Is the Moral Panic Over Critical Race Theory Justified? A Conversation with Sam Hoadley-Brill

Bad faith, right-wing attacks have made it hard to take true measure of this important theory and its disparate proponents

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Aaron Ross Powell: I am Aaron Ross Powell, and this is ReImagining Liberty, a podcast exploring the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic freedom. Few terms in our contemporary political scene provoke stronger reactions than critical race theory. If you listen to much of the right, CRT is a Marxist plot to literally destroy America by teaching children to hate the country, its founding principles and even themselves. The resulting moral panic has led to anti-CRT legislation and acted as a precursor to the growing anti-trans and anti-gay backlash among reactionary conservatives.

But what is critical race theory? Because few of those people with strong opinions seem to have much of an idea. Today I'm talking with Sam Hoadley-Brill, a PhD student in philosophy and a fellow at the African American Policy Forum. Sam has written extensively about critical race theory, the movement against it on the right, and the way concerns are being manipulated by dishonest activists like Christopher Rufo to roll back the achievements of social liberalism.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

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Aaron Ross Powell: Before we get to the current moral panic about critical race theory, let's start by clearing up for people just what it is and I think just as importantly, what it isn't—because like Marxism and postmodernism, a lot of right-wingers are against it without, it often seems, having much of a sense of what it actually is. To the extent that we can briefly summarize an entire academic sub-discipline, what is critical race theory?

Sam Hoadley-Brill: The term “critical race theory” was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. She is a law professor and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, which I currently work at. When she coined the term critical race theory or CRT as it's often referred to, that referred to a very niche at the time, intellectual movement in the legal academy in law schools and in works in law journals. It has since become influential in many other disciplines outside of law, disciplines in the humanities and social sciences like philosophy, education, sociology, and so on.

For a brief definition, I would say that critical race theory is a practice of examining the role of race and racism in society, the social construction of race and institutionalized racism, and how race intersects with identity, systems, and policies. Now, that seems like a very concise definition. Ironically, that definition actually comes from a proposed bill written by a Republican in Minnesota, to actually ban public schools from having any instruction required that related to critical race theory on that definition.

That proposal would've banned schools from requiring any instruction that examines the role of race and racism in society, the social construction of race, institutionalized racism, or how race intersects with identity, systems, and policies. Now, usually the people who are opposed to critical race theory aren't so accurate when defining it. That is a bit of an outlier in terms of the right-wing legislation proposed to ban critical race theory. The people who oppose CRT will usually define it by demonizing it, as you said, a lot like the right-wing proposed definitions of post-modernism and caricatures of Marxism.

CRT, the preferred way of demonizing it has typically been to connect it to Marxism. James Lindsay is one of the most prominent influencers in right-wing misinformation/disinformation about what critical race theory is and the moral panic. He wrote an entire book called Race Marxism that was supposed to reveal the hidden truth about critical race theory. Christopher Rufo is perhaps the most publicly prominent influencer in the “CRT moral panic”, and he has said many times that he takes most of his understanding of critical race theory from James Lindsay.

They both like to refer to it as either “race-based Marxism” or “race Marxism”, and in some cases, they refer to it as “state-sanctioned racism”. They argue that critical race theory sees all white people as oppressors and all people of color as victims and that critical race theory thinks white people should feel guilty or ashamed for being white. That kind of language has been very prominent in the bills going around red states that are supposed to ban critical race theory. They say that teachers cannot promote any material that says that any student should feel ashamed or any kind of psychological distress on account of their race.

That language actually comes originally from Donald Trump's executive order in September 2020, which was aimed at banning racial diversity training in federal government training and it targeted critical race theory by name. Of course, critical race theory does not actually say that all white people are oppressors, and that white children should feel guilty for their race. Ironically, it's pretty much the exact opposite. It's much more focused on institutions and the role that institutions and policies and social systems and structures have in upholding racism and very much not excessively concerned with the psychological life of the individual racist.

“Critical race theory does not actually say that all white people are oppressors, that white children should feel guilty for their race. Ironically, it's pretty much the exact opposite. It's much more focused on institutions and the role that institutions and policies and social systems and structures have in upholding racism and very much not excessively concerned with the psychological life of the individual racist.”

Aaron: That seems like a distinction worth taking a moment to dig into, because I think it is central to a lot of both the moral panic and the dishonesty that you see in the way that the right talks about this, but also a lot of the confusion that people who maybe aren't coming to it from a dishonest place, but are genuinely just confused about this. That's the nature of racism within this context. For example, systemic racism is something that gets talked about and as it's used by CRT scholars and people in adjacent fields. It seems to be fairly straightforward, but it does get at that difference between saying, "You specific person are a racist, whether knowingly or unknowingly,” or, “All whites are racists,” and institutions can be racist. Those mean different things. What is the difference in, I guess, the application of the term racism in those two contexts?

Sam: Yes, so this is of course a matter of debate in anti-racist scholarship, and not all critical race theorists agree and not all anti-racist scholars agree about how to define racism, how to define institutionalized racism. Systemic racism is one that started out with a pretty specific meaning proposed I believe by the sociologist Joe Feagin but has come to be used much more broadly, much like the term critical race theory itself, much like terms like intersectionality. These ideas can often take on a life of their own when they are divorced from the academic context in which they were originally proposed.

In terms of what I think—as a critical philosopher of race I would characterize myself, I've studied mostly the work of Charles Mills, who was a professor of mine. Very unfortunately passed away a little over a year ago now, but I think that his work is severely underappreciated and has very rich intellectual contributions to a lot of these kinds of debates. Pulling a passage from him here, this is from his book, Black Rights/White Wrongs, and he writes that:

"Racism has been given various competing definitions and attributed competing areas of application. I would distinguish between racism in the ideational sense, a complex of ideas, beliefs, values, and racism in the socio-institutional sense, institutions, practices, social systems.

For the first sense, the ideational sense, I would favor this definition. Racism is the belief that humanity can be divided into discrete races, and these races are hierarchically arranged with some races superior to others. The second sense, the socio-institutional sense would then refer to institutions, practices and social systems that illicitly privileged some races at the expense of others, where racial membership directly or indirectly explains this privileging."

I think that gets at the core issue pretty well. It helps us understand the key value of drawing a conceptual distinction between the racism that exists on an interpersonal level or even intrapersonal. Just some individual racists' beliefs about racial superiority and inferiority, and also the kinds of practices that can perpetuate racial inequality, even if there aren't necessarily any individual racists who are participating in them.

For instance, some policies like stop and frisk, or there are countless police examples to go on, or other things in terms of redlining and housing discrimination. The person who is discriminating against someone might not actually believe that races are inferior or superior, but the way that the practices are carried out can end up having the same effects as if those people did have those beliefs.

Aaron: I can imagine some of my friends on the right listening to this right now and saying, “Are you then saying that racism in this systemic institutional sense is always present whenever there are racially disparate outcomes? If so, does that basically mean that we have to assume that races, which often map onto ethnic groups or cultural groups for a variety of reasons, are in their behaviors, preferences, tastes, and so on, all identical?”

If it turns out that a certain group that happens to share a skin color, but also a culture has different outcomes than a different group with a skin color and a culture, that is evidence of racism as opposed to just any two groups are going to have differences between them that they're then going to manifest in outcomes, however, we measure those?

Sam: Great question. I actually think this is a good objection to certain brands of anti-racism. For instance—as far as I can tell—the anti-racism of a scholar like Ibram Kendi, I read his book How to Be an Antiracist in the summer of 2020, and I found it severely disappointing in terms of its relative status in that cultural moment. It was atop The New York Times bestsellers list. People were including it on all sorts of anti-racist reading lists. As far as I can tell, Kendi actually does believe that any racial disparity is always and only explained by racism.

It's actually a bit more accurate to put it as though racism just is the disparities between races and that any explanation must pretty much be mono-causal and cannot account for any other influences. Now, I think that's wrong. I gave a talk at the American Philosophical Association meeting in January 2021, where I delivered a critique of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi. Didn't have much time to go into detail, but the main objection that I gave to Kendi's theory was exactly the one you're opposing.

Where for instance, if we look at the undergraduate population of Ivy League schools and see how many students are Jewish, then we compare that to the number of Americans overall who are Jewish, number of Americans overall, something around 2%, the number of undergraduates at Ivy Leagues is something like 14%. According to Kendi's theory, which also goes into detail about what he calls “ethnic racism”, where he makes exactly the point you were challenging me with, which is he (Ibram Kendi) argues that actually any disparity between racialized ethnic groups—which Jews are probably the paramount example of a racialized ethnic group—that those disparities are explained by racism. That any policy that produces such disparities is a racist policy.

That to me sounds akin to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that actually led to implementing quotas on how many Jewish students could enroll at Ivy League universities earlier in the 20th century. I think that there's nothing in critical race theory that commits you to that position. Ibram Kendi himself has said that while he's inspired by critical race theorists, he doesn't consider himself to be one.

Aaron: I think that's an important point to make because it's frustrating how many people, they're like, "I don't like critical race theory and the only thing I've read is Kendi.”

Sam: Exactly, exactly.

Aaron: On the flip side of it then, or I guess not necessarily the flip side, but just from the other direction—one of the other criticisms that gets leveled against CRT, either as it actually exists or as it exists in the fever dreams of Glenn Beck and so on, is that it is fundamentally a form of “anti-white racism”. That whatever value these theories have or whatever their arguments, they're ultimately motivated by a hatred of white people or whiteness or a wanting to tear down the status of whites or whatever.

Tulsi Gabbard— it's hard to pull out a coherent ideology from what seems to be just like a grab bag of nonsense and conspiracy thinking on her part—listed anti-white racism that she said was endemic in the mainstream Democratic Party as a reason that she was leaving that party. Which is a little bit perplexing because I don't see a lot of anti-white racism from Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. What is the role of anti-white racism in all of this?

Sam: Anti-white racism is frequently invoked when it comes to any kind of “white backlash,” what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “white backlash.” Black intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King and beyond have pointed out this phenomenon in American politics that basically whenever there is substantive progress made for Black Americans especially, but also for people of color generally, whenever some progress is made, it is immediately responded to with an assertion of white supremacy.

When I say “white backlash”, I don't mean that every white person responds negatively. Of course, we know that most white people would declare themselves not racist. Maybe not most would say that they're “anti-racist,” although I think probably most would say that they're anti-racist, but that term has become toxic to some because of things like the CRT moral panic. We know that most white people in the US do not think of themselves as racist anymore. But when the status quo of white people being superior to Black people in the social and political realms is challenged, that is fought with, again, what King called a white backlash.

One of the most common ways that the fight begins is by asserting that progress for Black people is necessarily oppression of white people. That anti-racism, giving Black people rights must be taking away white people's rights. It's interesting how the politics of the Republican Party have shifted because when David Duke ran and won a seat in I believe the state senate of Louisiana, it was the state government of Louisiana in 1991— it was 1989, or 1991—he ran several times, but he ran as a Republican and he was elected as a Republican.

President George H. W. Bush got involved was like, “The Republican Party does not support this.” The fundamental talking points of David Duke, who at that time had abandoned the Klan imagery, he claimed to have denounced the Ku Klux Klan and he started his NAAWP, the National Association for Advancement of White People, but all of his rhetoric and talking points were about how affirmative action is racism toward white people, how any substantive program to give positive benefits to Black people was anti-white, fundamentally in its nature. The Republican Party then saw this as dangerous and that it had to be denounced.

Since the Republican Party has pretty much wholeheartedly endorsed this, that affirmative action that say if you have two equally qualified candidates for a job or a spot at a university and one is white, the other is Black, that you can take that into account—and give this token form of benefit to the Black person in that case, well, that's fundamentally anti-white. Critical race theory, many critical race theorists do support affirmative action. Not all do interestingly, especially because now the only kind of affirmative action that exists is that which uses diversity as its rationale.

Schools are not allowed to implement an affirmative action plan with reparations as rationale. The only rationale that's accepted by the Supreme Court is diversity and who knows how long it'll last, because I think affirmative action is on the docket in October. It's been very interesting to see the anti-CRT moral panic with especially people like Christopher Rufo taking up the exact talking points of people who just 30 years ago were seen as a threat to the image of the Republican Party, and now the talking points are fundamentally indistinguishable.

Aaron: Let's turn to that moral panic then, away from defining our terms and our disciplines to the contemporary scene. CRT's been around for decades as a somewhat obscure field of legal theory, certainly obscure by the standards of—most Americans were not aware of it and you don't get it—I went to law school and I don't remember being explicitly taught CRT stuff. I took a legal theory course. What's happening now? Why now is this the panic?

I guess one way to frame the question is there have always been moral panics on the right that are typically, “We just don't like that the social liberals are pushing a socially liberalizing agenda of acceptance for groups that we think should be less privileged or should be excluded, or should be discriminated against, or just run counter to socially conservative values.” There's always something that they point to. Sharia law was it for a while. That just basically meant anything that the people who give acceptance speeches that the Academy Awards would support was basically Sharia law, or it was post-modernism for a while, or it was Marxism for a while.

Is the CRT panic just the latest iteration of that, of grabbing a term that sounds scary to Middle Americans and saying all the stuff that we've always been against happens to be this thing? Or is there something deeper, particularly about—because Sharia law had a racial element because it was fear of Muslims, but it wasn't explicitly about race, neither was postmodernism, neither was Marxism, but this one is. Is there something else going on right now that racializes things?

Sam: That's a good question. I think that there are two things going on. One of them is the white backlash dynamic that I just referred to a bit ago. The other is the need for moral panics that do not necessarily need to be racialized, but need to be oriented around some sense of what it is to be an American, around American identity. This is important for the Republican Party because for a long time now, the Republican Party has been a very nationalist party. The Sharia law thing worked especially well I think in the aftermath of 9/11. You see Islam as a threat to American identity because you can point to the visceral image of the Twin Towers being assaulted by aircraft, and the people who died, and all of the sweeping policies that were enacted afterwards.

There needs to be some binding myth that brings people together that they can point to in the event that there are serious questions asked about, "Well, what does the Republican Party actually even stand for?" Because we know that the material economic policies that the Republican Party stands for are overwhelmingly unpopular. People are not very happy about more tax cuts for the rich and more taxes that they themselves have to pay. These things are not going to win elections so Republicans have to run on another platform.

They often do using bigoted social rhetoric that often falls under the label of culture wars, which I'm not—I didn't see a problem with it in the past, but the more I've come to think about that frame, culture wars, the more I've come to think that it's actually counterproductive and just cedes ground to the right, but that's another conversation entirely. Just before Fox News picked up critical race theory as the new moral panic, they were talking about Dr. Seuss' books being banned, banned as in they were out of print.

The truth doesn't matter in a moral panic, it's about taking some isolated event, ramping it up as—portraying it as a threat to civilization and self-identity, and everything that we've always cared about, our way of life, and that's what it did with critical race theory. Just before critical race theory, I can't remember whether it was before or after the Dr. Seuss panic, they were talking about Mr. Potato Head's gender being changed. Often these things are thrown at the wall—they throw whatever it is at the wall, and they see what sticks. Critical race theory stuck. I think that the main reason it stuck is going back to the other phenomenon, the white backlash.

This began really in 2020, where the first piece of official policy was Donald Trump's executive order targeting critical race theory by name. He called it a Marxist doctrine, he called it toxic, that it was poisoning the minds of American children. Why September 2020? Well, because after George Floyd was murdered by the police in May 2020, we witnessed the most massive and most racially diverse protest for racial justice in American history. For the first time, it seemed like it wasn't just a matter of mostly Black people fighting for their rights, but for a truly multiracial coalition that was going to strive towards a multiracial democracy.

In the ‘60s, those protests then were more diverse than the previous wave of protests that swept the nation, but nothing like the ones that we saw in 2020. This white backlash has to—there has to be one, the pendulum swings one way and it always swings back the other way. I think you can really see that backlash start to take root in for instance, Tucker Carlson's coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests that summer. He started to break records of how many sets of eyeballs were glued to him as he demonized Black people fighting for their rights and against police brutality.

He was saying that they were “coming for you”. We know Fox's broadcast, I think their viewership is something like 96% white, so the context is very implicit throughout all that. Then, I think the first big moment of self-assertion of the white backlash on a large scale was Jan. 6th, 2021. There was research by the political scientist Robert Pape, who found that what all of these insurrectionists had in common wasn't that they all came from red states or anything like that, but what was true was that they all came from places where non-white populations were growing fastest.

There are many other things going on at the same time. Of course, you can't reduce it to any one cause, but I think that the unification of the white backlash and your typical Republican-pushed Fox News, right-wing media-pushed moral panic converged and found very fertile ground in 2021, especially.

Aaron: I wonder too, if there's just—I think one of the things that we often forget is how the height of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement and the really ugly open racism throughout, particularly American South was not that long ago. Martin Luther King's, his “I have a dream” speech was 59 years ago I think. There are people alive today who were teenagers at a time when really virulent open racism was the norm in their communities and people don't change that rapidly. I think the same thing goes on with acceptance of gays and lesbians. I was a teenager in the ‘90s and it's shocking looking back at how homophobic mass media was when I was in high school.

You mentioned Tucker Carlson. The average age of a Tucker Carlson viewer or of a Fox News viewer is well north of 60, I believe. How much of this is just people who grew up in a time when it was much more acceptable to be racist, when those hierarchies of races, the sense of the hierarchy of races was much more ingrained? They look around and they see protests, even if they're mostly peaceful, you can find examples of the violence and then Tucker can highlight those. They just view it as, “These people who I am convinced are somewhat violent by nature anyway, and used to be in their place, are now rising up in this violent way and that's terrifying to me.”

It does seem like then the Republican Party and Trump and Chris Rufo and the whole grifting class have just latched on to those—what I think are the racism defined two ways that we talked about earlier. This is actual racism, the racism of beliefs and assessments of people as individuals and as members of categories. It shouldn't shock us, but it is shocking just how openly racist a lot of the rhetoric is.

Sam: Yes. I think there's another quote from Martin Luther King that I like to use to illustrate critical race theory when people ask me more about the details of critical race theory. Well, they say, "I get that it's examining the relationship between race and law and power in American society but what do you critical race theorists actually believe?" When I do get into those conversations, I like to throw at them quotes from Martin Luther King that they have likely never heard of. So many Americans just have this extraordinarily impoverished conception of who Martin Luther King was, what he believed about racism in the US, and how to fight it. They think that he advocated for colorblindness in the sense of having completely race-neutral policies and that that would somehow—

Aaron: But there's that one line. It's the only line anyone knows from anything he ever said.

Sam: Exactly. Even that line, when you examine it just a little more closely doesn't support what they usually take it to support. Because what he (MLK) says is that he has a “dream that one day his children will be able to hold hands with white children and that people will be judged not for the color of their skin, but for the content of their character.” As far as I can tell, no critical race theorist disagrees with him that that is a worthy goal. Except for the virulent racists of the world, we all want to live in a world where racism is no longer an issue.

You cannot extract from that quote the idea that the means to such an end is to pretend that race has no relevance and should not be accounted for when it comes to society. There are quotes where he quite explicitly says that America has done something special against Black people for so long and so to bring them back up, they need to do something special for them. That's quite explicitly advocating for race-conscious reparations policies. The quote that I was thinking of specifically in terms of, I was reminded of it by what you were just saying about we have to remember this wasn't that long ago that dogs were sicced on racial justice civil rights protesters, that people were jailed for these things, that John Lewis’ head was beaten in for peacefully protesting by police officers in the South. All of these things were not that long ago.

One of the key insights of critical race theory is that racism is not an aberration in America. Racism happens all the time. This is something that's explicitly been banned in Texas and in Florida. There's legislation that prohibits teachers from describing racism and slavery as anything other than aberrations or deviations from the core founding principles of America. That ideology is something that they want their children to learn. That actually, America has always been the “land of the free, home of the brave” and “with liberty and justice for all”. Of course, anyone who has pretty much any understanding of American history, as it relates to ideas about race, knows that for quite a long time, white supremacy was enshrined explicitly into law.

Anyways, the King quote is, and this is something you could read—it sounds exactly like something you would read from a critical race theorist today: "For the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country even today is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists." The opposite of that is pretty much exactly what Republicans are fighting to put into the heads of young children who are going to school in the coming generation.

Aaron: Let's talk a bit about what it is that they're objecting to being taught because we are seeing these anti-CRT bills being passed. The real focal point of a lot of their moral panic is the schools. The worst outbursts always show up at the school board meetings that get filmed and shared. We talked about what CRT is, but a lot of what they're objecting to being taught is not actually the weird little sub-discipline of critical race theory. I want to mention something that you said on Twitter a while back, and I'll put a link in the show notes, but I encourage listeners to follow you on Twitter because I think you use the medium well and—

Sam: Well, thank you.

Aaron: —a lot of us would crack that the Republicans are upset that CRT is being taught in our elementary schools, but no elementary school is teaching Kimberlé Crenshaw. I have made that remark in the past and you—

Sam: And so have I.

Aaron: —pushed back. You've pushed back on that in a way that really stuck with me saying that to make that argument cedes ground because that's not what this is really about, and that's not what the “don't teach this stuff in the schools” case made by the right is about. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Sam: Sure. There are a few reasons that I think that this is counterproductive, although I have sympathy for people who say it. I was one of these people myself at the very beginning of this whole moral panic before I think I even really registered it as a moral panic. I thought what was going on was that people had legitimate issues with the ideas that were properly known as “critical race theory” and that they wanted to have a public debate about critical race theory. It has come to my attention and hopefully everyone else's attention, people, at least anyone who thinks of themselves as moderately well-informed on this issue that these people are not interested.

The anti-CRT crowd, the people pushing the moral panic, are not interested in having a debate about the pros and cons of the scholarship of critical race theory. One key tweet or pair of tweets in helping me realize this comes from Christopher Rufo himself. He has this habit of tweeting as though he's a cartoon villain announcing his evil plans to the public. In March 2021, Rufo wrote:

"We have successfully frozen their brand, critical race theory, into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. 

The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans".

This is a very shameless announcement, almost a proud announcement of what the strategy is for right-wing influencers like Chris Rufo. James Lindsay is, I think, his chief—it's almost wrong to call him a sidekick because, in many ways, James is the master behind the curtain who is pulling certain strings because of how much Chris Rufo has learned from James Lindsay. 

It's clear it's about branding. When anyone who has an issue with critical race theory says, "We don't want critical race theory taught in our schools," if you respond to them by saying, "Critical race theory is not actually being taught in our schools," there are a couple of problems with that response. First of all, what they mean by critical race theory is likely not the same thing as what you mean by critical race theory, because when you say that critical race theory is not being taught in schools, that's only true if you have in mind the very narrow conception of what critical race theory is. It's this academic construct. It doesn't influence K through 12 curricula, et cetera. What they mean is obviously not that.

One, it creates an issue of talking past one another. Two, it just feeds the right-wing narrative that the left liberals, the Democratic Party, however they characterize us, that we are out-of-touch elites who don't care about the concerns of average, ordinary, every day, working Americans. Because if we say, "Guys, critical race theory is not actually taught in schools," we sound like we're self-congratulatory because we know this thing about an academic elite concept that other people don't know about.

Those are a few of the reasons. Another one is just saying—if you respond to someone who says, "We don't want critical race theory in schools," by saying, "Well, don't freak out, it's not in schools." That implies critical race theory is bad, and it makes sense for you to not want it in schools, because if somebody said they're teaching algebra in schools, and we said, "No, they're not teaching algebra in schools, why are you freaking out?" Obviously, you can see that that's strange, because the appropriate response is, "What's wrong with teaching algebra in schools? Don't you want your kids to know algebra? Don't you want students who can do advanced mathematics?"

Similarly, we should want critical race theory in schools insofar as the core ideas are packaged in ways that can be understood by students at whatever age or grade level they're being taught. Critical race theory, the core insights are just that, "Look, passing the Civil Rights Acts and the landmark legislation, things like the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, these were important steps in the fight for racial justice. We cannot say that because our laws are now colorblind or race-neutral on paper, that has eliminated systemic racism or institutionalized racism in the US. There's a lot more that we have to look at."

Responding, "Critical race theory is not being taught," for many reasons, I find, is not the right response.

Aaron: It's interesting and discouraging just how much of this is—read the tweets from Rufo—is explicitly a con upon the people that they are riling up. They are open about lying to their audience in order to get them upset and then to motivate them in directions that Rufo and his compatriots want. You have, and I’ll link to it, a long article you wrote going through just how much Chris Rufo dissembles or misrepresents or outright lies in the stuff that he's doing, and he's open about it. It reminds me—that seems like there's been a general shift on the right in being more open about approaching politics in this direction.

For example, Sohrab Ahmari, in his famous 'Against David French-ism' article in First Things, I think it was back in May of 2019, which was—that was the essay about “Drag Queen Story Hour”, for listeners who aren't familiar with it. He says—and this sounds very much like what you just were describing Rufo saying—he says, "Progressives understand the culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values." It's a very Carl Schmitt view of politics as simply war and rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies.

This is just out in the open, and that it's out in the open, and that this is what the right is doing is one thing, but what's really distressing about this is how many people don't seem to recognize that that's what's happening and just take at face value, people like James Lindsay. I know a lot of very smart people in my libertarian circles who were reading Lindsay's books as a way to understand this stuff, and understand critical theory in general, which was very discouraging because he was obviously just a deranged grifter. Accepting Chris Rufo, accepting Sohrab Ahmari, and it feels like those people ought to—if nothing else, they ought to be angry that they're being used so transparently.

Sam: Yes, I totally agree. This is something I've found comes up again and again as I've paid attention to what Rufo is doing and how explicit he is. I get this persistent sense that Rufo just has absolutely no respect for the intelligence of his audience, that he will openly lie to them, but it's okay as long as he tells them that he's going to be lying to them or something to that effect. I think that I've come to think about it a little bit differently. I see it as something that I think is key to fascist politics, which is this sense of willful—this willingness to participate in lies to defame the enemy because it brings you together and reaffirms your status as a member of the in-group and one of the good people.

Because anything, as you said with Carl Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, anything is justified to defeat the enemy. It's not about any commitment to abstract principles or respect for civil debate or anything like that. (Chris) Rufo himself has come out as saying that he doesn't believe in anything like academic freedom, that it's a myth. That if in Florida, if the legislature has the votes to ban academics from studying racial inequality, then it's not a violation of academic freedom to pass a law that would prevent professors from doing that. Because the universities are funded by taxpayer dollars, and the taxpayers, through their representatives, have every right to abolish the study of those things if they want to.

I think one of the most illuminating instances of Rufo coming out into the open and explaining just how much he doesn't care about telling the truth when it comes to his enemies comes when he did a thread about the language he recommends people use when talking about drag queens. So, relevant to the Sohrab Ahmari piece. This is especially worrying to me because, as you said earlier in your time in the '90s, mainstream American culture was vastly more homophobic. I've witnessed a pretty massive change over the course of my lifetime in how tolerant people are of LGBTQ identities. It's something I experienced a bit more firsthand because I have two moms, they're lesbian.

I remember in middle school when California, one of the most progressive states on this thing, in 2008 passed Proposition 8, which made it illegal for gay couples to be married. I remember having people I was friends with at school, I brought it up to them and I was like, "Isn't this messed up?" People that I was close friends with saying, actually, "I'm pretty sure that being gay is a sin, like your moms might be going to hell," this sort of stuff. It was a lot more common back then and I thought, just up until pretty much this past year, that we had made progress that I naively saw as pretty set in stone. The critical race theory panic paved the way for the grooming panic, and all of these issues about forbidden material in schools, explicit material in schools very much set the stage. The CRT panic set the stage for the issue to shift to teaching about LGBTQ issues in schools, and the presence of any transgender persons whatsoever is seen as a threat to children's innocence.

That's another thing that connects the two issues, is there's this overwhelming concern for the innocence of white children in the CRT case and what is seen as straight-by-default children in the grooming case, and cisgender children in the grooming case. What Rufo said about the language in June of this year, he wrote, "Conservatives should start using the phrase “trans stripper” in lieu of “drag queen.” It has a more lurid set of connotations and shifts the debate to sexualization. “Drag queens in schools”, invites a debate. “Trans strippers in schools”, anchors an unstoppable argument." Then he says, "Let the left try to nitpick the phrase: We can say that “trans” is a stand-in for “transvestite”.” Which is a term that literally means cross-dresser, someone who dresses the opposite of their gender or sex.

He says, "We can show videos that are undeniably strip shows." He says, "The “blackface for women” argument is the wrong approach because it adopts the frame of the left, which traps conservatives in their identity games," which I thought was very amusing that he's arguing that people shouldn't characterize drag queens as doing “blackface for women” because they shouldn't argue that blackface is bad. Then he says, "Saying it's “blackface for women” misses the main problem, which is the grotesque sexualization of children," right back to the innocence issue.

Then he says, "Trans strippers in schools is a powerful frame to this debate. If the left chooses to engage in language games on that phrase, they will find themselves defending concepts and words that are deeply disturbing to most people. Let them get stuck in the linguistic mud." Andrew Sullivan, who is usually team anti-woke, took issue with what Rufo said here. He said, "Chris Rufo says that British parents who take their kids to pantomimes, where a drag queen is always one of the stars, are taking their kids to see trans strippers. The post-truth right has truly arrived."

Rufo's response is, "We shouldn't use euphemisms. This is a male-to-female transvestite strip show with children in attendance," taking one of those videos where children are present at a drag queen event that involves some stripping, and that one event serves to solidify his entire linguistic manipulation. Again, as you said, it's very concerning that people don't seem to care. The only way I can explain it now is that they actually enjoy participating in this defamation of their opponents.

Aaron: Then, to close out our conversation, what can we, as people who are very much worried about this direction that things are taking, what can we do about it? Particularly given—several episodes ago on this show I had on Matt McManus to talk about the post-modern right and the way that the right, which is very much what you were just describing, has embraced this post-modern approach to truth, that it's all narrative. We can manipulate the narrative. There's no point in trying to tie it to underlying principles or really much of anything. Consistency doesn't matter in this view and so on.

What do we do about that? Because it seems like arguing against it just traps us in either normalizing some of these views by taking them seriously in the same way that you don't necessarily debate the Young Earth creationists, or it enables them to play the sorts of games that you just described Rufo articulating. How do we push back on something that is both so corrosive and immoral from a social standpoint, but also so detached from basic principles of argumentation and what we took to be healthy political discourse?

Sam: A lot of people who are more involved than I am—I consider myself, I would deeply identify with the label 'anti-fascist', but I have not participated in Antifa protests myself. I have spoken with people who are more involved in countering fascistic political movements and things like right-wing militias and all those groups. They often say that you cannot out-debate fascism. You can only smash fascism. Now, some people hear that and they think, "Okay, we should go, murder Nazis and those sorts of things." Now, that's not what I'm saying. I don't think that—at least now, I think for instance, if we were in another situation and there was a World War and there was Nazi Germany again, do I think that we should not intervene? That's not what I'm saying.

I think that there is a time and place for warfare and it's not to start wars, but to respond and to intervene when that's required for saving the lives of innocent people. In terms of domestic issues, I do think it's true that you can't out-debate a fascist. I think that, depending on the context, it could be worthwhile to debate specific fascists. For instance, I would be confident in my ability to debate someone like Chris Rufo, and I have invited him to do so multiple times, and he has blocked me on Twitter. If anybody shares my article going into detail about how often he lies in his reporting on so-called critical race theory in schools, he'll block you too if you put it in his mentions. It's very important to him to preserve the epistemic bubble, the echo chamber that he has.

I think that one of the ways in which ordinary people can get bogged down is to hyper-focus on debunkings of specific claims. If you focus always on debunking specific claims, you'll never finish because there will always be more claims that you have to debunk. Every time you debunk one claim about, say, a right-wing media story that has been proven to be based on false premises or bad reporting or whatever, there'll always be another one that someone can refer to. That will never change their mind. It's very tempting to get caught up in the game of just refuting all these individual cases.

What I think is much more powerful is to construct—to be able to tell a story about what the right is doing, to be able to weave, to be able to connect the dots for people on things that they might not have thought about themselves, to be able to connect tax breaks for the uber-rich with the kinds of policies that are dominating Republican platforms so that the debate isn't focused on how unpopular their economic proposals are.

They have to keep us fighting about critical race theory in schools, about grooming in schools so that the topic of debate isn't the fact that the right is absolutely opposed to improving healthcare for ordinary working-class Americans, that they're actually opposed to the institution of public education itself. Part of the—some of the—I would argue probably the primary long-term goal of both of the “critical race theory in schools” moral panics and “grooming in schools” moral panic, those are both about privatizing public education, which itself is not a popular policy for most Americans.

Most Americans do want it to be the case that they can send their children to a school where they can get a quality education and not have to pay any money on top of the taxes that they're already paying. But because it's not popular to say that “We want to privatize public education”, as Rufo put it himself, they have to operate from “a premise of universal public school distrust to get to universal school choice.” I think what we have to be able to do is to point out to people how they're being deceived, because I think for a lot of liberals, there is a temptation to buy into these moral panics, right? They're moral panics for a reason. People are panicking about these things because if they were true as they're being presented, they would be incredibly worthy of panic, right?

If it were true that at schools across the United States, all the white children were being told that they're oppressors and that they should be ashamed of themselves, that'd be a pretty bad thing. If it were true that teachers were actually grooming students sexually to be exploited later on, that would be heinous. That would be a crime of massive proportions, right? The temptation for these people is always going to be there. The way to debunk the myth is not to constantly refute individual cases, but to be able to tell a story that connects the dots for people as to why they are being manipulated in the ways that they are.

I think that is the only way that we will really be able to defeat this on a democratic level. There have to be people reaching out to the people that they're close with in real life. There are going to be a lot of uncomfortable conversations with people. One of the main reasons the CRT issue has taken hold so strongly, I think, is that a lot of white people, but also people of other races do not want to have uncomfortable conversations with maybe older members of their family for fear of not wanting to point out that something that they said is racist or that actually, we don't use that kind of outdated terminology anymore or any of those things.

A lot of one-on-one conversations are going to happen, but I think a lot of the responsibility resides with people much higher up than ourselves in media institutions. I think there's a huge danger of prioritizing profit over the stability of a democratic republic. If there are many more stories that can be pumped out, and whatever gets the most clicks, if that is always going to determine what stories are told, then we might be doomed, but I don't think that we are doomed yet. I think that there's a huge responsibility on the people in the media to be able to connect these dots for people in a way that is digestible and in a way that can get across to people without them having to read a six-volume study. I'm not extraordinarily hopeful, but I am not totally in despair either.

Aaron: Thank you for listening to ReImagining Liberty. This show is listener-supported. If you'd like to become a member, gain access to our discord community and listen to every new episode two weeks before its public release, look for the link in the show notes or head to reimaginingliberty.com/subscribe.

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The UnPopulist invites interesting thinkers from across the political spectrum to foster a wide-ranging and thoughtful conversation in defense of liberalism, including those it may—or may not—agree with.