Thread by @DefendingEd

🧵THREAD: 🧵We need to talk about this Washington Post piece that attacks @defendinged. It’s by @pbump, and it’s a case study in bad faith, bias, and snark. Here is the piece: 1/
washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…

@pbump's goal is to show that the broad, bipartisan, informed concerns we have with the woke revolution in our schools is merely a “trigger issue for consumers of conservative media” egged on by Trump and Fox News. This is a ridiculous take. 2/

He posts a graph titled “Another administration, another education scare.” If you're concerned your kids are being educated in toxic, extremist new political ideas, you are irrational. There’s no real problem. We’re just “scared.” 3/

@pbump offers a vague and flattering two-sentence definition of Critical Race Theory and then claims “it’s not clear that there are a lot of schools in the United States that are explicitly teaching CRT.” What does “a lot” mean? This is just bad writing. 4/

@pbump then claims the "backlash" to this apparently made-up problem is fueled by "conservative frustrations about race" (more bad writing – what does that mean?) and "a healthy dose of hyper-patriotism." Opposition to the 1619 Project is b/c of "hyper-patriotism." Ok. 5/

Apparently in @pbump’s mind, critics of the things he supports cannot be reasonable, informed people. They are only irrational, ignorant, fanatics. It’s so stupid and insulting – and it’s exactly why the media business is held in such low regard by so many Americans. 6/

And then he gets to our organization, @defendinged: 7/

That poll question is not in any way a caricature or "highly negative framing" of the issue. It is taken directly from Critical Race Theory and specifically from the work of Ibram X. Kendi. 8/

If @pbump read Kendi he would know that Kendi explicitly calls for race-based discrimination. We chose not to use Orwellian woke slogans like "social justice" and "antiracism" in our poll questions. We polled people on actual woke policies and beliefs, stated plainly. 10/

And not surprisingly, when you strip away the misleading, self-flattering woke jargon, people do not like wokeism in our classrooms. And that includes a large number of Democrats. We have nothing to hide. You can read our poll + crosstabs here: 11/ defendinged.org/commentaries/p…

Having caricatured and dismissed critics of woke education, @pbump ends with a condescending request that we "consider CRT…for what it actually is" which will result, he implies, in the great popularity of this Marxist-derived ideology. 12/

On this we are in agreement w/ @pbump. Please do "consider CRT for what it actually is." Study it. Read about it. Philip Bump should do this as well, since he obviously knows little about it, or the country he covers as “National correspondent” for the Washington Post. /end