Leftists Are Attacking American Education But They Are Vulnerable

By Jason Peirce

Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) is a dangerous ideology that eats away at America’s foundations. However, the attention it’s received recently provides an enormous opportunity for those Americans who have long been sounding the alarm about this formerly insidious, but now outright pernicious, movement.

I am one of those Americans. I’m also the father of children in a school district infected by CRT. The district in question is Brevard Public Schools (BPS), in Brevard County, Florida.

Brevard is a seemingly unlikely place to find CRT. Known as Florida’s “Space Coast,” Brevard is the home of NASA and Patrick Space Force Base. It’s a primarily “red” county that heavily favored Trump in the 2020 election. Many in Brevard consider themselves patriots, dedicated to the American ideals of individual liberty and equality for all. Yet CRT was still Trojan-horsed into BPS, in the form of BPS’s new “Diversity and Equity” (DE) program, created over the summer and fall of 2020, in the name of closing racial disparities in students’ educational outcomes.

There’s much debate about CRT’s proper definition. I feel the most apt definition focuses on CRT as a movement of activists using racism to achieve power – an idea I came to from CRT proponents’ own words. More on this shortly.

One of Brevard’s state representatives, Randy Fine, held a press conference on June 25, 2021, to bring attention to CRT in BPS. At Fine’s side was the parental rights organization “Moms For Liberty” (“M4L”), as well as former BPS employee Anna Ryan. M4L reached out to Fine after collecting emails, documents, and receipts related to CRT’s existence in BPS, all obtained via public records requests. M4L presented its findings at the press conference, including leaked screenshots from CRT-fueled BPS employee training sessions. (All these documents can be found here).

Some of the findings focused on the racist rantings of Mathew Kincaid, who founded “Overcoming Racism,” the organization that BPS hired to conduct CRT-based training for staff (see here, under “Training”). A simple, mere minutes-long internet search would have revealed a multitude of Kincaid’s racist social media posts, like the following:

White America has a deep and thick appetite for black death and violence upon black people. White America dines on structural and physical violence in our schools, the deaths of black babies and mothers in our healthcare system, the imprisonment of black bodies in our carceral state, the erasure of black voices in our political systems until they are full. You would think after centuries of consuming the richness of our blood, they would have developed the ability to stomach black dissent… So unless that system is completely stripped to its core and built anew, we will be permanently marked for destruction, physically, mentally, emotionally, and structurally.

Kincaid’s training for BPS directly cited CRT, as well as prominent CRT leaders such as Ibram X. Kendi. For his part, Kendi publicly advocates racial discrimination.

Receipts show BPS paid Kincaid’s organization $13,500 for just his first training program. Fine noted the destructive absurdity of spending thousands of dollars on racist training -- and $200,000 on the DE program itself -- while BPS was facing a multi-million budget gap, and as student performances in core curriculum subjects were plummeting.

At the press conference, Fine and M4L presented emails in which BPS’s head of secondary education called a beachside high school “privileged,” and therefore, “far more racist” than other schools. Fine also played audio of the DE program director repeating the central claims of CRT, that “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias” are pervasive and all-defining.

The DE director even admitted she holds biases towards others. It would behoove her employer, BPS, and the parents of students in BPS, to know toward whom the BPS DE director is biased. Importantly, the DE director has stated that the DE program is designed to expand its “ongoing” commitment to “antiracism.” Like all “Social Justice“ parlance, “antiracism“ means the opposite: racism.

Former BPS community education coordinator Anna Ryan also delivered powerful testimony. Ryan resigned from BPS in April 2021, after being reprimanded for requesting an exemption from CRT-based employee training that she described as “programming” and “brainwashing sessions.” Ryan noted that, after pointing out to her direct supervisor the training’s linkages to CRT and Marxism, she was told BPS had to obfuscate the linkages to create sufficient “buy-in” from BPS employees. Ryan described her experience as “demoralizing.” She noted that the way BPS treated her amounted to a “violation of my civil rights and an assault on the very principles this country was founded on.”

This brings us to the goal of CRT. We shall know CRT by its fruit: division and destruction. The most immediate evidence is the very fact that you’re reading this article, prompted by the very fact that Brevard County is divided and facing destruction. CRT-fueled groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM) are not shy about their goals, one of which is to “disrupt the Western-proscribed nuclear family” – meaning, families like mine.

But we shall also know the goal of CRT by how its leading proponents identify it.

Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic, two of CRT’s most prominent architects, say it best. In their 2001 book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Delgado and Stefanic describe CRT as a “movement” of necessarily political “activists” bent on using the means of race and racism in the education system, for the ends of power, to “change” and “transform” the United States of America, recognized as the greatest manifestation of the Western “liberal order,” founded on individual liberty, equality before the law, free speech, and private property.

Take it from Delgado and Stefanic themselves. Let every word sink in, good and hard.

Many school districts are denying that CRT exists in their schools. Following Fine’s press conference, BPS did so, making the strawman argument that CRT is not in the curriculum, something Fine and M4L never asserted. Rather, Fine and M4L proved that BPS was using CRT in teacher and administration training to craft the greater culture of BPS. Delgado and Stefanic would most likely agree that defining and dictating the culture is sufficient for CRT’s ends.

On this point, Fine delivered an appropriate analogy:

Hitler didn’t create the Hitler Youth directly. He brainwashed the parents. He brainwashed the adults first, and they created the Hitler Youth. The way that you indoctrinate our children is by indoctrinating those who teach our children.

Fine is correct.

Beyond the fact that, whether you know it or not, you are under vicious, withering assault if you represent and uphold the ideal of the “Western-proscribed nuclear family,” the greatest lesson to pull from all of this is, that we can never be too vocal or radical about peacefully advocating for the “liberal order” that CRT is hell-bent on destroying. Meaning, there’s never too much passionate advocacy for America’s founding ideals, including individual liberty, equality before the law, free speech, and private property. These are the only tried-and-true mechanisms that can, at the very least, provide the greatest opportunity for all people to pursue peace, prosperity, happiness, and true community.

Moreover, all the facts are there to wage this battle. While CRT practitioners will deny direct accusations, their writings provide irrefutable proof of their destructive, Marxists goals.

It’s not too late.

If you haven’t already, start now.

(Full disclosure: I have volunteered to conduct research for M4L in the past, though I played no role in the press conference.)