Thread by @jholbo1

'I can't believe letting leopards-eating-people's-faces partisans draft anti-CRT legislation has produced a raft of bills that plausibly mandate leopards eating the faces either of teachers or children or both.' 1/

https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1413304933160476681

No, seriously. It must be exhausting to be David French. He's trying to be decent and reasonable about this. But, while it would indeed be hard - probably impossible - to write good bills in this vicinity it wouldn't be at all hard to draft less terrible bills than these. 2/

That strongly suggests that the bills are bad by design. And so the question becomes: why do the partisans of these bills perceive it as in their interest to back bad bills, by design? 3/

French's MLK example - see thread - seems perfect for demonstrating what's going on, and what the problem is. French's point is: these bills would probably make it illegal to teach MLK. But clearly you want to be able to teach MLK. These bills are bad. 4/

The first thing to say it it's much worse than just not being able to teach MLK. Here we have Rufo saying that French, and his co-authors, are lying about a Tennessee bill. Rufo implies it is narrowly drafted. But it is shockingly over-broad. 5/

https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1413864240339767298?s=20

The bill explicitly forbids teaching itself, since it forbids teaching anything that 'includes the concepts' it includes, and it itself does include them. I haven't seen anyone note this, particularly, but referring to propositions as 'concepts' makes mischief. 6/

If I'm not allowed to teach the concept of 'the cat is on the mat' - which isn't a concept - then plausibly I can't touch on cats or mats in any way that touches on the degree to which they might or might not enjoy contiguity relations. 7/

Teaching 'the cat is NOT on the mat' teaches the concept 'the cat is on the mat', since it raises the possibility. Now this is very logic-choppy and you might think: maybe they just didn't think about the concept-proposition distinction, you analytic philosopher? 8/

Honestly, that's possible. But I don't think it is likely lost on the drafters of these bills that they are vague, with very unclear implications. If they failed to notice, everyone pointing it out to them should have brought it to their attention. 9/

The unclarity seems by design then. So what's the point of by-design unclear legislation? 1st, it stirs the shit, in a Kulturkampf way, getting people like me tweeting. 2nd, it puts teachers and school in fear. 10/

Why put teachers and school in fear? You don't want them teaching about racism or the history of race at all. But you can't ask for that. So you just make it unclear how it would be legal to teach about it. 11/

3rd, what proponents of these bills want is actually incoherent. There isn't any way to coherently mandate the incoherent. So the best you can do is legislate incoherently, and thereby permit a sort of holding pattern of incoherent attitudes. 12/

The MLK passage shows the problem again. The rhetorical goal, with anti-CRT, is a grand sort of table-turn: [wrapped in mantle of 'content of our character'] WE are the tribunes of MLK's aspirational vision of color-blind equality, whereas you CRT'ers are the real racists. 13/

The problem with this, as people keep pointing out, is that MLK believed a lot of stuff that the anti-CRT'ers want to ban. At this point we get in a useless argument about whether that means MLK was for CRT. It's useless because, by this point, the term has been made useless. 14/

There's narrow CRT, which is a bunch of academic papers. There's medium-wide CRT, which is narrow CRT plus anything that may flow from it - be inspired by it. There's wide CRT, which is anything the likes of Rufo don't like, hence tar as 'CRT'. 15/

MLK is clearly wide CRT. MLK said a ton of stuff that Rufo thinks is totally not ok to teach in schools. But now we run into the problem that there's wide MLK - namely, all the stuff MLK implies in his writings; that arguably includes a lot of stuff that's narrow CRT. 16/

Because MLK was very sensitive to systemic racism and how white people are deluded about the degree of the problem and etc. 17/

Then there's medium-wide MLK, which is just stuff he outright said. And he never said the words 'critical race theory' as such. But then there's narrow MLK, which is just that one sentence anti-CRTers like to quote - 'content of our characters'. 18/

What we've got, then, is a sort of 3-D chess meets three-card monte rhetorical dodge in which anything you say about CRT or MLK is defensible, because you can just keep shifting senses, narrow-medium-wide. 19/

The bottom line: anti-CRT'ers in fact want MLK's ideas, which French says clearly should not be banned, banned. But they don't want to say they are banning MLK's idea, because that sounds bad. They want to say they are the only people who agree with MLK. 20/

George Orwell once remarked that Dickens is an author well worth stealing. The same is for sure true of MLK. The reason the anti-CRT bills are written so badly is this kicks up confusion, under cover of which anti-CRT folks can try to steal MLK, for rhetorical purposes. 21/

No bill that was not extremely badly drafted would do. 22/