HOUSE REPUBLICANS FOLLOWING RON DESANTIS’ LEAD ON CRT:
House Republicans are following Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ lead in trying to keep Critical Race Theory from spreading.
As the Daily Caller reported, North Carolina GOP Rep. Dan Bishop introduced a resolution on Friday that labels CRT a Marxist ideology that poses a threat to the country.
Bishop’s resolution notes that CRT class “into question the founding and moral legitimacy of the United States, both here and throughout the world.” In doing that, CRT asserts that whites created “whiteness” as a “special kind of property” that exists “in order to grant themselves power and privilege while excluding other racial groups from ‘whiteness’ and its putative benefit.”
Moreover, according to Bishop’s measure, CRT claims America is built on a “racial hierarchy” that foments “racial-class antagonism” by arguing that our nation is driven by ‘‘structural racism’’ and ‘‘systemic racism.” It even filters down to the youngest Americans by teaching “children that they are either oppressors or oppressed based solely on the color of their skin.”
In this sense, Bishop argues, CRT’s structural dialectic” makes it “analogous to Karl Marx’s doctrines of structural classism, material determinism, and dialectical materialism.”
CRT also aligns with Marxist criticism of capitalism in that it teaches that racism is not just part of the founding narrative or embedded in America’s structure, it is also the ‘‘ordinary state of affairs,’’ which then frames the United States “as an intrinsically unjust, oppressive, and racist nation.”
“In its own words,” Bishop’s resolution notes, CRT denounces “equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law,’’ as well as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the “American founding ideals of inalienable rights secured by a government, and the social fabric of the American Republic.”
And much like Marx wanted to “abolish bourgeois private property” to end capitalism, the resolution says, CRT maintains “that the only solution to this state of affairs is to ‘abolish whiteness’” and thus fundamentally change America from the ground up.
Deep State aficionado Bill Kristol responded thusly:
I’m so old, I can remember when Kristol edited a conservative magazine that published its own numerous critiques of CRT.