We’ll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell! We’ll tell you Kojak always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker’s house… We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear! We deal in illusion, man! None of it’s true! But you people… do whatever the tube tells you… This is mass madness, you maniacs!
— from Network, 1976
After a few days away from the news I watched Network, a movie about a mad prophet whose prophesies come true. Anchorman Howard Beale’s seminal speech described how America could commoditize anything, even the awful truth that its mass media had raised an illiterate populace that followed The Tube as the word of God. “Turn them off!” Beale screamed, just before collapsing in religious fervor, but one eye peeked out to see how his revelation was selling. True to form, even Network made a pile of money and won four Oscars.
Forty-five years later, the film’s predictions still look right, but too optimistic. Back then, a few networks dominated, and the trend was the One Big Lie: the Missile Gap, the Domino Theory, 4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident. What could be worse? Ambrose Bierce once said there were only two things more horrible than a clarinet — two clarinets. The only thing darker than Network’s dystopian future with television as the national religion is the world we’ve got: two religions.
The last week has been typical of life in the news-as-doctrinal-squabble era. On Sunday, September 19, a freelance photographer named Paul Ratjebased in Las Cruces, New Mexico, shot pictures of U.S. Border Patrol Agents chasing Haitian migrants trying to cross the border. In several photos, the agents appeared to be carrying lengths of leather cord. The next day, a former aide to onetime presidential candidate Julian Castro named Sawyer Hackett tweeted, “Border patrol is mounted on horseback rounding up Haitian refugees with whips,” and “This is unfathomable cruelty towards people fleeing disaster and political ruin.”
BREAKING: Congressman @BurgessOwens will introduce legislation to reinstate Trump's ban on critical race theory in the federal government. Owens blasts critical race theory as a "Marxist ideology" that seeks to destroy "Western Enlightenment Liberalism." pic.twitter.com/wvQhqpT96S
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 14, 2021
Utah is a microcosm of the national debate around Critical Race Theory being taught in the schools of America.
One Utah father is standing up and speaking out for the sake of his white wife and biracial children caught in the middle of the noxious racist curriculum that has embedded itself in our schools.
Here is the open letter he wrote to the governor:
I received this letter last week from a political insider who worked during the Utah-Herbert/Cox Administration. I waited several days to do a background check on the writer before making this public. He/She checked out.
If you want to know why the Cox Administration will never meet with me, and quite frankly, why they are more than likely figuring out a nasty way to destroy my name and honor? Read on:
Doctor Thompson:
“Gary, you do not know me personally. I worked through__________and contacts on the UDOE, mainly ____________back in 2014-16, to try to stop the State’s work in digitizing children and creating electronic figure-prints, and using the data commercially. It was an epic failure.”
“You scared the hell out of the establishment. I suspect Gov. Herbert admin was especially concerned over the potential for you exposing them, and how they circumvented the intent of parental rights and stripped away all local control”
“And you would have exposed how they altered the legal language, so they could digitize minors for profit, while making parents responsible as the primary for exposing them, all while stripping parents of all editorial control over the classroom. You would have shown how digitizing minors completely ignored all the science behind the principle of “do no harm” .”
“And how it was never about improving educational outcomes. It was about them gaining power and the State profiting. In a word, you would have exposed the lie. And they knew you would.”
“What you may not know, is your battle exposed enough of their design as to prevent them from carrying it out in full. And it provided parents a way to take it back without having to fight the beast….”
Here is my open response to the Cox Administration:
Dear Cox Administration:
I don’t want to fight you, expose you, or have ANY involvement with politics. I do not wish to be on TV, made famous by Tucker Carlson or any media talking head. I do not want to write a book, or receive monies from speaking engagements…..
All I want is to hang out with my beautiful wife and six kids, and to assist her with her efforts of providing trauma level services to the area of the State with the highest youth suicide rate in the country, and to raise my kids via the values passed on by several generations of African Americans in my family system.
Critical Race “Theory” goes directly against those values, and have a strong statistical possibility of harming both my marriage and my biracial children.
5 years ago I promised to “go away” quietly from the public spot light IF your future policies did not directly negatively affect my wife or kids.
I kept mine…but it appears to be that you may be under the direct influence of the Union, BLM, and other woke, left leaning entities which are championing CRT….thus it appears that you are thinking about breaking your promise.
I hope you have the fortitude to stop this harmful garbage in its tracks during the special legislative session coming next month. If not? You will leave me no choice but to come out like a bat out of hell to fight this on both a local and national level.
I won’t come out of this as a “winner”, but I do know this much: Neither will you.
I am more than willing to be “canceled” and shamed fighting for my family against CRT……are you willing to risk your political career and good name over this garbage?
In addition, @BurgessOwens will introduce a resolution on critical race theory in public education, arguing that CRT seeks to "create a hatred" of American institutions, "resegregrate" public schools, and "reinforce the soft bigotry of low expectations" for racial minorities. pic.twitter.com/eqlnNCgw7L
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 14, 2021
I have been watching this interview off and on all day. At times I found myself weeping right along with the two men who are talking about what they have given up for speaking up and making their voices heard.
I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated
Children are afraid to challenge the repressive ideology that rules our school. That’s why I am.
I am a teacher at Grace Church High School in Manhattan. Ten years ago, I changed careers when I discovered how rewarding it is to help young people explore the truth and beauty of mathematics. I love my work.
As a teacher, my first obligation is to my students. But right now, my school is asking me to embrace “antiracism” training and pedagogy that I believe is deeply harmful to them and to any person who seeks to nurture the virtues of curiosity, empathy and understanding.
“Antiracist” training sounds righteous, but it is the opposite of truth in advertising. It requires teachers like myself to treat students differently on the basis of race. Furthermore, in order to maintain a united front for our students, teachers at Grace are directed to confine our doubts about this pedagogical framework to conversations with an in-house “Office of Community Engagement” for whom every significant objection leads to a foregone conclusion. Any doubting students are likewise “challenged” to reframe their views to conform to this orthodoxy.
I know that by attaching my name to this I’m risking not only my current job but my career as an educator, since most schools, both public and private, are now captive to this backward ideology. But witnessing the harmful impact it has on children, I can’t stay silent.
My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.”
All of this is done in the name of “equity,” but it is the opposite of fair. In reality, all of this reinforces the worst impulses we have as human beings: our tendency toward tribalism and sectarianism that a truly liberal education is meant to transcend.
Recently, I raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. (Such racially segregated sessions are now commonplace at my school.) It was a bait-and-switch “self-care” seminar that labelled “objectivity,” “individualism,” “fear of open conflict,” and even “a right to comfort” as characteristics of white supremacy. I doubted that these human attributes — many of them virtues reframed as vices — should be racialized in this way. In the Zoom chat, I also questioned whether one must define oneself in terms of a racial identity at all. My goal was to model for students that they should feel safe to question ideological assertions if they felt moved to do so.
It seemed like my questions broke the ice. Students and even a few teachers offered a broad range of questions and observations. Many students said it was a more productive and substantive discussion than they expected.
However, when my questions were shared outside this forum, violating the school norm of confidentiality, I was informed by the head of the high school that my philosophical challenges had caused “harm” to students, given that these topics were “life and death matters, about people’s flesh and blood and bone.” I was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs.” And I was told that by doing so, I failed to serve the “greater good and the higher truth.”
He further informed me that I had created “dissonance for vulnerable and unformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbance in students’ beings and systems.” The school’s director of studies added that my remarks could even constitute harassment.
A few days later, the head of school ordered all high school advisors to read a public reprimand of my conduct out loud to every student in the school. It was a surreal experience, walking the halls alone and hearing the words emitting from each classroom: “Events from last week compel us to underscore some aspects of our mission and share some thoughts about our community,” the statement began. “At independent schools, with their history of predominantly white populations, racism colludes with other forms of bias (sexism, classism, ableism and so much more) to undermine our stated ideals, and we must work hard to undo this history.”
Students from low-income families experience culture shock at our school. Racist incidents happen. And bias can influence relationships. All true. But addressing such problems with a call to “undo history” lacks any kind of limiting principle and pairs any allegation of bigotry with a priori guilt. My own contract for next year requires me to “participate in restorative practices designed by the Office of Community Engagement” in order to “heal my relationship with the students of color and other students in my classes.” The details of these practices remain unspecified until I agree to sign.
I asked my uncomfortable questions in the “self-care” meeting because I felt a duty to my students. I wanted to be a voice for the many students of different backgrounds who have approached me over the course of the past several years to express their frustration with indoctrination at our school, but are afraid to speak up.
They report that, in their classes and other discussions, they must never challenge any of the premises of our “antiracist” teachings, which are deeply informed by Critical Race Theory. These concerns are confirmed for me when I attend grade-level and all-school meetings about race or gender issues. There, I witness student after student sticking to a narrow script of acceptable responses. Teachers praise insights when they articulate the existing framework or expand it to apply to novel domains. Meantime, it is common for teachers to exhort students who remain silent that “we really need to hear from you.”
But what does speaking up mean in a context in which white students are asked to interrogate their “white saviorism,” but also “not make their antiracist practice about them”? We are compelling them to tiptoe through a minefield of double-binds. According to the school’s own standard for discursive violence, this constitutes abuse.
Every student at the school must also sign a “Student Life Agreement,” which requires them to aver that “the world as we understand it can be hard and extremely biased,” that they commit to “recognize and acknowledge their biases when we come to school, and interrupt those biases,” and accept that they will be “held accountable should they fall short of the agreement.” A recent faculty email chain received enthusiastic support for recommending that we “‘officially’ flag students” who appear “resistant” to the “culture we are trying to establish.”
When I questioned what form this resistance takes, examples presented by a colleague included “persisting with a colorblind ideology,” “suggesting that we treat everyone with respect,” “a belief in meritocracy,” and “just silence.” In a special assembly in February 2019, our head of school said that the impact of words and images perceived as racist — regardless of intent — is akin to “using a gun or a knife to kill or injure someone.”
Imagine being a young person in this environment. Would you risk voicing your doubts, especially if you had never heard a single teacher question it?
Last fall, juniors and seniors in my Art of Persuasion class expressed dismay with the “Grace bubble” and sought to engage with a wider range of political viewpoints. Since the BLM protests often came up in our discussions, I thought of assigning Glenn Loury, a Brown University professor and public intellectual whose writings express a nuanced, center-right position on racial issues in America. Unfortunately, my administration put the kibosh on my proposal.
The head of the high school responded to me that “people like Loury’s lived experience—and therefore his derived social philosophy” made him an exception to the rule that black thinkers acknowledge structural racism as the paramount impediment in society. He added that “the moment we are in institutionally and culturally, does not lend itself to dispassionate discussion and debate,” and discussing Loury’s ideas would “only confuse and/or enflame students, both those in the class and others that hear about it outside of the class.” He preferred I assign “mainstream white conservatives,” effectively denying black students the opportunity to hear from a black professor who holds views that diverge from the orthodoxy pushed on them.
I find it self-evidently racist to filter the dissemination of an idea based on the race of the person who espouses it. I find the claim that exposing 11th and 12th graders to diverse views on an important societal issue will only “confuse” them to be characteristic of a fundamentalist religion, not an educational philosophy.
My administration says that these constraints on discourse are necessary to shield students from harm. But it is clear to me that these constraints serve primarily to shield their ideology from harm — at the cost of students’ psychological and intellectual development.
It was out of concern for my students that I spoke out in the “self-care” meeting, and it is out of that same concern that I write today. I am concerned for students who crave a broader range of viewpoints in class. I am concerned for students trained in “race explicit” seminars to accept some opinions as gospel, while discarding as immoral disconfirming evidence. I am concerned for the dozens of students during my time at Grace who shared with me that they have been reproached by teachers for expressing views that are not aligned with the new ideology.
One current student paid me a visit a few weeks ago. He tapped faintly on my office door, anxiously looking both ways before entering. He said he had come to offer me words of support for speaking up at the meeting.
I thanked him for his comments, but asked him why he seemed so nervous. He told me he was worried that a particular teacher might notice this visit and “it would mean that I would get in trouble.” He reported to me that this teacher once gave him a lengthy “talking to” for voicing a conservative opinion in class. He then remembered with a sigh of relief that this teacher was absent that day. I looked him in the eyes. I told him he was a brave young man for coming to see me, and that he should be proud of that.
Then I sent him on his way. And I resolved to write this piece.
CORRECTION: The anecdote about Glenn Loury was originally attributed to the head of Grace Church School. In fact, those statements were made by the head of the high school. Apologies for the error.
I am extremely proud to publish this piece by Paul Rossi. If you are a teacher who finds yourself in a similar situation; if you want to speak out but are afraid to risk your job; if you believe that political indoctrination has no place in schools, Paul would love to hear from you.
