The Critical Analysis to reclaim CRT -- and more
The abuse of the phrase Critical Race Theory is the latest excuse for racism and White Supremacy to stay relevant in American society. Now, desperate, they are willing to simply demand we "cancel," via laws, any discussion of race that threatens the feelings of White kids.
Turns out these folx love cancelling -- when it's their feelings on the line.
We cannot fight back until we understand how we got here. And with this, as with so many of these shibboleths: the problem is dark money, and the eyeballs it can buy. Per this excellent Popular Information article:
“In March 2021, Rufo acknowledged that he is simply using CRT as a vessel to capture concepts he thinks are politically unpopular. As Sarah Jones of New York Magazine recently wrote, Rufo ‘takes critical-race theory as a concept, strips it of all meaning, and repurposes it as a catchall for white grievances.’”
He gets paid, and paid well, to do this:
“The Thomas W. Smith Foundation donated $4.32 million to the Manhattan Institute between 2017 and 2019. ”
Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
The rot in American politics is not a Conspiracy. Neither Smith, nor Rufo, for all their failings, are part of some cabal explicitly plotting the downfall of American Democracy.
It’s worse. It’s just a loose affiliation of groups, each with a piece of the puzzle, and now protected by a set of legal decisions, most notably Citizens United. They just want money, and power, and these kinds of games are the easiest ways to egt them.
They’ve been running this game for a long, long time now – at least since the founding of the John Birch Society in the 1950s.
This game is just letting people push at the boundaries of Democracy, each in their own way. Because one of the axioms of modern Conservatism is that self-interest is the only real interest, they don't see what they do as that damaging, and they don't care what others are doing. They are, at best, blind to the collective damage being caused, and even Jan. 6th isn't seen, from their view, as "that bad" -- especially after the new Talking Points got handed down.
That game is the poisonous version of letting a thousand flowers bloom. It’s that they learn psyops tactics and techniques from each other, then use them to run out ideas and plays, in public and private. These days they can add social media to their toolbelt, and a mighty weapon it is -- but they learned these tactics from folx working these scams well before the World Wide Web was even a dream.
By the time we see these concepts in the news, these folx have spent thousands on ensuring there’s a seedbed of people eager to drive the idea forward, to emulate yet another “grassroots” fight. And that fight is one that these ordinary folx are primed to believe came from within themselves and their friends, not from some barely-known Foundation.
Yes, even if Rufio literally tells everyone the game being played, they’ll still think it was their idea.
So yes, I say groups like these are a core primer for everything from the waves of Voting restrictions, to the inability to move controls on the climate forward. Time and again, a wave of money from people with far more wealth than sense funds people with the morality of a kumquat, and the desire to make money off the suffering of people they can only perceive as enemies – or worse, just don’t care so long as causing suffering cashes checks.
These are not people and groups we can slogan or even really march our way into impacting, at this time. Yet if Progressive values and votes are going to matter, we need to come to grips with their presence in our body politic, and figure out ways to mitigate their harm.
We need more people running investigations on these groups. Cracking them open. Finding out how they create these waves of anxiety and agitprop.
And we need to talk about this, publically and openly. We need our co-opted friends and family to understand the ideas filling their heads? They were bought and paid to believe that crap.
If we fail to do so – if we continue to focus on the people who spout these lies, and the “big” targets like Fox News who spread untruths birthed by another group -- they will simply continue to play this game, and keep digging a bunch of holes for Democracy to fall into, someday.