“George Washington was an evil man! He’s not a hero. You need to take that picture down,” my 13-year-old daughter admonished my brother while standing in his home. “He slaughtered Native Americans and owned slaves. My social studies teacher taught me all about him.”   

“And you are sending your kids to that school?” my brother asked. I shook my head and vowed to investigate while gazing at his copy of “The Prayer at Valley Forge” by Arnold Friberg. It has always been one of my favorite works of art, and in our family, the portrait is symbolic of the power of prayer and what it means to be an American. 

 I would not condemn my daughter’s instructor until I knew the whole story. However, I could not get over her dismissal of Washington’s role as a Revolutionary War hero and his place in history as the first president of the United States. 

In our family, this was the opening of the Critical Race Theory can of worms in the Olentangy Local School District, a system that began as a one-room schoolhouse in the early 1900s and grew to be Ohio’s sixth-largest public school system. 

As it turns out, my daughter’s teacher, a self-proclaimed lover of “hard history,” is a disciple of anti-racist teaching. Parents in our community have testified that they do not object to lesson plans presenting multiple perspectives of history and they support diversity training; they disagree when instructors present revisionist history as fact and disavow the United States Constitution. Unfortunately, this seems to be lost on educators like my daughter’s teacher, who tweets praise for activists such as Hasan Kwami Jeffries, an Ohio State University professor who was contracted by OLSD to provide professional development. 

On one of Jeffries’ instructional slides, he states that 1619 is our country’s origin, and that “Racism is encoded in our DNA.” After uncovering this, parents began protesting Jeffries’ teachings and the fact that teachers had been given the green light to implement anti-racist, CRT ideas into their lessons. Unabashed, Jeffries taunted them on Twitter. His assault continues, as he attacked Republicans and Tweeted multiple CRT endorsements last month.  On July 4th he echoed the assault on George Washington's place in American history.   

Even after sharing Jeffries’ social media posts, school board members and administrators insisted that the district was not teaching CRT. When parents brought evidence forward, the “CRT is not in our curriculum” message continued, and the school board president charged parents with “conflating national media reports” with what was going on in their kids’ classrooms. 

Trained in equity and inclusion, teachers all over the country are operating as Marxist social justice activists. Parents are fighting to take back their schools. On defense, newspapers, along with local and national television news broadcasts, rage against reason with slanted stories arguing that conservative parents refuse to acknowledge history over heritage and that Critical Race Theory is not being taught in schools and the Republican party is racist and soulless. 

This hit home for Olentangy parents reading the July 17th lead story of the Columbus Dispatch, a paper that serves a metropolitan area of two million people and is owned by Gannet, America’s largest newspaper publisher. The top-of-the-fold, front-page article “Future of Critical Race Theory Debate” includes coverage of the most recent Olentangy Local School District board meeting. 

Months prior to that meeting, parent groups voiced concern that school officials were placing a stronger emphasis on equity and inclusion and emotional and social learning than on academics. However, the Dispatch story leads readers to believe that only three parents and a student were at the board meeting to speak in opposition to teachers’ use of CRT in classrooms. The story’s lie of omission is that school board policy limits community participation to thirty minutes at meetings, with each speaker having a maximum speaking time of five minutes. 

During the meeting, two parents gave their speaking time to former Ohio State football player Dimitrious Stanley who delivered his objections to Critical Race Theory and shared how anti-racist teachings negatively impact his interracial family. The reporter writing the story failed to acknowledge that parents filled an entire side of a high school auditorium and that numerous families had been in contact with administrators in objection to assignments and projects promoting the 1619 Project as the beginning of America, presenting Marxism as a superior form of government, and examining how Caucasian students have used white privilege to harm minorities. 

The Dispatch story reports that a local petition against teaching CRT had fewer than 200 signatures but fails to mention the community’s Change.org petition which has been signed by more than 1,200 objectors. By neglecting to provide background information and extended facts about the board meeting, the Dispatch, like so many other media outlets, marginalized parents’ concerns and portrayed them as outliers. 

Should anyone really care about these school official denials and the media’s attempted manipulation? The answer lies in the Illusory Truth Effect, the phenomenon in which the repetition of ideas makes them easier to process. Ultimately, the fluency in which people receive information creates a perfect method of disseminating fiction-over-fact because the more often people hear ideas, the more likely that some might start to believe them. Americans cannot escape corporate media headlines stating that America is systemically racist and that CRT is only taught at colleges.

While truth-seeking citizens will see through these swirling sound bites, some viewers will fall victim to false claims and choose to criticize, ostracize, and demonize anyone who goes against the media machine, including neighbors, friends, and family. Don’t want the “hard truth” taught exclusively? You’re racist! Voted for Trump? You’re a white supremacist! The endgame of this media manipulation is a fractured nation, a fallen Republic that is devoured and destroyed by revisionist history-driven socialists. 

In a correspondence sent to Thomas Lomax on March 12, 1799, Thomas Jefferson shared sentiments that transcend time:

The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, & made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But time & truth have dissipated the delusion, & opened their eyes. 

Indeed, though mainstream media outlets dishonestly dismiss dissident parents and categorize free-thinking objectors as ignorant, ill-intentioned fascists who are trying to protect their way of life at others’ expense, parents will not be thwarted. Public teachers will no longer go unchecked as they strive to suppress cognitive dissonance and dupe their students into believing that the Western ideals of capitalism, individualism, and equality should no longer serve as America’s foundation. Media moguls and teachers-turned-ideologues have underestimated how many people are willing to break the chains and engage in a modern revolution to protect our Republic. Americans know that the truth will set them free, and they will refuse to drown in the river of miseducation, manipulation, and misinformation. 

Image: Max Pixel

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