Trygve Hammer, Velva

Andrew Allis’s nearly 800-word regurgitation of right-wing talking points–“Breathtaking Failure or the intended deconstruction of America?”–met none of the Minot Daily News’s criteria for a piece of that length.

The first paragraph took nearly eighty words to say nothing. The second paragraph, personified, would have jumped off the page with a tiki torch and marched around our living rooms chanting “You… will not… replace us!”

The letter did manage to hit all of the expected buzzwords: Marxism (twice), socialism (also twice), Antifa, BLM, and Critical Race Theory (CRT). It even wedged Marxism, socialism, and Democrat (as an adjective) into a single sentence. Then it lurched about as if it were pushing a broken shopping cart down a dirt road.

This was at least the second letter in which Allis has addressed CRT. In a previous letter to the editor, he declared, “Critical Race Theory is Marxism.” Senator Ted Cruz also tweeted, “Critical Race Theory is Marxism.” In neither case was this an original or accurate thought.

Critical Race Theory is not Marxism any more than algebra is Satanism. Senator Cruz knows this. Cruz, who has also claimed that CRT says all white people are racist, is merely one cog in a messaging machine working to inspire anger and fear over CRT and other nonexistent threats.

Because schools have become a favorite target of this manufactured outrage, parents and others have appeared as unhinged rage clowns at school board meetings across the country. Ridiculous anti-mask freedom fury is also part of this misinformation campaign, but the messaging on CRT in particular targets something darker than its audience’s willful ignorance, something darker even than the far right’s appetite for gleeful cruelty in rhetoric and policy.

None of the things being packaged under the CRT label in order to generate hysteria are actually part of that law-school concept. CRT is not and never has been part of the K-12 curriculum. This messaging campaign and anti-CRT bills in several state legislatures are intended only to keep students ignorant and to inspire red-faced rants at school board meetings and in letters to the editor.