President Trump was grilled during his first debate with Joe Biden over his war against critical race theory training. Moderator Chris Wallace framed it as “racial sensitivity training” when he asked Trump why he banned the left-wing indoctrination in federal agencies.
Trump rightly called the training racist, un-American, and a “radical revolution.” He did, however, fail to specify who the training is racist towards. (Pssst… it’s white people.) “We have to go back to the core values of this country. They were teaching people that our country is a horrible place, it’s a racist place, and they were teaching people to hate our country, and I’m not gonna allow that,” Trump said.
Former Vice President Joe Biden replied “no one is doing that” and then proceeded to call Trump a “racist.” He also bizarrely claimed the president looks down on “Irish Catholics like me.” In his old age, Biden must’ve mistaken Trump for Bill the Butcher—the president is far from a Know-Nothing.
The media, of course, reacted with outrage at Trump’s response. One Washington Post op-ed argued that the president’s efforts against critical race theory are “operationalize[d] white supremacy.” Other commentators followed Wallace’s framing and assumed the training just teaches co-workers to not use racial slurs.
Christoper Rufo, who’s done incredible work exposing CRT training, does a good job of explaining the basics of this pernicious phenomenon and why Americans should care about it. “To any fair-minded observer, these are not ‘racial sensitivity trainings,’ as Mr. Wallace described them at the debate,” he writes in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “They are political indoctrination sessions. While this misrepresentation is a disappointment, it isn’t a surprise. Progressive activists and their media enablers routinely manipulate words to conceal the truth: Violent riots have become ‘mostly peaceful protests’ and ‘defund the police’ has become ‘reimagine public safety.’”
CRT is not a minor issue. It’s not just a boring training session workers sit through and forget about afterward. It infects corporate HR departments and dominates college campuses. To see it in its full hideous state, one should look at the insane story of a college professor forced to apologize for wanting football to return.
“I am sorry for the hurt, sadness, frustration, fatigue, exhaustion and pain this article has caused anyone, but specifically Black students in the higher education community and beyond,” wrote Ohio State professor Matthew Mayhew in his groveling apology published last month. Mayhew composed the most pathetic apology in human history in response to his op-ed making anodyne arguments for the return of college football. He said the sport can restore America’s morale and show the country is returning to normal.
According to his detractors, however, that argument is extremely racist and gravely harms the black community. Mayhew capitulated to his detractors, a strong indicator of how much sway radical race theories have over college campuses.
Mayhew’s apology, by the way, gets worse the longer it goes on.
“I am just beginning to understand how I have harmed communities of color with my words,” he writes cringingly. “I am learning that my words—my uninformed, careless words—often express an ideology wrought in whiteness and privilege. I am learning that my commitment to diversity has been performative, ignoring the pain the Black community and other communities of color have endured in this country. I am learning that I am not as knowledgeable as I thought I was, not as antiracist as I thought I was, not as careful as I thought I was. For all of these, I sincerely apologize.”
He also talked about all the tears he shed for saying college football is good: “I know it’s not anyone’s job to forgive me, but I ask for it—another burden of a white person haunted by his ignorance. To consider the possible hurt I have played a role in, the scores of others whose pain I didn’t fully see, aches inside me—a feeling different and deeper than the tears and emotions I’ve experienced being caught in an ignorant racist moment.”
Don’t read the whole thing. It’s not good to witness a man’s public humiliation to appease bad people. The Inquisition would have blanched at such capitulation. The main takeaway is Mayhew agreed to do more to “unlearn” racism and listen to people lecture him about his evil whiteness and systemic racism.
The apology letter is the logical and pathetic endpoint for critical race theory training. White people cannot express basic opinions without the fear of being labeled racist. Any opinion of theirs can be counted as “harmful” to people of color and may require this kind of complete groveling if they want to keep their jobs, their public respectability, or even access to their bank accounts. Thanks to these insane ideas, Professor Mayhew must accept he’s an inferior being and must mentally geld himself just because he’s white.
That sounds awfully like how Trump described this heinous practice.
Unfortunately, college campuses are now fiercely engaged in multiplying efforts to enforce this sick mentality. Just this week, Central Michigan University President Bob Davies announced he would work to implement the radical ideology of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist book at his institution. Random state universities will now teach their students to hate themselves if they’re white and hate the “white supremacist” country in which they live.
Trump is right to go to war against this poison. He is also right to offer a patriotic alternative for our schools with his 1776 Commission.
We cannot allow our educators, government workers, and corporate executives to turn into poor Matthew Mayhewfor expressing any opinion a protected class member finds offensive. This is America—we have the right to speak freely and live without ancestral racial guilt.