Old-fashioned racism

The radical Left is making race the most important factor in evaluating everyday Americans, and in the process, is furthering racist attitudes it claims to abhor.

Critical Race Theory is one of the great evils of our time. Its central tenets are: 1) The most important thing about a person is the color of his/ her skin. 2) You have rights as a member of a group, not as an individual. 3) People of the same race have similar character and personality traits. Critical Race Theory, in other words, is nothing but old-fashioned racism. CRT advocates like to say that “whiteness is a disease.” Can you imagine the outcry if our public schools started teaching that “blackness is a disease”? But for the Left, the most virulent racism is not only acceptable but admirable, as long as it is directed at whites.

American Experiment has been fighting against these poisonous doctrines for years, going back at least to 2017 when we exposed leftist political indoctrination in the Edina public schools. But CRT has now gained a foothold in public schools across Minnesota, and Gov. Tim Walz’s proposed revisions to the K-12 Social Studies standards would institutionalize CRT in all of our classrooms. Those standards teach that America is an oppressive country, and that “whiteness,” Christianity and the free enterprise system are all to blame.

Do these extreme views represent the majority of Minnesotans? Of course not, as the Thinking Minnesota Poll recently confirmed. But they do represent the views of the Walz administration and Education Minnesota, the state’s far-left teachers’ union. It will take a concerted, district-by-district effort to keep our schools from teaching these anti-American doctrines to our children.

That is the message of American Experiment’s 17-city “Raise Our Standards” tour. Over a whirlwind two weeks, we sponsored events across Greater Minnesota. More than once, we put on three events in different cities on the same day. Catrin Wigfall, our featured speaker, is six months pregnant. I am not sure how she did it.

Most events drew crowds of more than 100. As I write, we are looking forward to four meetings in the Twin Cities, with early registration suggesting some will bring 500 people.

To my knowledge, no policy organization has undertaken anything comparable to our “Raise Our Standards” tour. We have drawn national and even international acclaim for our grass roots approach. Of course, this success has also attracted CRT forces set on indoctrinating our children.

At several stops, leftists tried to disrupt our presentation. In Moorhead, one leftist was led away in handcuffs. But activists were vastly outnumbered by citizens who wanted to learn about CRT.

Perhaps even more insidious was the Left’s effort to suppress our First Amendment rights by threatening host venues. In Hibbing, our original locale canceled and we had to move to another location on short notice. In Duluth, the country club that had agreed to host us received threats and smears directed against us from left-wing activists, and backed out. We then moved our event to a Holiday Inn. Within hours, they called to say that they couldn’t host our meeting after all.

To his everlasting shame, Duluth’s Superintendent of Schools hailed the postponement as a credit to the “community,” alleging that we were spreading “misinformation,” although he had no knowledge of our content.

Of course, we will not be deterred. We rescheduled our Duluth program for the week of July 12, and we arranged for uniformed off-duty police officers to provide security for all of our Twin Cities events. But the fact that the Left is so determined to prevent our message from being heard shows how committed they are to turning our public schools into anti-American indoctrination centers. We truly are engaged in a battle for the future of our country.