There Is Literally No Defense of Critical Race Theory so
Bizarre That Conservative Inc. Will Not Support It
Last week, Time magazine’s online version featured a story headlined The Conservative Case Against Banning Critical Race Theory. Oddly enough, its author was a law professor at the University of Chicago, Aziz Huq, who is neither conservative nor terribly sympathetic towards America or American values. The story did not feature anything about “banning” CRT or the conservative case against it.
The article is largely balderdash. It claims that different states that have forbidden the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a tool for indoctrinating school children have described that pernicious philosophy differently that the critics of CRT don’t understand what CRT is. This, at least, prevents us from having the insult to our intelligence of being told that CRT is only taught in graduate school classes. And it equates state-supported propaganda and indoctrination with free speech.
It is difficult to credit the bullsh** in the article as an accident. Huq may be an intellectual degenerate, but he’s not an idiot. For instance, he says the Supreme Court has said that CRT can be taught based on this:
Conservatives disparage arguments made by “snowflake” college students. But the case against CRT is made of the same stuff. As such, it is subject to the same response. Hence, in a recent opinion concerning off-campus student speech, Justice Alito explained why a student’s crude rant about being excluded from a cheerleading squad could not be punished in simple terms: “Speech cannot be suppressed just because it expresses thoughts or sentiments that others find upsetting.” This is indeed the law: The Supreme Court has not allowed the state to prohibit or punish speech because it riles up an audience since 1951.
The case he refers to involved a school district attempting to discipline a student for something she posted about her school on Snapchat. The student didn’t require anyone to read it, she didn’t require them to agree with its premise as the price of getting a passing grade or keeping their job, and she wasn’t paid by the taxpayers for her post…though they should be stuck with her legal bills for this grotesque overreach by the Karenwaffen at her school.
He lies in his characterization of Florida’s restrictions. This is what the good professor says: “Florida’s, for example, defines it as any ‘theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice.'” What it actually says is: “that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” This is not a minor difference.
Former RedStater Dan McLaughlin does a brief takedown on this noxious piece of disinformation at National Review:
If Time wants to publish a progressive academic reciting the usual progressive case against anti-CRT bills, it is certainly free to do so. But it is affirmatively deceptive to its readers to bill this as a “conservative case” when it is not written by a conservative and does not take conservative premises or arguments as legitimate. Worse, it fails to tell the reader that this is not a conservative writer. One would think that minimal standards of journalistic honesty would demand that.
That a liberal law professor who appears to be pig-ignorant of conservatism beyond Twitter hot takes would lie to forward his cause is not news. That’s what these people do for a living.
Then came Phase II.
Just as surely as night follows day, David “I’m a macho combat vet” French shows up to the party.
Anyone who would call this stinking puddle of effervescing diarrhea “excellent” is a clown. But this is French we’re talking about and that, of late, goes without saying.
French has gone all-in in his defense of CRT as a sequel to his praise of Drag Queen Story Hour in public libraries as a “blessing of liberty.” Over Fourth of July weekend, French co-authored an op-ed in the New York Times that claimed forbidding political indoctrination in K-12 was a danger to “liberal education.” Helen Roy of Claremont University’s The American Mind blog gutted it like a trout in her substack essay:
Totalitarians do not get very far without the help of enablers who, whether out of fear, principle, or instinctual subservience to power, pave the way to hell. Thankfully, no “conservative” who has ever attempted to conserve anything (especially the innocence of children) reads David French. He does not write for conservatives. He and the rest of the “good faith conservatives” write for liberals and for libertarians who need liberals to pat them on the heads and say, “Good boy.” The project of the obsequious person is to secure his social status among people who hate him. Maybe he knows that. Maybe that’s why.
(See RedState’s coverage of this tragic self-beclowning at For Some Republicans, the Losing Is the Point; The Fight Over CRT Has Conservative Inc. Gasping for Air; and Christopher Rufo Issues a Devastating Rebuke of David French’s CRT Fluff Piece.)
If you wait long enough, you will find the grifters who infest Conservative, Inc., will defend literally any action by the left that advances progressivism and weakens Western Civilization. During the debate over homosexual marriage, we were assured by leading lights of the conservative movement that you had to be an irrational hater to oppose everyone who was on the “right side of history” (spoiler alert: they aren’t on the right side of anything). We see the same pattern on transgenderism and CRT. At least the North American Man-Boy Lincoln Association is honest about its goal.
Guys like French are out to destroy our nation and us, but they don’t have the nerve to voice their objective. If they did, then they’d no longer be of use to the deep-pocketed progressive donors that let them live in upscale neighborhoods and send their kids to private schools that cost as much as an Ivy League college. So instead, they try to convince us that the only way we can hold true to our principles is by letting the people who hate those principles win.
I think they may have overplayed their hand this time around.