by Alex Newman
Critical Race Theory, all the rage in America’s government schools, is just rehashed Marxist Critical Theory attempting to divide the country along racial lines.
During China’s so-called Cultural Revolution, the mass-murdering monster Chairman Mao and his minions divided the children and the population as a whole into two broad categories: the black classes and the red classes.
The black classes — those who came from families that owned land or businesses prior to the revolution, for instance — were the “oppressors.” Individuals from those classes were ordered to stand in front of their peers and do “self-criticism.” They also had to repent of their supposed “privilege,” though all of the repenting in the world could not get rid of the stain of having been born into a “black” family. In many cases confused children were ordered to denounce their own parents.
The red classes, by contrast, which included landless peasant families and revolutionary Communist Party soldiers, among others, were members of the “oppressed” class that was set to “liberate” China. All of the oppressed’s problems, claimed the propaganda and functionaries of the regime and its indoctrination centers, were the result of systematic exploitation and oppression coming from the evil black classes. To fix it, all of the “olds” — the habits, customs, culture, and ideas of China’s ancient civilization supposedly developed by the black classes to oppress everyone else and maintain power — needed to be dismantled and eradicated.
Before long, blood was literally running in the streets, as crazed and brainwashed “Red” youth in thrall to Chairman Mao’s lies terrorized and massacred their own countrymen. Children even turned their own parents over to the Communist savages to be tortured or executed. Libraries were burned, statues were torn down, professors and intellectuals who stood in the way were cut down, and frenzied children behaved more like rabid hyenas than human beings.
Lily Tang-Williams, who was just a young girl at the time, remembers it all like it was yesterday — and she remembers getting caught up in the mass hysteria, too. She was there. She lived it. She remembers the seething hatred and division that was inculcated in the population and especially impressionable young children. She remembers the violence that resulted. And she sees troubling parallels with the ideology and worldview that has taken over America like a fast-moving cancer.
They’ve seen this before: Lily Tang-Williams (left) grew up during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Communist China, and she remembers how children were brainwashed and divided into “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes. After fleeing communist madness in North Korea, Yeonmi Park (right) came to America in search of freedom, but what she found in the “education” system was more outrageous than in her native land. (Photo credit: Left, John C. Williams, right, P Tore Sætre/Wikimedia)
“What is going on today in America with Critical Race Theory and identity politics really reminds me of what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution,” said Tang-Williams, who is now a proud American trying to sound the alarm about the mass insanity involving CRT and race that is gripping her adopted homeland before it is too late.
“I have witnessed how horrible social and political chaos can be when you tell the police to stand down and you … categorize people into classes, into two groups, oppressors versus oppressed, like the Marxists did,” she recalled, noting that there were five subcategories within the red and black classes that the communists used to foment more and more hate between people. “Mao divided the whole Chinese population into identity politics, fighting tooth and nail with each other, and 20 million people died.”
“I feel like this is a lesson I need to share with my fellow American citizens,” explained Williams, who serves on the advisory board of U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) and has been raising awareness about the dangers of CRT by doing everything from testifying in legislatures to publishing columns in major newspapers. “This is my new country, and I came here to achieve the American dream, not to relive another Cultural Revolution.”
It’s not just Chinese refugees to America who recall with horror the use of Critical Race Theory-style tactics to divide and enslave their nation. North Korean defectors and even those who fled from communist slave states in Europe remember it well, too — and they are expressing shock at seeing the very same techniques being deployed in America, from schools and businesses to government agencies and even in churches.
At a school-board meeting in Bedford Central, New York, in June, a mother who was born and raised in the Soviet Union spoke out against CRT and “equity” schemes. “The proposed ‘anti-racist program’ is just a prettier name for racial Marxist teaching. You don’t need to sugarcoat it for me. I lived it. Same methods, same vocabulary, same preferential treatment to certain groups,” explained the outraged mom. “That’s why equity is packed with good causes like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion,’ so nobody can challenge it. But, I know.”
Blasting the “equity for all” program and other racialized Marxist teachings, she said it is “actually a tyrannical Soviet ideology” that has resulted in mass starvation and millions of executions around the world. “Ask me how I know? I was born in Soviet Union and my family has seen it all. Suffering first from Nazi and then from tyrannical Soviet ideology. Back there, what started with ‘equity for all,’ quickly ended with nothing to eat for my people,” she declared. “And now my family is here because of it — because ‘equity’ does not work.”
“They told us they were advocates for equity and enemies of privilege, people believed this, and we paid the awful price. This ideology killed millions of people worldwide. And now you’re bringing it here to indoctrinate our own children,” continued the mother. “Equity was just a tool used by communists to make sure everyone was equally poorly educated so people didn’t question authority. While in definition it was about fairness, in reality, it means same outcome — nobody excels, mind-boggling sameness. The key tactic is to remove all the incentives and motivation to succeed for all the students.”
Now, despite having fled that horror, she sees it rearing its ugly head in her new homeland. “We did not come here for a blanketed synthetic equity. We had enough of that one,” the mom concluded in her stinging three-minute scorching of the indoctrination taking place in government schools. “We came here for equal opportunity under the law and freedoms in this country. Soviets extinguished all the excellence and opportunity.”
According to a North Korean defector, the anti-American propaganda in America’s “education” system is even more extreme than the North Korean regime’s indoctrination. When Yeonmi Park fled to the United States from North Korea, she was under the impression that America was a land of free speech and freedom of thought. After attending Columbia University, however, her views changed. “Even North Korea isn’t this nuts,” she told Fox News.
The Critical Race Theory was laid on thick at Columbia. “Every problem, they explained [to] us, is because of white men,” Park continued. Many of the hyper-racialized indoctrination sessions on “white privilege” and similar CRT-inspired nonsense reminded her of the “caste system” in North Korea where individuals were placed in categories based on their ancestry and family history.
“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park explained, saying she could not believe how much she was being asked to censor herself. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”
Divide and Conquer
The reason so many victims of communism from around the world see the parallels between CRT and what they experienced under communist oppression is simple. Critical Race Theory, a derivative of Critical Theory, is literally a Marxist tool created by Marxists to be used for dividing and conquering nations to further Marxist objectives.
Leaving aside the fact that the Bible never speaks of “race” as an issue — in fact the Bible says all men come from “one blood” and are descended from Adam and Eve — the New Testament in the Bible sheds light on the dangers of CRT and its utility for subversives. Three of the four Gospels quote Jesus warning that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. In fact, in Matthew, Jesus is quoted warning that divided kingdoms will be “laid waste” or “brought to desolation,” depending on the translation used. And that is the point: Marxists have known all along that the way to destroy a nation is to divide it — especially one as powerful as the United States.
Marx, of course, viewed the key fault line to base conflict around as being bourgeoisie (capitalist class) versus proletariat (working class). In Russia, revolutionaries backed by American mega-banks, as documented by Stanford historian Antony Sutton in his essential book Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution,succeeded with that class-struggle formula. After all, Czarist Russia was already a deeply divided society with a relatively oppressive, quasi-feudalistic ruling class lording over the peasantry. Backed by Wall Street money, Marx’s formula proved successful.
In America and Western Europe, however, the class conflict argument was far less appealing. Indeed, trying to persuade “working-class” Americans that they were being “oppressed” by their employers proved largely futile. The “American Dream” was real: People from anywhere could come to America with nothing and, if they worked hard and served their fellow man, they could become rich and successful beyond anything that the world had ever seen. Thus, the Marxists needed a new tactic to divide America.
Enter the exploitation and even weaponization of “race.” Communist operatives recognized early on the potential of exploiting racial division in America. In fact, documents from both the KGB and the FBI reveal a Soviet plan to create what they described as a “Negro Soviet Republic” in the American South that could serve as a beachhead for Communist slavery on the American continent.
Black American revolutionaries were brought into leading positions in the Communist Party USA to help advance this agenda. Among them was Manning Johnson, a black radical who rose so far through the ranks in the Communist Party that he was invited to Moscow. But eventually, he realized what was going on and blew the whistle in his historic book Color, Communism, and Common Sense. Not only did communists not care about black Americans, he explained, but the Reds were actually vicious racists exploiting black Americans to enslave mankind.
“The placing of the repository of everything, right and just, among the darker races is a dastardly Communist trick to use race as a means of grabbing and enslaving the whole of humanity,” explained Johnson, who defected from the party after realizing he was being used. “Moscow’s Negro tools in the incitement of racial warfare place all the ills of the Negro at the door of the white leaders of America…. Moreover, while they talk about ‘racial strife’ in America as providing grist for Moscow’s propaganda mill they are busy creating it.”
Like old friends: Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi (right), whose parents came to America from Nigeria (presumably not for the alleged “systemic racism”), stands next to murderous Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. (Photo credit: Twitter)
Today, the situation is the same: Behind the race-mongering and CRT are Marxist operatives. Consider, for example, Black Lives Matter. All three of the co-founders are proud Marxists. Speaking on The Real News Network, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors admitted that she and fellow BLM co-founder Alicia Garza were “trained Marxists.” The third co-founder, Opal Tometi, posted to Twitter a photograph of herself in Venezuela with mass-murdering Marxist dictator Nicolás Maduro. “Currently in Venezuela,” she tweeted along with the picture. “Such a relief to be in a place where there is intelligent political discourse.”
And just like the black Marxists pushing racial hatred in Johnson’s day, behind the three BLM co-founders are wealthy white financiers such as George Soros, the Rockefeller dynasty, and many of America’s Fortune 500 corporations.
CRT fundamentally rejects the official rallying cry of Martin Luther King, Jr., and (more broadly) the Civil Rights movement — the idea that people should be judged on the “content of their character” rather than the color of their skin. Instead, Critical Race theorists argue that people should be judged by the color of their skin. But as always with Marxist campaigns, the issue is never really the issue — the issue is always the revolution, as the 1960s Students for a Democratic Society used to say.
Marxist Race-mongering
Almost a century ago, a cabal of Marxists led by law professor Carl Grünberg organized around the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. More commonly known as the “Frankfurt School,” this subversive operation was actually hatched in a Moscow meeting at the Marx-Engels Institute convened by the Communist Internationale and mass-murdering Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin’s key operative Karl Radek. Other key players included Soviet secret police boss Felix Dzerzhinsky, Hungarian Bolshevik “cultural commissar” Gyorgy Lukacs, and Communist Internationale (Comintern) bigwig Willi Münzenberg.
Around the same time that Italian communist Antonio Gramsci dreamt up what came to be known as cultural Marxism, the forces behind the Frankfurt school also realized that Marxist “revolution” would not be possible in the West — at least not until the nuclear family, Christian culture, religion, and other key institutions were undermined. And so they set about destroying the pillars that sustained civilization so that a new Marxist society could emerge from the ruins of the old world. After helping lay the foundation for National Socialism’s rise in Germany by promoting Nietzsche and others, the Frankfurt School ended up having to flee from the Nazis. They ultimately landed at Columbia University in New York.
There were many tools used to break down the old order — radically sexualizing the youth, demonizing religion, weaponizing education, and more. But among the key weapons formed by the Frankfurt School to deploy against Western civilization was Critical Theory. In his 1937 work Traditional and Critical Theory, ISR Director Max Horkheimer explained that the goal of Critical Theory was to bring about radical social change by exposing the alleged oppression of people by capitalism and traditional culture.
Analyzing everything through the lens of “oppression,” Critical Theory was used to criticize every institution and idea that was contrary to the Marxist agenda until it became discredited in the mind of the people. The theory was promoted primarily through academia at first, but from there worked its way into K-12 schools and eventually into every American institution. From Critical Theory grew Critical Legal Studies, which worked to demonize the American legal system, grounded in the Constitution and the laws of Nature and Nature’s God, as a tool of oppression.
By the 1990s, CRT had been born. In 2001, Critical Race theorists and pioneers in the field Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic published Critical Race Theory: An Introduction outlining the key beliefs of the CRT movement. Among other ideas, they claimed racism was the norm in America and that any advances made by non-whites were only allowed because such advances supposedly served the interests of “whites.”
But again, behind the façade, Marxism was never far away. Another modern pioneer of Critical Race Theory, for example, was fringe left-wing UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris. Among other Marxist ideas, she proposed confiscation of private property, including land. The primary difference from traditional Marxism was that, rather than redistributing the property to the oppressed proletariat, it would be doled out by the nation’s new racial overlords based on race. In practice, though, it would almost certainly end up with property in the hands of a centralized state, just as Marxist redistribution schemes always do.
More recently, CRT kingpin Ibram X. Kendi, who leads Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, has proposed a full-blown racial dictatorship. This would include the creation of a “U.S. Department of Antiracism” with the power to overturn any law or policy at any level of government if the department, which would be beyond the reach of voters, determined that it did not contribute vigorously enough to “antiracism.” Even the speech of politicians would be subject to controls from the new department.
Basically, the goal is to destroy Christian civilization and replace it with Marxism. “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist,” explained Kendi, who has also publicly argued that orthodox Christianity, particularly the Christian doctrine of salvation, generally “breeds bigotry.”
Today, Critical Race Theory has become ubiquitous in America. From corporate boardrooms and church pulpits to government agencies, entertainment, and even schools, there is no “safe space” to hide from the escalating madness. “Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy,” warned Christopher Rufo, founder and director of the public policy research center known as Battlefront and a leading figure exposing CRT.
“Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, over the past decade it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions,” Rufo continued in a talk for Hills-dale College that was adapted into an essay for the school’s Imprimis publication. “When I say that critical race theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions, it is not an exaggeration — from the universities to bureaucracies to k-12 school systems, critical race theory has permeated the collective intelligence and decision-making process of American government, with no sign of slowing down.”
CRT now dominates federal agencies and bureaucracies. This very much includes the U.S. military, where soldiers are being taught that America is plagued with white supremacy and that all whites contribute to this, fomenting division and distrust between soldiers and sailors based on “racial identity,” not to mention encouraging a hostile view of their nation and its institutions. The national-security implications of this madness cannot be overstated. Meanwhile, the toxic ideology has overrun federal law-enforcement agencies, the “intelligence” apparatus, the bureaucracy, and much more. Rufo gives a brief overview of CRT indoctrination within the federal government:
The FBI was holding workshops on intersectionality theory. The Department of Homeland Security was telling white employees they were committing “microinequities” and had been “socialized into oppressor roles.” The Treasury Department held a training session telling staff members that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” and that they must convert “everyone in the federal government” to the ideology of “antiracism.” And the Sandia National Laboratories, which designs America’s nuclear arsenal, sent white male executives to a three-day reeducation camp, where they were told that “white male culture” was analogous to the “KKK,” “white supremacists,” and “mass killings.” The executives were then forced to renounce their “white male privilege” and write letters of apology to fictitious women and people of color.
Of course, Trump famously banned CRT training within the federal workforce by executive order. But the fact that it was going on even during the Trump presidency highlights the fact that this insidious weapon — much like termites eating away at the structures that support a building — was already very advanced in destroying the nation before most of the public caught wind of it. In any case, Biden overturned Trump’s executive order on his first day in office so that the dangerous CRT brainwashing of America’s millions of federal employees could continue.
“This is a revolutionary change,” continued Rufo, adding that the entire machinery of the federal government and even state and local power is increasingly being “turned against the American people.” “This ideology will not stop until it has devoured all of our institutions.”
And indeed, CRT now dominates major corporations, megabanks, and more. Coca-Cola even famously told its employees they should try to be “less white.” Mega-corporations across the nation are forcing their workers into training sessions where CRT dogma is pounded into them. Those who dare to publicly disagree can be drummed out of their jobs, denied promotions, and more. An entire cottage industry of grossly overpaid “consultants” and “experts,” along with “chief diversity officers” and “equity and inclusion directors,” is now a staple at nearly every major business and institution.
Training the next generation: America’s children in all 50 states — even those that banned CRT — are being indoctrinated with CRT and lies to hate their churches, families, and nation. (Photo credit: AP Images)
Even more alarming, perhaps, is the infiltration of CRT into the churches. Despite the Bible specifically pointing out that God created all people of “one blood” and never dividing human beings by “race,” churches, including even many conservative evangelical churches, have fallen victim to the poisonous Marxist narrative. In fact, the CRT banner has been picked up even by the Southern Baptist Convention, which infamously adopted a resolution claiming it was a useful “analytical” tool. While the SBC walked that back somewhat in 2021 following outrage, CRT and its proponents continue to wreak havoc among Southern Baptists and Christian denominations across the board. For a much more detailed treatment of this subject by prominent Pastor Voddie Baucham, who argues that CRT is actually an anti-biblical “cult” animated by “demonic” ideas, see his book Fault Lines, reviewed on page 18.
CRT in the Classroom
Nowhere is the CRT extremism more out of control than in government schools, however. As detailed in The New American’s June 21 Special Report on education headlined “Save Our Children,” CRT is now the lens through which everything from math and science to English and civics is taught. Racial propaganda and Black Lives Matter dogma are taught literally from pre-K to university in every state in the union.
To get a sense of what this looks like, consider an exercise forced on third-grade children, typically aged eight or nine, in one of the wealthiest school districts in the nation, Silicon Valley’s Cupertino Union School District. The confused children were ordered to “deconstruct” their racial, gender, religious, family structure, and sexual identities. After that, they were told to create an “identity map” and rank themselves based on the “power and privilege” received from the “intersection” of their various “identities.” “A white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman,” offered the school materials in an example of how to understand the results.
Despite growing outrage from parents of all skin tones across America, the three-million-member National Education Association recently approved a resolution at its convention vowing to teach CRT everywhere. Amid half-hearted denials from dishonest union bosses that CRT is being forced on children, the far-left NEA even vowed to create a team to help teachers “fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric.” Even in the states that have banned it, CRT brainwashing of children continues. Indeed, Biden’s Department of Education is bribing state and local governments to peddle the poison to children in government schools using “stimulus” money.
Of course, promoting a false narrative such as CRT depends on the creation of fake history to support the narrative. Enter the 1619 Project, written by a virulent racist for the far-left New York Times and taught nationwide in government schools. This fraudulent narrative holds, among other claims, that “anti-black racism,” slavery, systemic oppression, and other evils are embedded “in the very DNA” of America. Of course, if America’s very DNA is evil, there can be no change in policy and no possible transformation that would make the nation redeemable. In other words, the only solution is to kill America and replace it with something new. That is the point.
The 1619 Project was so dishonest that even the Times’ own fact checker argued against publishing it, and countless left-wing historians have debunked it. Indeed, the screed even omits the historical fact that the first legal slave owner in America was an African named Anthony Johnson, who arrived in America as an indentured servant like most Africans and many Europeans at that time. After serving his time, Johnson purchased rights to many indentured servants, including Europeans.
The CRT-peddling history books have completely rewritten American history. Christian America, organized under the self-evident truth that God created all equally with unalienable rights, went from being the very first society in human history to abolish slavery (numerous states abolished it before Britain) to being portrayed as a uniquely evil nation that practically invented slavery. Instead of being proud of their incredible heritage, young Americans are taught to be ashamed. Even the struggle for independence is falsely portrayed as an effort to preserve slavery.
Of course, to peddle that false narrative, lies and omissions abound. Virtually all the so-called history books today have removed any reference to the first martyr for the cause of America’s independence, a patriot of African heritage named Crispus Attucks, who was the first casualty of the Boston Massacre in 1770, and thus, the first American killed in the revolution. How could Americans of African descent be convinced that they needed their own “Independence Day,” so-called Juneteenth, if they knew the truth? Many other great American patriots of African heritage have similarly been deleted from history because, if people knew their stories, the CRT narrative would implode.
What Next?
The goal of CRT promoters is to dismantle America. Ultimately, the goal is the complete overthrow of the free market, freedom of speech, Christianity and Christian culture, federalism, Western civilization, separation of powers, the U.S. Constitution, God-given rights, equality under the law, and even America itself. This can be seen clearly in the effort to demonize each of these as the product of — or even perpetuator of — “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.” If the evil forces behind CRT succeed, America will go the way of many nations before it — China, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Angola, Mozambique, North Korea, and so many others.
Because CRT and its offshoots and proponents increasingly have a bad smell associated with them — and because in some jurisdictions CRT has been banned in government institutions — new terms and phrases are constantly being dreamed up. After all, CRT itself is just re-branded Marxist propaganda. Today, this poison hides behind seemingly innocuous and non-threatening terminology such as “equity,” “social justice,” “inclusion” and “inclusivity,” “diversity,” and so on. No matter what disguise the monster takes, it must be opposed and exposed.
Defeating CRT will require a multi-faceted response. And it will not be easy. Tens of millions of Americans — including millions of teachers shaping the minds of America’s youth — now see the world from a Marxist-CRT worldview. That means simply passing a state law or school board resolution purporting to “ban” CRT will be totally ineffective. A much more comprehensive approach will be required.
At the political level, Congress, governors, legislatures, and even local governments must root it out from government. Not one cent of taxpayer money should flow to any institution or individual promoting this evil, anti-American ideology. Lawsuits against this poison are already making their way through the courts and may offer a useful avenue when it comes to reining in public institutions. In the business world, consumers should avoid doing business with any company that promotes CRT or any of its derivatives. Churches that embrace CRT should be corrected or, if that proves impossible, abandoned. And parents must get their children out of government schools before another generation of children is raised to believe these deadly lies.
More importantly, though, will be developing and propagating a truthful narrative about America, Christianity, and Western civilization that exposes the evil fraud of Marxism and CRT. Of course, America has had its flaws, and still does, because it is made up of sinful human beings. However, it is also unique and amazing: Americans, first at the state and then at the federal level, were among the first people in human history to reject slavery, an institution that has been ubiquitous throughout human history and was not even criminalized in parts of Africa until the 21st century. America created a model for the rest of mankind to follow. It established liberty and protected the God-given rights of more people, and created more material prosperity and human well-being, than any other nation in history. America is amazing, and it is worth not only preserving, but celebrating. The dishonest Marxists and their useful idiots must never be allowed to obscure that.
NA: https://thenewamerican.com/magazine/tna3715/
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at anewman@thenewamerican.com. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook
