When Republicans across the nation started storming school board meetings, in full-blown hysterics about something called "critical race theory," the initial reaction of the non-Fox News-watcher was confusion. Very few even know what critical race theory is. It is not being taught to the vast majority of public school children, as it's a high level academic theory used by legal scholars and sociologists, not 8th graders. But soon it became clear that "critical race theory" was being invoked as a scare term, exploiting this multisyllabic academic jargon as cover for what was, in actuality, an effort to censor any curricula or educational materials that taught kids unpleasant truths about the history of fascism, the struggle for civil rights, or the existence of LGBTQ people.
Republicans, unsurprisingly, faked umbrage at this claim, insisting repeatedly that they had no intention of removing standard classroom lessons on matters like the Holocaust, Brown vs. the Board of Education, or the March on Washington. Instead, their talking points were a jumbled, bad faith explosion of claims that they were actually against racism and just worried about "divisive" lessons. They kept this patter of nonsense up, even as Virginia's successful GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin ran ads celebrating a right-wing mother who tried to keep her son from reading "Beloved" by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, a book that was clearly only objectionable because it portrayed slavery in a bad light.
