By CatholicVote | Created at 2024-11-05 00:26:19 | Updated at 2024-11-05 10:33:29
10 hours ago
A pro-Trump video ad running in the swing states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin features a college professor appointed by Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz who has called for the “irreversibly racist” United States to be “overthrown.”
Walz appointed Brian Lozenski, a Macalester College professor and one of the nation’s top educator-activists of Critical Race Theory (CRT), to the committee tasked with creating the plan for how Minnesota’s ethnic studies curriculum will be implemented in public school classrooms.
“The first tenet of Critical Race Theory is that the United States is irreversibly racist,” Lozenski is heard saying in the video ad, produced by Restoration PAC. “It must be overthrown.”
“At Waltz’s direction, this man is leading the effort to teach Critical Race Theory to every child in Minnesota,” the voice-over explains.
Lozenski is then heard declaring, “You can’t be a Critical Race Theorist and be pro-U.S.”
“Pennsylvania parents don’t want their children taught that ‘the United States – it must be overthrown,’ but Walz was chosen by Harris to do just that – teach your children that ‘America must be overthrown,’” the voice-over concludes the ad.
In a column published September 25 at National Review, education policy analyst Stanley Kurtz uncovered the video of radical CRT activist Lozenski.
Meanwhile, Walz has been attempting to appear as a charming, moderate Midwesterner to American voters. During his debate last month with Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, for example, the Minnesota governor tried to minimize his false statements on his visits to Tiananmen Square in China by simply calling himself “a knucklehead.”
Kurtz updated his Minnesota education story last week when the video ad appeared, pointing out the high rank Lozenski enjoys among CRT radicals.
“Lozenski is no outlier,” he wrote. “He’s long been both the intellectual and activist leader of the movement to incorporate ‘ethnic studies’ into Minnesota’s K–12 curriculum.”
Kurtz explained what Lozenski hopes to accomplish in the Minnesota implementation plan:
In the version Lozenski supports — radical or “liberated” ethnic studies — the field excludes ethnicities such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews, except perhaps to excoriate them as oppressors, or berate them for assimilating into American culture. Otherwise, liberated ethnic studies is confined to the treatment of blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans and retells their oppression by — and celebrates their resistance to — America’s dominant culture.
In Minnesota, Kurtz continued, all government school districts are required to teach this radical brand of ethnic studies – not just a stand-alone course, but radical principles that “must also be infused into every Minnesota grade level and subject, ultimately even science and math.”
Walz, he noted, “has put Lozenski and his followers in charge of designing the ‘implementation framework’ that will tell teachers how to convey the state’s radical new ethnic-studies standards.” And, because of Lozenski’s high rank among CRT educator-activists, he is “first among equals.”
“He is the expert, and a number of the concepts in the new ethnic-studies state standards come straight out of Lozenski’s 2022 book, My Emancipation Don’t Fit Your Equation: Critical Enactments of Black Education in the US,” Kurtz added, observing that Lozenski produced the video that contains his remarks heard in the ad to accompany his book.
Lozenski’s entire video event, titled “Education in the Blacklight: Fugitivity, Abolition, and Accommodation,” is no longer available on YouTube.
The Center of the American Experiment – a Minnesota public policy foundation that has analyzed the ethnic studies framework – presented the proposed standards, showing that kindergartners will need to meet the following standard to learn the concept of “resistance” in the ethnic studies curriculum:
Describe how individuals and communities have fought for freedom and liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power locally and globally. Identify strategies or times that have resulted in lasting change. Organize with others to engage in activities that could further the rights and dignity of all.
The “benchmark” for a five-year-old to show he or she has met the standard is “Retell a story about an unfair experience that conveys a power imbalance (a personal experience or one from a story). Share what can be learned from this story.”
One can only wonder how a kindergartner’s “story” of his perception of an “unfair” rule his parents set down within his home will be treated as a “power imbalance” in government-run schools in Minnesota.
First-graders will need to meet the following standard:
Identity: Analyze the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, religion, geography, ethnicity, and gender. Apply these understandings to one’s own social identities and other groups living in Minnesota, centering those whose stories and histories have been marginalized, erased, or ignored.
In order to meet that standard, six-year-olds will need to achieve the following “benchmark”: “Identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power. Use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.”
Ninth-graders in Minnesota are expected to achieve the following “benchmark” in ethnic studies:
Examine the characteristics of freedom movements; develop an analysis of racial capitalism, political economy, anti-Blackness, Indigenous sovereignty, illegality and indigeneity.
As a former social studies teacher himself, Walz is backed by teachers’ unions and is sure to direct the national education agenda if he and Harris win the White House. Kurtz fears, however, that “education issues, and even Walz’s overall radicalism, have largely disappeared from the campaign.”
“Walz’s invocation of ‘neighborly socialism’ has faded, for example, in favor of jokes about his hunting misadventures, odd arm movements, and trouble with the truth,” Kurtz wrote, concluding:
Given Walz’s track record in Minnesota putting Lozenski and his radical followers in charge of education, we should expect disastrous results. A Harris-Walz administration would tie strings to federal education grants designed to force Minnesota-style education radicalism on every state.
