Strip-Quoting, Deception, and Outright Falsehoods, a Manual for Disruption
This is the CRT handbook for people who want to turn our democracy into a theocracy. It's a series of strip quotes, distortions, and outright falsehoods. The authors appear to be scholarly by pulling partial statements from Postmodern theorists, but they have no actual examples of widespread, or even small "outbreaks," of teaching Critical Race Theory at the K-12 level. There examples are drawn from hearsay or university classes. They cannot prove something that isn't happening. They also seem to forget that private schools, because they are "private," may make their own curriculum decisions.
This CRT nonsense is a means of stirring up the uneducated base. This book is dangerous because it gives the surface appearance of being scholarly. Real scholarship examines all sides of an issue. When a critical theory of any discipline, such as law or public communication uses a critical theory, a concept is applied to a specific case to examine phenomena. There are huge shifts in tone and syntaxes. When specifics are provided for the reader: questions to ask, how to infiltrate meetings and engage in "guerrilla tactics," tone changes, vocabulary and sentence structure are about a sixth grade reading level. Some of this is quite close to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
I am an Iiowa PhD, 1979, Rhetorical Theory and Argumentation, with cognates in 20th Century History and First Amendment Theory. I've read ALL of the alleged CRT Postmodern theories. I've also read Greek & Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, early American rhetorical theories, and the history from which these theories developed. I also taught the history of Western Rhetoric for 40 years. These authors may quote Postmodern theories of human behavior, but they do not understand it. I especially love how they twist Augustine's justification for teaching science, got it backwards.
WE NEED TO KNOW WHAT WE ARE UP AGAINST. EVERY VOTER, ESPECIALLY Democrats, need to know what we are facing. These people want to impose a theocracy on us. They want to severely restrict critical thinking and research. If this foolishness isn't stopped, we lose our great research universities and teaching liberal arts of any kind. Remember what happened to German education when Hitler came to power.
The subtitle of Ainsky's Rules for Radicals was "Please Steal this book". I paid full price for it because a colleague wanted my opinion. Get it from your library. It took me an hour to read it.