Trump Confronts Critical Race, but a Long Campaign Awaits

Little noticed on the list of President Donald Trump’s second term agenda items was a line about teaching American exceptionalism. This was an important step, long overdue. Merely blocking federal funds from going to educational programs that essentially teach the Howard Zinn Hoax View of history is important, no doubt.

But as with most things these days, while direction and trends are important, they are only that. President Trump has stopped the boat from taking on more water. How he bails it out is an entirely different matter.

Today’s universities and even high schools (and probably even elementary schools) are top-heavy with America haters. These statistics have long been known. In the late 1980s, a conservative think tank sponsored a survey of a dozen universities, ranging from Ivy League to state universities to small liberal arts colleges. They found that in political science/government, history, and other departments, the registration of Democrats to Republicans was on the order of 10:1.

At the time, I taught at a supposedly moderate Midwest Catholic university. There, in my own history department, I was the only registered republican out of a faculty of 20. Later on, we brought on one other after hiring a few more liberals. Surprisingly, some of the Ivy League schools had better ratios than some of the large state universities. At the University of Colorado, for example, across several departments, the ratio was about 100:2.

It is absolutely true that if you expand your parameters in such searches to include the schools of engineering and business, the numbers will change substantially. Some engineering/business schools are even a majority of conservatives of various stripes, if not liberals. Again, my own school proudly boasted after the 1992 election that the faculty had broken 50/50. There is only one problem: all students are required to take certain liberal arts/social science courses including history, English, political science, sociology, or some mixture thereof. At my college, there was a “western civilization” (before the name was changed) requirement for all freshmen. But only a small percentage of students overall go into business or engineering. All are exposed to blatant leftism in the liberal arts courses, few are exposed to a more rational view of life in other schools. And to be fair, most business or engineering professors are not pontificating most of the time on current events as do liberal arts instructors.

So here is President Trump’s problem: even a mandate to teach American Exceptionalism would flounder because the teachers who would be in charge of teaching it are far lefties. I saw this in the state of Arizona when a mandated high school course in “free enterprise” was established. Those who received the duty of teaching this course were anything but friendly to free enterprise. The result was a course in “here’s why free enterprise sucks.”

As of today, virtually any history professor or high school teacher forced by law to teach American exceptionalism (if they even knew what it was) would teach it from a negative perspective. This is the battle the second term Trump administration faces.

One solution is to design the course in such a way that it can only be taught by officially sanctioned instructors. While this will smack of way too much government interference to some, it is, unfortunately, the only way to take back this subject and some of the classrooms. For example, the administration could require a certificate from an approved program in American Exceptionalism and design such programs with colleges such as Liberty University, Grove City College, Hillsdale College, and Ottawa University in mind. There could be assurances from such certified schools of exactly what outcomes were desired, and therefore shape who the instructors were. Again, government overreach but we are way beyond the “small government” debate now.

While this wouldn’t be perfect, it would go a long way to ensuring that all schools have at least one voice on campus who knows, understands, and likely loves American Exceptionalism. Of course, the on-campus fallout and discrimination would be tough, both in terms of pay increases and assignments/perks. But it could be done. Whatever the administration’s direction is on this, however, realize that Trump has only just fired the opening salvos, not the final shots in this war. Personnel still is policy, and until the people in these programs are turned around, it will be a guerilla war, even with the law on our side.

Trump has carried this elimination of anti-Americanism to a second front: President Trump has ordered federal agencies to cease providing any race-related “training” (i.e., “hate white”) sessions. The Bureau of Management and the Budget last week sent a memo saying that the expenditure of millions of taxpayer dollars for anti-American propaganda will end. Thank God.

This officially ends any training on “white privilege” or so-called “critical race theory” arguing that it “engender[s] division and resentment” and undermines America’s core values. Amen to that.

There is no basis in history or reason for such nonsensical self-immolation. But this toxic self-hate must be eliminated at all elements of the government and all contractors associated with it. Earlier this month at Sandia National Laboratories, part of the National Nuclear Security Administration was hit with a whistleblower complaint that it forced white male executives to attend anti-white training sessions. An electrical engineer at Sandia, Casey Peterson made a YouTube video challenging the “narrative of modern systemic racism and white privilege,” and unleashed a firestorm, both against himself and against Sandia. But Senator Josh Hawley and Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette both launched investigations. This will not end well for Sandia.

Larry Schweikart is the co-author with Michael Allen of the New York Times #1 bestseller, A Patriot’s History of the United States, author of Reagan: The American President, and founder of the Wild World of History curriculum website with full US and World history courses for grades 9-12 that include teacher guides, student workbooks, tests/answer keys, images/maps/graphs, and video lessons for all units (www.wildworldofhistory.com).

The Bureau of Management and the Budget last week sent a memo saying that the expenditure of millions of taxpayer dollars for anti-American propaganda will end. Thank God.

It is well that you credit both Trump's Bureau of Management and Budget as well as The Almighty for this welcome development. However, I believe a fundamental cure of this potentially mortal infection of our ability to think and reason will require more than addressing this particular symptom.

The problem of Critical Race Theory is that it is an assault on our very epistemology. It has thoroughly distorted the way we see and understand the world. It has substituted a catalog of false shibboleths for science or even for reason which inevitably leads to the dystopian situation infecting our universities, our corporations, our politics, our law enforcement, our public speech and, certainly, our culture. At root it is a soul sickness of philosophy.

If politics is downstream from culture then culture is certainly downstream from philosophy, especially philosophy cranked out in our modern universities. This relatively new pernicious philosophy, often labeled "postmodernism," explicitly abandons the age of reason so painfully accumulated over millennia from Greece to the Enlightenment and which found the acme of expression in our national birth.

The new philosophy holds that all human interaction is striving and exploitive. In this Hobbesian environment the individual's subjective experience is to be seen as his participation in his group identity. His group identity is determined by his color, his genitalia, whom he sleeps with etc (oops, I meant her, or it, or whatever, as well as his-forgive my lapse into white-gender privilege).

That identification determines right from wrong. Therefore, the idea of a shooting by a police officer of a citizen has nothing to do with the facts of the encounter and everything to do-and only to do-with the color of the skin of the police officer and the "victim." If the victim is white, the encounter is to be held to be of no consequence. If the victim is black and the police officer is white, guilt is certain.

In a stroke the painstakingly accrued concept of due process is summarily dismissed from our thinking and from our law while a rank kind of mindless racial prejudice is substituted. Logic has no place in this jurisprudence. Hence it is possible to continue to believe that "hands up don't shoot" is historically true because actual facts are irrelevant, only color of skin is relevant.

This Weltanshauung tells us that riots are "peaceful demonstrations" and that criminal acts are justified when the issue is white privilege. By the application of this perverse doctrine, the rule of law is lost along with the control of our streets and jurisprudence on the streets as well as in the Supreme Court is turned over to race theory.

Unfortunately, the application of this principle to episodes involving police on our streets is but an illustration of the pernicious doctrine. The doctrine has application in our universities in which admissions policies have discarded merit for race or gender considerations. Perhaps even worse, those courses with the suffix "studies" are rife in our universities and they have utterly abandoned reason for the shibboleths of that particular study.

Critical theory has many pernicious tentacles reaching deep into our economy. The abdication of merit means that corporations must hire and promote based on race and render their eleemosynary contributions to extortionate race hustlers. As merit is discarded, so ultimately is decency.

As providential as is the President's executive order ending this madness so far as he can within the confines of his federal administration, these illustrations tell us that we are playing whack a mole.

Instead we must discredit utterly the underlying philosophy which animates all of this pernicious activity now besetting us and, indeed, threatening our civil society at its core. We cannot hope to rewrite Howard Zinn's misguided history unless we change the assumptions which make his conclusions seem quite reasonable. We must raise our sights from treating symptoms and move against an anti-Christian, anti-western, anti-reason, anti-Enlightenment soul killing virus until it becomes as generally repugnant as the philosophy of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi party.

With one breath we must uphold our cherished values and with the next we must ridicule the whole postmodern edifice to render it not just repugnant but too embarrassing to be spoken out loud.

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