of the various cultural insanity under that brand category.
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately
think critical race theory. We have decodified the term and
will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions
that are unpopular with Americans. Oh, my God, he had admit it.
This was never about critical race theory. They just needed a boogeyman. Some race baity catchphrase they
could use to scare white people with. All of this screaming all of
this divisive bullshit for what? For what?
Oh, shit, the Meat Loaf. If you asked a sociologist,
they'd probably describe the freak out over critical
race theory as a moral panic. A situation in which the public
is tricked into overreacting to something that isn't actually dangerous.
Imagine the Salem witch trials, but if Fox News were covering them.
It’s a civilization ending poison, but it's everywhere. How widespread is it?
Well we can't really be sure. Like the witch trials, the point of a moral panic
is not to warn the public about a real threat. It's to manipulate them.
To take advantage of their fear and anxiety to get what you really want.
So what do the people lying about critical race theory really want?
For a lot of these grifters, it's attention. I've joked a lot about Meatloaf Girl in
this video mainly because she's an icon. She's an idiot. And she is the moment.
But also because I think she represents the motivations behind
a lot of the bad actors in this story. If you're trying to draw
attention to your YouTube channel, your consulting firm or your vile Substack, moral panics offer a great way to get yourself
in front of a large triggered audience. I can roast Meatloaf Girl,
all I want, but she went from a few thousand subscribers to over 45K
when she started posting about CRT. Mr. Clickbait over here was already
a pretty decent sized YouTuber, but he's enjoyed a nice bump
of about 20K subscribers since his rant went viral.
I'm not jealous. I just want to die. There's always a market for
stirring up racial anxiety, and if you're a nonwhite person willing to say
what rich conservatives want to hear, even better. Actually, let's check in with Meatloaf
Girl and see what she's up to now. Hit the like button. Subscribe if you aren't
already subscribed to see more videos exposing the darkness of woke mentality.
Holy shit, that's depressing. Her YouTube transformation is complete.
For the professional grifters, your Shapiros, your owens, your pools,
the rationale is basically the same. These people have made a career of
saying what their audience wants to hear and saying it every single day,
so they kind of have to agree with whatever moral panic is popping off,
even if they haven't done the reading. Shapiro is an especially
sad example of this because he went to Harvard Law, the
birthplace of critical race theory. He absolutely studied CRT as a student and knows
how ridiculous this all is. But if he says that, his audience
will turn on him, and more importantly, he won't get
invited on Bill Maher to agree that all of this race stuff is
really tearing the country apart. If, if critical race theory means making children
in school fixate on race, I'm not for that. If it's about dividing everybody into
oppressed and oppressor, I'm not for that. So there are things that are being
taught and are going around that I'm not for.
That, if that was critical race theory, I wouldn’t be for.
Oh my god. How do you host a political talk show and not
even Google the topic before the show starts? New rule: don't have sex with
anyone who watches Bill Maher. I don't care how hot they are.
Do not cross the dicket line. Now, to be fair, not everyone lying
about CRT is doing it for attention. They're also doing it for the money.
Rufo has gotten a very nice career bump from all this.
He's got a cushy new think tank job, a donations page to fund his
fight against critical race theory, and he's become Fox News's resident
expert on the thing he made up. Quite the haul, and apparently he's not alone.
Critical race theory has become a fixture in right wing
fundraising emails for both politicians and think tanks alike,
and NBC reports that local political action groups have raised
hundreds of thousands of dollars campaigning against school boards
that talk about racial justice. As one of the attorneys that's suing a
school district over CRT told a reporter: This is a new area where people think they
can either become famous or make money on the issue, and they're probably right.
Good Lord, this video should just be called screaming the quiet part out loud.
Speaking of which, I should probably also acknowledge that
many of the people lying about CRT are doing it because they are just racists.
Like Tucker, Carlson is a soulless grifter, sure, but he is also a sincere bigot
who wants a white ethno state, and I don't want to downplay the
ideology that motivates people like him. But behind these grifters, behind Tucker and Rufo
and Shapiro, there are these goddamn billionaires: corporate oligarchs, oil barons
and Republican kingmakers who have spent lots of time and money trying
to make sure that you're afraid of critical race theory.
What's in it for them? And for that, I give you Derrick Bell, the
father of critical race theory, who saw this coming nearly 30 years ago.
Racism, ever since slavery, has provided the stabilizing influence.
It is what those on top have used to keep those on the bottom,
if not satisfied, at least quieted. And it, it works very well.
It works very well. It's hard not to notice that the
panic over a critical race theory really only started after Republicans lost
control of Congress and the White House. As the party that had done nothing for four
years but pass tax cuts for corporations, give away billions to weapons and oil companies
and cut government aid during a pandemic suddenly found itself
out of power with no serious policy agenda to speak of.
Moral panics, and especially moral panics about race,
are a reliable way to win back voters. To convince them that you're on their side,
even when all you've done is sell them out. And you can actually see the strategy going
all the way back to the fight over bussing. President Nixon believes bussing is wrong.
It's wrong for the white children. It's wrong for the black children.
It will have the effect of creating hatred hatred among the kids.
In 1970, before the Supreme Court made its decision in Detroit,
Richard Nixon's political strategist explained how Republicans needed
to use racial anxiety to convince white Democrats to vote against their own interests.
For a long time, the liberal conservative split was on economic issues.
That favored the Democrats. In the future, the liberal conservative
division will come on social issues. Will there be a continuation of
bureaucratic do gooder interference symbolized by the school bussing issue?
The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South,
the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.
Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old,
comfortable arrangement with the Democrats. I've always been against the bussing of children
to achieve a racial balance and always will be. Let's keep our children in our own
neighborhoods where they belong. You can really see this strategy if you
look at old Republican campaign ads. Look how quickly this guy
pivots from talking about bussing to talking about cutting social services.
There are many differences between my opponent and myself. One is bussing. Mondale is for bussing,
Phil Hansen's against it, Mondale’s for more and more government programs, I say no.
The same thing happened in the 80s. As Reagan was working to cut taxes for
the ultra rich and make radical cuts to government programs for the working class,
his aide explains how Republicans used racial bullshit to sell trickle down
economics to white Americans. You start out in 1954 by saying
[noooope]. By 1968 you can’t saythat anymore, it hurts you, backfires.
So you say stuff like forced bussing, states rights and all that
stuff, and you get so abstract... you're talking about cutting taxes,
and all of these things are totally economic things and a byproduct them
is blacks get hurt worse than whites. Boy, am I glad I did not have
to read that quote myself. Don't worry, that aide was chased out
of Republican politics soon after that. And by that, I, of course, mean he became
chairman of the Republican National Committee. We are fortunate to have someone of Lee's
perception leading the Republican Party. He is now involved in trying to elect
Republicans all over the country. One of those Republicans he
helped elect was George Bush, who ended up hiring him as his campaign manager
and who won his election thanks to an ad that used images of a black criminal to
stoke white fears about law and order. And we see our politicians use it all the time.
Our president got elected notwithstanding the tremendous gaps in
wealth and income, the need for healthcare weren't even issues,
weren't even serious issues last time because he talked about Willie Horton.
And Willie Horton was the 1988 keyword that everybody understood.
Now what are the Republicans going to use of the key word in 92?
We're not sure, but they will have one. They sure will.
Republicans are already working to make CRT a centerpiece
of the 2022 midterm elections, part of a broad strategy to run
on culture war issues, rather than campaigning head on
against Mr. Biden's economic agenda, which has proved popular with voters.
Republican candidates are betting this is connecting with voters of
all political backgrounds. The first test will be here in Virginia
and the governor's race in November. It's genuinely soul crushing to watch
this happening over and over again. To watch billionaires and their
lapdogs win election after election, using the same old racial bullshit to divide
and conquer it just feels so hopeless. But, you know…
There is a way out of this freethinker. A way to break the cycle. To connect racial justice and
economic justice once and for all. It's been here the whole time.
It's the orb. After all, what happened in Detroit
is not just a story about race. It's also a story about class.
About how the wealthy abandoned the poor and how the lack of funding for
schools and affordable housing can keep working class people trapped in
cycles of poverty that lasts for generations. We should have national resources being poured in,
but right now there's just a level of indifference.
That statistic about racial disparities in drug arrests
isn't just about racist cops. It's also about how the privileged get to play
by a different set of rules in this country and how police departments often
target neighborhoods they know can't afford to defend themselves in court.
That report about racial disparities in the tax code
is literally also a report about how our economic system
caters to those who are already wealthy and how the ruling class manipulates the law
in order to avoid paying their fair share. As so often is the case, the problems that
minorities are complaining about are dramatic instances of injustices that are visited
across much of the population based on class. Critics accuse CRT of being obsessed
with race, but the whole point of CRT is that focusing on race alone is not enough.
As long as America's institutions allow the powerful to exploit the powerless,
that exploitation will have a racial component. And that awareness can lead to
some dangerously free thinking. Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the founders of CRT,
went on to coin the term intersectionality, which is the idea that
categories like racial inequality and economic inequality cannot be fully separated.
They often reinforce each other. So while segregated school districts, for example,
are bad for black and brown kids, they are also bad for young people,
retirees and workers who quickly find themselves getting priced out of fancy white suburbs.
And while the collapse of labor unions hurts all workers,
it especially hurts black and brown workers who are uniquely at risk for
employment discrimination. It's not a coincidence that the states
that have banned critical race theory are the same states with the lowest
minimum wage rates and the weakest unions. Because while immigrants, people of color
and working class whites are exploited in different ways and for different reasons,
they are often exploited at the hands of the same powerful elites
and have reason to look out for each other. To treat racial justice and economic
justice as part of the same struggle. And maybe that is why billionaires are so
intent on banning critical race theory, banning anything that gets you
to think about systems of power, or question whether America is really
as free and fair as they tell you it is. Not because CRT divides us, but because to be
honest about what happens to black and brown people in this country is to become aware of all
the ways the deck can be stacked against you. To begin considering the ways that you
too might be playing a rigged game. And to imagine viewing each other, not as
enemies in an endless fake culture war, but as potential allies. Co-conspirators.
Or most dangerously of all: dining partners.
Hey! What.
Don’t get cringey! Fine.
You know what? Believe whatever the hell you want.
I grow tired of these free thinkers. Their Substacks.
Keep listening to Ben Shapiro complain about the Aztec god of human sacrifice
and then wonder why nothing ever changes. It's a free country.
And while I have genuinely given this my best shot,
my blood sugar is getting low. So this is the end of the video.
Godspeed. Join a union.
And… Bon Appetit. The problem of racial injustice and
economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution
of political and economic power. Now when we come to Washington,
we are coming to get our check.
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