Washington — As I wrote many years ago, when an entity falls under the control of liberalism, it eventually loses all sense of what its purpose was to begin with. The entity can be as small as a schoolroom or as vast as a great city or even a nation. Hand over a schoolroom or a vast city to the leadership of a cabal of liberals, and you will eventually see the schoolroom devoted to teaching such balderdash as gender studies or critical race theory, and the great cities will be devoted to feeding large numbers of people nuts and disgusting vegetables and to defunding the police. After defunding the police, you will find the cities devoted to such nonsense as rehabilitation programs for the criminals. Often rehabilitation programs that leave the criminals feeling vaguely privileged.
Actually, we no longer see liberals taking over school systems or large cities because there are few liberals around today. Now the takeover comes from people who call themselves progressives or Woke Folk. They are the clarions of advanced thought, the do-gooders, the virtue flaunters. Wherever they dominate, they confuse. Look at their domination of the cities. Consider the schools. There the progressives and the Woke Folk dominate, and they turn out students who can hardly read or perform math, but when it comes to the mysteries of those students' genitalia, they are Ph.Ds.
Now there is a growing rebellion among parents, and it is being led by governors such as Ron DeSantis from the great state of Florida. The Florida legislature last week passed a bill aimed at nonsense that has been taught in the classrooms of the Sunshine State. As The Washington Post put it, “The measure prohibits trainings that cause someone to feel guilty or ashamed about the past collective actions of their race or sex.” Apparently, the progressives and their Woke Folk allies in the classroom were intent on embarrassing white children because of the pigment of their skin and its supposed relationship to white supremacy. I am not sure which classes white supremacy is taught in, but I know no Tyrrell could possibly be guilty of it, as we were not here when it was in fashion, and for that matter, I imagine DeSantis was probably not around either.
Actually, I am not sure that white supremacy has ever been in fashion. So why is it being taught in the schools? It sounds to me like another deceit being perpetrated by the practitioners of critical race theory. They deal in a lot of deceits, for instance: that the true date of the founding of the Republic was 1619, the date slaves were brought here by, I suppose, Europeans, but they could have been Arabs. The truth is that America was founded in 1776, and when all this claptrap about race and gender and whatever else is thrown in ends, America will still celebrate July 4, 1776, as America's birthday.
In the course of this debate over race in the Florida public schools, Florida state Sen. Audrey Gibson, a Democrat, asked the rhetorical question, “Is it possible to talk about slavery, or the fact that white people, not black people, were enslavers?” Well, I do not know how obsessed with the question of a person's skin color Gibson might be. I do know that no one alive today is an enslaver or enriches himself or herself from slavery, which ended 157 years ago. I also know that the topic of slavery is more tendentiously discussed today than at any other time in my life. Moreover, I would hazard the guess that it is more tendentiously discussed than at any other time in American history. Frankly, I cannot see that any good will come of such a discussion. Discussing race in the way that the critical race theorists insist on discussing it only ensures the tendentious discussion continues.
DeSantis is right to lead this band of indignant parents — white and black and Asian — in putting an end to that claptrap. The real reason for doing so is that its message is untrue. No one in America today personally had anything to do with enslaving black people, and I shall end my column prompted by the day's headlines: Glory to Ukraine!
