North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a rising national star in the Republican Party, said he was prepared to begin talks with the state legislature about how to tackle issues of indoctrination, including Critical Race Theory, in the school system.
“We’re about ready to move on this,” Robinson told Headline USA in an exclusive interview Monday.
Robinson, who is both black and a former teacher, said one of the top things he hoped to ascertain while meeting with the state’s Republican-led General Assembly is “how many understand what Critical Race Theory actually is.”
That effort ironically parallels one of the pedantic talking points that leftist media outlets have attempted to deploy in defense of the vastly unpopular curriculum.
Proponents smugly claim that critics of the theory, which has inspired mass uprisings of concerned parents at local school board meetings nationwide, know nothing about it.
But as with many of the Left’s losing battles, they have wasted no time trying to move the goalposts and to stealth-edit their own claims when called out over the radical doctrine.
Already, plans are afoot to try to rebrand the Marxism-based ideology, which has been embraced by well-funded radicals within the far-left black-liberation movement.
The underlying thesis, long circulated in the faculty lounges of elite college campuses, is “basically the ideology that social factors, not individual choices, are what determines” the lives of those living under such a system, Robinson explained.
Thus, it overlooks the fact that someone might choose to live in a one-bedroom apartment while saving for a home, and someone else might splurge on a fancy iPhone and expensive sneakers with nothing left over for long-term objectives.
Instead, Critical Theory—based on concepts Karl Marx developed in the 1840s as a critique of Russia’s serf-based, feudal society under the czarist monarchy—maintains that, with the exception of those at the very top, subjects are locked inescapably into systems of oppression.
“The only thing Critical Race Theory does different is add in that element of race,” Robinson said.
Robinson said one of the most obvious examples undermining the theory it was the success that non-native Americans and immigrants from many cultures have seen when arriving in the US.
“Critical Race Theory can be disproved by the fact that you have foreigners who don’t speak the language and are not the correct color, who come here and succeed better than any of the natives do, white or black,” he said.
Moreover, successful blacks contend that the theory—and its proposed solution of solving systemic anti-black racism with systemic anti-white racism—has diminished their individual achievements and reduced them to examples of tokenism and affirmative action.
“The internet is exploding with videos of minority parents,” said Robinson, whose own political career was launched by a viral 2018 video of him defending gun rights before the Greensboro City Council.
Robinson pointed to recent reports of a concerned father in Illinois who dismantled the school board’s justifications by pointing to his own achievements.
“How do I have two medical degrees if I’m sitting here oppressed?” asked Ty Smith.
In March, Robinson announced the creation of the Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students initiative.
The FACTS task force seeks to tackle more broadly the problem of indoctrination in the school system, often targeting traditional conservative values.
While Critical Race Theory was “quickly becoming a focus,” Robinson said, “it’s not the focus, but a focus.”
The seepage of immorality into the classroom “just burns my behind when I think about it,” he said.
He railed against social-justice works with overly mature and divisive themes, such as The Hate U Give, which are regularly supplanting classical and canonical texts in English and language-arts classrooms.
“You’re a child in an adult’s body,” he said of those who impose their radical political agendas onto a captive audience of young, impressionable minds.
“The immaturity I see in the school system is just mind-numbing,” he added.
In addition to the FACTS task force, Robinson said a core component to his own reforms would be to support school-choice vouchers.
“You can talk all day about fixing the school system, but I need to make sure that parents have the right to send kids to schools anywhere they want,” he said.
Unlikely to support the effort is the state’s recently re-elected Gov. Roy Cooper, who was one of the only Democrats to emerge unscathed in the state’s 2020 general election.
Cooper has clashed regularly with the legislature over educational issues, often to the detriment of the schools themselves.
Taking on the highly controversial Critical Race Theory could also hearken back for some veteran lawmakers to the 2016 “bathroom bill.”
HB2 thrust the Tarheel State into the spotlight after LGBT activists threatened boycotts over the legislature’s effort to block left-leaning cities from implementing their own transgender policies.
Republicans in the state legislature eventually watered down the demands under duress.
But one of those who refused to back off was then-state Sen. Dan Bishop, now a US congressman, who, like Robinson, has become a champion in the fight against Critical Race indoctrination.
In an interview with NTD News earlier this month, Bishop—who has introduced two bills against Critical Race Theory in the House—said he was optimistic that the mass public outrage over it would compel many Democrats to reach across the aisle in support of a bipartisan solution.
“I think you’re gonna find a lot of agreement between Republicans and Democrats across the ideological spectrum that that particular notion—that poisonous ideology, which is essentially state-sanctioned racism—is something that, particularly, parents of children in schools are gonna rise up as Americans altogether and say this has got to go.”
