"Why Do Conservatives Fear Critical Race Theory"

 I saw this on "Quora" and I thought it was a good explaination.  It expounds on what I have said in the past.  the post was well written.

    The guy name is "Ted Kord"

The question should be, why don’t more self-professed liberals actually fear Critical Theory.

Actually, some are afraid. As Edward Slosser pointed out in a Vox article titled I’m a Liberal Professor and my Liberal Students Terrify me (link below).

Professors, often leftist professors, have every reason to be scared of students who have been indoctrinated on one branch or another of Critical Theory (not just Critical Race Theory.

Consider for a moment what happened at 2015 at Yale University. Highly regarded Educator Erika Christakis had the poor taste to opine that colleges shouldn’t be in the business of telling students what Halloween costumes the students can and cannot wear. Professor Christakis expressed that students should be free to make mistakes and commit faux paus.

“Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you? …What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment? Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.”

Her Husband Nicholas, also a professor at Yale, agreed with her. I can understand that as I would never publicly disagree with my wife. But Both professors are advocates for a truly liberal model of a university.

For agreeing with his wife Nicholas Christakis found himself surrounded by an angry mob insulting him and calling for a change in his employment status.

Mind you, Erika and Nicholas Christakis are deeply liberal Democrats, what we used to talk about when referring to “liberal college professors.” The video of Professor Christakis being insulted and berated by students for not publicly disagreeing with his wife. I don’t know about you, but as someone who’s been happily married for quite some time, publicly disagreeing with my wife is something I just don’t do. My wife is a career educator, and if someone came up to me and asked me to denounce something she’s written or said, I’d tell them to perform a sexual act on themselves.

The Christakis video from Yale shocked many, but it was nothing compared to what would happen to another professor with even more left-wing cred.

I present the case of Bret Weinstein, whom I mentioned earlier. Professor Weinstein taught Evolutionary Biology at a crunchy little left-wing college in the Pacific North-West called Evergreen State College. Weinstein is a pretty left-wing guy. He supported Bernie Sanders and Occupy Wall Street. If you go listen to his first interview with Joe Rogan, you can hear him make very well-crafted arguments in favor of abolishing nuclear power and why the capitalist system needs to be replaced.

If you truly listen to his arguments, you will see that by any objective standard Weinstein is a deeply committed progressive wanting America to adopt some, as yet, untried form of socialism.

Despite being of the left, when Evergreen State College asked White faculty and staff to stay away for a civil rights-related day of absence, Weinstein sent this very carefully-worded letter of protest to colleagues and administration.

For sending this very measured e-mail, Weinstein was targetted by his more radical-left colleagues who whipped students into a fury, then sent them out to disrupt his biology class.

The students began with insults and profanity, but progressed to the point where armed students were searching cars (Portland Antifa style) for the professor. The campus police chief called Weinstein and told him not to come on campus because it wasn’t safe, and the college president had ordered the campus police to stand down…that is: the college president ordered the campus police to NOT PROTECT Professor Weinstein.

This illiberal violence directed at Weinstein was stirred up by one of his very colleagues. Naima Lowe, an “art” professor at Evergreen State College who sees activism as the focus of her teaching.

When some of her left-wing colleagues at Evergreen disagreed with her on how to achieve a more egalitarian campus, here’s how she responded. “You are now these motherf***ers that we’re pushing against. You can’t see your way out of your own ass.” She helped instigate verbal assaults on Professor Weinstein.

Weinstein might be “deeply progressive,” as he describes himself, but when he disagreed with Lowe he found his classes being disrupted and his family being threatened by her students.

This socialist educator lost his teaching position because he had become the subject of a witch hunt. One can assume that there were one or two conservatives on the Evergreen staff, but they survived by camouflaging themselves and hiding their opinions. Unable to find real conservatives, the raging SJWs went after the nearest thing to a witch (conservative) and that was a mild-mannered biology professor who had supported Bernie Sanders in the previous election.

Critical Theory is a utopian political ideology that seeks to dismantle the centuries long liberal project that turned western and northern Europe, along with North America, into the destinations of choice 90% of the world’s migrants.

I first became aware of Critical Theory more than a decade ago while earning a graduate degree in Educational Administration. Years earlier I had noticed the general lift-wing bias in graduate Education courses while earning my first credential. But by the time I was working my first masters degree, Marxists like Brazilian Paulo Friere…

…along with 1960s/70s “new-left” terrorist turned “educator” William Ayers were becoming the dominant voices within the field of Education, often displacing older Progressives like John Dewey.

The sudden predominance of Marxists and Neo-Marxists as part of an educational curriculum for aspiring principals and education bureaucrats was part of what is called Critical Pedagogy.

Douglas Kellner, a proponent of the neo-Marxist Critical Theory, describes the evolution of thought from Karl Marx to what I had to learn to get my credential in California 20 years ago in From Classical Marxism to Critical Pedagogy by Douglas Kellner.

“Alongside of the proliferation of neo-Marxian theories of culture and society and globalization of cultural studies, forms of an oppositional critical pedagogy emerged that explicitly criticized schooling in capitalist societies while calling for more emancipatory modes of education. In his now classic The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972), Brazilian educator and activist Paulo Freire criticized the "banking concept of education" while calling for more interactive, dialogical, and participatory forms of pedagogy that are parallel in interesting ways to those of John Dewey. While Dewey wanted education to produce citizens for democracy, however, Freire sought, in the spirit of Marxist revolutionary praxis, to develop a pedagogy of the oppressed that would produce revolutionary subjects, empowered to overthrow oppression and to create a more democratic and just social order.”

Most people would assume that Education graduate programs were left wing. But they would shocked if they learned how one small branch of left-wing politics, a branch so radical that it is at odds with both liberalism and even classical Marxism, has taken over teacher training.

Over he last 2 decades, many branches of humanities and social studies have embraced what is known is Critical theory. So what is critical theory.

In the early 20th Century, Marxism has become a political force. Proponents of Marxism made claims, and among them were:

• Communism was scientific and its benefits would be easily measurable.
• Those benefits would include a higher standard of living because of the efficiency of state control.
• Communist countries would be more humane than capitalist countries.

By the 1960s, data was rolling in and it didn’t turn out exactly how the proponents of Communism had intended. Among the pieces of evidence the intellectuals had to take into account.

The mass starvation of Ukrainians by the Soviet Union.

Forty-five million Chinese peasants being worked, beaten and intentionally starved to death during China’s Great Leap Forward.

The numerous purges through which the likes of Lenin, Staling and Mao killed more communists than all the world’s anti-communists combined.

The final straw for many was the use of Russian tanks to suppress Hungarian student protesters in 1956.

By the 1960s, an honest intellectual could not defend communism either on economic or humanitarian grounds. But as it turned out that there were plenty of intellectuals who thought that something … kinda … sorta … like Marxism was just what west’s culture needed. Intellectuals of the The Frankfurt School created a form of Marxism mostly devoid of economics. Instead of workers vs. capitalists, advocates of Critical Theory saw almost every cultural interaction as an instance where someone was oppressing and someone was being oppressed. It was men vs. women, whites vs. blacks, and homosexuals vs. heterosexuals; in all these interactions someone was being oppressed and someone was doing the oppressing.

I’m oversimplifying to some extent. Professors of education and humanities didn’t just decide to adopt Neo-Marxist Critical Theory as the operating system (so to speak) of academia. First academics embraced the French philosophy of Postmodernism. This radical philosophy was great for dissecting and deconstructing existing institution, but it wasn’t really suitable for building institutions.

Advocates of Postmodernism, like renegade historian Thaddeus Russell maintain that most of the supposedly “postmodernist scholars” of the 1990s and 2000s completely missed the point Postmodernists like Michel Foucault were trying to make. One thing is without question, Postmodernists rejected the idea that anything could be known objectively, which is the basis of science. If “scholars” within humanities, social sciences and cultural studies kept anything from Postmodernism, it was a rejection of a scientific way of knowing.

Postmodernism went through academia like a tornado through a trailer park, overturning assumptions and dismantling previously reliable ways of knowing.

Now, just to be clear, Postmodernists are not communists. If the Postmodernists had any particular mission, it was the dismantling of all grand narratives whether that narrative was The Scientific Method, Christianity or Communism. But postmodernism created a void that was filled by hard-left authoritarians with a new all purpose ideology, Critical Theory.

Critical Theory is the term that Marxist social critics (sometimes called Neo-Marxists), such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer gave to their particular approach to political and social philosophy.

Critical Theory is basically Marxist ideology as applied to everything outside of economics. Where Marx was obsessed with class differences, Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer created a new ideology that focused on power rather than money, and through which the world could be divided into oppressors and oppressed.

Make no mistake, you’re either one or the other.

These three men invented the ideology called Critical Theory. I capitalized the words critical and theory because it is a title, a proper noun. “Critical Theory” is basically the brand name Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer gave to their particular brand of Marxism. There are some peculiarities that result from the particular interests of the original authors.

For example, Marcuse was far more obsessed with sexual liberation than Marx ever was. He seemed to think that if humans were freed from capitalist drudgery they could spend all days learning new and better ways to orgasm.

Marcuse was also a big fan of Martin Heidegger, the German collectivist philosopher who’s most famous contribution to history was putting the socialism into German National Socialism.

The ideology devised by Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno is sufficiently malleable that it can be applied to other areas of interests.

• Critical Race Theory, for example, is merely the application of Neo-Marxist Critical Theory to race.
• Gender Theory is Marxist Critical Theory applied to issues of gender.
• Critical Legal Theory is simply a Neo-Marxist interpretation of law.
• And of course Critical Pedagogy is the application of Marxist Critical Theory to Education.

The important thing to understand is that none of those are “theories” as the term “theory” is understood by science. A theory is a hypothesis that, after being repeatedly challenged through experimentation, is found to be correct.

But the assertions made in the various Critical Theory “disciplines” are immune from being challenged. If an advocate of Critical Race Theory asserts an idea, someone challenging that idea might find themselves treated much the way Bret Weinstein was treated…if not worse.

So not only are the offshoots of Critical Theory free of theories, they are largely free of hypothesis. What Critical Theory has is dogmas. So in all important ways, the branches of Critical Theory are more akin to a religion than to science or social science.

Critical Theories are new secular religions.

These new religions were crafted together based on equal parts mis-understanding of Postmodernism and a piss-poor understanding of Neo-Marxism. While the overriding philosophy is a miss-mash of “postmodernism” and “Neo-Marxism” As it evolved since the turn of the century, the guiding principle became Intersectionality. The idea is that some people are privileged in multiple ways while other people are oppressed in multiple ways.

Look at the diagram above. Everyone will fit into more than one category.

• The more of your categories that appear above the horizontal line, the more privileged you are in society.
• The more of your categories that appear below the line, the more oppressed you are.

Within this system of understanding, “knowledge” is given credibility based not on whether is is empirically true, it is based on the extent you are privileged or oppressed.

If you mostly fit into categories below the horizontal line, your opinions are given greater weight, and it doesn’t matter whether or not your beliefs are based on reality, because there is no real way of knowing; it’s all about power.

If you mostly fit into categories above the horizontal line, your opinions are given less weight, even if you’ve compiled lots of facts and data to support your believe. The fact that you rely on “factoids” rather than emotion to make your argument means that you just don’t get it.

More so than Postmodernism or Marxism, this is the overriding philosophy at work in American universities. If you have any interest in understanding how these ideas took hold in academia, I would recommend listening to Helen Pluckrose.

Ms. Pluckrose is a left-wing critic of Postmodernism and Critical Theory. Remember earlier where I said that Critical Theory often finds itself in conflict with liberals and old-school Marxists. Much is made of the cultural wars on college campuses, with narratives that seem to pit conservatives against wacky liberals. That is a misrepresentation. Critical Theory is at odds with both conservatives and liberals, and for the moment the world’s newest religion seems to be winning.

Critical Theory, and its many offshoots are undeserving of being taught in public schools because they are a political ideology that has been raised up to the status of secular religion.

We should not be indoctrinating children in politics or religion within our public schools.

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid