Larry Kudlow: If parents don't object to woke education, who will?

Tonight, I'm thinking about why parents don't have rights when it comes to bringing up their kids. There's this whole new controversy, started by the National School Board Association, asking the Department of Justice that parent protests at school board meetings be treated as possible acts of domestic terrorism. That's right. Parents are domestic terrorists. 

So let me get this right. Parent protests, at this enormous leftward swing in our culture and particularly what the left-wing teacher’s unions are teaching their kids in school, is a bad thing? I'm not buying it. And this business about threats is also nonsense. For one thing, any physical threats to teachers or school board members, or anybody else involved in public schooling is already against the law. 

Now, actual violence in schools is minuscule, certainly, nothing compared to the violent protests we've seen over the last couple of years in our nation's cities, organized by left-wing groups -- and we know who they are and they never seem to get prosecuted, do they? The vast, overwhelming majority of parents are law-abiding folks who just don't like the direction public schools are going. 

Now today, unfortunately, Attorney General Merrick Garland at a Senate hearing announced that the Justice Department will be holding strategy sessions in the next 30 days on how to deal with these alleged threats to school boards and teachers and others. Garland is bringing in US attorneys and the FBI, among others. 

Frankly, I think this is President Biden and Attorney General Garland simply weaponizing the Justice Department against parents. But not all parents, mind you. Just parents who happen to object to the teachings of critical race theory and other interpretations of American history that have been proven time and again to be factually wrong. 

And I'll tell you what, I think the minority groups in the classroom hearing this stuff, I think they suffer as much or more as the kids who are being targeted. It tells these young minority kids that they are victims, that they are no good, that they can't succeed or climb the ladder of opportunity because of their skin color. 

These teachers are spreading crazy left-wing ideologies that will do great harm to minority students. It is divisive. It's a bunch of dumb finger-pointing, and most of all, it's not teaching all the kids reading, writing and arithmetic to recoin an old phrase. It fosters racial divisions in the classroom and that is nothing but poison. So it's lose-lose for everybody. 

Now, during the pandemic, as kids stayed home, their parents watched Zoom and they saw what was going on in these classrooms. And they didn't like it one bit. So when the pandemic starts to clear up, parents start to show up at school board meetings. Well, good for them. 

Any sane person of any color would be justified in doing it because it sounds like school board members forget that they are elected by the community, including most of all parents. So they should heed the idea that democracy requires the consent of the governed. Government is never all-powerful in our system. 

Now, the teachers and others, well, they're playing a cat and mouse game. We don't teach critical race theory, they said, and they hide behind a hundred different excuses, which is just a cover to dodge the truth. Now, of course, parents who have watched these Zoom classes, they know otherwise. 

The National School Board Association and the National Education Association, which is one of the two largest teacher’s unions in the country, they call this parental criticism propaganda. However, speaking of propaganda, careful research shows that CRT racism is alive and well inside the teacher's union and their classroom instruction. 

At the NEA annual meeting in June of this year, key resolutions adopting critical race theory, and worse, were mysteriously scrubbed from their website after the fact. 

Again, careful research was found in at least two cases, and I'll quote the new business agenda item A as the first one, which was adopted. And I'm just going to quote this: "supporting and leading campaigns that result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory and ethnic studies curriculum in pre-K to 12 and higher education." All right. Sounds pretty clear to me. 

Then, there's another one -- new business agenda item 39, which was adopted as modified. That instructs teachers to provide already created in-depth study that, and I'm going to quote, "critiques empire, White supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, capitalism," and then I quote again, "and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society." End quote. 

They scrub that from the internet records. But we discovered that and those were the resolutions passed. 

Now look it, I'm just going to leave it to viewers to make their own judgment about the appropriateness of this kind of teaching in today's classrooms and the appropriateness of parents of all races to step in and try to stop this nonsense. 

America has its flaws. But America's long history of freedom and democracy and market-oriented prosperity is unparalleled in world history. These teachers aren't teaching that. And if the parents don't object, well, then who will?

This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow's opening commentary on the October 5, 2021 edition of "Kudlow."