 I am going to turn this into a YouTube segment. So chat, say hello to the YouTube commenters. YouTube commenters, say hello to chat. We're gonna turn this into a thing. I think that more people really need to address critical race theory on the left because what we're seeing is that this is like the new boogeyman for the right and essentially this is like the new McCarthyism for the right. Any and everything that they don't like or that's even mildly controversial, they chalk that up to this is critical race theory. It's like this catch all thing and there's like accusatory sentiment being thrown around now. So it's like, oh, you're just a critical race theorist and it's really frustrating to me because the way that critical race theory is used is so broad, so misrepresented and it just quite frankly is incoherent. So I wanna shed some light on critical race theory and we're gonna start with a really, really hot take. So folks, get ready, buckle up because this is a hot take. Okay, are you ready? Are you ready? Critical race theory is based. So to oversimplify critical race theory is essentially the study of institutional racism. Now, when I was in my PhD program, that was the very first time that I ever encountered critical race theory which is an offshoot of critical theory and it's not like I took a class on critical race theory, but it came up because if you're going to get a degree in public policy in governance, then you need to learn how to draft good public policy. You need to know how public policy works and how, for example, a policy that isn't necessarily race based, it's race neutral, can still have racial outcomes. This isn't something that's actually super, super controversial in my opinion. So we're gonna get to this article and also we're going to get to how critical race theory shot up into the main stream. So this right here, this document, this is not super long, but if you wanna get the core tenets of critical race theory, you can go here. I forgot what page number this was on. Yeah, so this is basically a literature review, but it talks about the origins of critical race theory and this is important if you actually wanna know what critical race theory is and I think that we should know what critical race theory is because a lot of folks don't know what it is. They hear it being thrown around and they assume that it's bad because Republicans and Fox News, they're talking about it a lot, but this is just an academic study that is, I think, very insightful and necessary. So if you wanna read this, Google critical race theory and examination of its past, present and future implications, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, I am not gonna read this, but I think it will be insightful to go over a more concise summary by the American Bar Association. So this is a lesson on critical race theory. Now, we're not gonna read this, but we're gonna go through some of the main principles here. So first and foremost, recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science, as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project, refutes the idea of biological race differences. According to scholars, Richard Delgado and Jean Stephankic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality. Acknowledgement that racism, second of all, is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations, but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism. Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few bad apples. CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or color blindness. CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing inequality. Recognition of the relevance of people's everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling and rejecting deficit informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color. So if somebody asks you what critical race theory is, it would be an oversimplification, I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to say. It's basically the study of institutional racism because that's a big focus. Now, if you're wondering, how did this thing become a thing? Why are we all of a sudden talking about critical race theory as of this year? And one thing that I think is driving fear and hysteria over critical race theory is that there's this assumption that it's being taught in schools. It's so widespread. But again, as a graduate student, I did not encounter critical race theory. Now, this wasn't necessarily in my field. I did political science, but I focused on international relations and comparative politics. But in my PhD program, again, that's the first time I ever saw it come up. So if people are thinking that critical race theory is being taught widely in elementary schools and high schools, that is not going to really be the case. Sure, maybe in high school, you're going to learn about institutional racism and whatnot. And you start to really at an elementary level learn about the history of racism in the United States. But if you ask a conservative, what do you think critical race theory is? They're going to say something like, oh, it's like the study of how white people are the devil and America is evil. That is not what critical race theory is. Again, if you want the literature review, this is a really great place to start here. It's 19 pages. But this is something that's not widespread in schools. So the conservatives who are saying that they can provide you with anecdotes, they can say, well, this teacher made a post on Facebook about critical race theory or this individual made a TikTok saying that she wants to teach critical race theory, but she's mad that she can't because we're on to Sanitas Bandit. It's not that widespread. So what we're seeing is fear mongering. But I want to show you why we're all even talking about this, right? So back in 2012, there was this attempt to kind of propel critical race theory to the national level. It was during the Obama campaign, I believe. This article might jump into it. But the reason why we're talking about this is because of one individual. His name is Christopher Rufo. And this individual bragged about getting everyone to demonize critical race theory and to categorize basically anything that they don't like as critical race theory. Yeah, I think that James from the internet nailed it. It's a culture war boogeyman. That's precisely it. And I would argue it's a distraction by the GOP. If you listen to any conservative pundit, any conservative politician, there is zero policy substance. So this, in my opinion, is their attempt to distract us from their lack of substance. But also, and I think more importantly, it's an attempt to distract us from the meaningful conversation that we were all finally having for once as a country last year after George Floyd's death. When Black Lives Matter protestors got people to really think about police brutality and institutional racism in a different way or really acknowledge it for the first time, it's not a coincidence that something like this is gonna pop up. This was orchestrated by someone who is very savvy on the right. And his name is Christopher Rufo. 36 was at once an unconventional and a savvy choice for the leaker to select. Through FOIA requests, Rufo turned up slideshows and curricula for the Seattle Anti-Racism Seminars under the auspices of the city's office for civil rights. Employees across many departments were being divided up by race for implicit bias training. Welcome, internalized racial superiority for white people. Read one introductory slide over an image of the Seattle skyline. What do we do in white people's space? Read a second slide. One bullet point suggested that the attendees would be working through emotions that often come up for white people like sadness, shame, paralysis, confusion, denial. Another bullet point emphasized retraining, learning new ways of seeing that are hidden from us in white supremacy. A different slide listed supposed expressions of internalized white supremacy, including perfectionism, objectivity and individualism. Rufo summarized his findings in an article for the website of City Journal, the magazine of the Center Wright Manhattan Institute. Under the banner of anti-racism, Seattle's office of civil rights is now explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt and race essentialism, ugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago. The story was a phenomenon that helped to generate more leaks from across the country. Marooned at home, civil servants recorded and photographed their own anti-racism training sessions and sent the evidence to Rufo. Reading through these documents and others, Rufo noticed that they tended to cite a small set of popular anti-racism books by authors such as Abram X. Kendi and Robin D'Angelo. So now we're slowly but surely starting to get to him making this all about critical race theory. Rufo read the footnotes in those books and found they pointed to academic scholarship from the 1990s by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory in particular, Kimberly Crenshaw and Derek Bell. These scholars argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in laws and societal rules of the present. So again, this does not mean that all white people are evil and racist. This means that institutional racism exists and past injustices still impact communities of color till this very day. So if somebody on Fox News, for example, says critical race theory teaches you to hate white people and they're teaching our kids to hate white people, that is incorrect. As Crenshaw recently explained critical race theory found that the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantage that stretched across American society. This inquiry into the footnotes and citations in the documents he'd been sent, he being Rufo, formed the basis for an idea that has organized cultural politics this spring, that the anti-racism seminars did not just represent a progressive view on race but that they were expressions of a distinct ideology, critical race theory. With radical roots, if people were upset about the seminars, Rufo wanted them also to notice critical race theory operating behind the curtain. Now, any academic theory, any academic field of study is going to cite all of the relevant materials and authors and studies that came before. Critical race theory is no different, it's building upon critical theory, right? So the fact that it has radical roots, you can say that about so many different academic theories. If people were upset about the seminars, Rufo wanted them also to notice critical race theory operating behind the curtain. Following the trail back through the citations in the legal scholars texts, Rufo thought that he could detect this seed of their ideas, this is key here, in radical often explicitly Marxist critical theory texts from the generation of 1968. Crenshaw said that this was a selective red-baiting account of critical race theories origins which overlooked less divisive influences such as Martin Luther King, Jr. So this is why I call this the new McCarthyism because they're really making a huge logical leap here to say, oh, well, this is like grounded in Marxism. I mean, this obviously is them trying to scare people into believing that not only is critical race theory going to teach your children in schools that white people bad, but also that Marxism and socialism and communism based and he doesn't want that. Now, is he being intentionally disingenuous? Absolutely, but that's the point and this individual knows that. Crenshaw, okay, so we read that part, but Rufo believed that he could detect a single lineage and that the same concepts and terms that organize discussions among white employees of the city of Seattle or the anti-racism seminars at Sandia National Laboratories were present a half a century ago. Look at Angela Davis. You see all of the key terms Rufo said, Davis had been Herbert Marcus's doctoral student and Rufo had been reading her writing from the late 60s to mid 70s. He felt as if he had begun with a branch and discovered the root. If financial regulators in Washington were attending seminars in which they read Kendi's writing that anti-racism was not possible without anti-capitalism, then maybe that was more than casual talk. As Rufo eventually came to see it, conservatives engaged in the culture war had been fighting against the same progress of racial ideology since the late Obama years without ever being able to describe it effectively. We've needed new language for these issues. Rufo told me when I first wrote him late in May, political correctness is a dated term and more importantly doesn't apply anymore. It's not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits. They're seeking to re-engineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race. It's much more invasive than mere correctness, which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what's happening. The other frames are wrong too. Cancel culture is a vacuous term and doesn't translate into a political program. Woke is a good epithet, but it's too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. Critical race theory is the perfect villain, Rufo wrote. So this is not somebody who is dumb, but he knows that he can pray on conservatives and get them on board with this. And look, it's easy to shoot down Cancel culture and he knows this, he knows that woke, he rightfully points out it's too broad. So this individual knows what he's talking about. He's incredibly fucking savvy, right? So it's not that surprising that this would be the individual who would catapult this to national political discourse. And we have no dog on camera, unacceptable, unacceptable. Okay, different doggy, different doggy. Sorry, folks. He thought the phrase was a better description of what conservatives were opposing, but it also seemed like a promising political weapon. Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities who see the world as creative rather than critical, individual rather than racial, practical rather than theoretical. Okay, dogs are not wanting to be on camera today, folks. Strung together, the phrase critical race theory connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-based, poisonous, elitist, anti-American. I'm gonna read that again, because these are all of the things that we're hearing, right? Strung together, the phrase critical race theory connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American. Most perfect of all, Rufo continued, critical race theory is not an externally applied pejorative. Instead, it's the label the critical race theorists chose themselves. This individual knows what he's doing. So this is how he single-handedly got critical race theory to be a thing. Last summer, Rufo published several more pieces for City Journal, and on September 2nd, he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Rufo had prepared a three-minute monologue to be uploaded to a teleprompter at a Seattle studio, and he had practiced, excuse me, carefully enough that when a teleprompter wasn't available, he still remembered what to say. On air, set against the deep blue background of Fox News, he told Carlson, it's absolutely astonishing how critical race theory, he said those three words slowly for emphasis, has pervaded every aspect of the federal government. Mind you, this is the first time that we're hearing about critical race theory on Tucker Carlson's program, but he's already saying it's pervaded every aspect of federal government. Crazy Hawaiian NPA, thank you so much for the gifted sub, I really appreciate that. Carlson's face retracted into a familiar pinched squint while Rufo recounted several of his articles. Let's see, I think that we can remember what that squint is, it's that right there. This is what Tucker Carlson looked like as Christopher Rufo was explaining critical race theory, all right, just to kind of give you the image, okay? Let me read it back as if I'm Christopher Rufo. It's astonishing, Tucker, how critical race theory, critical race theory, has pervaded every aspect of federal government. Ha ha ha, ha ha ha. Conservatives need to wake up. This is an existential threat to the United States and the bureaucracy even under Trump is being weaponized against core American values. So Trump, the president of the United States, he doesn't understand that under his nose, this is happening. You have critical race theory infiltrating all levels of bureaucracy and Trump doesn't even know it. Keep in mind, this is when Trump was still president and this individual knew that Donald Trump was watching Fox News. Where the fuck are we at? Oh, here we go, and I'd like to make it explicit. The president and the White House, this is a message to Donald Trump directly. It's within their authority to immediately issue an executive order to abolish critical race theory training from federal government. And I call on the presidents to immediately issue this executive order to stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudo-scientific ideology. That's what this individual said on Tucker Carlson. And guess what? Donald Trump saw that segment. The next morning, Rufo was home with his wife and two sons when he got a phone call from a 202 area code. The man on the other end, Rufo recalled, said, Chris, this is Mark Meadows, chief of staff, reaching out on behalf of the president. What? He saw your segment on Tucker last night. And he's instructed me to take action. Soon after, Rufo flew to Washington, D.C. to assist in drafting an executive order issued by the White House in late September that limited how contractors providing federal diversity seminars could talk about race. This entire movement came from nothing. Rufo wrote to me recently as the conservative campaign against critical race theory consumed Twitter each morning and Fox News each night. But the truth is more specific than that. Really, it came from him. Since his appearance on Tucker Carlson last fall, Rufo's rise had matched that of the movement against critical race theory. He'd become a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for which he had written more than two dozen document-based articles mostly about anti-biased training in the government schools and corporations, which he told me had together accrued more than 250 million impressions online. That is insane. That's a lot, he said. Carlson had been an especially effective ally. He relied on Rufo's reporting for an hour-long episode this spring on woke education and invited Rufo to join as a segment guest. Conservatives in state legislatures across the country have proposed and in some cases past legislation banning a restricting critical race theory instruction or seminars. Rufo has advised on the language for more than 10 bills. 10 bills. When Rhonda Santis and Tom Collin have tweeted about critical race theory, they have borrowed Rufo's phrases. He has traveled to Washington DC to speak to an audience of two dozen members of Congress and mentioned in passing that earlier in May he'd had drinks with Ted Cruz. Imagine wanting to have drinks with Ted Cruz. Rufo set up a tip line last October and has so far received thousands of tips, many of which he thought were substantive. An assistant does the culling. From among this pile, he discovered that third graders in Cupertino, California were being asked to rank themselves and their classmates according to their privilege. He also learned about a three-day whiteness retreat from white male executives at Lockheed Martin and an initiative at Disney urging executives to decolonize their bookshelves. Some of the outrage appeared to have been jinned up by local political actors, particularly combative and high-profile anti-CRT parents group in Luton County. Was organized by a former Trump Justice Department official, but it was nonetheless deeply felt. In Luton, one parent had said, if you spend millions to call people in our community racist, you better be able to prove it. Do these anecdotes right here? Would that give you the impression that critical race theory has taken over all forms of academic curricula, bureaucracy, government, schools? Of course not. This is very, very telling. 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 insanities under that brand category. So this individual who catapulted critical race theory into the mainstream of political discourse is admitting right here what we've been seeing in action. They're making critical race theory a boogeyman. And in a matter of months, you see how successful this campaign is, how everyone here, yeah, let me take off the highlights, you can screenshot that folks. Anytime a conservative talks about critical race theory, show them this screenshot, because this right here, he's telling you exactly what the goal is here. It's to make this the new boogeyman. So truth out, I think that, and we're not gonna get to much of this article, this op-ed here though by David Kirkland says the best, the right has chosen critical race theory as it's new boogeyman to scare voters. And do you wanna know why they've chosen this as their new boogeyman? Because it is very incredibly effective. And they're probably gonna be talking about critical race theory for quite some time. And there's gonna be some new buzzword that comes up to replace critical race theory in a year or two years. But this has been so far one of the most effective things. Cancel culture, it had its day in the sunlight or time in the sunlight I should say, and it was successful to an extent. But critical race theory, I mean, nothing lands like critical race theory, nothing's more scary than critical race theory. Critical race theory has been around for 40 years. So why is there so much talk about it now? Following the racial justice uprisings of 2020 when critical race conversations broke out across the country, racial progress seemed possible, and then came the backlash. And then came the backlash. In a letter to US Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, Attorneys General from 20 states have requested that the department's grant funding through the American history and civics education programs include a language that opposes what they see as the deeply flawed and controversial teachings of CRT in schools. At least 25 states and multiple municipalities have proposed or passed legislation banning CRT in schools. So this is very, very successful and it's specific. So this is why going back to the article from the New Yorker when Christopher Rufo specifically talked about why cancel culture and woke isn't adequate enough is because all you can really do is demonize what you view as cancel culture and someone being too woke. But how do you translate that into policy if there's nothing like actually there, right? You can't ban being woke. You can't ban cancel culture. That doesn't even make sense in a legislative standpoint. You can, however, ban an academic theory. And on top of that, you can highlight how you think it's being taught in schools, in government, in the workplace. And not only can you actually apply a policy solution, I use solution very charitably here, folks, to this, but you can also use it as a boogeyman. So it really is effective in a multitude of ways. This is why they do it. So whenever you see somebody claim that someone is a critical race theorist online or you see them call something critical race theory, guess what? That is the new McCarthyism. It is comparable to red-baiting as Kimberly Crenshaw, one of the founders of critical race theory points out. And before leftists take the bait and they jump on board the hysteria surrounding critical race theory and this academic theory, I really hope that they don't take the bait and they reject the premise that's being pushed by conservatives. Critical race theory is good. I think that it is absolutely crucial that institutional racism is taught. Now, critical race theory isn't as prevalent as Republicans are trying to make it out to be. They provide you with anecdotes, but that's the extent of critical race theory because it's not really a thing. It's a boogeyman, right? It doesn't necessarily have to be grounded in facts, but reject the premise if you see this. If somebody says, nope, I reject that because it's critical race theory, I reject this particular author because they're a subscriber to critical race theory, reject it and challenge them because this is nothing more than a smokescreen. It's all an attempt to, one, distract from the necessary conversation that Americans are finally having about institutional racism. And two, distract from the fact that Republicans don't have a leg to stand on come 2022, 2024. Now, they don't necessarily have to come up with any sort of policy pitch to voters because they could just gerrymander their way to victory by redistricting in a way that yields them an additional like four or five seats. And then I believe they take the house back. But would it be a lot more effective to try to galvanize voters more by getting them to think that the left and the Democratic Party, lumping them together, obviously, as Republicans do, is trying to teach people that white people are evil. Yeah, that'd be a lot more effective. All they have are cultural issues. So yeah, let's go back to that tweet. Keep this, keep this sweet in your arsenal, folks, because show this to everyone that is fear mongering about critical race theory because this right here is a Republican operative saying the quiet part out loud. And they usually do end up doing this like the Republican who admitted that they're trying to win using gerrymandering. It's shocking to me that he admitted that. But I mean, when they admit this, it's not like it should be surprising. But of course, when they do admit something, when they kind of give away the game, I think it's incumbent on us as leftists, as responsible citizens to actually educate people and let them know this is bullshit. Don't buy into it. Critical race theory is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. And it's not being taught as much as it should be taught. This is something that is needed so that way policymakers and educators and individuals learn about our country's history. And they know the way that racism is embedded in every single aspect of our society, of our culture, of our institutions, of our judicial system, it's everywhere. And we can't solve the problem unless we acknowledge the problem in the first place. But they want to whitewash American history, make it seem as if we didn't do terrible things as a country, and that's just not realistic. The first step to admitting or to tackling a problem is to admit that there is a problem in the first place and it's no different when it comes to things like this. So critical race theory, absolutely, it's good. It is based.