This is Part 1 of a new 3-part series on the rapidly deteriorating situation in American schools with regard to the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as part of Ethnic Studies programs. The dangerous effects of CRT ideology already are apparent across U.S. institutions and must be countered immediately and resolutely if we are not to lose this Shining City on a Hill forever to a dark Marxist future.
A series of four articles here, here, here, and here, published at this site last year began to lay out the situation with a focus on the Santa Barbara Unified School District in California. This new series will update that focus, as the State of California continues to wrestle with the final form of an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. With the Biden Education Department signaling its intent to push Critical Race Theory on America’s schools, however, the issue is nationwide. In mid-April 2021, the Education Department released the text of a proposed new rule establishing priorities for the awarding of grants in American History and Civics Education programs to U.S. public schools.
Parents across the country are becoming increasingly alarmed at the pace with which the Biden administration and Department of Education are pursuing the framing of education across the board – in K-12 classes in everything from civics to basic reading, writing and math – in terms of racism. Many parents, stuck at home for the last year along with their children, are just beginning to realize what their kids are being indoctrinated with. It is identity-based Marxism in its purest form but adapted for the U.S. system to centralize race rather than economic class as the Alinskyite wedge issue maliciously designed to provoke division, hatred, and eventually, revolution.
This article will focus on the origins and ideological content of these ethnic studies curricula. Part 2 will provide an in-depth update on the status of the California state legislative mandates for its Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum as an example of what’s headed for classrooms elsewhere across the country. Part 3 will discuss how families, parents, and citizens are organizing to fight back against this revolutionary Marxist indoctrination in America’s classrooms.
Critical Race Theory and the CCP
Critical Race Theory is not new, although for many just becoming aware of its divisive and hateful racist influence, it may seem so. CRT in fact was formulated decades ago by Marxist intellectuals who realized that a Bolshevik-style communist revolution based on class – proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie – would not take in the American free market capitalist system that offered opportunity to anyone willing to apply talent and hard work to achieve it. The pivot to race-based revolution began in the 1960s. As this author described in her October 8, 2020 essay at The Epoch Times, “Race, Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Party”, Black Panther and other black revolutionary leaders were readily co-opted by Mao Zedong, who was then dragging China through the murderous upheaval of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Black Panther Party leaders like Elaine Brown and Huey P. Newton and other militant revolutionaries such as Robert Williams visited Beijing repeatedly and developed close ideological and personal relationships with the CCP leadership, who helped stoke their anger and encourage their determination to “burn it all down” to achieve a communist revolution in America. The civil rights movement, however, and leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., along with President Lydon Johnson’s Great Society programs, succeeded for a time in inspiring Americans to overcome the calls for revolution in the streets. But the Marxists weren’t about to give up that easily.
American Academia in the Communist Crosshairs
A return to the fundamentals of Antonio Gramsci’s “Long March Through the Institutions” followed. Key among those institutions was academia – and Critical Race Theory was the ideological vehicle. Former FBI agent W. Cleon Skousen had summarized the top institutional targets of the communists he’d heard testify as witnesses before Congressional Committees in the early 1950’s in Chapter 13 of his 1958 book, “The Naked Communist: Exposing Communism and Restoring Freedom ”. Entitled “The 45 Goals of Communism Today”, that chapter is well worth a review today, but with a special look at #17. Goal #17 states, “Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of the teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks”. Indoctrinating America’s youth was essential to corruption of the entire society. CRT was designed to do just that.
The development and popularization of language, memes, and narratives is central to political warfare. Terms like “diversity”, “equity”, “social justice”, and “systemic racism” began to appear in American society, first among leftist fringe elements in the universities, but then with increasing frequency across popular culture and social media. The meaning of these terms, however, was not as ordinary Americans might expect. Rather, these words were code language, used to mask the actual revolutionary Marxist objectives of the insurgency. Those objectives remain exactly as first laid out in “The Communist Manifesto” of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848: “abolition of private property”, “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax”, “centralization of credit in the hands of the state”, “centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State”, and “free education for all children in public schools”. The means by which the destruction of our Constitutional Republic and free market capitalist system are to be achieved bear quoting as well:
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Obviously understanding that openly revealing their aims in the shocking language of Marxist texts too few Americans will ever read would give away the game, today’s communist revolutionaries instead insinuated their precepts first into upper-level academia (co-opted since the 1930s by Frankfurt School operatives), and then gradually throughout the lower levels of K-12 education. For those familiar with the “45 Goals of Communism Today”, the way this was done will be familiar. Teachers’ unions fell easily into their clutches; popular culture coarsened; religious faith was mocked; foundational principles of the Republic were demeaned and ridiculed; Founding Fathers were attacked as nothing more than slave-owning racists.
All of this was inserted into U.S. curricula long before the “1619 Project” ever found its way into the pages of the New York Times in 2019. From the schools, generations of graduates moved like a metastasizing cancer into academia, industry, the media, and popular culture. Once a certain level of critical mass was achieved, particularly in the schools and media, the demonization of anyone who disagreed with the Marxist narrative ensued. “Diversity” no longer meant diversity of opinion and thought, but increasingly only skin color or other markers of identity politics. Dissent is ruthlessly stamped out despite the reality that the majority of Americans are not at all on board with the CRT agenda. Cowed by threats of exclusion, marginalization, and job loss, many retreat into silence.
Critical Race Theory Inside U.S. Institutions
But soon enough, even that was not enough. Drunk with the political power they were amassing across American institutions, the Marxist CRT bullies next forced their revolutionary ideology into compulsory training programs in government at every level as well as businesses everywhere. Americans who grew up in a tolerant, multicultural environment suddenly found themselves accused of complicity in “oppression”, “institutional racism”, and “white supremacy”. American society is being torn apart, deliberately, methodically, in textbook “Rules for Radicals” fashion. The May 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN was merely spark to the tinder that had long been piled high. Street riots, led by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Antifa and Black Lives Matter revolutionaries, mark our passage from decades of communist influence operations within our institutions to the dangerous next phase of violent societal collapse.
The objective remains chaos, the complete breakdown of law and order, out of which the Marxists expect the opportunity to seize power completely. We’re not there yet and don’t need to get there. But American citizen patriots need to mobilize, speak up, and act to defend our Constitutional system before it’s too late.
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll take a closer look at how CRT seeks to manipulate the emotions and shape the minds of students in California and across the nation.
This article was originally published at FrontPage Magazine.
The views expressed in CCNS member articles are not necessarily the views or positions of the entire CCNS. They are the views of the authors, who are members of the CCNS.
