Ep 521 ｜ Yes, Critical Race Theory Is in Schools ｜ Guest： Tony Kinnett
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
179.14851
Summary
In this episode of Relatable, host Alex Blumberg discusses the growing problem of Critical Race Theory being taught in public schools, and why it's a symptom of white supremacy and white fragility, and white supremacy itself.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. Hope everyone has had a wonderful week so
00:00:14.360
far. Go back and listen to yesterday's episode about vaccine mandates that I did with Ben
00:00:19.240
Shapiro. Definitely go back and listen to or watch Monday's episode with President Donald
00:00:24.540
Trump. Today we have another guest. We are going to be talking about how critical race
00:00:29.580
theory actually is showing up in schools. You have been hearing breathlessly, endlessly,
00:00:37.400
relentlessly from liberal pundits on social media, in the media, saying that critical race
00:00:44.820
theory isn't something that's taught in K-12 schools. This is a law school level, esoteric,
00:00:51.540
obscure philosophy. This has nothing to do with public school education. This is not something
00:00:57.880
that's happening. This is just a bunch of racists stoking racial anger. And this is white supremacy
00:01:06.700
and white fragility and white and racist and white. The reality is, is that critical race theory and
00:01:14.900
the tenets of critical race theory absolutely are being taught in schools. We have talked about
00:01:21.800
critical race theory a lot over the past two years. And let me just say, let me just say,
00:01:26.220
I'm not trying to pat us on the back here, but we were one of the first conservative shows to even
00:01:32.220
define critical theory, to talk about critical race theory. We were way ahead of the curve on this.
00:01:37.660
Now, I will also say that there were a lot of people talking about critical theory and critical
00:01:42.360
race theory before I was talking about it. Obviously, they've been talking about it for decades,
00:01:47.260
but there were conservatives, there were Christians who have been talking about this and warning about the
00:01:51.700
tenets of critical race theory for a very long time. And so really, in the grand scheme of things, I'm late to
00:01:57.980
the game. But we have been talking about this for years now, in one form or another. And thankfully, more and more
00:02:04.520
people are waking up to it. So the first thing I take issue with is when people say, well, these people
00:02:10.720
complaining about critical race theory, they don't know what critical race theory is, they can't define critical
00:02:14.700
race theory. As I've said many times, try me, try me. Unfortunately, I've spent a lot of time reading
00:02:21.680
critical race theorists and reading primary sources on critical race theory. I wish I did not know the
00:02:29.480
misery that is critical race theory, but I absolutely do. The reason that we're talking about this, the
00:02:35.060
reason we're going to talk about or talk to my guests is because of this Virginia election, where parents
00:02:39.720
were up in arms, not just about the tenets of critical race theory that are being taught in public
00:02:43.720
schools, but also the gender theory that's being taught in schools and the mishandling of some
00:02:50.980
terrible situations that we've talked about in Loudoun County schools. And so parents really did.
00:02:58.060
They made this election. They pushed the election in the way of Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. And that's
00:03:06.700
why we're talking about this. And for whatever reason, Democrats and a lot of people in the liberal
00:03:10.340
media, they just, they just don't believe it. They just don't believe that it's anything other than a
00:03:16.100
white supremacist boogeyman. And that parents who are mad about it just must be these crazy white
00:03:21.060
supremacists. Here's a little montage of people in the media saying just that. Critical race theory,
00:03:28.940
which isn't real. You cannot teach the truth about Thomas Jefferson. You must give encomiums to
00:03:34.960
Thomas Jefferson in school. Otherwise that's critical race theory. If you even talk about enslavement,
00:03:38.940
that's critical race theory. Anything that makes a white parent uncomfortable is critical race theory.
00:03:43.420
We don't teach critical race theory. This is a made up, this is a Trump, Betsy DeVos,
00:03:51.500
All right. Well, there's a lot more examples than that, but this has been talked about constantly in
00:03:58.200
the media, on social media, that this is just this boogeyman. That was Joy Reid. She's been saying
00:04:05.060
this a lot. That was her in the middle talking about that really white people and conservatives
00:04:12.420
just say critical race theory is this, is just talking about slavery or is just talking about
00:04:20.700
racism. And white parents are just uncomfortable with kids learning about racism and slavery,
00:04:26.240
which is not true. Way before we were talking about critical race theory, way before people were
00:04:30.440
even worried about leftist indoctrination in schools. People were learning about slavery.
00:04:36.200
People were learning about the Trail of Tears. People were learning about Jim Crow. I went to a
00:04:40.580
Christian private school in Texas growing up. I learned about all that kind of stuff. Honestly,
00:04:46.120
it seems to me like the majority of mainstream liberals actually have no idea what it is and especially
00:04:52.780
don't know how it manifests itself. Really, what it seems like most liberals think is that it just means
00:04:59.080
being critical of racism. That's what critical race theory means. I have talked to liberals who say
00:05:04.360
that they're, you know, social justice liberals and they accuse conservatives like me of not really
00:05:09.620
knowing what critical race theory is. And then when I ask them to define it and ask them what they've
00:05:14.660
read about it, what they say is that, oh, you know, it's basically just looking at how racism affects
00:05:19.560
people. They don't know. I think, honestly, a lot of people on the left just defend it because
00:05:24.120
the right is attacking it. And so it's just a knee-jerk reaction. They see it as another culture
00:05:29.720
war. It's just they think that because the right says it's bad that they have to say it's good.
00:05:36.260
But if a lot of these liberals actually knew what CRT holds, they would realize that it goes against
00:05:42.440
many of the things that they say that they believe in, like equal rights. And we'll explain that in just
00:05:46.800
a little bit. The truth is what started out as an obscure esoteric idea by a 1970s scholar has now
00:05:54.460
expanded to characterize much of the left's understanding, not just about race, but about
00:05:59.820
human nature in general, about our society, about America's institutions, our constitution,
00:06:05.280
even their understanding of truth itself. There are people in the center and on the left,
00:06:10.460
professing Christians included, who will say, I don't believe in critical race theory. Critical race
00:06:15.360
theory is not something being preached from the pulpits. It's not something being taught in schools.
00:06:19.300
They'll say, you know, yeah, I don't believe in critical race theory at all. But then they will
00:06:23.780
say things that actually are derived from critical race theory. They just don't realize it. The concept
00:06:30.200
of white privilege, for example, is a concept of critical race theory. Whether you agree with it or
00:06:34.200
not, it is. Specifically, it comes from critical whiteness studies. This idea that there is a seen and
00:06:40.940
unseen collection of ways that white people use and have access to to help each other that is mostly
00:06:47.960
inaccessible to non-white people. That's originally what white privilege means. Systemic racism is a
00:06:54.880
concept of critical race theory. Again, whether or not you think that it is real in 2021, it is a concept
00:07:00.560
derived from critical race theorists. People really get mad when I say this, but if you read critical race
00:07:06.840
theorists, you know that that's not actually controversial to say that the claim of systemic
00:07:11.620
racism is not based on hard data. It's not based on hard facts. It's based on a narrative with certain
00:07:20.000
forms of facts sprinkled in to try to support the narrative. It's really a theory. It is a particular
00:07:26.600
perspective. It is a philosophy that the system is to blame for all problems that are suffered by
00:07:35.440
non-white people. So it goes something like this. Slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, the war on drugs,
00:07:42.300
etc. All existed not that long ago, which is true. Therefore, it's obvious that these laws, this theory
00:07:49.160
says, are the reason for racial disparities and black people's problems today. And that theory, that
00:07:58.060
narrative of systemic racism sounds really believable because those were things that actually happened.
00:08:02.900
That's real. That's historical. But the assertion that those things were actually the cause or are
00:08:09.360
actually the cause of remaining disparities today is not backed up with factual causal arguments.
00:08:18.140
It is highly, highly debatable whether or not those policies still have a significant impact on
00:08:23.120
disparities and outcomes today. But rather than debating it, CRT just accepts it as true without
00:08:29.900
debate. Because CRT, critical race theory, starts. It starts with the assumption that everything is
00:08:36.060
characterized, everything in this country is characterized by anti-black racism. So when people
00:08:42.540
say, well, I don't believe in critical race theory, but I do believe in white privilege and I do believe
00:08:48.060
in systemic racism, well, you believe in critical race theory. And those are just two examples.
00:08:53.280
We'll get to more later. Let me give you a definition, a real definition of critical race
00:08:59.880
theory. Critical race theory. This is the definition. I always try to shorten it and
00:09:06.740
summarize it as much as I can. And I'm never able to because it's just, it is kind of complex. I mean,
00:09:12.720
you could just say it boils down to white oppressors and black and brown oppressed and that every single
00:09:18.240
thing in society comes down to that. That might be a simple way to just say it. But there are a lot
00:09:24.660
more aspects of it that I think are even more troubling and radical than that kind of reductive
00:09:30.860
myopic and ahistorical and illogical view of the world. So critical race theory is a theory
00:09:36.860
by a scholar developed by a scholar named Derek Bell in the 1970s. It's been around for a long time.
00:09:44.040
He and the proponents of CRT would say that it is a way to examine American history and our current
00:09:49.700
institutions through the lens of race. That's the most generous definition that you could give it.
00:09:54.500
That is how they would define it. So Bell held that racism is not an exception in society,
00:10:00.480
in American society, but it's actually its normal state. It is the usual way of doing things in
00:10:05.680
America. It is intertwined, not just with our institutions, but in how most people live our
00:10:10.740
lives in the U.S. So in other words, it is central to the human experience. And critical race theory
00:10:16.860
seeks to examine how the centrality of race and racism has affected people's lives, black people's
00:10:22.900
lives in particular, both individually and systemically. CRT is one of many critical theories.
00:10:29.000
There's queer and gender theory, feminist theory. Critical theory is a school of thought that examines
00:10:33.940
power structures and hierarchies within society and asserts that society's problems are due to these
00:10:40.380
structures and hierarchies rather than, say, people's individual choices. So the goal of the critical
00:10:47.200
theorist is to liberate so-called people from these structures and hierarchies, typically through major
00:10:54.020
societal and political changes. The assumption is that people are oppressed by systems that have been
00:11:00.280
put in place by the most powerful in society to keep them down. So critical theory examines these
00:11:06.920
systems and offers ideas for how to finally attain liberation. Critical theory was established by
00:11:14.100
the Frankfurt School in Germany, which was a school of social theory that, like Karl Marx, who wrote the
00:11:19.300
Communist Manifesto, examined social conditions and hypothesized about how the poor conditions caused
00:11:25.220
by capitalism and other systems could be changed by revolutionizing power structures and hierarchies.
00:11:31.240
So critical theory, it's not identical to Marxism. So when you hear liberals saying,
00:11:36.680
oh, they're just saying this, it's Marxist, it's not, it's not Marxist. It's not exactly Marxism,
00:11:42.900
but it is similar. So just as Marx, the father of communism, saw the world through the lens of class
00:11:49.060
oppression, rich versus poor, bourgeois versus the proletariat, greedy capitalists versus the working
00:11:53.700
class, and sought to overthrow capitalism, so everyone would live communally and equally in harmony without
00:12:00.440
any, you know, personal profit or private property. That's what he believed. So critical theories see
00:12:07.580
the world through the lens of some kind of oppressor versus oppressed. So critical race theory takes
00:12:14.600
Marx's view of the world as the rich oppressors versus the poor, poor oppressed, and asserts that
00:12:19.280
the world, or at least the U.S., is divided by the white oppressor and the black and brown oppressed.
00:12:24.920
And the simplest and most clear breakdown of CRT is a book called Critical Race Theory,
00:12:31.740
An Introduction by Richard Delgado, Gene Stefansik, two critical race scholars. And here's how they
00:12:39.660
introduced CRT. So they say, quote, critical race theory builds on the insights of two previous
00:12:44.820
movements, critical legal studies and radical feminism. So from critical legal studies, it borrows the idea
00:12:51.700
that there is no one right answer when it comes to the law and legal decisions. It depends on
00:12:56.060
interpretation. It depends on perspective. It depends on reasoning. It uses feminism stance on the
00:13:02.460
relationship between power and social roles and, quote, the unseen, largely invisible collection of
00:13:08.520
patterns and habits that make up patriarchy and other types of domination. That's important because
00:13:15.020
that lets us know how radical CRT is compared to most traditional Western thought about the rule of law,
00:13:24.420
about due process, right, and the concept of truth. So CRT, as a critical theory, and as critical theory as a
00:13:30.180
product of the Frankfurt School, dismisses the idea that truth about society can be discovered through
00:13:35.480
objective means or through the scientific method or through data. And rather, truth is a matter of a person's
00:13:42.200
standpoint within power structures. So this is why white people, and in particular white conservatives, are dismissed
00:13:51.120
on this subject, even if they bring up data or counter logic to a particular claim about black people's oppression
00:13:56.680
in the U.S. Data or any points that contradict the idea that black people are systemically oppressed because of
00:14:03.920
inherently white supremacist institutions can be ignored because they are coming from the wrong standpoint. The
00:14:09.480
standpoint of the so-called oppressed trumps any standpoint or facts presented by someone else.
00:14:16.300
And now, it's not just white people who are dismissed by this. It's also people who represent
00:14:21.140
the construct, critical race theory says, of whiteness. So that is why a black or brown person like
00:14:28.500
Winsome Sears or Ben Carson or Votie Bauckham or Candace Owens or Samuel Say or all of these people who
00:14:35.160
don't agree with critical race theory and don't agree with the leftist perspective on race and
00:14:39.720
justice, why they are dismissed as, you know, carrying water for a white supremacist or even called white
00:14:46.220
supremacist themselves is because critical race theory doesn't just see white and black as the color of
00:14:51.240
your skin, but where you stand when it comes to these power structures. And so a white person like Terry
00:14:59.000
McAuliffe might actually be considered by this leftist view of race as more black than someone
00:15:05.160
like Winsome Sears, who is a Republican and a conservative and doesn't go along with the victim
00:15:09.460
mentality that critical race theory peddles. So it's very convoluted. It's very convoluted.
00:15:16.360
Delgado and Stefan Sick also explained that one of the primary tenets of CRT is a critique of the liberal
00:15:21.780
order. By liberal, that doesn't mean leftist. It just means basic Western democratic systems and the
00:15:27.440
Western rule of law. So it actually holds in derision the idea of inherent rights and constitutional
00:15:33.960
rights, the right to due process, free speech. They actually argue that these are all tools of
00:15:38.480
the oppressor. So critical race theory, it's radical. It is truly radical. It doesn't believe in the
00:15:43.780
constitution. It doesn't believe in constitutional rights. It doesn't believe that America has ever
00:15:48.980
been a place that has granted liberty and equality for all people, but that it is inherently white
00:15:54.400
supremacist. And so even though Iber Max Kendi and even though Nicole Hannah-Jones, who wrote the
00:16:00.860
1619 Project and whatever that woman, that white woman's name is, who wrote White Fragility, Robin
00:16:08.460
D'Angelo, even though they don't call themselves critical race theorists, they are all peddling the
00:16:13.900
same nonsense. That America is inherently innately racist, that white people are inherently innately
00:16:20.560
racist and that the entirety of the institutions and systems in the United States are so infected by
00:16:29.400
white supremacy that there is no way that we will ever be able to achieve their version of justice,
00:16:37.360
equality, and liberation until we hold all white people back and we tear the systems down and we
00:16:43.820
build it into some newfangled, convoluted, in my opinion, corrupted version of equity. It's truly
00:16:52.200
radical. It is revolutionary. And again, it's not based on fact. It's based on this hypothesis
00:16:58.140
that we were actually founded on the enslavement and oppression of people and that we are still
00:17:04.140
carrying forms of enslavement and oppression today. It's really hard to make that case when you look at how
00:17:10.360
far Black Americans have come. Also, when you look at the fact that every single civilization has had
00:17:16.580
slavery, every single ethnicity has been both an oppressor and oppressed. Every person of every skin
00:17:23.560
color probably has oppressed people somewhere in their lineage. So this collectivist idea that America
00:17:30.740
is only exclusively and systemically a form of oppression for non-white people, it just doesn't hold up
00:17:39.460
to facts. And if you bring up, for example, that Asian Americans are far more successful across a
00:17:45.320
variety of categories, including Asian immigrants than white Americans, they have a higher graduation
00:17:50.940
rate, they have a lower divorce rate, they've got a lower fatherlessness rate, they've got a higher
00:17:55.660
median income than white Americans. And so if you ask logically, how can America be a white supremacist
00:18:01.440
nation if white people aren't supreme, when it comes to most of the categories that we view as
00:18:06.400
categories of success? They'll call that a model minority myth. They'll say that's offensive,
00:18:11.360
that's pitting Asian people against Black people. Really, we need to just be pitting, you know,
00:18:16.040
white people against non-white people. And they won't deal with your facts. They won't deal with your
00:18:22.180
data. They won't deal with your logic. They'll actually just say that that's all a construct of
00:18:26.040
whiteness. They don't want a colorblind society. They want more division. They want more segregation.
00:18:31.700
They actually think this is going to somehow accomplish liberation. Well, look, critical race
00:18:38.500
theory and its philosophies have been driving the most radical wing of racial activism, so-called
00:18:45.800
social justice activism in the Democratic Party for a long time. The people who are fueled by this kind
00:18:52.120
of theology and ideology have been leading the cities who are made up of majority Black and Brown
00:18:59.600
constituents for decades. And has that achieved liberation? I don't think so. But again, if you
00:19:05.920
bring up those kinds of logical or data-driven points, then you're just dismissed as some kind
00:19:11.360
of white supremacist. And so in that way, critical race theory is self-certifying. It can't actually be
00:19:17.400
argued against. It is axiomatic. It is really more of religious dogma than anything founded in truth.
00:19:24.820
And so when professing Christians, they find themselves latching on to this kind of thing
00:19:29.360
by saying, well, systemic racism is a fact in 2021. White privilege is a fact in 2021. You might agree
00:19:36.800
with some parts of that. But to say that those are all givens, that we just must accept those as a
00:19:41.900
reality, well, you're not actually trafficking in truth. You have believed and are peddling critical
00:19:47.800
race theory whether you want to believe it or not. And we do see forms of this, absolutely,
00:19:52.800
in the public school system by separating oppressed versus oppressors, by talking about
00:19:59.160
the inherent evils of the United States. We're not just talking about teaching the good and the bad
00:20:03.720
and the ugly of American history, which everyone is all for. But we are actually talking about
00:20:08.900
resegregation, demonizing whiteness, demonizing Western civilization, demonizing America, and also
00:20:17.260
putting a stumbling block or an obstacle before black and brown kids by saying there's this
00:20:22.860
insurmountable thing called white privilege and you'll never be as successful. It's breeding resentment.
00:20:28.280
And it is also, a lot of people are angry because it is taking the place of kids actually learning
00:20:34.220
critical thinking, actually reading the classics, learning about math and science and STEM, all of
00:20:39.920
these things that parents want their kids actually learning about. Not to mention it's unbiblical.
00:20:44.820
We don't have time to get into all of that right now, but critical race theory is partiality. It is
00:20:53.220
judging people by their skin color, assuming their experiences and their inherited oppression and where
00:21:00.780
they stand in the world based on the color of their skin rather than based on fact. God hates
00:21:04.920
partiality, Exodus 23.3, Leviticus 19.15, Deuteronomy 117, Deuteronomy 16.19. And we've talked about this
00:21:13.260
many times. We'll link some previous episodes where we talk about the dangers of critical race theory
00:21:18.280
and where it is cropping up. Tony, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell everyone who you
00:21:24.780
are and what you do? Absolutely. I am Tony Kennett. I am the founder of the Chalkboard Review, which is
00:21:30.360
an education publication for all teachers. And then I am the science coordinator for now for the
00:21:36.980
Indianapolis public school system. Okay, tell us why you said for now.
00:21:41.860
Well, so I've exposed a lot of stuff going on on the inside of Indianapolis in the last couple of
00:21:47.160
days. Some might say that even after I've been in two HR meetings before for really small things that
00:21:53.300
kind of weird to be pulled into HR over tweets saying, rest in peace, Rush Limbaugh, I wonder how
00:21:59.100
they're going to react at this point. I've received no emails of any kind this morning. So none that I
00:22:03.800
usually get normally I have 1520 emails in the morning, it's been eerily silent all morning.
00:22:09.460
And that is because for those who don't know, well, we're recording this on a Friday. So this
00:22:15.040
will actually come out on on a different day. But as we're recording this last night, you went on
00:22:19.740
Tucker Carlson, you had a video that came out on Twitter. That's how I discovered you talking about
00:22:25.820
how critical race theory actually is in schools, at least where you are, but it's not necessarily
00:22:31.220
under the explicit name of critical race theory. So that's why you're a little skeptical that things
00:22:37.900
are eerily quiet in your inbox. Can you tell us why you made the video and reiterate what the video
00:22:45.360
is about? What did you say? Absolutely. So I've been writing in conservative education policy for
00:22:52.220
some time. But in my my work life, I have been working as a science coordinator, as a science
00:22:58.200
instructional coach for the district of Indianapolis. And my job is to go around and make sure that
00:23:03.120
the science curriculum is up to snuff for our 30,000 plus students. I'm supposed to help teachers
00:23:08.540
become better teachers, not just in science, but kind of across the board. And in the last year,
00:23:14.020
it's gotten really weird. Some of the stuff the district has started putting out, they've always
00:23:18.400
been really to the left. But things that they started expecting of their teachers to do grouping us
00:23:22.680
into these weird sessions where they would tell us that, you know, this systemic racism that white
00:23:27.480
people are responsible for is ruining the entire country and that IPS is going to fix it by
00:23:32.900
utilizing these principles from Kimberly Crenshaw and Gloria Ladson Billings, these critical race
00:23:38.700
theory as they wrote it in the early 90s and early 2000s. So finally, I honestly had enough. I've been
00:23:45.060
held to double standards. They've literally sent out an email earlier this year telling parents are
00:23:50.720
telling principals that if a parent emails you, you tell them that we are not teaching critical race
00:23:55.480
theory. And with the Yunkin election and everything going on, now all of these people are coming out
00:24:00.480
on media and saying not only is critical race theory not taught in K-12 classrooms, not only is it not
00:24:05.200
even a legal framework anymore at some graduate level, you have people going on national media and saying
00:24:10.960
Right. But it's Nicole Wallace, MSNBC, a supposed Republican, Hardy Har, who said critical race theory,
00:24:18.540
which isn't a thing. And so and there are other guests saying the same thing. It's amazing how they've
00:24:23.880
shifted all the way to there, that it's basically just this imaginary boogeyman that the right just made
00:24:30.460
up. Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, continue on. Obviously, we know that that's not real, that it
00:24:38.620
is showing up in classrooms, but continue on what you were talking about in the video, how it is showing
00:24:43.200
up. Well, there are two basic arms of learning and instruction. There's curriculum, which is the stuff
00:24:49.480
that you learn in class. It's the actual facts, the actual standards, the math, the history, the English,
00:24:54.720
et cetera. And then there's pedagogy, which is how it's taught. And so we can legally tell parents we
00:25:01.820
can, you know, kind of wink and say, well, we're we're not actually using critical race theory in
00:25:06.920
our standards. We're not teaching it as part of the curriculum. But realistically, once those school
00:25:12.040
doors shut and the administrators are alone with the staff, they implore us to make sure that we're
00:25:18.380
teaching our students from a critical race theory pedagogy, which just means that when I teach,
00:25:23.560
it's through a lens of systemic racism in the United States, this race essentialism. And so that's more
00:25:29.980
of what I want to communicate to parents. I just can't stand the lying to parents. I don't think
00:25:34.420
that's in any way acceptable. And that's what finally pushed me over. Yeah. And give us some
00:25:39.740
examples of how this is showing up in the classroom. Maybe a lot of parents, well, meaning parents, maybe
00:25:46.300
even conservative parents might not recognize it because it's so often brought in under the guise of
00:25:52.680
diversity, inclusion and tolerance and equity. All of these very good and just and righteous
00:25:58.800
sounding terms that no one wants to push back against because no one wants to be seen as a
00:26:04.660
racist or bigot. But it's not really about diversity and inclusion and tolerance, is it?
00:26:10.120
Right. No, it's all about the buzzwords and education. We love our buzzwords. They make us sound
00:26:13.860
so smart. We went to our graduate programs and we learned to say things with such nuance and talk about
00:26:19.660
mitigating these incredible factors. So how it looks in classroom is the teacher will walk in
00:26:24.320
and say, guys, to encourage equity and to encourage racial justice and all of these things that sound
00:26:29.620
really great for our communities, I'm going to have you all stand up and do a privilege walk.
00:26:34.380
And we are going to determine that because of your skin color, not your heritage, even now it's about
00:26:38.880
the phenotype, the skin color. You look white. So if you're Cuban or you're, you know, a light skinned
00:26:43.480
Hispanic person, you're out of luck. Sorry, you're white now. Yeah. And we make students do these
00:26:47.560
privilege walks and at very young ages determine how racist they must be and how privileged they
00:26:53.860
must be. And there's the soft bigotry of low expectations. We just had a meeting the other
00:26:58.540
day in which it was discussed that while our black and Hispanic students weren't scoring very well
00:27:03.540
on state reading tests, all of our teachers were still giving them A's and B's in the classroom just
00:27:08.480
alongside students who weren't black or Hispanic, which was really weird. It sounds like the soft
00:27:14.460
bigotry of low expectations to me. That doesn't sound like that's helping children, patting them
00:27:19.240
on the back when they're not meeting standards. That's how it shows up is we treat black and
00:27:23.960
Hispanic students like they are inferior victims. And then we treat white students as though they
00:27:29.460
are horrific oppressors. And that's what it looks like on the day to day. Just has nice words painted
00:27:35.260
So we hear it a lot in the rendering of history that sometimes comes from the classroom, like
00:27:42.220
Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States type teaching, 1619, right? 1619 project type
00:27:49.560
teaching, which is not at neither of those sources are actually even meant intended to be historically
00:27:56.120
accurate. They are actually intended to be a particular narrative or particular perspective
00:28:01.300
of what the authors of those sources want American history to look like, where white means
00:28:08.000
oppressor, black and brown always mean oppressed. And therefore, every institution in the United
00:28:12.900
States is permeated by that oppressed versus oppressor, white versus black dichotomy. Real
00:28:19.100
history is a lot more complicated than that. There's good, there's bad, there's ugly. That's
00:28:22.620
the problem with critical race theory. It's not teaching kids about race and history. It's about
00:28:26.440
teaching people about a particular, and I would even say prejudiced and ahistorical view of history.
00:28:33.640
That's why people have a problem with all of this. But it's not just showing up in the history
00:28:38.300
classroom or in the English classroom or in social studies or whatever. It's showing up in math and
00:28:43.720
It really is. And that's kind of the weird thing. And in my domain of science, there's been such a push
00:28:48.220
to make sure that we're meeting these weird racial quotas in our programs. We're putting a weird
00:28:55.160
emphasis on how equitable our texts are and making sure that all of these science texts,
00:28:59.880
we're adopting a science curriculum this year. So I'm reading hundreds of different science texts,
00:29:04.800
articles, et cetera, trying to make the right choice for our district. Well, they put us on a committee
00:29:09.420
and now they have a racial equity committee looking over my shoulder to make sure that the books that
00:29:14.140
we choose are equitable. And they have all of these examples because there's no way that a black or
00:29:19.280
Hispanic student could ever understand the same examples a white student could. That's called the
00:29:24.000
culturally relevant pedagogy. That's Gloria Ladson Billings again. And so it crops up some math and
00:29:29.220
science. We're starting looking at a partnership with Indiana University that analyzes how a math
00:29:34.300
teacher teaches and then analyzes what the students of color score in that class to determine how racist
00:29:43.180
Oh, my goodness. Can you explain that a little bit more? How are they determining how racist a math
00:29:47.880
teacher is by how many equitable, so-called equitable examples she's using?
00:29:52.600
Well, it kind of depends there. So the Racial Equity Institute out of the Carolinas comes in every
00:29:57.700
year. We pay them oodles, canoodles and toaster strudels of money to come in and give this big,
00:30:05.880
Oh, absolutely. So your property tax dollars are going straight to some racial equity group to come
00:30:11.080
in and lecture us about water. And they come in and there's no data that supports a lot of the
00:30:16.500
claims they're making about ethnomathematics, for example.
00:30:21.080
Oh, ethnomathematics. Yeah. The theory that math has been dominated by white faces for such a long
00:30:26.320
time, you know, even though we're using Arabic numerals and even though we draw a lot of the
00:30:29.740
concepts of trigonometry from the Islamic golden age, et cetera, it's apparently dominated by white,
00:30:35.280
male, cisgender, normative nonsense. And so ethnomathematics is more equitable. It's about teaching the
00:30:40.760
history and the process and the color of the people that were coming up with these things and
00:30:45.920
really just theorizing these incredible whatevers, because you could never find your multiplication
00:30:50.860
tables useful, despite the fact that I use my multiplication tables every day. That's the
00:30:55.980
only reason I know what seven times seven means anything.
00:30:59.100
So equitable or ethnomathematics is more about the process, but not even necessarily the process of
00:31:07.320
how you get, you know, what seven times seven is. But I guess how these formulas were formulated by
00:31:16.920
people of color and how colonization, I'm sure, and imperialism and oppression and all of these things
00:31:23.560
kind of go into the history of mathematics. But at the end of the day, that's not going to teach
00:31:28.680
someone how to build a bridge. It's not going to teach someone how to engineer a plane. It's not going
00:31:33.400
to teach someone how to calculate the dosage if they're a nurse. So what are the repercussions of
00:31:38.760
kids, especially, like I would say this disproportionately affects kids who don't
00:31:43.540
necessarily have involved parents who are raised by maybe a single mom who doesn't have time to pay
00:31:48.100
attention to all of their homework. Like what are the repercussions for these kids who are not
00:31:52.180
learning simply that two plus two equals four, but that two plus two equals four is a construct of
00:31:58.560
Well, think about it. You just talked about all of the industries that those students could never
00:32:01.920
participate in because they didn't have a good enough grounding in mathematics.
00:32:05.580
So all of the trades education fields that would make a lot more than I'm making at Indianapolis
00:32:10.340
public schools that I wish I had known about when I was in high school are not being given to these
00:32:16.000
students. Instead, they're all of these airy social dynamics that we really want our students to focus
00:32:20.620
on that don't do anything for trades education. I mean, we're in the middle of a massive supply shortage
00:32:25.000
in this country. I really wish we had more people going into trades education, working in industries
00:32:29.580
like contracting and lumber and HVAC, etc. But we're not preparing our students for that. In fact, we're
00:32:35.780
ostracizing large parts of our communities that work in those trades because we're afraid of stereotyping
00:32:41.840
the Hispanic community. Don't want to talk about contract and drywalling work because that could have
00:32:46.440
some type of anti-Hispanic or, excuse me, latinx implications. It's silly, it's performative, and it's going to
00:32:53.700
cripple our students in the modern economy. So what is the goal then? What is this curriculum
00:32:59.260
preparing kids for, if not real life? I think it's really in two parts. So I think the goal
00:33:05.880
realistically is just to preen. A lot of people are bored and they want something to preen over. And so
00:33:11.260
this is something that at the end of their day, they can come home and they can feel really good
00:33:15.100
that they advocated for someone. And it makes them feel really great when they're angry, when they
00:33:20.240
participate in their Orwellian two minutes of hate. And it gives them a passion and a drive for
00:33:24.560
doing things. Realistically, I think that the district is wrestling with this as a whole.
00:33:29.140
Superintendent Johnson has her big masterful plans that she's going to carry through
00:33:33.160
because our academics are pathetic. Our scores are dismal. So she doesn't want to be responsible
00:33:38.320
to the Indiana Department of Education or to the parents of the community. So she needs a project to
00:33:43.300
look like she's actually doing something. Enter the Black Lives Matter resolution and the 1619
00:33:48.380
project resolution. She gets to look like she's doing something, even though realistically our
00:33:53.140
kids academics aren't getting any better. In fact, we're crippling them socially and emotionally as
00:33:56.720
well. Yeah. And, you know, it's that aspect that I think has woken a lot of parents up who aren't
00:34:01.440
necessarily political or maybe they typically vote Democrat. It's not just what these kids are
00:34:06.580
learning. It's also what they're not learning. And I have talked to several moms, one mom in
00:34:11.580
particular outside of Dallas and Texas, a conservative area. She was not just saying all of this
00:34:16.960
sexually explicit, racially divisive, you know, LGBTQ material that her young kids were
00:34:24.020
learning as young as five. They were learning about gender identity. And then her eighth grader
00:34:28.560
was learning, was recommended a book by her social studies teacher that opened up with different ways
00:34:34.240
and how to's on how to commit suicide, glorify child rape, pedophilia. Suicide? Are you serious?
00:34:41.640
Yes. Yes. And people can go back and listen to that episode. We'll link it in the description to this
00:34:46.420
episode. I mean, terrible, terrible stuff. And this particular teacher is very much a left-wing
00:34:51.620
activist teacher. And so, of course, this mom, she's a Christian conservative mom. She was obviously
00:34:56.320
upset about this. But what has gotten other parents upset, even if maybe they ideologically agree with
00:35:02.160
some of that stuff, is what the kids are not learning. They said the same thing. Their scores are
00:35:08.140
abysmal. Their eighth graders, a lot of them are reading at a third grade reading level for no reason,
00:35:15.260
for no reason. And so you're creating a bunch of, I guess, dumb activists. Maybe that's the goal.
00:35:20.760
I mean, it's really embarrassing. But this is, again, most likely from what we can tell from the
00:35:24.680
early data, what flipped Virginia for Youngkin. I mean, you have all of these parents of every
00:35:29.960
color and creed who are upset at how the public schools are doing things. And then his campaign
00:35:35.220
comes out. Randy Weingarten from the union comes out like as a last ditch effort to save the election
00:35:40.400
from McAuliffe to suggest that the only people who are concerned are white parents. And all of
00:35:45.620
the black and Hispanic parents are looking around going, we care just as much as the white parents,
00:35:49.780
what we don't exist because we don't agree with you. And this is, again, this is just the exact same
00:35:54.760
racial pawns on a chess piece that have been in education for a very long time. You don't care
00:36:00.480
about the parents and the kids. Their color is just a way for you to feel better about your activism.
00:36:05.660
And it goes to show how convoluted that word racist has really become that. I mean,
00:36:11.160
that's the accusation that's been launched since the Virginia election that, oh, they voted for racial
00:36:18.560
white ignorance, whatever it is. They can say that you voted for the Republicans that won,
00:36:25.620
the three Republicans, only one of whom is white, by the way, because you're a racist white person.
00:36:32.640
But if you didn't vote for these other guys who are white males, it's because you're racist. It
00:36:39.840
doesn't make any sense. Obviously, the Republican side included a Cuban American, a Jamaican American
00:36:45.460
who was the first black woman to be elected to a statewide office. The left obviously cares about
00:36:50.240
that identity politics. But apparently you are actually more black and you're more equitable if you
00:36:57.320
are a white person who voted for a white Democrat than you are if you are a black parent who voted for a
00:37:02.480
black woman to become lieutenant governor. It's insane. Is it not insane?
00:37:07.760
Oh, it's hilarious. There was just a guy that I speak with pretty regularly in Indiana. He used to
00:37:12.140
be the vice president of the Indiana College Democrats, and he thought he had this really
00:37:15.980
great tweet lined up. Look at all of these members of the Indiana General Assembly and of like the
00:37:21.320
representatives they send to Congress. Only one of them is black. And then it turned out that that was
00:37:26.280
false. And now, of course, we're going to the Virginia election and we elect not only the first
00:37:32.620
black lady lieutenant governor, but also the first son of or the first child of immigrant attorney
00:37:38.560
general and a fine gentleman. And yet there's no you know, there are no posts made. My racial equity
00:37:45.780
office didn't send us any emails about this historic moment in genuine racial equity and equality.
00:37:50.580
Instead, it doesn't fit their agenda. So it gets left out. Yeah. More racial pawns.
00:37:58.660
And it just goes to show maybe this gets to the heart of what we are talking about, about the why
00:38:03.120
behind this curriculum. It shows that it's about power. It's not really about helping people of color.
00:38:09.220
It's not really about so-called justice and equality. It's really about power. You are considered
00:38:14.500
on the right side, even if you are a rich white male who sent his kids to private school,
00:38:20.020
just as Terry McAuliffe did. You are more black and more equitable than the black daughter of
00:38:29.560
immigrants or the black immigrant who is a Republican. It's really about power. And that's
00:38:34.640
why people say what critical race theory comes down to is the same thing that queer theory comes down
00:38:39.380
to. It's the same thing that feminism comes down to. It's not actually about for women, just like
00:38:44.240
feminists really don't give a flying flip about what I do or don't do or whether I'm oppressed or not.
00:38:49.440
They only care about people on their side of the political aisle. What it always comes down to
00:38:56.120
is a form of communism, whether it's it's not, you know, class bourgeois versus proletariat anymore.
00:39:04.400
Critical race theory is white versus black. And then queer theory is cis heteronormative versus not
00:39:11.240
feminist theory, male versus female. But what it really comes down to is power. What it really comes
00:39:17.640
down to is politics, right? You're absolutely right. And there's so many interesting aspects
00:39:23.700
of the Marxism into critical race theory dynamic. I used to not believe it. I used to think that it
00:39:28.860
was just some silly racial performative nonsense that it had always been. And I honestly used to
00:39:34.640
think the Marxism aspect of it was like a kind of a deeper Republican conspiracy theory until I sat
00:39:39.700
through the racial equity training. And they told us that they wouldn't even use the term white privilege
00:39:44.220
anymore in that certain racial equity institute because it disparaged the underpaid, oppressed,
00:39:50.540
poor white people in areas like Appalachia. And they imposed through the entire segment of
00:39:57.120
trainings that we had to go through and have our camera on. And we had to be active and paying
00:40:00.360
attention because they were hoping that they were watching us that the American system of capitalism
00:40:06.280
is what perpetuated slavery. And American capitalism is what perpetuated Jim Crow ism,
00:40:11.700
even though that's not true. It was obviously state laws that kept black individuals from eating
00:40:16.800
inside white areas of restaurants, etc. And it's amazing how they've shaped this narrative,
00:40:22.840
as you talked about Howard Zinn, into this very strange socialist dynamic they're trying to pass
00:40:28.520
off as just the way it's always been, the way it always was.
00:40:31.920
Yeah. You know, it's interesting that you said that they won't use white privilege because it
00:40:36.600
disparages poor white people. That actually shows to me something that actually makes more logical
00:40:41.920
sense, because I do think white privilege is offensive for that reason. There are black and
00:40:48.580
brown people who have not been oppressed in this country. There are white people who have been
00:40:52.960
oppressed. And I don't even know about oppressed being the right word, but they've had particular
00:40:58.660
hardship. I think that what you see, what you're seeing with that is what you always see with
00:41:03.540
intersectionality is that they end up tripping over themselves because you're constantly finding
00:41:07.900
these like little intersections of how someone is oppressed. And you can't ever get fully woken up
00:41:14.920
to like fully acknowledge all intersections of oppression until you finally realize, oh, so people
00:41:20.940
are just individuals with individual experiences, individual hardship, individual talents and strengths.
00:41:26.800
And if we treat people as individuals and hold people to a high standard, give them the tools to reach
00:41:32.060
that high standard rather than lowering everything to the most common denominator of our perception
00:41:36.900
of the kind of person who is oppressed, then maybe we can actually move forward. But people don't seem
00:41:43.780
to be able to get that. I don't know. This is where the history revisionism comes in, because if you start
00:41:48.940
looking at people as individuals and their character and their choices, you can build a much broader
00:41:54.760
society that's colorblind, that works to help each other, that actually encourages the goodwill
00:41:59.620
towards all men. And you can't have that in the intersectional dynamic that, you know, Kimberly
00:42:04.760
Crenshaw puts out. That's why Nicole Hannah-Jones worked so hard to reshape the narrative of American
00:42:09.660
history in the 1619 Project. It's why Howard Zinn did his entire thing. It's why we're doing it in
00:42:14.560
Indianapolis and claiming that Indianapolis is one of the last cities to embrace civil rights, which is a
00:42:19.820
complete sham. And in Thomas Sowell's book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, the very first line
00:42:24.960
actually shows from Indianapolis history that the upper class white people in Indianapolis were not
00:42:30.620
upset about black individuals emigrating north from the south. They were mad about poor white people
00:42:35.320
emigrating north from the south. And he points that out very quickly and says it's more about
00:42:39.580
individualism and more about being concerned about character than it is about being concerned about
00:42:44.500
what skin color is moving into your neighborhood. It's a lot of crazy, fear-mongering nonsense when you
00:42:51.300
start treating everyone as part of this weird social victimized group.
00:42:55.140
Yep. And he also says in that same book, making a similar point about different kinds of
00:43:00.240
black people, how northern black Americans didn't like southern black Americans moving to moving to
00:43:07.940
the north. There was a different culture. There was a different type of behavior. There were different
00:43:11.280
expectations for the family, for employment and things like that. And he talks about the rift
00:43:15.720
between black Americans. And that is one problem with critical race theory viewing, you know, white,
00:43:23.700
bad, black, good, is that the world is way more complicated than that. The reality is that every
00:43:30.120
person of every different kind of ethnicity has oppression somewhere in their lineage. Virtually every
00:43:36.900
civilization has had enslavement, has had some kind of discrimination, prejudice. Thankfully, in the United
00:43:43.160
States, because of our founding documents, what Frederick Douglass called anti-slavery documents,
00:43:48.960
essentially, we've been able to look back at those founding ideals and say, oh, right, slavery is wrong.
00:43:54.760
Excluding women from the voting process or black people from the voting process was wrong. Jim Crow was
00:43:59.260
wrong. Without those foundational documents that critical race theorists and radicals like
00:44:04.320
Ibram X. Kendi and Nicole Hannah-Jones think are bad, like critical race theory actually thinks due process and
00:44:09.860
free speech and freedom of religion are all tools of oppression that should be eradicated. Without
00:44:13.880
those things, we would not have the equality and the liberty and the justice that we have today.
00:44:22.460
And so it's not only historically wrong, it's morally wrong. And what I want to hear you talk about
00:44:27.560
also, I know you're a Christian. From a biblical perspective, why do you take an issue with some of
00:44:35.020
In the very latter parts of Scripture, it's cited that every tribe and tongue and nation will bow to
00:44:40.300
the name of Jesus Christ. And Christ came to save the sins of the world. Christ never looked at an
00:44:46.720
individual and asked them about their family history, about what history of oppressive sins. In
00:44:50.960
fact, early on in Old Testament Scripture, the Israelites were told very specifically not to
00:44:56.820
whine about the things their parents had done, you know, children on these sour grapes that their
00:45:01.540
teeth had been sharpened for, meaning that you are not responsible for the crazy things that your
00:45:07.300
parents, your grandparents, your great grandparents did. And I'm not going to hold you to those things
00:45:12.600
either. So that's one issue. Before that, of course, was the fact that all peoples are created by God
00:45:19.260
equally. And he didn't, you know, create people to be part of certain cultural groups, certain
00:45:23.820
different cultures popping up on different sides of the earth, kind of evolving alongside each other.
00:45:28.560
He created one people that we're descendant from, and within that we're all related. It's actually why I
00:45:34.020
became a science educator is because I am just astounded by the beauty of creation and the intricacy
00:45:39.620
of its design. And really seeing that day-to-day interaction, it makes me cringe at the idea that
00:45:47.800
someone could view the soul of an individual reduced down to its skin color. That bothers me. I don't like
00:45:53.780
equating culture to color. It's never been done in Scripture. You'll notice that the Bible never
00:45:58.240
actually talks about the color of an individual's skin in the entire book. It talks about the culture,
00:46:02.800
talks about where they come from, it talks about what they think. But you never have, you know,
00:46:06.800
in the latter writings of Paul going, now be careful about these Ethiopians down here, be careful about
00:46:11.420
these Greeks over here being white people. He never does that. He addresses specific cultural issues
00:46:16.960
within the church that they're dealing with. And that culture, the character, and the decisions
00:46:21.720
are what are addressed in Scripture. Yep. It's an anti-biblical view of sin, of human nature.
00:46:31.680
It says that instead of original sin being sin, as we know it to be, original sin is actually racism
00:46:38.900
for white people, and people who are not white are somehow absolved of the guiltiness of sin. And
00:46:46.500
you nailed it. When people are before the judgment throne of God, there's not going to be a bunch of
00:46:54.160
woke math tabulating if that person was oppressed enough to absolve them from the words that they
00:47:01.880
said, from the thoughts that they thought, from the things that they did. That's not how it works.
00:47:07.840
We are all held to the same standard. The fact of the matter is, is that every human being
00:47:11.940
is held to a standard of perfection, of perfection. In order to be reconciled to God, in order to have
00:47:18.840
a relationship with God, you have to be perfect. You have to keep the law perfectly. Bad news is,
00:47:24.740
absolutely no one can do that. White, black, does not matter. Doesn't matter what your dad did.
00:47:29.360
Doesn't matter what your great, great, great, great, great grandparents did for good or for evil.
00:47:34.600
Can't reach it. There is one who did. And the color of his skin, unlike what critical race theories say,
00:47:40.780
actually doesn't matter. What matters is that Jesus Christ became our reconciliation. He reached
00:47:47.480
that standard on our behalf because no one could do it. And all of us who are in Christ or made one,
00:47:52.840
all of us who are outside of Christ or dead in sin, those are the categories, biblically, ultimately,
00:47:58.720
that matter. And when we divide people along other lines, pit people against one another, try to
00:48:04.800
try to have people reach different standards based on some convoluted, newfangled idea of equity that
00:48:11.800
is actually completely inequitable and unjust, suffering will happen. People will suffer, right?
00:48:18.260
Every time. And realistically, this is one of the reasons I get such a kick out of every couple of
00:48:22.900
months. Some collection of institutes, you know, some group of anthropologists will come out with a
00:48:28.500
new picture of this is what we believe Jesus looked like. And then you see all the people from the
00:48:32.920
left and all of the hyper-progressives who aren't Christians and really have nothing,
00:48:36.340
want to do nothing with Christianity. They'll say, ha, see, look, he was a Middle Eastern Jew. He
00:48:40.860
wouldn't even be allowed in white churches today. And everyone on the area of Christianity is basically
00:48:47.220
like, so he was a Middle Eastern Jew? Yeah. We knew that. We knew that. Like, that's literally what
00:48:53.460
Matthew carefully outlines. Have you had the opportunity to watch The Chosen?
00:48:57.640
You know, a lot of people have told me to watch it, and I started watching it, and then I just
00:49:03.000
didn't. Not for any reason, not because I didn't like it. I just haven't watched it all the way
00:49:06.400
through. I love how they outline how particular Matthew is inciting Christ's genealogy and where
00:49:13.640
he comes from. Again, not from a, here's what color he was, but because you actually get to see
00:49:18.560
all of the individual prophecies that are fulfilled by his calculating writings. And again, I just,
00:49:25.460
I really get a kick out of someone, you know, telling me, well, you know, Jesus was Jewish.
00:49:29.800
What do you have to say to that? Well, yeah. Awesome. That's what I've known my whole life.
00:49:35.500
You know, it just gets this, these racialized ideologies get everything exactly backwards.
00:49:40.720
Like, we are made in God's image. I don't have to make my God in my image. Like, I don't,
00:49:46.100
I don't have to try to make Jesus in my image in order to worship him. And actually, if you love Jesus
00:49:50.760
any more or any less, if you relate to Jesus any more or any less because of the color of his skin,
00:49:57.160
then I'm afraid that you're actually worshiping a political ideology. You're actually
00:50:02.160
worshiping race rather than worshiping our Savior. And actually, the Bible goes,
00:50:09.780
the Bible doesn't even tell us, like you said, anything about what he says. But in Isaiah,
00:50:13.860
the one description that we do have of him is that he was really nothing to look at. Like,
00:50:18.780
his appearance wasn't anything that you looked upon and you said, wow, like, that is the king of
00:50:24.680
kings right there. And so it's almost like God is going out of his way to say, look, the appearance,
00:50:30.380
it really doesn't matter. When you put stock in that, you end up idolizing something that you're
00:50:35.080
not supposed to idolize. You end up breaking a commandment that you are supposed to put no other
00:50:41.420
gods before the Lord your God. When you elevate skin color to the place that a lot of racial ideologues
00:50:47.300
have in this country, that's what you're doing. You're making an idol, right?
00:50:51.160
Absolutely. And it's heartbreaking to see people really, and this is my issue, quite honestly,
00:50:57.540
with many of the hyper evolutionist views of history. And being a science educator,
00:51:02.360
this isn't usually something I talk about, but at least not since I've been out of the classroom.
00:51:07.820
But I have a serious issue with the hyper evolutionist view of history because it makes
00:51:12.220
human zoological. It puts us in the same classes as animals that are to treat each other in this
00:51:17.760
violent, horrid way without value, without a soul. And it takes away the individual value that is not
00:51:24.500
that isn't the outside of the of your skin, that isn't the amount of melanin, you know, the shape of
00:51:28.520
your nose, how high your cheekbones are, the shape of your eyes, etc. It does put the human value at the
00:51:35.540
consciousness at the soul. And that thing that we all have and share that animals do not have and never
00:51:40.800
will have. And realistically, when I'm considering science and my science instruction, I do try to
00:51:46.520
impress upon my students, or I did when I was in the classroom, how valuable human life is, and how
00:51:52.280
that is to be protected and sanctified. And that actually explains why humans do what we do regards
00:51:57.480
to the environment, in regards to our genetic experiments on things like food, in regards to
00:52:03.640
how we study and analyze history via science. And it really impacts your entire view as a human once
00:52:10.460
you realize the value that a soul has, not a color, but a soul.
00:52:16.080
Absolutely. All right, how can people follow you, support you? That's my first question.
00:52:21.860
The second part of the question is, for people who want to know what's going on in their school
00:52:27.040
district, what do they do? So two part question there.
00:52:30.860
Absolutely. So about a year ago, my colleague Daniel Buck, who is a teacher up in Wisconsin,
00:52:35.120
also a political writer, noticed that there were no places that if you weren't on the hyper left,
00:52:40.860
not the moderate left, not obviously not center or right, if you weren't in that camp, then you
00:52:45.760
were not allowed to write for organizations like Ed Week, Chalkbeat, University Publications, etc.
00:52:50.740
And so he suggested to me that we should start a publication that would give a window into
00:52:54.820
education. And so parents could see what all teachers are saying, regardless of political
00:52:58.160
affiliation, left, right or center. I told him, no, I didn't want to be a part of it. I had to like
00:53:02.740
another failed publication. No, thanks. I've made it through my early 20s without having a podcast.
00:53:07.480
I'm good. And he worked me over on it a little bit. And he asked me that if I'd pray about it,
00:53:12.560
I'd pitch it to a few people. Well, long story short, we launched Chalkboard Review in late
00:53:17.140
November. It's at Chalkboard Rev on Twitter, www.thechalkboardreview.com. And now we're at 18,000
00:53:24.780
readers monthly. It's been incredible. The amount of teachers and community members,
00:53:29.980
professors that have written for us from the left, right and center, we have articles that call me
00:53:33.680
very bad and ugly names. We still publish them because parents and teachers and community members
00:53:38.740
should be deciding whether the article is any good or not, not me. So that's something that we've
00:53:43.480
really enjoyed doing. We've had a lot of great guests on our cast on Teachers Lounge, which is I
00:53:48.000
ended up being forced to start a podcast. And we've had some phenomenal people just telling their
00:53:53.100
stories of things that they're doing in their communities. And it's been wonderful. You can follow me
00:53:57.620
on Twitter at the Tonus, T-O-N-U-S. Some okay tweets there. I appreciate it for sure. But make
00:54:04.880
sure you're checking out the Chalkboard Review. This is where our work is. If you're a parent,
00:54:09.660
and you want to know more about what's going on in your classroom, you want to see you're a little
00:54:13.480
nervous about the curriculum, you're not sure what your kids are learning. The first thing that I
00:54:16.920
would do is actually check your kid's phone. Most of the nasty stuff that they're running into is on
00:54:22.300
the first swiped news page on Snapchat. Seriously, that is where all of the frontline growth stuff is.
00:54:28.140
That's thing number one. Check your kids' phones. People don't like that I say that. Too bad. The next
00:54:33.740
thing you should do is talk to your teacher. I had great relationships with my parents. I would tell
00:54:38.160
them things I did like, things I didn't like. I would ask them what they were doing at home so I could
00:54:42.120
support it in the classroom. And that is a vast majority of teachers. The biggest lie in education
00:54:47.460
from the left that I've seen is that all teachers are voting on the left. That's not true. Surveys
00:54:53.520
have shown that that's not true. It's really only about one third, which means two out of the three
00:54:57.600
are moderates, conservatives, independents, who most likely just want to go teach. Talk to your
00:55:02.000
teachers. Now, if you see stuff in your kid's work, and you should be checking your kid's work
00:55:06.420
that you don't like, that you think is wrong, you should go to the teacher about it. The teacher's
00:55:10.740
uncooperative. Go to the principal about it. If the principal's not willing to hold his teachers
00:55:14.820
accountable, you go to the superintendent, because now you have a principal that's not doing their
00:55:18.580
job. And if the superintendent does nothing about it, they brush you off, etc., then you go to the
00:55:24.000
school board, and you elect a better school board that's going to hold your district accountable.
00:55:28.880
That's what you should do. And a lot of people did that. We saw last week during the election
00:55:34.360
that there were a lot of school boards, some successful in a conservative takeover of the school
00:55:40.160
board, some unsuccessful, but parents are certainly waking up and they're doing exactly what you're
00:55:44.160
talking about. Also, parents, you don't have to do this alone, I guarantee you. There are a lot of
00:55:49.140
parents who feel the same way you do, left, right, and center, who would be willing to talk to the
00:55:55.740
teacher, the principal, the superintendent, and school board with you. There's power in numbers. I heard
00:56:00.060
someone say, you know, fear is contagious, silence is contagious, but so is courage. Courage is contagious
00:56:05.860
too. You don't have to be a political expert. You don't have to have had, you know, an education
00:56:12.380
degree. You don't have to be a teacher to be an expert in the kind of education, the kind of
00:56:18.500
learning that you want your child to have. Parents, you have the greatest vested interest in the
00:56:23.180
holistic success and well-being of your child. Don't let anyone belittle you into thinking that
00:56:28.620
you don't have the primary role and responsibility there because you absolutely do. So thank you so
00:56:34.360
much, Tony. Thanks for being a teacher that involves parents. Thanks for raising awareness about
00:56:38.880
this. I know people are going to be so excited to follow you and especially Chalkboard Review
00:56:42.940
support you. And just thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk to us.
00:56:49.580
Really appreciate what you guys are doing. Seriously, go out and look at some parent groups.
00:56:53.420
I wrote an article for The Daily Caller on I Met the Domestic Terrorists, and every single parent
00:56:58.220
group that I talked to was full of well-reasoned, kind individuals who will link you up with all
00:57:02.860
kinds of local news and resources. Amen. Well, thank you so much, Tony.