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Home , Falsifiability, Marc Thiessen

WTH is critical race ? How a that inspired , Nazism, and Jim Crow is making its way into our schools, and what we can do

Episode #108 | June 23, 2021 | , Marc Thiessen, and Allen Guelzo

Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.

Marc Thiessen: .

Danielle Pletka: Welcome going on?

Marc Thiessen: Well Dany, we are talking about something that is on the minds of millions of Americans today: critical race theory. This is debated in school board

debated on all of the news c is critical race theory. We know that people are pushing for having discussions know what critical race theory is. And I was listening the other day to an interview with Professor Allen Guelzo of Princeton, and he had this really fascinating

Allen Guelzo: son probably thinks of critical race theory as simply an intelligent way to talk a lot about race, and it is. But critical race theory may also be the most irresponsible way to think about race in eory is a subset of , which has got long roots in back to in the 1790s. Kant lived at the end of a century known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, but he feared that had shown that reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives. There had to be a way of knowing things that went beyond reason, and for him that meant developing a theory of being critical of reason, hence critical theory. The problem was that critical theory got away. It instead justified ways of appealing to some very unreasonable things as explanations things like race, nationality, class and they gave us and

Marc Thiessen: It was a response to and a rejection of the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason and the principles on which our Republic was founded. And like so many dangerous ideas, the rejection of reason spawn a number of monstrous ideologies in the 20th century, like Marxism and Soviet Communism and Nazism, and dictatorships in between, that killed millions of people in the 20th century, and now in the 21st century some people are trying to apply this critical

2 theory to questions of race. This is basically an attack on the Enlightenment principles on which our Republic was founded. So, if we want to debate it I think podcast today to expound on what he just said.

Danielle Pletka: The problem here is that we have an idea, a philosophy about the role of race in American history and the role of race in American society. And what it at its heart suggests is, A: that race has been central to everything in America since the founding. That it is, to use a far less elevated rhetoric, that it is baked into the cake of American institutions and American attitudes. And because it is so baked into the cake, the notion that we have embraced, lo these many, many, many decades, even centuries of equality of opportunity does not suffice because opportunity isn't enough, right?

Danielle Pletka: Redistribution, equity, not equality, has to be the outcome. In other words, it's not enough that I put you both, you, a white child and you, a black child in a school and I paid your parents a hundred thousand dollars each and I gave you the same teachers. If the white child comes out with an A and the black child comes out with a B, that is an unacceptable outcome because it is in not rooted in performance, it is rooted in the structural systemic racism of our society that we practice every day in every way without even realizing it. Now, when you think about that, you realize there's no way out of that morass, ever.

Marc Thiessen: No. Yeah. 100%. And look, what Arthur Brooks used to talk about is that the between equity and equality is that equality is an equal start on the starting line, equity is about the finishing line. And if you don't end up in the same place in the finishing line, then you've failed. if you go back to read Martin Luther

racist, he argued that racism was un-American, right?

Marc Thiessen: He appealed to the Declaration of Independence, he appealed to the Cons that I have come to cash a check that was promised me by the founding fathers in that wonderful document, the Declaration of Independence. He said, "Our founders made a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men would be guaranteed the unalienable of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." He had come to, "Cash a check that give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of so that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these to be self-evident that all men are created equal." Critical race theory rejects that. Critical race theory says that those promises were, illegitimate, that those truths are not truths and that there's no argument against that.

Danielle Pletka: First of all, I am so grateful to be reminded of the eloquence of Martin Luther King, because truly the way he expressed these things I think has very little equal in American history. I think that a lot of this has become, like everything we debate in our society today, has become about politics, right? The right thinks this, the left thinks that, and that's just the way it's going to be. And that does a disservice to something that deserves genuine debate, that deserves genuine discussion. But there's a bigger problem here as well, which is that it is, for me, critical race theory and everything about it is the denial of to the

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3 individual. When I look at a group of first graders, I do not think to myself, oh, now one is black and one is white and one is purple and one is Jewish and one is Catholic.

Danielle Pletka: I don't think about identity politics-

Marc Thiessen: They don't either.

Danielle Pletka: And they don't either, but what these ideas do, even when toned down, is that they inculcate in these children a sense of otherness from each other. They are not in this game together, they are competitors. One is bad, one is good. These sorts of judgments that I associate with, I do, I associate them with eugenics, I associate them with Hitler, I associate them with Saddam Hussein. These are horrible, horrible notions that are being inculcated in our children. And I don't want to question the motives of people who genuinely feel that America must spend more time on its terrible racial crimes because I think that there's nothing wrong-

Marc Thiessen: We all agree.

Danielle Pletka: Right. There's nothing wrong with teaching that and seeking to regress it and making sure that such things never happen again, and ensuring that racism is erased and that opportunity is equally distributed. My biggest complaint, and I say this in our conversation with Dr. Guelzo as well, my biggest complaint is I think that this is actually educating a of racists, black anti-white racists, white anti-black racist, and I don't know how we get out of that nightmare.

Marc Thiessen: This is why it's such a cancer in our educational system because you just described that classroom of first graders, right? They have to be taught to hate. Hate is not natural, hate is not something that they come up with on their own. And what critical race theory is doing is teaching them, one, to hate each other, and two, to hate America. That this country is corrupt. And I-

Danielle Pletka: And it represents everything bad in this world.

Marc Thiessen: Exactly. And so I go back again to Martin Luther King because I want people to understand, all of us want to fight discrimination, all of us want to oppose racism and this is a rejection of Dr. King's strategy of doing that. I want to quote his speech that he delivered the night before he was assassinated, when basically his argument was that it was Bull Connor that was violating the principles of American founding. He said, this is a quote, "If I lived in China or even Russia or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions, maybe I could understand the denial of basic First Amendment privileges because they hadn't committed themselves over there." He said, "But I live in America." And he said the goal of the civil rights movement was to make America what it ought to be by standing up for the best of the American dream and taking the whole nation back to the great wells of democracy, which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution."

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4 Marc Thiessen: And the next day, he was assassinated and gave his life for the cause of equality in this country. Critical race theory-

Danielle Pletka: Is a repudiation.

Marc Thiessen: ... is a repudiation of that. And not only that, it is embrace of the totalitarian of China and Russia-

Danielle Pletka: And Jim Crow.

Marc Thiessen: ... and Jim Crow and all the rest of it. It basically says it's not enough to get rid of discrimination. We all want to get rid of discrimination.

Danielle Pletka: We have to discriminate.

Marc Thiessen: We have to discriminate more, and we have to have alternative discrimination until the inequities are justified. In our country, we look at the civil rights that we've made as a battle against discrimination. Critical race theory embraces discrimination.

Danielle Pletka: So there's been a lot of conversation on TV networks, in state legislatures, as Marc and I said, in families living rooms about these ideas, but a lot of these conversations have been nasty. They've been dopey, they've been uninformed. And so what Marc and I hope today is actually to bring someone to have a very serious, reasoned discussion about the philosophy behind critical race theory, what it really is, what its history is, what its roots are, and to try to bring a better understanding of it to our listeners so that when you do hear conversations about it, you can root them in a much deeper foundation of understanding. You all may remember Dr. Allen Guelzo. He's been a guest of ours before. He's the director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and senior scholar in the Council of the at Princeton University. He's a New York Times bestselling author. He's written in , . You've seen his name-

Marc Thiessen: The preeminent historian of Abraham Lincoln.

Danielle Pletka: And he is the preeminent historian of Abraham Lincoln as Marc just said, bogarting my introduction. So with that, we'll go to our interview.

Marc Thiessen: Well, Professor Guelzo, welcome back to the podcast.

Allen Guelzo: Thank you, Marc. It's good to be back.

Marc Thiessen: Well, what prompted us to have you on is you were on the other day, and first time I'd ever heard Immanuel Kant mentioned on Fox News, but it was a fascinating explanation of what critical race theory is. And most Americans look and hear this and think, well, what's wrong with teaching racial sensitivity in our schools, what's wrong with confronting the flaws of our racial history? But that's not really what critical race theory is. Can you tell us what it is and where it comes from?

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5 Allen Guelzo: Well, let me answer the second part of that question first, and then let that begin to answer the first part. Let's do a little history. Critical theory has a very long trail, surprisingly. You can find its origins in a reaction against the Enlightenment and against the confidence that scientific reason could discover the answers to things like physics, as it did with , to art, as in the writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, to religion, as it did with Bishop Butler, to , as it did with Adam Smith, and ultimately to society, as it did with Locke and Montesquieu. The Enlightenment was confident that reason could discover the real answers to these things. But you know there was always a suspicion that the human reason was getting ahead of itself, that somehow it was missing the real essence of things. It was giving us the dry and dusty rather than real life.

Allen Guelzo: Now, we usually call this reaction to the Enlightenment, we call it romanticism, and it had its philosophers as well as composers and artists, and that is where critical theory begins. The hinge figure here is Immanuel Kant. A lot of Kant faces back to the Enlightenment. Kant was appalled at the irreligious conclusions to which reason had driven the Enlightenment. He was determined to find a way around Enlightenment religious lack of faith.

Allen Guelzo: So he says, what can we know for certain? Well, if we rely strictly on reason, we discover that reason only works on what our physical senses tell us, and that's not much. Reason can't penetrate into the essence of things. Some other tool was needed to reach what he called the thing in itself. So, to brush back the influence of reason, Kant develops a critique of reason, a critical theory, if you will. And he does this by asking a series of skeptical questions about reason. All right, here's question number one. When reason asks, what is, or what is not, how comprehensive is that question, really? Is something failing? Is something being held back there? Question number two, when you become hesitant about reason's strength in asking questions, then ask this, why are you asking this question? What is really motivating you?

Allen Guelzo: Question three, when you become self-conscious of the real motivations for your reasoning, then, ah, that's when you see how little reason can penetrate to the real lessons of things and you awake to a new . And that reality is that reason has blinded you. That is critical theory, Marc. It is a procedure for unmasking one's real motivations and the real of things.

Marc Thiessen: Professor Guelzo, one of the things you said in this interview was that this led to everything from the Third Reich to Jim Crow, connect that to us, what you've just said.

Danielle Pletka: I think what Marc is asking, which is really fascinating, is we hear all of this facile talk and criticism of critical race theory without understanding the philosophical underpinnings, but also the historical underpinnings. So can you draw us, if I may use Barack Obama's somewhat loathsome term, can you draw us an arc from Immanuel Kant through to the modern day and some of the ideas this has spawned?

Allen Guelzo: Sure. Yeah. Kant, you have to understand, Kant actually hoped that critical theory would produce a healthy religious and philosophical result, but it didn't. Instead, critical theory set off a chain reaction of romantic investigations for non-rational

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6 explanations of reality.

Allen Guelzo: Now, some of those non-rational explanations took a form of nationalism. That's what you find in the philosophy of Georg Hegel. Some of them took the form of out-and-out racism. That's what you find in the writings of the French racist, Arthur de Gobineau. This is all 19th century. Above all, you find non-rational explanations of reality based on economic class, and that is Karl Marx. You see, the fundamental contention of critical theory is that everything you see on the surface around you is actually entirely separate from the intentions that created it. You might think that you could explain, let's say Napoleon Bonaparte, you might think you could explain Napoleon by power politics practiced by a shrewd Corsican. In reality, his triumph was really governed by the conquering of nationalism.

Allen Guelzo: And you might think that economics functions as what Adam Smith called a natural instinct to truck and barter. But in reality, it's governed by the oppressive relations of class. Especially in the hands of Marx, critical theory uncovers the activity, not of employers and employees, but of an oppressor class and an oppressed class.

Allen Guelzo: Now, the great attraction of critical theory is that, like the romantic poets and the romantic artists, it promises an emotional burst of revelation and indignation. It allows you not so much to understand because remember, understanding is a function of reason, it allows you to denounce. It allows you to replace the question, is what I know true with a different question, whose interests does this question serve?

Allen Guelzo: Now, the great weakness of critical theory at exactly that juncture. If the only purpose of questions is to serve the interests of a dominant or oppressive class, then no question that you ask about the of a situation or the truth of an event or the truth of a , none of that kind of questioning about truth has any meaning. And any answer you come up with, which doesn't speak in terms of some hidden structure of oppression, can simply be dismissed as part of the structure of oppression.

Allen Guelzo: Critical theory, if I can put it this way, critical theory lacks what called a vital element of the of , and that element is falsifiability. Critical theory lacks falsifiability.

Marc Thiessen: Basically, critical theory spawned racism, nationalism and Marxism, so how has it brought us to the anti-racism movement here in the United States?

Allen Guelzo: Start with that idea about falsifiability. Falsifiability means that before you grant any answer or any assertion or any or any theory the status of a worthwhile , that theory, that answer, that hypothesis has got to show on what grounds it might be proven false. And if that theory or answer passes that test of falsifiability then fine, it is a worthwhile belief. If not, move on to the next hypothesis. Critical theory shrugs away any tests to falsifiability because it has discovered the real hidden explanation for everyday problems. And any attempt to suggest criteria for falsifiability means that you are actually part of the conspiracy undermining critical theory. This is where we get, for instance, to the

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7 Nazis.

Allen Guelzo: For instance, if you believe, as the Nazis did, that the Jews are responsible for all political and economic events, then my pointing out that the overwhelming majority of political leaders are not Jews merely shows that I am either a dupe of the Jews or that I'm in on the fix. That is how Nazi racial theory functioned. It was a kind of critical theory.

Danielle Pletka: So this is absolutely fascinating. I think your argument about, sort of, the lack of falsifiability while it sounds like an elegant intellectual argument is in fact, the sort of in which we find ourselves. I still remember that I came back from an event at a television station, and I won't be more specific than that, and one of my guests, one of my co-panelists didn't like something I said and she turned to me during the commercial break and she said, "Yes, you know, many white people just don't realize their own racism."

Allen Guelzo: Exactly.

Danielle Pletka: I mean, I was agape, but this is the falsifiability. It is you said that, your argument is rooted in the whole structural weakness of your society, right?

Allen Guelzo: Right, you are in on the fix. If you object to what is being promoted by critical theory, that merely demonstrates that you are part of the problem.

Allen Guelzo: I've talked about this resistance falsifiability as a great weakness for critical theory. For a lot of other people, that resistance to falsifiability, that's critical theory's great strength, because it means that they now have a ready-to-use explanation for everything. And it s an explanation which is proof against any kind of normal reasoning or normal objection. The classic example is in how Marxist theory developed in the 20th century.

Allen Guelzo: In Marxist theory, the proletariat, the working class, is oppressed by the dominant bourgeoisie. The dominant bourgeoisie are oppressors because they control the means of production. And being in control of the means of production, they're able to immiserate, that's a fond Marxist term, they're able to immiserate and exploit the proletariat. The poor proletariat, they have to produce for the bourgeoisie for wages, and the wages are far, far, far below the value of what is actually produced and that value is what is appropriated by the bourgeoisie.

Allen Guelzo: Now for Marx, it was as sure as the sun comes up in the morning that in a brief time, a moment of crisis would arrive and the oppressed proletarians would rise up, shake off their chains and overthrow the bourgeoisie. Well, the moment of crisis arrived in 1914 with World War I, only the proletariat, bless their hearts, rather than rising in revolution, went out and fought for their kings and their emperors for four perfectly pointless years in the trenches of the Western front and the plains, the snowy plains, of the Eastern front.

Allen Guelzo: Now, at that point, the Marxists should have turned to each other and said, "Look. Was Karl wrong?" "Well, no, no," cried the post-World War I generation

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8 of Marxists. "No," they said, "No, Marx was not wrong. The problem was that the proletariat had been suckered. The proletariat had been enculturated into bourgeoisie democratic values and they didn't see their misery as misery. And they didn't see democracy for what it really was, which was another form of oppression.

Allen Guelzo: Now, in this way, Marxist theory does a major shift. People do not resist the bourgeoisie because they failed to penetrate the cultural veil of hegemony. That's really the case that has happened here. They've been drugged so that they don't see their oppression by bourgeoisie culture. What they require, you might say, is not so much a revolution. They require a revelation, which will enable them with newly opened eyes to look around and see how they have been suckered and then we will get the Marxist revolution.

Marc Thiessen: So bring this home to today. So for the Nazis, the Jews were the oppressors. For the Marxists, the kulaks and the bourgeoisie were the oppressors. And today, in 21st century America, the whites are the oppressors.

Allen Guelzo: Basically, yes. Critical theory springs out of that in a number of new applications. And then finally, we get to critical race theory. Critical race theory emerges as a way of destabilizing thinking about race and yes, discovering hidden forms of oppression. It's what we find today in the writings of Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Kimberlé Crenshaw, F. Delgado, and Stephanic and other promoters of critical race theory.

Danielle Pletka: And, of course, The New York Times 1619 Project, which is the sort of the more pedestrian version of that in action.

Allen Guelzo: You might say that. Now, 1619 Project does not directly invoke critical race theory, and there may be reasons for that that I have not entirely penetrated because I am not conversant with certain individuals who are part of that and they are probably not eager to be conversant with me because I've been very critical of the 1619 Project purely on historical grounds. But there is a certain family resemblance that people have seen. I would prefer not to pin the tail on any particular donkey at this point until someone associated with the 1619 Project comes right out and says, "Well, what we're really doing is we're just practicing critical race theory," that hasn't happened. So I will treat them, at least up until that point, purely on the basis of historical debate.

Allen Guelzo: What is, is that critical race theory teaches that race is the key factor in understanding all human relationships.

Allen Guelzo: Now, the 1619 Project says that race is the key factor in understanding American history. So there's a family resemblance, but I won't press it to be more than a family resemblance. If I'm sticking to just talking about critical race theory, then what I have to say is that critical race theory teaches that race is that most important, that non-negotiable that governs and helps us to interpret all human relationships because all human relationships are relationships of power. And what critical race theory basically comes down to saying is that all white people are oppressors. All white people are instinctively white supremacists. Notice I say instinctively, because this is not a function of reason. None of this, going back to

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9 Kant, has been a function of reason. All white people are oppressors. They employ privilege. They use tricks like democracy and the search for truth. They use those things to exploit and oppress and dominate people of color, or as it sometimes is used as an acronym, BIPOCs, meaning black indigenous people of color. The only remedy is the inversion of color power and that brings us finally then to critical race theory as it is being promoted and taught today.

Danielle Pletka: Okay, so what I want to do is find my way out of this thicket. You've given us all of the underpinnings and in some ways you've helped everybody visually erect this maze that we found ourselves in, whether rooted in Kantian theory or in more modern versions of this. But what you're really suggesting is on the most basic level of debate and argument, a denial of agency to almost anybody. So you mentioned an interesting piece that appeared by Charles Blow in the New York Times and he goes at this in exactly the way that you would have predicted, right? He says, "Critical race theory was simply an analytical tool, but to some white people, the fact that white supremacy was overtly used to infect America's systems of power with both racial oppressions and racial privileges is too much to handle. It's discomforting. It unravels the American myth."

Danielle Pletka: In other words, by even arguing with this, you are in fact a racist. Okay. So how do thoughtful people who don't believe themselves to be racist and who deplore racism when they see it, how do they extricate themselves from this thicket?

Allen Guelzo: Well, I think there are two things that need to be kept in mind. First of all, people need to realize that there is no genuine compatibility between critical race theory and democracy. Democracy is about deliberation. It's about persuasion. It's about reason, and it functions on the assumption that people are entitled to disagree. Democracy says that when a majority arrives at a conclusion, the majority has the right to have its way. And the minority has to acquiesce in that. At the same time, it also says that the majority is not entitled to take the minority and put them up against a barn wall and shoot them, because it could be that over time and over argument and over reason, and over the minority may persuade enough people that they can become the majority and the entire thing tilts again.

Allen Guelzo: It's about discussion. It is about reasoning. It is about evidence. That is what democracy rests on. Critical race theory reduces all disagreement to power relationships. Power relationships in which the oppressors are dealing with a marked deck, and there's no reason to trust anybody, there's no reason ever to want to say, "Well, you know, we might be wrong and there might come a time when you persuade enough people that you will have the opportunity to tell us what policy should be." Critical race theory eliminates that entirely, because the very possibility that there could come a moment when those with whom you disagree, could exercise that control over policy, that is a moment not of democracy, that is a moment of oppression.

Allen Guelzo: So critical race theory, by reducing all disagreements to power and questions of power, means that democracy cannot function. Democracy has simply been eliminated. Democracy is, shall we say, a relic of Enlightenment reason. In some respects, that is true. We often think of democracy as being something which

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10 began in Athens, but in the democracy that we live with and have lived with since the end of the 18th century, we are really talking about democracy as it functions under the umbrella of the Enlightenment and under the umbrella of reason, but critical race theory eliminates that. So people need to understand fundamentally: You can have critical race theory, or you can have democracy, but you cannot have both.

Allen Guelzo: The second thing is there's no real compatibility between critical race theory and what I would call academic life. Now I live inside academia. I have all of my career. So this is important to me, but I think it's also important to others, because academic research, which has produced so much of improvement in everyday lives, academic research is about establishing what is true through constant application of experiment, of questioning, of reasoning, and yes, of falsifiability. But for critical race theory, oppression cannot be falsified. Oppression can only be unmasked. The search after truth can therefore only be the servant of oppressor interests. That means that any kind of academic life... And in truth, this doesn't mean just colleges and universities, it's any life of inquiry about subjects that matter. That is made impossible by critical race theory.

Allen Guelzo: Critical race theory is a theory of dominance and power. It is about how to overthrow a dominant party and how to replace it with another. For that reason, it actually leads to an unending cycle of violence, because that really, that is how critical race theory understands all human relationships as being built out of power and violence. If critical race theory is what you want to embrace, then you are going to have to embrace a life, which is a cycle of violence, which is anti- democratic and which makes no effort to search after truth. That's a pretty stiff price to pay for critical race theory.

Marc Thiessen: The other thing that's interesting is when most Americans think about race, they think about battling discrimination, but critical race theory actually embraces discrimination. Well, you mentioned Ibram X. Kendi. He said, "The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is anti-racist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. And the only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." So it actually embraces discrimination.

Allen Guelzo: It does, and in so saying Kendi has really done nothing more than to translate the categories described by Herbert Marcuse and the latter generation of Marxists to a racial environment. Because when Marcuse talked about free speech, he said virtually the same thing. The only real speech is the speech that promotes the interests of the proletariat. Any other kinds of speech must be suppressed. And if you say, "Well, that's a contradiction of free speech." No, it isn't. The only genuinely free speech is the speech that is uttered by the proletariat. So for Herbert Marcuse it is entirely possible to say that the way towards free speech is to suppress free speech in exactly the same way that Kendi says that the way to move towards a non-discriminatory society is to discriminate incessantly. The translation is simply from one category to another.

Danielle Pletka: One of the reasons that this has become such an argument both at the federal

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11 level, but also at the state legislative level, is because increasingly we are seeing these ideas or ideas that have sprung out of this theory being taught in schools. Even if they're not being taught with the explicit moniker of critical race theory, they are fundamentally being taught with this sort of non-falsifiable assertion, that structural racism, and we haven't yet used that expression, but that structural racism is such that honesty is not even possible.

Danielle Pletka: The system has to be upended and for a lot of parents and I know Marc and I feel this way as parents of students in university and in high school is just, how do we stop this? Why is this fight so vicious, and do you think there's anything to be done about it?

Marc Thiessen: And the fight, by the way, if I could jump in... The fight is not so much about teaching it in universities, because your philosophy students are going to have a field day with what you've laid out here, but we're talking about teaching this to grade school students. So they're not going to be teaching them Kant, but they're going to be teaching them the results of this kind of thinking. Why is that dangerous to teach that to grade school kids?

Allen Guelzo: Well, it's extremely dangerous simply because of the impressionability that prevails in the students at that particular age level. To inflict upon them this kind of guilt is actually the commission of a serious psychological trauma. Now it's argued back. Oh, well, yes, well, trauma has been inflicted on others, so we're getting a little bit of our own back here by reversing the trauma. The cure for trauma is not to traumatize somebody else. The cure for trauma is to get rid of the source of the trauma and to recognize it for what it is not to try to call it something else.

Allen Guelzo: Critical race theory uses a number of interesting terms, which are the kinds of terms that when you press on them, turn out to have very little substance to them, they are terms like structural or systemic. Systemic sounds like systematic, except of course that it isn't. When you try to find something that is systematic, then you have to go find evidence. You have to discuss it as though it was a subject of truth and examination.

Allen Guelzo: Systemic, however, implies something entirely different. Systemic implies something so deep and so instinctive that you're not even conscious of it. That is why critical race theory likes to talk about racism as systemic racism. It is not going to be offering examples, it is not going to be inviting a reasonable discussion about race or racism. What it is going to do is to suggest that there are hidden structures, hence the use of the term structural, there is a systemic spin to it. There is an instinctive bias that is built into people of certain colors. Well, in this case, let's just call it what it is so often called, and that is white supremacy.

Allen Guelzo: This is entirely resistant to any kind of questioning. The questioning itself is an example of how you're in on the oppression... Nor can it be established by standing outside. If you're talking about something which is systematic, you can stand outside the system and examine it. But if you're talking about something which is systemic, then that infects every of it, you can't stand outside it. There is no . There is no way to stand with a ruler and measure it, come up with a formula. Even the action of creating the formula is part of this

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12 systemic nature of what you're critiquing. So vocabulary of that sort is in a way designed to make critical race theory impervious to questioning and to investigation.

Allen Guelzo: It makes people back off and say, "Well, we have no idea. How can we respond to critical race theory? How can we respond to it whether it's taught in schools, whether it's taught as training sessions in business, whether it's taught by heads of corporations or whether it's taught by college university faculty?" People back off from that, because you cannot evade, you cannot analyze, you cannot question something that you call structural or systemic, because if it's systemic, you are part of the system itself. There's no way objectively to stand apart from it and evaluate it.

Danielle Pletka: The one thing we haven't talked about here is the backlash. Because what I perceive when I talk to, especially my younger kids about this is, is I see that backlash. For me, one of the single biggest fomenters of racism that I have seen in decades in Washington has been this. This attempt to label all white people as racists has caused so much anger, racial anger, that it really is... I think, actually it is the backlash that is going to be hugely dangerous in our society. What do you think about that?

Allen Guelzo: Well, I am fearful of the backlash, too. I am fearful of the backlash, because when you indulge in unreason, then you let loose the beasts of other forms of unreason. If a particular theory cannot be reasoned with, then you give up on reason and you surrender yourself to what you hope will be an alternative to it, which turns out to be just as irrational in its own right. So for instance, the response to critical race theory should be questioning, but for many people, the frustration that they experience is instead going to drive them into equal, but opposite irrationality. The irrationality, for instance, of genuine white supremacy, of genuine Aryan Nazi fairytales. It will give credit and sanction to withdrawing into that, because if your critical race theory is impervious to questioning and evidence, then fine. I will retreat into my critical race theory and it too will be impervious to evidence and the questioning. At which point then the only solution becomes violence.

Allen Guelzo: It is that violence, which will not only cause the shedding of blood, but it is a violence which ultimately will be destructive of democracy itself. And that is a terrible, terrible price to pay, because at the end of the day, naive though some people may suggest I am, I persist in being a believer in democracy. I persist in being a believer in reason, and in the search after truth. I know all about the hesitations, the restrictions, the failures of reason. But my argument is that every moment at which reason fails, you pick yourself up and you keep reasoning forward yet again and so much in the past has been a justification of that. We have paid severe prices at those moments when people have lost faith in reason and decided to defect to something else.

Allen Guelzo: Those are the moments when genocide rears its hideous head. And these are the things that I become anxious for as possibilities in our future. And this is why I want to, on the one hand, have people understand what critical race theory is. Understand that this is not something that you pick up from the water system, it's not something you breathe in from the air. It's not something inevitable like a

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13 sunspot. It has a historical origin. It has an air tube, so to speak, to the past. You can cut that air tube. You can deal with that. You can respond to critical race theory. The question for us I think is, what kind of tools can we put into the hands of people to respond to critical race theory at various levels? And that I think is the next step that we have to take.

Allen Guelzo: When we understand the history, then we're prepared to respond to critical race theory. And I would suggest that there are basic ways that we can and we should respond when we find ourselves in situations or in environments where people are promoting critical race theory. And some of these may be the kinds of things you take into a school board meeting and some of these things may be things you take into a business meeting. Some of them may be things that you take into a campus environment.

Allen Guelzo: First of all, establish its non-. Human are rational beings. We have minds, we reason. If I tell you that A equals B and B equals C, then you cannot resist saying that A equals C, and that's as old as the Greeks. You can't deny that. And you can't deny it because human beings are fundamentally rational people. We are rational beings, we reason. Now, take critical theory out of its disguises, strip it of those disguises and show that it is fundamentally non- rational. Show that critical race theory can't show you how to change a tire because to change a tire, you've got to understand at least in the most primitive sense, a little bit about mechanics, a little bit about the application force, a little bit about the application of gravity, how to do this, how to do...

Allen Guelzo: There's a certain logical sequence, a certain rationality that goes into something as simple as changing a tire. And when the tire blows out, you just don't rail against it. All right, maybe you do for five minutes. But when the tire goes out, you have to set yourself to changing it. You have to do something reasonable.

Allen Guelzo: How would critical theory help you to change a tire? And the answer is, it can't. All it can do is teach you how to be mad at it. How can critical theory enable navigation? Not the meaning, not the theory of navigation, I mean real navigation. Real navigation is very mathematical. It is down to degrees of latitude and longitude and those can't be waved away as mere examples of oppression or of white supremacy. You might want to think that, but then you'll have to explain why your boat crashed up on the rocks.

Allen Guelzo: In some respects, in fact, critical race theory's non-rationality borders on what we would call in psychological terms, cognitive distortions. There's a marvelous book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt called, The Coddling of the American Mind, it was published in 2018 and I strongly recommended it. In it Lukianoff and Haidt address much of what critical race theory tries to say and Lukianoff especially points out how close critical theory is to promoting what psychologists and cognitive behavioral theory call cognitive distortions. Now I won't go into the weeds of the psychology here, but let me simply recommend Lukianoff and Haidt's book for understanding that.

Allen Guelzo: Second, second point, embarrass critical race theory. Show its fundamental family similarity to conspiracy , like the Grassy Knoll, like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Conspiracy theories function in the same way. They too are

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14 impervious to falsifiability. Similar to conspiracy theories are cults, like the Nation of Islam or the Heaven's Gate cult. The Nation of Islam in a sense was practicing critical race theory before critical race theory came along. Cults and conspiracy theories do this. Embarrass critical race theory by pointing out how much it lives up to what Richard Hofstadter, a great American historian once called the paranoid style in American politics.

Allen Guelzo: Third, complicate it. Critical race theory likes to function by one size fits all categories. But one size fits all categories like people of color, indigenous, one size fits all categories defy the disparateness of reality. When critical race theory says that what it is combating is privilege. What is privilege? Who has privilege? How much privilege counts as privilege? What is a person of color? What do we mean by that term? What is indigenous? What does it mean to be indigenous? How long do you have to be in one place to be indigenous? So, complicate critical race theory because critical race theory thrives on radical .

Allen Guelzo: Fourth, establish critical race theory's conflict with our basic human desire to know the truth. Sure, uncovering revelations of the secret operations of things gives you a momentary fix but it's really immature. It's something for adolescents. The basic human desire is to know the truth and to dig down to the truth and establish that critical race theory is really at war with that.

Allen Guelzo: Lastly, show critical race theory's historical roots. In other words, show that critical race theory is a historical narrative just like all the other narratives it pretends to critique. And if we can do those five things, then we can respond effectively to critical race theory and show that instead of being an explanation, it is merely one voice crying in a crowd, which has no more authority than any other voice in that crowd.

Marc Thiessen: Professor Guelzo, you are masterful in explaining all of this to us and we are so grateful for your time. Thank you so much.

Danielle Pletka: Thank you really. This is just fascinating.

Allen Guelzo: Well, you're very welcome and I'm happy to be able to have this discussion with you. I know it took us into a lot of philosophical forests but that in fact is where we find the real origins of things.

Marc Thiessen: Terrific. Well, thank you very much. We're grateful.

Marc Thiessen: So Dany, I think Professor Guelzo has some good advice in his five point plan for fighting this. This is a huge issue. We didn't get to ask him the question, but in state legislatures across the country, they are banning teaching of critical race theory in schools. Normally, I'm not a big fan of banning teaching any philosophy because we believe in open debate and reason, right? But when you have a philosophy that rejects reason, a philosophy of unreason, and you're going to indoctrinate young children in this, it's one thing to have this discussion in Professor Guelzo's class at Princeton. It's entirely another thing when they're trying to indoctrinate children who are first graders, third graders, fifth graders, teaching them that you are an oppressor and you cannot reason your way out of it or have any reason or argument back against this philosophy. Even if they're

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15 not doing it so explicitly, if that's the foundation of it, that's deeply concerning.

Danielle Pletka: Yeah. I'm very conflicted about this. I don't like state legislatures telling schools what they can teach and what they can't teach because I think it's a slippery slope. Today, we may be very pleased with the notion of the Florida state legislature banning the teaching of critical race theory. But do we really want the Oregon state legislature banning the teaching of religion? I think it's a very, very fraught topic and it is a testament to how broken our political system is that we cannot any longer have intelligent conversation. We have to instead have only sanction. You can't say this word, you can't say that word, you can't do this, only certain people can do that, you can't teach this, you can't read that book. What is the end of that road?

Marc Thiessen: Okay. But would you support a legislation that banned teaching of white supremacy.

Marc Thiessen: Yeah, of course you would.

Danielle Pletka: No, no. I'm struggling with it. Not because I mean that white supremacy should be taught, obviously I -

Marc Thiessen: Because I think we need to see this for what it is, Dany, which is that this is not... Everybody agrees that we should teach people to be racially sensitive, everyone agrees that we should teach the history of our country without blinders on and acknowledge the original sin of our founding and the flaws of our history. But this is something different. This is teaching a philosophy that basically says that America is intrinsically and inherently, and irredeemably evil. And that you need to look at everything through the prism of race, and you're either an oppressor or the oppressed. And if you're the oppressor, there's nothing you can do to make up for it or change. It's just such a cancerous ideology.

Danielle Pletka: Yeah, it is. But I got to say, I'm much more comfortable, we saw these school board elections in Texas. I'm much more comfortable when parents come in and get rid of the people who want to infect our school systems. And I'm much less comfortable when this is in the hands of politicians just because I have seen, as have you, too many times, the stupid ideas that our politicians often embrace for no good reason. I understand what you're saying and I get it, but like so many things, I feel like it's the people who are affected who should be the guarantors of their children's education, the parents who should be engaged, who should elect school boards that actually are responsible in this regard.

Danielle Pletka: I hate the idea that we have to go around censoring people any more than I like being told this is how I have to refer to people, this is how I have to say these words, these are the words you're not allowed to say because of who you are. There is no end to this. I know you disagree.

Marc Thiessen: Again, I started out by saying I'm not for banning ideas, but part of... First of all, I think the state legislature is the appropriate place since this-

Danielle Pletka: Certainly better than Congress.

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16 Marc Thiessen: Than Congress, absolutely. I think Congress should stay out of it, there we agree. State legislature, and I agree, in school boards this should be an issue. But part of the job of the grade school education system versus the university is to teach citizenship, to teach respect for your fellow citizens, to oppose discrimination. And so if I had a widespread movement in this country that was teaching that the Jews are what's keeping us down, the same kind of educational materials that were being used in Nazi Germany in the 1930s-

Danielle Pletka: trying to bring those back?

Marc Thiessen: She is, she is. And that's an issue for Congress, but that's another podcast.

Marc Thiessen: But we wouldn't want the educational materials that were being taught in schools in 1930s Germany to be taught to our kids.

Danielle Pletka: No, no, no .

Marc Thiessen: It's a fundamentally racist, fundamentally anti-reason, undemocratic, they're teaching kids to hate each other because of their race and hate their country. And the jobs of our school is to teach the opposite. And so I just don't think that this should be taught in our schools.

Danielle Pletka: So, what do you guys think? We really would love to hear from you. I have no doubt that in pretty much everybody's kitchen table, in everybody's living room, during your commute to whatever volleyball, lacrosse, hockey game you're doing with your families, these are the kinds of questions that often come up. And we're very curious to hear what our listeners think. Don't hesitate to share with us, don't hesitate to tell Marc he's wrong and I'm right. Don't hesitate to subscribe, review, share with your friends.

Marc Thiessen: Keep asking Dany, eventually somebody will come along.

Marc Thiessen: Eventually somebody will do it.

Danielle Pletka: I'll just be like Sally Field, "They like me." Anyway, we look forward to hearing from you and thanks for listening.

Marc Thiessen: Take care.

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