The Daily Beast Podcast - Fox News Has Critical Race Theory All Wrong w/ Kevin M. Kruse

Episode Date: June 27, 2021

In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, historian Kevin Kruse makes the case that Republicans might actually agree with Critical Race Theory if they actually knew what it was. Oh, and those angry parents protesting it just might be plants. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another special bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Princeton historian Kevin Cruz, who's the author of White Flight, the new suburban history. And today we're going to talk about the controversy in history all around critical race theory as well as a host of other subjects. But before we get started, I want to remind listeners there's a new way for members to get notified when exclusive episodes drop or in there's a live recording of the new abnormal. head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash newsletters to sign up for email alerts. That's dailybeast.com slash membership slash newsletters. Welcome back to the new abnormal, fancy Princeton academic Kevin Cruz. I'm very fancy.

Very, very fancy. You know, I had wanted to talk to you as soon as the moral panic in the schools started, and we should have seen this coming, right, because this was clearly orchestrated by the right. As soon as this critical race theory and children can't be taught about history because it will destroy them, I don't know what the thinking there is. As soon as that started coming down the pike, I thought of you. Given my reputation for destroying children in school? Yes, pretty much because we all know you hate children. No.

Yeah, just can't stand. That's right. The worst. Hopefully mine are out of your shot right now. Let's see. Yeah, we'll find out soon. So, but because I really thought about how little history the right knows or is interested in. Talk to me about this critical race theory, panic in the school's Fox News talking point.

Well, I mean, before we talk about it, I think it's important to think about why we're talking about it. And it's clear that we're talking about this because the Fox News cinematic universe tried to come up with a number of ways to hit the Biden. administration and couldn't. You know, the COVID vaccine rollout went pretty well, still don't going well, even despite the push against vaccination in red states. The economy is coming back, it seems like. And so they had to kind of find a way to land a blow on him. And critical race theory seems to be the way to kind of get people angry. And I think it's clear that they seized upon this. I mean, we don't have to guess. We've got, you know, people like the guy, Chris Rufo, have basically given away the game on Twitter,

explained what it's all about. We want to have this one scary term that's going to be a catch-all for everything that's bad. And so critical race theory sounds scary. It's critical, like it's critical of your race. And theory, oh, my God, that's, that's, you know, devoid of fact somehow. But look, critical race theory, if you're listening to this

and you're thinking, you know, is this being taught to my kids? If it's being taught to your kids, your kids are in law school. Right, exactly. We explain that because that is important. Critical race theory comes out of legal studies and you really only get taught in some law schools, maybe some advanced graduate programs. You're not being taught this in the third grade. So that's it for starters.

The second thing is, what is critical race theory? If you listen to people on the right, the people who are banning this, they say, critical race theorists argue that, one, race is the most important thing in society. And two, you individually are racist and if you're white and that's bad and you should feel bad. That is exactly wrong. What critical race theory, in fact, says is actually race is a social construct. Race has no basis in biology, no basis in science. It is something we human beings made up.

It is not real. But they say people took it as real and they wrote it into the law. And so even if you know racist and real, we still deal with the effects of this because it was written into our laws. You can go back to the 1790 Naturalization Act, which said only white people could be naturalized as citizens. Okay, that opens up a whole can of worms. Who counts is white? Right. For a while, the Irish didn't.

For a while, the Italians didn't. Right. Jews didn't for a while, right? Even now. There's Supreme Court cases in the 1920s, which are fascinating on this, which critical race theorists look at and are really smart. And there's one where a Japanese guy says, oh, you keep saying it's white skin. Look at my skin. And the Supreme Court says, no, we don't mean you.

We take the scientific term. We mean, you know, Caucasians, right? And so then a man named Thagat Fend, who was a South Asian, says, oh, I am literally from that part of the world. You say it's got to be Caucasian. I come from those mountains. So look at me. I must be that.

And they say, no, no, no, it's common sense. We're going to look at you. Your skin is brown. Right. So the law bends this back and forward to decide who isn't and who isn't white. That's critical race theory. So we're talking about institutions. But the takeaway is it's not about making you feel bad.

it's not about blaming you individually. In fact, if you're worried people are putting the blame on individuals, critical race theory is for you. You should be all in favor of critical race theory because it says individuals aren't really the issue here. What is the issue here are structures, systems, institutions where the individual racism doesn't really matter. These things work whether or not you personally are saying the N-word at home or not, right? This is still going to proceed. So that is what critical race- Better not to say the N-word at home. Yeah, don't do that. But I'm saying, I think so many people have a cartoonist view of racism that is solely about did an individual white person say or do something that is overtly racist?

And what critical race theory says is, no, you got to look bigger than that. It's more than that. And that's more complicated, right? It strikes me that what we have here is there's sort of, I'm going to bring up someone no one ever brings up anymore. And I kind of wonder why. We have a sort of Susan Faludi backlash, right? Where we had last summer, a summer of racial reckoning where we really started to try to begin to look at ourselves and our inherent racism. And then as if that was too much progress, the right was like, we must stop this. And so now we will talk about the dangers of looking at ourselves. Yeah. That backlash exists because I think the realization was that actually if we are going to reckon with this, it's got to be deep, right? It can't simply be, I mean, it's no accident that in the Juneteenth holiday, a long time in the making, glad to see it,

But that can't be the endpoint, right? There are a lot of people who are, you know, whether it's Nancy Pelosi of Democrats, you know, wearing kente cloth and taking a knee for a photo op or... That was not a great move. Or both parties, you know, rally behind Juneteenth. Hooray, we did it. Okay, yeah, federal holiday is great.

But that doesn't address the structural, the systemic problems that are at the root here again. And I think that's actually... I'm blanking on where I read this. It's not my idea, but I'll repeat it like it is. Good. It's welcome. Somebody's pointed out that, you know,

one of the reasons that Republicans, I think, are so opposed to critical race theory is it actually says, hey, you've got to do big collective things to correct this, right? You've got to ask the government's got to get involved. The government's got to do something. We've got to do something together as society to correct this. And that cuts against the whole conservative project, right? So I think that's another reason why they've really kind of leaned into this.

Conservatives are really for limited government, except when it comes to masks or education or anything that you might think would consider to be limited government and then therefore big government. Right, yeah. There's been a wave of red states are engaged in voter suppression. They're also engaged in, you know, kind of knowledge suppression. I mean, it really is amazing to see how much, in the name of liberty, by the way, in the name of liberty, they're out there outlawing certain schools of thought, certain subjects you can't teach. I'm one of the authors of the 1619 project. The book's coming out in November. Very excited about that in the company I'm in. We're banned in several states already, right? There are several states that have banned a book which is going to have eight to 10 historians who have done a pretty prominent job with their work and some Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. That's been banned, right, in the name of liberty. So, yeah, we're in a ridiculous place right now.

It's interesting because, you know, I had this grandfather who was a communist who was blacklisted, and then I had this mother who wrote these dirty books who was always getting banned from, like, libraries. They tried to take away her NEA grant. So this feels very much on brand for today's Republican Party. even for the Republican Party of 50 years ago. Yeah, if we're looking for through lines and everybody said, oh, has Trump changed things not in the Republican Party?

The kind of the perennial moral panic about what's going on in the schools is there. I mean, they did this with, you know, American history textbooks back in the 1920s and 30s, biology texts at the same time. There was a big panic, obviously in the 50s with all kinds of literature. They went after comic books in the 50s. We're rotting people's minds. The 70s in West Virginia. And communism, too.

Yeah, communism, for sure. But just, I mean, even things you wouldn't even think were being kind of, you know, quote unquote, capital P political have been targeted. There was a textbook war in Conama County, West Virginia in 1974 over a textbook that kind of taught an early version of multiculturalism. It was very soft stuff. But they spun a bunch of lies about it. And you had, you know, kind of giant protest in a street. They put dynamite of a school board building. They actually blew up a school.

They fired shotguns into school buses, right? So this kind of stuff that happens all the time, but it can be really dangerous. So I'm both kind of bracing myself and rolling my eyes and as a historian who's written about these things in the past. Here comes another one. But at the same time, I know this is, you know, maybe a tried and true tactic, but it's one that can turn ugly and violent pretty quick. It seems like it already has, right? I mean, we saw these people in Virginia getting arrested. It's interesting, though, this is a group that has really doubled down on they don't like vaccines.

They're mad at Fauci. They're mad at different scientists. You know, Dr. Hottes, Dr. Peter Hottes, has been on this podcast a lot and who's a friend of mine, getting all these terrifying threats. But this is not new to Trump at all. Like this sort of hostility towards knowledge is really like a Republican trope at this point. Yeah, and I think you only have to look back to, you know, kind of the Republicans who came before him, you know. Mitt Romney has done a lot of good grown-up things in recent years, but his presidential campaign was, was the one where, you know, they had the unskew, the polls guy was being promoted. And Jack Welch was saying he didn't

trust the job numbers and things like that. So there's a real kind of, I don't trust the expert vibe there. The Bush administration, you know, sidelined climate scientists at NASA and Noah. What about even Tipper Gore? Remember Tipper Gore? Yeah, oh, this is bipartisan. Yeah. I mean, Tipper Gore was that these musical lyrics were going to cause people to be killers, right? Wasn't that the? Yeah, the PMRC. Tipper Gore and, uh, And Jim, I'm blanking on her for a same, Jim Baker's, a wife led the charge on that. And so it was a bipartisan moral panic. And this is, you know, there's a perennial thing in American politics.

Think of Helen Lovejoy from the Simpsons screaming, won't someone think of children? That's a punchline built on, you know, 100 years of history. And there's this constant panic about what is going on in the schools and what is happening in schools. And it largely relies on misinformation. Again, your kids aren't being taught critical race theory in the school. If someone's teaching your kids that they should feel bad simply because they're white, yeah, that's not good. That's not critical race theory. Right. I don't know what that is.

They've kind of ginned up the latest outrage in an effort to kind of get people mad, to get people mobilized and in hopes of harnessing that. We had someone on this podcast who talked about this sort of network of conservative thoughts, that the sort of network of conservative thinkers who connect to propaganda networks who connect to these Baptist radio stations and how sort of seamless this transition is and how they're able to sort of get a message out, which is clearly what's happening here? Yeah, and what's the group? What, no left turn or something is the group behind this? And you mentioned those protests in what? It was Loudoun County, Virginia. I saw pictures of

these people outside who had, you know, very kind of slick, masperative signs that said, I'm a parent against critical race theory. They've clearly been churned out by somebody. And by the way, the people holding them appear to be in their 70s. I don't think they were. you know, maybe they weren't. I don't want to cast a school in their life, but I'm pretty sure they weren't parents of middle schoolers, right? But it still ended up. And then what happens is that money goes to put those people in the street and then people like Fox News, places like Fox News will come around and say, look at all these outraged parents. And in fact, somebody came, might have been media matters, did a piece on Fox News had all these, quote, concerned parents speaking out against criminal race theory.

And it turns out most of them were Republican operatives or conservatives, you know, think things or things like that. So a lot of it is performative and it's not, you know, it's not grassroots. It's astro-turf protests. That's what I was thinking about. In fact, in New York City, which this is sort of an interesting and new phenomenon, we have a bunch of private schools that have been kind of targeted by the New York Post. And they have had these astroft protests too, though. There haven't been any protesters. They have had these like mobile billboards, which I was trying to get one of my kids to take a picture of it. And they were like, we are not doing that for you. And they were like, we're not going to help you with your social media content.

And I was like, teenagers are really mean. I thought they were in social media. Come on. Mine are like just so disappointed by my like embarrassing them on several different platforms that they are not willing to help me with content. They're de-platform mom. That's their team. But so my sense is that this is like really like the same kind of thing as the caravan. And as we come into the midterms, and I've already seen reporting on this, the Trump world really thinks that this could deliver them the midterms.

I mean, maybe. You know, the caravan didn't deliver them the midterms in 2018, right? You know, so they'll certainly try it. I think on that level, I absolutely think it's a cynical political strategy. It feels like it's peaking way too soon. I mean, in a way. Right. The midterms are a year away. And, you know, the Tea Party movement against Obama certainly started this early,

but that was something that kind of had a direct connection to him, right? You know, Joe Biden isn't out there writing your, you know, your local school boards, you know, standards policy. He's not writing, you know, education stuff in your state level. So it's a weird thing to try to make a national political issue. And whether it can sustain that kind of steam, I don't know. They will certainly try it. You know, we might get a sense in the off-year election coming up next year, or this year, sorry,

we might get a sense of how well this plays locally, but I'd be hard-pressed to think that this is going to still be the campaign issue in, you know, in the next midterms. It might be, but I don't know. There was a time when Republicans weren't just all cultural wars, right? Yeah. You got to go way back. You got to go way back. There was time in, so say, kind of the pre, it was the George Wallace Richard Nixon shift, where Wallace as a Democrat and independent started raising a lot of these social issues, the law and order. stuff talking about what's going on in the schools. And Nixon picked those up. And that kind of

got it into the Republican Party. Reagan is governor of California about the same time. Love to talk about, you know, UC Berkeley nonstop. So that kind of panic about the schools kind of came into vogue in the 60s. In the 50s, if we look at, say, that kind of the anti-communist stuff. But before that, yeah, there wasn't this kind of cultural warfare, or at least not as prominent on the right. And it was more about, you know, kind of limited government, low taxes, kind of the A accountant with the green eye shade was the old kind of Republican, right? Worryed about the bottom line, thinking about, you know, waste and things like that. That didn't animate enough people, right?

And so there's an argument in the party that you've got to start pressing these hot-button culture wars issues. And increasingly, that becomes a way in which you unite the different elements of the party. Right. I mean, I guess it works. I don't know how. So, I mean, I know how, but it just, it seems insane to me. So I'm curious to know we, so we are on the precipice, it looks like to me, of a climate catastrophe. California is incredibly hot.

There's a terrible drought. It's fire season, right? Like, it just seems like we are, you know, several states are so hot that if you sit on the asphalt, you can get three degree burns. I mean, we're like living in a dystopia. Like we went right from the pandemic to the, like, it's too hot. drought, it seems to me like a large chunk of this country is not going to take climate seriously until it's too late. Yeah, I think that might be true. And I think it's going to be affecting different people at different times, right? And so California, I think if it was just California burning,

I don't think that would really give a lot of, you know, kind of Republicans and red states real cause for alarm. Fine, let it burn. But it's going to be, you know, it's going to be the Gulf Coast. It's going to be, you know, Gulf Shores, Alabama and Pensacola, Florida are going to be getting hit by flooding in things. I'm from Nashville. We've had crazy floods and tornadoes there in the last 10 years like we never have when I was grown up. And so I think you're seeing different parts of the country are going to hopefully start to realize

this is the new normal or the new abnormal. Here, I'll plug the podcast. Right. Yeah, that's good. That's a real problem. It's going to take some Republicans coming forward and realizing they have to have some kind of climate plan and we're starting to see them move on that on the way. Yeah, because Republicans do sane stuff all the time.

Like, who would do that? Who is sane in the Republican Party who has power? Mitt is basically it. They're a group of Republican senators who I think are sane but are terrified for a variety of reasons to speak out and they're cowards about that. I think someone like Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey, you know, I think they are not, you know, they haven't drunk the Kool-Aid, but at the same time, they're locked in on a certain, you know, kind of course because that's what the party dictates.

And I think they're all terrified, even the ones who aren't up for re-election. Like Pat Toomey, you're not, what? What are you doing that? He's out. He doesn't want to get murdered. Honestly, I think they're terrified of their own base. I think they've rid the tiger for so long and they don't know how to get off. Well, you saw what they did on January 6th. They were scared. But it is interesting to me. And I wonder if we're going to get to a place. We're not supposed to talk about this. You're never supposed to talk about this. But I want to talk about it because I feel like you understand the history of this. Is there a world in which these blue states secede? I mean, it's possible. I think it's incredibly problematic. You know, we think of the, of the U.S. as, you know, a set of distinct regions, but, you know, no state is entirely blue, no state is entirely red. They're all a mixture thereof. And we're so intertwined and caught up with each other at this moment, you know, if the blue state's a seed, are they leaving, you know, NASA behind or, you know, who gets what in the divorce? There's a lot that's tied up. And each second nuclear weapons, which would not be good. Right. I mean, you have, but you have this minority rule, right?

You have these 50 Republican senators represent 43 million less people or something, right? So we are living in this minority rule state that's only going to get worse. Yeah. I mean, demographically, you know, by like 2040, I think, what is it, 30% of the Senate will represent 70% of the country and vice versa, which will be kind of deeply unbalanced. The system is already lopsied. for the people who are currently represented by the Republicans. It's lopsided for them in the electoral college and the Senate in a variety of ways. So, yeah, something's got to give.

There are a couple things they could do right now. You know, they're not going to abolish the electoral college right now. They can certainly do away with the filibuster of a Senate. But they could also enlarge the House. You know, the House used to stay, you know, used to grow in size every about 10 years or so. We talked to them out in 1920s. $435 isn't written to the Constitution. It's just where we stop the clock, right?

You could add a number of seats to make the average congressional district the same size it used to be, you know, for 100 years before that. And that would actually kind of balance out the disproportionate strength that Republicans have in the Senate. But there doesn't have a will to do that. Why won't they do that? I think they're just so wedded to the status quo. I mean, it might be, and I have no inside knowledge here, but it might be that, you know, for House members who have gotten that way in that system and have that much power, they don't want to change the system and give it up. Right. It does seem like our government is really, really, really stuck in its current formation.

And what is happening, right, is we have people, we have situations where, like, Donald Trump is president and you have, like, lunatics Republicans in the House sort of trying to take over the country. And, you know, they're representing a very small group. Yeah. And for the moment it works. We'll see if that kind of friends group, as it takes over the party, if it continues to drive other people away. I mean, the Republican Party is, in one way, kind of demographically in a death spiral. You know, they have catered more and more to not just a part of the country that is and writing off the rest, but to an element of society that, you know, you don't need an actuarial table to know that if you've based your party on, you know, white people 60 and over,

that's not going to last for a long time if you're losing younger generations. So it works for the moment, but we'll see if it maintains for them. I mean, if we get to a place where there's an election in 2024 and there's a Trump or a DeSantis who wins enough states, you know, so it's close and then Michigan, you know, the Republicans in Michigan decide that they're going to throw out the election, which is, you know, we're, I mean, not Michigan, but there are certain states where they're making it so partisans can overturn a election. election results they don't like, Texas, it's probably not going to be a swing state, but there's certainly our places. We could see a world where we have like 2,000, but a hundred times worse, right? Oh, yeah, we're heading there. Even without that, even without a state doing the unthinkable and tossing out its results, just because of partisan hackery, we're on a course to make 2000

look like nothing. Two thousand was one state was in doubt because of about 500 votes. And then 2016 was what, two or three million, and then move ahead to, you know, let's say 2024, 2028, we have, say, the Democrat wins the popular vote by 10 million, but loses the electoral college. That can happen. And that would be working exactly how it's poorly designed, but that's even without anyone kind of, you know, throwing monkey wrenches at the state level, right? And that, in and of itself, would be a incredible crisis for democracy, for American

democracy. I mean, the fact that the Biden administration can't get a voting rights, I know that HB1 wasn't a good bill and that there was a lot of stuff in there that was not great and not what people wanted. And I understand that. But like the reality is it looks like we're not going to get anything. And I don't know how we continue on like that. Yeah. If nothing passes Congress this year on voting rights, I think it'll be a total disaster because all these state restrictions that go through will be in place and you will have the kind of the trust in democracy at the grassroots totally eroded. I mean, Democrats keep asking people to come out and vote for them and to wait in lines

that are now hours long to jump through hoots for voter ID and drop boxes and all kinds of things to get their vote in. They've got to make it count. And I realize it's unfair to blame all Democrats for this because it seems to be just a few holdouts on the Senate. But the party itself has to lean on those people in order to bring them in line. And they can't just simply throw up their hands and say, well, Mansion and Cinema won't do anything. They've really got to put the screws on them and really make it clear.

And it's up to us to do that as well. Call your senators. Call your Congress. Call your people in your state house. If you're listening to this and you're thinking about running for office, hopefully if you paid attention to state level politics anywhere near you, you've learned that it can be an incredibly low bar to get into office. Yeah. And also Congress. Yeah.

And also Congress. So please, run for office, right? We need good, smart people at every level, especially in the state. I think Democrats and people on the left in general have kind of ignored what's going on in state-level politics for far too long, and hopefully they're waking up and we'll get engaged and get involved. But keep the pressure up because this can't simply be a thing where we say, oh, well, we couldn't get it done and walk away because so much depends on protecting the vote. Yeah, I mean, I absolutely think that it seems inevitable. This was so great. Thank you, Kevin.

Please come back soon. My pleasure. Let it be on any time. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode.

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