Nov 5 2021
Every election cycle, the GOP has to come up with a new boogeyman to scare conservatives into voting. That’s who they are now. They can’t use the same one over and over again, because even conservatives might notice that the last one never happened. The caravan full of terrorists never arrived, the death panels never passed judgement on anybody’s grandmother.
So this go-round it’s Critical Race Theory. The right-wing media machine has decided to pretend that public schools are teaching CRT to your children, whether you like it or not. As they would have it, white kids will be taught to be ashamed of their race, their heritage and their country.
School board meetings have become shouting matches and borderline riots, and conservative parents are sending their kids to church-run private schools in droves. Youngkin, West Virginia’s new governor, used CRT as a wedge issue to win the Guber seat in his state.
In case you haven’t heard, Critical Race Theory is NOT being taught in school. It is not leftist propaganda designed to make your children ashamed of themselves, it is a well-researched correction of Caucasian-slanted history that is being offered as a class in some universities.
It’s worthy of note, I think, that the right-wingers who are pushing the CRT lie recently began trying to pass a bill in Texas banning any mention of the KKK, Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Suffrage from school textbooks. If the bill passes, it will likely affect all school textbooks in the country, since the company that publishes textbooks takes its cues from Texas.
As ever, the fact that the right-wing media machine is a closed system is a major part of this issue. Conservatives get all their information from Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, Daily Wire, Breitbart and a host of lesser outlets, and all of them spout the same propaganda in a self-referential news bubble. Their followers are told that all other news sources lie, so they rarely peek outside the bubble.
The rest of the world’s news outlets go on about their business of reporting what’s actually happening, and rarely bother to refute the lies and distortions coming from the Right. For the most part, these stories go unchallenged. The Right produces a steady stream of fulminating blather for their followers to be angry about, and the Left mostly just ignores it.
Non-partisan media treats both sides’ views as equally valid, even though what the Right presents as fact is obviously false. Only by reading opinion editorials or watching late-night cable comedians can you find any refutation of the Right’s claims. The Right-wing think-tanks spend millions broadcasting their lies, and no opposing view is heard. The Left has nothing to compare with the Right’s propaganda machine, and there is no comparable organization dedicated to opposing their lies.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was? Wouldn’t it be great if those who are undecided could turn to a dedicated information source that would reliably take apart the Right’s lies and talking points and expose the actual facts of the matter? I know, there are fact-checker websites, and the Lincoln Project does have a voice. I’d like to see a dedicated anti-propaganda fact-checker with the savvy of the Lincoln Project and the reach of CNN or the NYT. I think this is something we need.