CRT Is Not a Free Speech Issue!

BUCK: One of the weak arguments that’s being made these days in favor of the continuation of CRT in schools, by the way, is that it’s now… Some on the left and actually some — I’m gonna say this — kind of Never Trumper-type Republicans are saying, “Well, this is a free speech issue! Teachers can teach whatever they want to teach in the class.”

So now they’re free speech absolutists. The people that were in favor of banning Trump from Twitter and Facebook are saying, “Teaching your kids if they’re white, then they are stained with immorality and oppression, it’s a free speech issue.” Oh, no, wait.

These are government employees, and these are editorial decisions in a sense being made by these government employees. So as we can see, there’s not a whole lot of consistency when it comes to principles in the free speech debate from the left — or from the Never Trumpers, for that matter.

CLAY: Yeah, and this is why content neutral rules are so important, right? Because politics of speech can’t vary, right? If you look back historically in the wake of 9/11, Bill Maher got canceled for saying something that was not sufficiently condemnatory of the 9/11 terrorists, and —

BUCK: He said they weren’t cowards, was what he said.

CLAY: That’s right. Yeah. Which got him canceled then. And now, to his credit, Bill Maher has come back and become a defender of free speech of late. But this is, I believe, indicative of what usually the truth. People defend free speech when it represents something they agree with, and then they wholeheartedly attack it if it represents something they disagree with, which is why these Big Tech platforms need content neutral speech as opposed to being able to pick and choose who’s allowed to speak and not.

BUCK: And also why the ACLU is a laughable organization now.

CLAY: Ugh. They’ve given up their job.

BUCK: They believe in free speech, unless of their woke friends are gonna be really upset at them and then free speech all of a sudden goes away and the principles no longer really matter. I meant to get to this before. I know I’m having a real… Fauci gets a lot of heat from me, Clay, so does Randi Weingarten, especially because, let’s remember, she was one of the primary proponents of “the science” when it came to shutting down schools —

CLAY: Oh, yeah. She’s failed.

BUCK: — which never should have happened, and now the whole Soviet-style rewriting of history from Weingarten and others like is that, “Oh, no, they’re big proponents for reopposing schools now, though there may still be masks on kids in the fall so that we have to continue to talk about it.” But there’s an author named Douglas Murray who’s pointing out that Weingarten is… This goes to the free speech issue and what’s really happening and is this about teaching history or not.

Weingarten is a culture warrior for the left. Play 15.

MURRAY: She calls these people, these parents and others “culture warriors” now. So she’s trying to turn this whole thing around. She’s the one who’s being a culture warrior on it. She’s fighting incredibly hard for critical race theory. She’s gonna fight very hard, she boasts, for her union members who teach critical race theory. I just wish she’d ever fought half as hard for America’s students who’ve missed so much of their education in the last year and prioritized them. But that’s clearly not her priority.

BUCK: You know how I mentioned before that this is going after the heart of the Democrat power structure with CRT? But it’s also you’re seeing the teachers unions are so essential to the left and to the Democrat Party across the nation. It’s really one of the most powerful sources, not only of funding for Democrat politicians.

And then you have the self-licking ice cream cone, right, of better and better benefits and pay for these questions as long as they vote Democrats and Democrats give them better donations — and they usually back end it so it has to do with more retirement benefits and stuff like that.

But the teachers unions know that they are essential to the Democrat Party, which is why they were able to actually push around the Biden administration a little bit on reopening. So this is a fight we need to have. This is a fight we’ve picked, and this is a fight we need to have.

CLAY: And it is well said that she’s defending CRT more aggressively than she defended kids needing to be in schools, because science was pretty straightforward, transparent, and clear, that kids were under no danger from covid and they needed to be in school, and yet the vast majority of kids out there did not have that opportunity at all to be in school.

So we’ve been talking a lot about CRT, and many of you have flooded our phone lines with your own stories about your kids and your experiences as teachers — 800-282-2882 — to the extent that Buck Sexton even had to give you the ability to anonymize all of your criticisms because so many people are afraid that if they speak out the wrong way, that they end up being targets themselves.