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Jeet Heer Profile picture
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18 Jun, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Essential point!
Because of elite overproduction we have too many over-educated pundits trying to prove they know what CRT is and have a developed critique of it, when all these anti-CRT bills (or anti-"CRT") are not about CRT at all but messaging bills (the message being "ooga-booga").
If someone is saying "A bunch of Jews created CRT to stir up race war in America & kill white people" you don't respond by saying, "Well, I have a much more modulated criticism of Adorno & Horkheimer's's Dialectic of Enlightenment." You say "that's an anti-Semitic myth."
Here's Chuck Woolery being fairly explicit of the underlying narrative.
I keep going back to this but the right has created a bogeyman they are calling "CRT." To turn this into a conversation about the real CRT rather than about scare-mongering is a waste of time. jeetheer.substack.com/p/critical-rac…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
17 Jun
1. The anti-CRT thing is an obvious astroturf culture war propaganda operation (with the fingerprints of GOP dark money all over it). The fact that it's also designed to stifle speech deserves more attention.
2. I haven't done a full inventory but as far as I can tell, the only two signatories of the notorious Harper's letter to speak out against these anti-CRT bills are me & @thomaschattwill. And yet the bills clearly have a chilling effect on teaching USA history honestly.
3. The anti-CRT stuff is worrisome because it follows a pattern familiar in USA history of pushing schools to indoctrinate patriotic history -- going back to progressive era backlash against Beard & forward to McCarthyism. This stuff has been historically poisonous.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
12 Jun
1. Interesting conversation here between @sgw94m and @KevinMKruse about how to respond to CRT moral panic.
2. What I'd add to the conversation is that right-wing CRT discourse is a mythology of a familiar sort: the story of innocent (implicitly white) children children corrupted by alien forces. The same battle as over evolution, school prayer, sex ed, LGBTQ students & teachers etc.
3. In the current battle, liberals are pretty heavily invested in fact checking (i.e. CRT isn't really what it is accused of & isn't taught in public schools). This has some value to broader public but doesn't address the emotional core of the panic.
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
10 Jun
1. The discovery of a mass grave at Kamloops Residential School last month with as many as 215 remains was shocking but not surprising. The Canadian federal government has long known there are likely many such graves across the country but refused to investigate
2. The key thing about the residential school story is about Indigenous resistance in the face of both the government and its allies (most notably the churches) who didn't want to face the truth. This resistance continues.
3. Lots of outstanding questions still on the residential school, about the Vaticans refusal to apologize, about records still being kept hidden or destroyed, about the state and church playing the blame game against each other.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
8 Jun
1. Lab leak theory getting a new hearing is salutary (since the origins of covid are unsolved and it's a reasonable, although not likely, hypothesis). What's not salutary is how some contrarians are using the current moment to whitewash promoters of bioweapons theory.
2. It's important to understand that lab leak theory (accidental release of virus collected as part of normal research) is distinct from the far less plausible bioweapon theories (engineered virus, perhaps deliberately released).
3. Prominent Trumpist both outside the government (Bannon) and inside it (Navarro) used the legitimate lab leak theory as a stalking horse for the much more radical (and unsupported) bioweapon theories. That was the source of fact-checking reaction of 2020.
Read 6 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
7 Jun
1. Trump's a clown but the GOP is serious about power. I was interested to learn from Ronald Brownstein's reporting in Atlantic that Biden White House has fears of elected GOP (in congress & state legislatures) overturning 2024 electoral vote.
2. With all coup talk, it's important to realize dual truth: Trump wants a coup & also he doesn't have a plausible mechanism for one. Resistance of permanent bureaucracy (civilian & military) + GOP elected officials sparred USA from real threat in 2020/21. But 2024?
3. Plausible coup scenario that Biden White House worries about is: post-2022 GOP controls House & key swing states. Trumpized GOP (purged of those who resisted in 2020/21) overturns electoral results.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
3 Jun
1. I want to return to the @EricLevitz piece because it really underscores that the GOP war on democracy is one of choice. It raises the crucial question of why a party would decided to shrink the electorate instead of enlarging their share: nymag.com/intelligencer/…
2. It's true that Trump in 2020 showed GOP can be competitive with Latino voters (and to a lesser extent other POC voters). But that's not something GOP can bet on: it could be due to incumbent effect (which benefit Bush Jr. in 2004 & Obama in 2012).
3. More to the point, as @EricLevitz points out, the Tucker Carlson wing of GOP doesn't want party to become more multi-racial. And here some history is useful since these fights were played out in 1980s and 1980s between Pat Buchanan & Jack Kemp.
Read 7 tweets

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