Critical race theory has blossomed in the United States into a culture war between institutions and those they purport to serve. As usual, legacy media have colluded to delegitimize any objections by either minimizing the dogma, re-defining it, or denying its existence. Americans ought to consider the media’s frenzy to smear writers exposing CRT in 2012 when examining the reality of today.
After Andrew Breitbart indicated at the Conservative Political Action Conference that he had footage to substantiate that President Barack Obama maintained a relationship with a prominent critical race theorist, it led to a news storm.
Breitbart’s fiery speech led to a now all-too-familiar CRT battle between two opposing media forces. Breitbart.com released footage of Obama speaking at a diversity protest in support of a professor named Derrick Bell, whom the outlet’s former editor Ben Shapiro referred to in an explainer column as “the father of Critical Race Theory (CRT).” Heritage Foundation fellow Mike Gonzalez told me in an email he is more like the “godfather” of CRT.
A Familiar Media Smear
Bell, a Harvard University Law professor at the time, was overwhelmingly defended by left-leaning pundits, as was Obama. If you can picture it, and hopefully you can given how investigative journalist Christopher Rufo and others have been treated by media today, Breitbart’s writers were lambasted as conspiracy theorists.
Joel Pollak, the editor-in-chief at the time and now the current Breitbart editor-at-large, was implicitly called racist on CNN by host Soledad O’Brien, a “smear artist” in The New Yorker, and told in The Nation he was unreasonably rebuking “intellectual leaders in a long tradition of calling on America to address racial unfairness.”
“The Breitbart.com approach is to turn every last human gesture into evidence in an ongoing character trial conducted by the most zealous members of an ideological tribe,” declared The Atlantic. “The people in charge of Breitbart.com belong on a 1990s college campus chanting ‘the personal is the political’ and fighting with their far-left analogs. Instead they’re running a popular conservative Web site, which tells you just how intellectually bankrupt movement conservatism has become.”
Rolling Stone rejected CRT’s radicalism, declaring, “Anyone who thinks power and race don’t figure in how the law is applied or that racism is a thing of the past is not paying attention.”
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