The Daily Signal - Why Rep. Chip Roy Aims to Defund Schools That Teach Critical Race Theory

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

Rep. Chip Roy recently introduced a bill to withhold federal funds from any schools that teach critical race theory. The Texas Republican lawmaker joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to talk about the bill, how critical race theory is affecting what children learn in schools, what can parents do to make sure their kids aren’t being taught critical race theory, the illegal immigration crisis at the border, and more. "What now the American people are seeing is they've had the veil lifted on our corrupt public education system," said Roy, whose bill would apply to both elementary and secondary schools as well as higher education. "They're now actually starting to see the garbage that's being taught and shoved down the throat of our children," he said. "And part of that garbage has been critical race theory and all of the various tentacles that critical race theory creates, in which we are teaching our children to believe that America is evil, to be ashamed of "their whiteness." And how they can undo their whiteness. There are so many stories if you go look." We also cover these stories: Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is speaking out about newly unearthed emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden. Both Buzzfeed and The Washington Post obtained emails via a Freedom of Information Act request.  The Republican National Committee is putting pressure on the Commission on Presidential Debates to ensure that presidential debates are nonpartisan.  Rashad Turner, the founder of the Black Lives Matter chapter in St. Paul, Minnesota, leaves the organization over policy disagreements.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, June 3rd. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Congressman Shiproy of Texas has authored a bill to defund schools who teach critical race theory. He joins me today on the Daily Signal podcast at Resource Bank to talk about how critical race theory is affecting what children learn in schools and the dangers it poses if it isn't addressed. He also weighs in on the crisis at the southern border and more. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. The Daily Signal is currently at the Heritage Foundation's Resource Bank Conference in Austin, Texas, so please do excuse some of the background noise and the chatter that you're going to hear. All right, now let's hear

our top news. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is speaking out about newly unearthed emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy Infectious Diseases, and Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden. Both BuzzS. and Washington Post obtain emails via a Freedom of Information Act request. One email read, masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. Fauci said in an email to someone asking a question about mask wearing for an upcoming trip.

Fauci added, the typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit and keep out droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low-risk location. On Wednesday, Paul tweeted, told you hashtag fire Fauci. Can't wait to see the media try to spin the Fauci FOIA emails. House Republican Whips, Steve Scalise is calling for an investigation, tweeting Wednesday,

The Truth is out. Fauci's emails show he suspected early last year that COVID-19. possibly leaked from the Wuhan lab, yet he stayed silent. This is a major cover-up. We need a full congressional investigation into the origins of COVID-19. The Republican National Committee is putting pressure on the Commission on Presidential Debates to ensure that presidential debates are nonpartisan. In a letter to the Commission of Presidential Debates, R&C Chair Rona McDaniel said GOP candidates would be encouraged not to participate in future presidential debates, unless the commission made needed changes.

McDaniel wrote that the CPD's repeated missteps and the partisan actions of its board members make clear that the organization no longer provides the fair and impartial forum for presidential debates which the law requires and the American people deserve. And she added a warning stating unless the CPD adopts significant reforms to ensure that it better fulfills this,

important non-partisan function, the RNC will have no choice but to advise its future nominees against participating in CPD-hosted debates. Rashad Turner, the founder of the Black Lives Matter chapter in St. Paul, Minnesota, has left the organization. Turner said he left because Black Lives Matter wasn't supporting education and real solutions for the black community. Turner also said the intentions of Black Lives Matter was made clear when they publicly denounced charter schools alongside. the teacher's union. Here is what Turner had to say about why he left the organization via Take Charge and then.

I was a founder of Black Lives Matter in St. Paul. I believe the organization stood for exactly what the name implies. Black lives do matter. However, after a year on the inside, I learned they had little concern for rebuilding black families, and they cared even less about improving the quality of education for students in Minneapolis. That was made clear when they publicly denounced charter schools alongside the teachers union. I was an insider in Black Lives Matter, and I learned the ugly truth. The moratorium on charter schools does not support rebuilding the black family, but it does create barriers to a better education for black children.

The San Francisco Giants baseball team are wearing special uniforms this weekend in celebration of gay pride month. The Giants will sport jerseys with an SF low. logo pride patch on the sleeve and caps that incorporate the 11 colors of the progress pride flag during their home game with the Chicago Cubs this Saturday. The Giants are the first team to incorporate LGBTQ pride colors into their baseball uniforms. Giants president and CEO Larry Baer said in a statement Tuesday that we are extremely proud to stand with the LGBTQ plus community as we kick off one of the best annual celebrations in San Francisco by paying honor to the countless achievements and contributions as all those who identify as LGBTQ Plus and are allies of the LGBTQ plus community.

Now to tune for my conversation with Congressman Sherproy on Critical Race Theory, The Border, and more. This is Virginia Allen, host of the Daily Signal podcast. I don't know about you, but YouTube is certainly one of my guilty pleasures. I really enjoy. watching short videos on a variety of topics, so I'm always looking for videos that are actually educational and beneficial to me in some way. And the Daily Signal YouTube channel never disappoints. There is so much binge-worthy content, from policy and news explainers to documentaries. If you're not driving, go ahead and pull out your phone and subscribe to the Daily Signal YouTube channel so you can be in the know on the issues you care about most.

You can also search for the channel by going to YouTube.com slash Daily Signal. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal by Congressman Sheproy of Texas. Congressman Roy, it's great to have you with us on the Daily Signal podcast. Well, it's great to join the Daily Signal, particularly from Texas. It makes it all the better. It makes it so much better. It's great to be in your state. So you have a bill to defund schools who teach critical race theory.

Can you tell us about your bill? Yeah, I mean, look, what America is having their eyes opened to, and I think that's, That's one upside, if there is an upside, to what we've experienced over the last year with the COVID shutdowns, and there aren't that many upsides, right? It was, I think, a terrible, you know, undermining of small businesses and our kids being, you know, in schools and mass or not being in school. But what now the American people are seeing is they've had the veil lifted on our corrupt public education system.

They're now actually starting to see the garbage that's being being taught and shove down the throat of our children. And part of that garbage has been critical race theory and all of the various tentacles that critical race theory creates in which we are teaching our children to, you know, to believe that America is evil, to be ashamed of quote their whiteness and how they can undo their whiteness. I mean, there are so many stories. If you go look at, and people ignore, they say, oh, this isn't real. No, it's real.

Go look at the curriculum. Go look at what's being taught. And this stuff is, frankly, being purposefully put into the minds of our kids. Rather than teaching our kids that America is great, rather than teaching our kids about what we can achieve and moving forward, they want to break down our country. And so I don't believe that any federal dollar should go to any school, K through graduate school, that teaches any of this. And so we've introduced legislation to combating racist teaching act,

H.R. 3163, to do just that, to remove all federal dollars from any school that teaches any of that stuff. Can you talk a little about how, you mentioned this briefly in your opening remarks, but how critical race theory is affecting what children learn in schools? Can you talk a little bit more about

what these kids are hearing in their classroom from their teachers? Yeah, I mean, so this goes all the way from the issues with training teachers to teach this and then this stuff gets implemented. It's not always, it's not like they've rolled, out the, you know, CRT manual, right? I mean, it's not like they just go, go, oh, here, we're teaching critical race theory today. What they do is, though, they train teachers, and then each one of these

little things and nuggets gets buried into all of the, you know, throughout the curriculum. And so when you're teaching history, when you're teaching different events, and then you just start dropping this stuff in there about teaching children how to, you know, deal with their whiteness, right? Or, you know, they read books, actual books that are titled, you know, how to, you know, you know, manage your whiteness and talking about how America is evil. And it's all under a Marxist theory and trying to move our children to the belief that our country isn't great and that we're evil and that we're evil because of systemic racism. And they use that. They use what we naturally as human beings, as Americans, as Christians, as believers, whatever that we believe, hey, you know,

the wrong of slavery, the wrong of Jim Crow policies in the South that we want to, you know, fix, move forward, make sure that all Americans are treated equally, they use that to then infiltrate essentially the education system to promote Marxist theories and undermine our country. And it's purposeful. What can parents do to make sure their kids aren't being taught critical race theory? Are there any things you'd like to mention about what parents, how they can be involved in this as they're finding out about what their kids are learning in school? Well, they need to step on the gas to boot out, kick out, all of the school board members who have allowed this nonsense to proliferate. They need to pull their kids out of

the schools that allow it to occur. Home school, choose to avail themselves of local private schools and then, but hold their schools accountable. I mean, if you can't afford it, I understand it. I mean, it's a struggle. And if you've got two, two income family, it's hard, then hold your schools accountable. But whatever it is, don't let them get away with it. Know what's in the curriculum. Know what they're being taught and make sure that they're being taught the things they need to know to go forward and thrive as a human being on this earth, reading, writing, arithmetic, science, history, the things that you need to know, but aren't being taught. and fed this stuff that is negative and breaks down our communities and breaks down trust and

divvies us up by race, to use the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, it's a sordid business this divvying us up by race. And that's what this is. It's purposeful to divide us rather than bring us together as Americans. We can all acknowledge things that were wrong in our past, right? You can look and see that our founders were flawed men, some of whom owned slaves, and recognize the greatness of our founding, carrying forward the eradication of slavery within 80 years. of the founding of our country, a great moment in the history of the world, and then carry forward and realize what we then were able to eradicate to blow out the Jim Crow South into where we are today and know that there's far more to do, but that we shouldn't be filling our kids with this

garbage that undermines our country and undermines their well-being. Well, big picture, Congressman Roy, we're looking at critical race theory. What's the danger if this is an address? What do you see going forward if no one does anything? What is that danger? The danger is that we destroy the Republic because we're no longer united under the idea of what it is to be an American. And that's, people say, oh, you guys are overstating this. This is, no, we are great because we're united around these ideas, right?

We're great because we have values that bring us together, right? The people that have come to our country, the immigrants that have made this country great, they come here around that idea. They were proud to come to Ellis Island. They were proud to immigrate to America. why to embrace what makes us great. Yeah, with differences. But at the end of the day, with a belief that you can achieve anything that this country does stand up for not just liberty, but also for equality and equal justice under law and that they could have the fruits of their labors, right? Why would you not go right now?

And I don't even have to ask you, invest a lot of money in Mexico. Because the rule of law isn't enforced, right? The rule of law is what separates us and really highlights what is great about this country. when you undermine the rule of law and destroy all those things that hold us together, including a belief that we're united as Americans, then it destroys the fabric of the country. We're here talking in Texas. How do Texans feel about critical race theory? What are they telling you?

I mean, I can tell you, we just had a number of, in May, we had some elections in local county school board elections, and we had some serious victories in Alamo Heights in San Antonio and Hayes County, the county I live in, in Bernie, in Kendall County. there was a little bit of some efforts in Austin. I think a couple of those fell short, but now they're energized for the next elections. And people are fired up about it. People recognize why this is a problem.

They're concerned about it. And like I said, the veil has been lifted, right? A lot of parents, frankly, had just kind of allowed the system to continue to educate their children. They thought, well, I'm sending them there. They're learning stuff. It's fine. I don't always agree with it. But okay.

Now they're trying to look at it and go, wait a minute, you're doing what? They're teaching you, what? And then they think, well, this isn't good for my children. children. I'm like, amen. Now let's do something about it. And you're starting to see people wake up to it. Well, as we're talking about critical race theory, race relations right now in the country are pretty tense. Is there a way that you think schools should address topics of race? I think at the end of the day, you best do that. People that I know of all races and backgrounds, white, black, Hispanic, you know, when we unite, as I was saying earlier, unite around the ideas

that bring us together, right? That's how you bring people forward, right? You root out discrimination wherever it exists, right? I mean, you combat it wherever it exists, but you don't dwell on it, right? Have you, if you turn on the news right now and you go listen to a speech by Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or any of the Democrats, what day can you remember where race wasn't a central theme to what they're talking about? So let me ask you a question. Over the last year, last 14 months since the tragic events surrounding Mr. Floyd, this intense focus on race, Has that been good or bad for the livelihoods, the well-being, the progress of communities within black communities in America?

I would argue if you looked at the burning in our streets, if you looked at what's happened in terms of families, in terms of violence, in terms of what's been happening over the last year, this intense focus on race has not been good, as opposed to an intense focus on policies, making good choices on policies. You know, in Austin right now, we just launched a Save Austin now petition to get 50,000 signatures to stand behind our police, not to defund police, but to actually have more resources for police, to increase community policing, to have more cops on the streets building relationships with people in the streets, and to make sure that they're, you know, having in communities, people that actually know the people in those communities. Maybe a black cop in a black community, but that's, you know, that can be helpful. but at the end of the day, make sure that you've got people there that know the people in the streets. Why are we going the other way?

Let's reimagine police by getting rid of them, right? What do you have? You have a doubling of murder in Austin, Texas, right? It's insane. That's not good for anybody, but it's not good for the communities that are alleged to be being helped. And that's one final point on what I'd say about Democrats. They talk a big game about how they're compassionate for people and they particularly like to play up race and color and ethnicity. But are democratic policies good for migrants?

the migrants getting abused in Mexico on the journey from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, the people that are then under the thumb of the cartels being put into human trafficking and sex trafficking, is that good for migrants? Democrats pat themselves on the back for saying, look at me, aren't I compassionate? Yay me for my open borders policies. Meanwhile, little girls getting raped on the journey. And they just go, oh, well, I mean, I guess that's just a product of my political well-being. Right. But that's, we're seeing the same thing with defunding police, reimagining police. This is absolute nonsense. and the American people see it and they understand it.

Well, Congressman Roy, you brought up the border situation, and I wanted to ask you about that. What is your perspective on what's happening right now since the inauguration in January? What have you seen happen and how it's gone down from the Trump administration to January when President Biden was inaugurated until now we're at? Well, it's hard to pick an issue that you can focus on that summarizes better the wrote incompetence and failure of the administration better than the border. you know, I guess the president has allegedly put the vice president, Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the border. I guess now she's in charge of HR1 and moving election integrity reform. I can only hope she's effective at that as she has been effective at securing the border

allegedly. But, you know, what's happening is, you know, we joke about it, but it's a tragedy. I mean, I talk to ranchers every day that have their property being destroyed, fences being destroyed. We see, you know, photographs on ranches where a little girl had her hands bound behind her back. You know, Kat Kamak, Mike. colleague was just talking about conversation she had with a young lady who had been gang raped on the border. I talked to a seven-year-old girl who was on the journey alone by herself, had no family,

had no friends. We talk about, you know, 600,000 apprehensions through mid-May of this year, probably pushing 700,000 soon, 300,000 gotaways and releases. We have more fentanyl that came through in the first four months of this year than all of 2020 combined. It's just absurd what we're doing, and we're seeing this unfold and destroy communities. As my colleague Kat was talking about the amount of Sentinel and we've got this fentanyl heroin cocktail and what's happening to our children and schools, the amount of opioids flowing into our country. Why? Because we have open borders. By the way, we could secure our border in about a week. Seriously, if you just had the willpower to do it, you could secure it, roughly secure it in about a week. Certainly within the year we could have it

pretty much fully secure. And you just change the policies, the asylum policies, the catch and release policies, knock the knees out from under the cartels, make sure that we fix TVPRAA, use return to Mexico, you know, Title 42 for the, you know, COVID and communicable diseases, we could limit flow, and then we could get busy building walls, roads, infrastructure, border patrol, and we could have a secure border. We could do it immediately. We just choose not to. Well, I wanted to ask you to you, you mentioned the vice president, how she's been put in charge.

And I believe recently she said this week or this past week that she's just made by the rhetoric surrounding her, you know, role in this situation. But I've already been twice at the border this year. She's vice president. She's chosen to go. So I guess what would your message? to her and other leaders be right now. Well, my message would be is, you know, if you look at a map of the United States and you just go over to the middle of the country and go down, there's a state and it's called Texas.

And then there's this river along Texas called the Rio Grande and it borders Mexico. There's a problem down here and you're allegedly in charge of it. They have planes. I think you actually have a plane that you can use, pretty sure. Taxpayers pay for it. You can fly out of an Air Force base in Washington, D.C. right outside DC, you can get on that plane, taxpayer funded. You can fly directly to the border.

I don't get to do that. I get on Southwest Airlines. I got to wait for a single direct flight, fly to Austin. Then I got to drive five hours down to McAllen. Now I do it all the time because I live in Texas and I drive down to the border. You can fly directly into McAllen. It'll take you about three and a half hours. You can go down and you can see with your own eyes what's actually happening down at the Rio Grande.

Yet you refuse to do that. And for about two weeks now, I've been throwing out there. I'm happy to debate you anywhere or anytime. I will show up anywhere the vice president says, and I will go there and I will debate her on the border. She won't do that because she knows their policies are an abject failure. They are endangering Americans, endangering migrants, weakening our country, weakening our children, endangering our children, filling our schools, filling our hospitals. She knows that it's a failed policy. So there's no chance she'll show up to debate, but that offer stands.

We mentioned the ranchers that you speak to and the broken fences, the broken water lines, everything that we see. see that happens on these ranches. More broadly speaking, how does illegal immigration affect Texans? Well, look, I mean, you have direct impact. How about Jared Vargas, who two years ago was murdered in San Antonio by an illegal immigrant who was working at the restaurant where he was working? And this guy, the illegal immigrant, had been caught, released, caught, released, caught again, released, and three days later killed Jared Vargas. I know his family very well. They're a lovely family. Jared's twin brother just graduated from college last year, and he's going on to graduate school. Great guy and God bless him. They've moved on through strong faith. That's one story of

dozens, of hundreds, I could tell you, of Americans that have been negatively impacted by this situation. Now currently with this recent flow, ranchers call me every single day. I got people that are texting me, showing me pictures. I could sit here and show you picture after picture of fences that are down, people breaking into homes. I had the mayor of Evaldi, Texas, which is just south of the district I represent. The mayor said they had a hundred mile per hour high speed chase through their town yesterday, and a migrant went through, then they threw a gun out the door as they went blow and throw. The district attorney in Kendall County, Texas, just outside in Bernie, just outside of San Antonio, Nicole Bishop, they had nine immigrants in a car, two of them bound up in a

trunk. They were headed to a stash house in Houston, Texas, to be put into the sex trafficking and human trafficking trade. One of the kids in the car had paid $4,000 to go pick grapes in California. The driver of the car is an American citizen, employee of the cartel del Nerestae of Losatis, operating in O.A. Laredo. That's what's happening every day in Texas, every single day. Fentanyl's killing our kids, the human and sex trafficking in our country, 600,000 apprehensions. That means hundreds of thousands of gotaways, negative impact on our schools, negative impact our communities, crimes that are committed against American citizens. But really, most of all, we've empowered cartels to run the border of the United States.

Well, before you wrap up, I wanted to talk a little bit about HR1. It was called the For the People Act. Now, I believe Democrats are calling it. at the John Lewis Act. What's your perspective of this legislation and what is your thought on it? It's absolute and total garbage. It federalizes elections in a way that it undermines the very structure of our Constitution. It would limit Texas's ability or any other state's ability to have voter identification. It would basically put in place mandates that requires to use mail-in ballots in ways that undermine our ability to have integrity in our ballots and elections. It would pay for campaigns for federal candidates, which inserts the government into that mix. And I go down the

laundry list of things, but it is a federal takeover of elections. It is, I think, in some ways unconstitutional, maybe not in other ways, but it's certainly highly problematic. And I'm obviously strongly against it. I think states ought to be doing what they're doing. We saw Florida, Iowa, Georgia, other states that have passed reforms. Texas needs to kick it in the gear. They just closed out their legislative session without passing election reform. That's a fail. They need to come back into session and pass election reform. The governor's going to call them back. I hope he'll do so pretty quickly, and they'll get back in and pass reforms. We need to ensure that we use voter ID not just in person, but have voter ID attached to mail-in ballots. We need to target mail-in ballots

to those who need it, who request it, who are sick and firm serving overseas, but largely then have people be able to show up in person, know that who's voting, that that ballot is attached to that person. Because if you don't, people say, oh, you know, you're trying to limit votes. No, we're not. We're trying to make sure every ballot that's cast is a ballot that you can trust so that if you cast your ballot, you know it's not being diluted or watered down by somebody voting who's not supposed to be voting. I introduce legislation to require U.S. CIS, DHS, to provide the information necessary to ensure that only citizens vote. This is common sense in a republic.

A republic's only as strong as the faith you have in the elections when you're sending representatives to represent you, and we need to make sure that we can believe it. HR1 is a disaster. We can hope that Senator Manchin holds a line. But we need states, Texas, and others to step up and lead and demonstrate that we're going to fix our elections here locally. Well, Congressman Roy, thank you for joining us on the Daily Signal. It's great having you with us.

Great to join you as always. Glad you're in Texas. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. And as always, please take a moment to encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening and we'll be back with you all tomorrow.

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