The Enablers | City Journal
In a New York Times op-ed, co-authors David French, Kmele Foster, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Jason Stanley present themselves as a cross-partisan group of thinkers sending a warning signal about the threat of authoritarianism in states such as Texas, Florida, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and New Hampshire. All these states have passed legislation prohibiting public schools from promoting the core principles of critical race theory, including race essentialism, collective guilt, and state-sanctioned discrimination.
These authors may imagine themselves to be defending liberal-democratic freedoms against the threat of illiberalism. But in practice, they enable, and would leave American families defenseless against, the worst ideologies of the Left. They advance three specious arguments that critical-race-theory restrictions violate free speech, that state legislatures should stay out of the marketplace of ideas, and that citizens should pursue civil rights litigation instead that would serve to usher in the concrete tyrannies of critical race theory, which explicitly seeks to subvert the principles of individual rights and equal protection under the law. Despite the superficial differences among the four heterodox authors, they all serve a single function: to prevaricate, stall, and run interference for critical race theory s blitz through American institutions.
Chistopher Rufo.