After generations of school-borne, anti-American propaganda and the degrading of our culture, only 36 percent of young people now say they’re proud to be American. But the Biden administration apparently believes this number is still too high and wants to lower it further.
This could be the takeaway after White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated, in so many words, that Joe Biden supports the teaching of toxic, anti-white Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools. The Daily Mail summarizes the story, writing:
- White House press secretary Jen Psaki said President Joe Biden believes children need to learn about the country’s ‘challenging’ history
- She was asked at Friday’s press briefing about the president’s views on critical race theory being taught in school
- Psaki pointed to the ‘many dark moments’ in U.S. history, adding ‘here is systemic racism that is still impacting society today’
- ‘And he believes, as I believe as a parent of children, that kids should learn about our history,’ she continued
Now, it should again be emphasized that Biden doesn’t “believe” much of anything in any enduring, principled sense; he has dementia and likely doesn’t even know what CRT is. Jen Psaki is a paid prevaricator and marketer of moral mayhem, doing the bidding of whoever is really pulling the strings.
Indirectly, one puppeteer is Big (Mis)Education, a huge Democrat donor that’s all in on CRT. The Mail writes, for example, that “on Tuesday, the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s largeset [sic] teachers unions[,] pledged to defend members who are punished for teaching an ‘honest history’ of the United States.” Pro tip: They really mean a “dishonest history” of the United States.
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The paper also quotes National Education Association president Becky Pringle as stating at the union’s national meeting last week that if “this grand experiment in democracy is to succeed, if the inhabitants of our nation are to prosper, we must continuously do the work to challenge ourselves and others to dismantle the racist interconnected systems, and the economic injustices that have perpetuated systemic inequities.”
Now, some would call this a rationalization. The more suspicious and blunt might say it’s a lie. The truth is that if our republic to succeed, children must be taught that it’s something worth preserving. If they believe it’s a misbegotten entity that needs to be rent root and branch, well, that’s exactly what they’ll support (ergo, the takedown of our culture, history, and statues — our Year Zero).
Of course, as Town Hall’s Larry O’Connor points out, Right and Left must agree that CRT is problematic and doesn’t belong in schools (sarcasm alert) because leftists swear up and down that it isn’t in schools. Yes, and the military would never accept during a campaign innocent civilian causalities — just collateral damage.
Whatever you call it — and perhaps Anti-American Race(to the bottom)Theory is a better name — CRT’s principles have permeated not just education, but American society far and wide. In a nutshell, it holds that civilization is divided into the oppressed and oppressors (i.e., white people) and that “whiteness” (a euphemism for white people) must be “dismantled”; and it handicaps black and Hispanic children by telling them that success-breeding habits (virtues and their byproducts, such as diligence, industriousness, and punctuality) are “white norms.” It’s divisive, toxic, and evil.
But the following tweet, courtesy of O’Connor, provides a good example of how CRT is “not in schools” (sarcasm alert #2).
Yet perhaps more important here than the above facts, which Psaki omits, is the fallacy she espouses. When saying our “kids should learn about our history,” of what “history” does she speak?
Innumerable things happened in American history, and since teaching them all is impossible, we must necessarily cherry-pick a small percentage of them for curricula. What should be chosen?
Psaki & Co. claim to believe we should teach “challenging” history because America has had “many dark moments.” But what country hasn’t had “many dark moments”? Unless a nation’s location is Heaven and it’s run by angels, applicable is Romans’ instruction that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Yet other countries — including Japan, Russia, and China — manage to give their kids a positive view of their history and instill national pride.
Any psychologist worth his salt (all six of them) will tell you that remembering the past is one thing; wallowing in it to the point where you create psychological distress and the past wrongly warps the present is quite another. But taking this down to the personal level is illustrative.
As most know, young children at some point want to hear about their parents’ history. So they may be told how daddy and mommy met, what colleges they attended, what awards they won, and what accomplishments they have. But since looking for the worst in someone ensures you’ll find it, to paraphrase Lincoln, parents also often have “challenging” history inclusive of “many dark moments.” Should they feel compelled to relate them, largely to the exclusion of their good points, to an 11-year-old?
Even if she has repented of past mistakes, should a mother relate in-depth to a young child her one-night stands, recreational drug use, and other reputation-besmirching iniquities?
Since Jen Psaki actually has two young children — and likely her share of past “dark moments” — some could be tempted to give her an object lesson in this “challenging history” folly. But even if I knew her past sins, and despite disliking her, I wouldn’t ever relate them to her young kids. This is for a simple reason:
It would hurt them.
That’s the point, too. Robbing children of respect for their national family hurts them, making them angry, unappreciative, rootless people. The purpose of teaching young kids history is to instill them with an understanding of, appreciation for, and love of their nation. If there is a time to teach “challenging” history, it’s when young people are mature and have well-formed moral compasses — the undergraduate or maybe even graduate level — and, even then, it should be framed properly.
Of course, another reason many young people think America is so rotten it shouldn’t be preserved goes back to Marxist agitator Willi Münzenberg, who reportedly said, “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks.” Though Münzenberg might or might not have actually said this, it’s now largely a fait accompli — a challenging present with increasing dark moments brought to us by the people who bloviate about a challenging past they don’t even understand.
