Sure, you could prepare a carefully worded argument as to why you feel the educational policies of your political opponents run the risk of understating the genuine horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and the extent to which the legacies of those practices endure.
Yeah, you could do that, I suppose.
But wouldn't it be much more fun to assume they hold the worst motives, call them all racists, and then make connections that don't exist to hateful rhetoric from 50 years ago?
Milbank starts with the typical gratuitous swipe at a random Republican because I'm pretty sure that's part of The Washington Post's style guide now.
This week, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), in a tweet deriding Anthony Fauci, claimed to quote the 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire. The quote was actually uttered by a neo-Nazi pedophile.
Look! A dumb Republican showed his true colors by quoting a neo-Nazi pedophile! Ha!
This, by the way, was the clearly Aryan-inspired Hitler goose-stepping quote:
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
Huh. That doesn't really sound all that Naziish now that I see it. It's actually a pretty good quote, and in fact is a sentiment that exists in many forms, including one from The Babylon Bee's Seth Dillon:
The way that you can tell who holds all the power in a society is by who you can't make fun of.
Not only that, but the quote Massie used is so often misattributed to Voltaire, there's a Wikipedia entry referencing the common confusion, even including the original quote which isn't actually the same casting some doubt on its origin.
The statement "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize" has been falsely attributed to Voltaire, the French Enlightenment philosopher. The phrase, however, is believed to have originated from an essay by Strom first published in 1993: "All America Must Know the Terror that is Upon Us". He wrote: "To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?".
No matter, Milbank's audience will still chuckle knowingly to themselves at how stupid that Republican was as they luxuriate in the superiority of their own ignorance.
Milbank then displays his logic chops by making a tortured segue from that, to smearing both Ron DeSantis and Glen Youngkin.
But Massie's, er, Enlightenment is a footnote compared with the historical revisionism Republican governors are attempting. Florida's Ron DeSantis proposes a law (variations of which have been enacted in 10 states) to prohibit public schools from making (White) children "feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race." Virginia's Glenn Youngkin opened a tip line so parents can report teachers mentioning anything "divisive."
Of course, what these governors are trying to do is prohibit the teaching of outright racism as is the clear and well-documented intent of anti-racist CRT-inspired education.
No matter, he's on a roll!
So how would history sound denuded of anything potentially distressing for White kids? We don't have to guess, because we've already been there. I have an actual 7th-grade textbook used in Virginia's public schools from the 1950s through the 1970s — when Virginia began moving toward the current version of history: the truth.
This is a straw man argument on steroids. We went from opposition to CRT race baiting straight to a textbook that hasn't been used since Neil Young was relevant.
I therefore present these verbatim excerpts from the textbook ("Virginia: History, Government, Geography" by Francis Butler Simkins and others), shared with me by Hamilton College historian Ty Seidule, author of "Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause." Let's call it "Glenn Youngkin's No-Guilt History of Virginia for Fragile White People."
Did I say straw man argument on steroids? Let's just say that large swaths of the Midwest would need to be clear cut of all vegetation in order to create this straw man.
It's worth lingering for a moment on one particular phrase, which he also used for the headline:
"Glenn Youngkin's No-Guilt History of Virginia for Fragile White People."
"No-guilt history?"
No guilt for whom exactly?
Why, "fragile white people."
If he is suggesting, as he clearly does here, that "white people" want to avoid acknowledging "guilt," that must mean Milbank believes they should harbor it in the first place.
He is, clearly and without even any explanation, convicting an entire race as having been complicit in a history they in all likelihood had absolutely nothing to do with as they were either children or not born yet. I'm sure there are people who were alive back then as adults who might feel shame for things they once thought or did, but what Milbank is doing here is indicting an entire group of people based solely on the color of their skin.
This kind of race-guilt, by the way, is a core tenet of the CRT he claims doesn't exist.
At this point in the piece, he follows through on this threat. He reprints excerpts from the text book. That's the entire rest of his column. He does it like he thinks he's making a relevant point about... something.
The excerpts are awful, by the way. I went to public school in the North and never saw anything like it, but it's no secret that the South was late in abandoning institutional racist thinking.
But suggesting that Glen Youngkin, who literally said, "Yes, we will teach all history, the good and the bad, because we can't know where we're going unless we know where we have come from," is going to advocate a return to history books with passages like this, is completely unhinged.
"Many Negroes were taught to read and write. Many of them were allowed to meet in groups for preaching, for funerals, and for singing and dancing. They went visiting at night and sometimes owned guns. … Most of them were treated with kindness."
I must have missed that particular Youngkin flyer.
Of course, the blue check Twitter mafia came out in force to hail Milbank as a hero.
Today @Milbank did more to counteract GOP propaganda on K-12 curriculum than a million dollar digital ad campaign could have done simply by publishing this.
Publishing excerpts from a fifty-year-old-plus history book counteracts GOP propaganda? That doesn't even rise to the level of logical fallacy. It's completely fabricated nonsense.
Brigades of the socially insecure also used the opportunity to tweet how comparatively smart they are to their political opponents.
My God, no wonder there are so many dumb Virginians.
You've got to read the excerpts from this old Virginia textbook to understand the White lawmakers now frantically passing racist school regulations:
Right, "This old Virginia text book will help you understand why my political opponents are racists, now please support my Marxist agenda or you're a racist, too."
Sorry, Ron, that may be how it works in your bubble land, but out here in the real world, people see what CRT, anti-racism, and the rest of the divisive collectivist agenda is all about.
Or would you like to argue with this guy?
Critical Race Theory is the most abominable, divisive form of postmodernist indoctrination I've ever seen.
Perhaps the most distressing thing about this intellectually vacant piece is that Milbank graduated from Yale with a BA cum laude in political science, is a nationally syndicated op-ed columnist, and authored three books. He's a purported member of our country's elite, sitting at the top of our intellectual hierarchy.
We are so doomed.
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