Conservative Racist Tropes Get Passed Off As Critical Race Theory
A significant part of the fire hose of lies coming from the right involves trying to scare white parents into believing their children are being indoctrinated in classrooms to hate their own race, which I’m assuming they think is part of the Secret Plan by people of color to seize power.
The code for this misinformation campaign is “CRT,” the initials for Critical Race Theory, traditionally a law school exercise designed to look at history and institutions through the lens of racism. Thus far, there is no documentation about CRT being taught in non-college settings. But, hey, since when did truth matter to right wingers?
In Republispeak, CRT involves programs or curricula concerning diversity and/or history involving racial minorities. So when somebody points out that CRT isn’t being taught to 10 year olds, they respond by pointing out a lesson that doesn’t make the Confederacy look good (psst! They lost!) or a program supportive of discussing any non-white heritage.
The very same people who were decrying the removal of civil war statues because those sorts of actions erased history, are now --in many instances-- advocating for legislation removing books and course materials seeking to present a wider view of the nation’s past.
The theory has become somewhat of a catchall phrase to describe racial concepts some conservatives find objectionable, such as white privilege, systemic inequality and inherent bias. Right wing dogma holds racism to be an individual characteristic rather than a societal one. This, for example, allows them to view the murder of George Floyd and other Black men as a consequence of their own actions rather than the result of law enforcement bias.
The campaign to make CRT into a threat is much broader than simply the usual babbling idiots at Fox News spewing code words for The Great Replacement, a white nationalist conspiracy theory holding that “elites” are working to demographically and culturally replace whites with non-European peoples through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate.
Former President Donald Trump heard of Critical Race Theory in the words of the conservative activist who advanced this particular conspiracy as “the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy...being weaponized against the American people.”By gum, that was enough for ol’ #45, who immediately ordered it banned, in addition to diversity training.
The demonization of just about anything to do with efforts to undo racism as a force in American society opened up the wallets of wealthy right wing donors.
From the Daily Beast:
The anti-CRT movement has descended with a vengeance this year into suburban school board meetings and Fox News programming. And while the movement may present itself with a local face, many of its most effective advocacy groups are propped up by wealthy, well-connected backers—right down to its connections to the billionaire Koch family.
The Daily Beast has identified eight recently created anti-CRT groups which operate at local levels across the country but bear ties to ideological right-wing aristocrats and political operatives. Their backers include former officials in Donald Trump’s administration, an executive at a notorious D.C. lobbying firm, as well as Koch entities and The Federalist Society.
More importantly, ginning up fears about CRT fits into the broader right wing agenda:
The folks who fund this also oppose public education, the distribution of public goods, and the power of collective action. It ties up in a nice package with a big bow: to undermine democracy,” Maurice Cunningham, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, told The Daily Beast.
It’s one thing to fund an astroturfed movement, it’s another to get the word out to a broader audience.
Judd Legum and crew at Popular Information did some digging and uncovered a massive network of websites posing as “local news outlets,” operated by an outfit called Metric Media.
There are at least 1300 outlets (some of which involve printed editions) and the parent company claims to be “the largest producer of local news in the United States,” publishing over 5 million news articles monthly.
Taking advantage of the demise of local news outlets in smaller markets, this group uses automated content generation for much of its coverage. The New York Times revealed it also utilizes a pay to play system, whereby freelancers or campaign staffers submit stories that are widely syndicated with slightly different headlines.
Some of these stories involve deception, like when an obscure online pledge campaign from the Zinn Education Project was represented as a legitimate opinion survey.
The 28 Metric Media sites in Virginia, according to Popular Information, published 4,657 articles about Critical Race Theory in schools from January to November 2021. The Old Dominion State just had a gubernatorial election where CRT was made into a campaign issue by the winning GOP candidate.
It should surprise nobody then to learn that Florida, Texas, Ohio, and New Hampshire, which just happen to have elections for governor in the coming months, have seen 11,988, 10,096, 6,262, and 2162 articles published concerning CRT this year.
As the Virginia gubernatorial returns came in, Garrit Lansing, president of WinRed, the main online fundraising vehicle for Republican candidates, sent this tweet
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Here’s Popular Information (which has an amazing amount of other details):
The piece that Lansing references, published in September 2020, is one of the first to claim that Critical Race Theory is infiltrating Virginia schools. It claims that "Loudoun County Public Schools has spent $422,500 in taxpayer funds 'training' staff on critical race theory." This is false. The money was allocated to create an equity plan and provide related services to help implement the plan. The initiative was created in response to a Loudoun County School that played an "Underground Railroad" game in which "an African-American child in the class was designated as a slave for the activity."
Neither the contract for the plan nor the plan itself mentions Critical Race Theory. It does talk about strategies to "ensure student growth and success for every child." This includes the "[r]ecruitment and retention of a high performing, diverse workforce." The West Nova News story describes this as "hiring fewer white teachers."
A few weeks later, in October 2020, an article written by Prior that cited all of the same underlying documents, accompanied by even harsher political rhetoric, was published on The Federalist, a far-right website.
Here’s the deal. All these “local” media sites don’t get squat for traffic. That’s okay with their owners, because they’re not selling ads or monetizing clicks. What they do is to provide a seed bed for misinformation and propaganda that gets passed up through social media networks and works its way into mainstream media.
And then we have elected dolts, like this guy from Louisiana who can spin CRT into just about anything he says:
https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1457460601131700224?s=20
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Lead image via Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture