VIDEO – Veterans, Educators, and Parents Stand Against Race-Shaming and Other ‘Critical Race’ Tactics

VIDEO – Veterans, Educators, and Parents Stand Against Race-Shaming and Other ‘Critical Race’ Tactics

On Sunday night, May 23, 2021, the Barrington (Rhode Island) United Veterans Council, supported by Legal Insurrection Foundation, held an online event to stand against the race-shaming and other tactics used under the umbrella of “Critical Race” activism.

For details on the events that led up to the Veterans pushing back, see our prior post. It started with the Town Council flying the Black Lives Matter flag above the veterans memorial over the protests of the Veterans Council that it didn’t want ANY political movement flags in that location. The last in a line of precipitating events was when, in April 2021, the Barrington Town Council sponsored and promoted a community event with Ibram X. Kendi, whose philosophy that current discrimination is needed to remedy past discrimination is driving neo-racism in schools, government, and corporations.

HIGHLIGHT REEL

The Highlight Reel below runs 38 minutes. The full event video, at the very bottom of this post, runs almost 1 hour and 43 minutes, so over an hour of content, including most of the Q&A, was left on the Highlight Reel cutting room floor. But you can watch the whole thing at the bottom of this post.

Please note that the highlight reel (and transcript) compacts clips of statements by the respective speakers and are not single uninterrupted presentations, it should be obvious where the break in the original comes (but if there’s any doubt, you can watch the full video at the bottom of the post). Also, the transcript is mostly auto-generated, so there may be transcription errors.

VIDEO HIGHLIGHT REEL TRANSCRIPT

(AUTO-GENERATED, MAY CONTAIN TRANSCRIPTION ERRORS. TIME-STAMPS ARE APPROXIMATE.)

Because the highlight reel transcript is longer than usual, I have added some emphasis to parts of the transcript:

Professor William A. Jacobson, Cornell Law School and President, Legal Insurrection Foundation (00:13):

“Unity, Not Division: A Non-Racist Approach to Community and Education.” And my name is William Jacobson. I am a Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, although I am here in a different capacity, as President of the Legal Insurrection Foundation… But this is something that’s extremely important to us because we’ve covered a lot about education at the Legal Insurrection website, and also at CriticalRace.org, which is our website [of the] Legal Insurrection Foundation. And that website has received a lot of attention… The opinions expressed by the different speakers tonight, including me, are not on behalf of their employers or groups that they are affiliated with or people they know. With us tonight, in addition to me, is Kemberlee Kaye, who is the Director of Operations and Editorial Development for the Legal Insurrection Foundation… Why we’re here and why [the] Legal Insurrection Foundation is involved, there’s a lot of concern rising among parents, not just in Rhode Island, but really around the nation as to what is going on in their schools, and some of the approaches that are taken.

And we’re here to present an alternative view that may not be necessarily heard in Barrington or in Rhode Island or nationally, but is extremely, extremely important. There are a lot of parents’ groups rising up against what is loosely called Critical Race Theory, and there are different variations. And we’ll talk about that tonight. But one thing I want to emphasize to everybody is this is not a partisan issue. This is not Republicans versus Democrats. It’s not left versus right. This is what’s in the best interest of the children and what’s in the best interest of the country…

This event is sponsored by the Barrington United Veterans Council. We agreed to help out. So this is a Barrington United Veterans event supported by the Legal Insurrection Foundation and also supported by the Rhode Island Coalition for Israel…

Paul Dulchinos, Ret. Lt. Col. and President, Barrington United Veterans Council (02:22):

So why is a local veterans group sponsoring a webinar on Critical Race Theory? Well, maybe this wasn’t a fight I was looking for, up until a year ago. I was perfectly happy hosting the annual Memorial day parade and advocating on behalf of local veterans on multiple issues.

Unfortunately, last June, our very progressive and activist town council decided to begin to fly unauthorized partisan political banners under the American flag, which happens to be co-located as part of our veterans Memorial. Obviously, the members of our veterans council were not pleased with this perceived disrespect to our monument. We were concerned that this would ultimately lead to a slippery slope where more controversial banners would end up being displayed. In September 2020, our concerns are realized. A BLM banner was hoisted over our Memorial, and it was to grace our townhall skyline for the next five months. Subsequently, the town council shot down several Barrington United Veterans Council requests for compromises, from allowing us to move the flagpole or to move the monument itself…

This culminated with the town council promoting a webinar with Critical Race theorist [Ibram X.] Kendi, along with the help of the Barrington Public Library. which provided their zoom hosting capabilities, as well as advertising and distribution of Kendi’s book, Stamped.

The impetus of tonight’s event is in response to the local government’s one-sided activism and refusal to allow an open exchange of ideas in a public forum. And predictably, the Barrington town council and the public library were unwilling to extend the same level of support to us as they did to the Kendi event.

When the members of my council all joined the military, we all took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. That oath didn’t have a sunset clause or an expiration date. So there’s the answer to the original lead-in question; the civil rights of our citizens as articulated in the Bill of Rights are under attack. Freedom of speech has been curtailed. Dissenting opinions have been systemically canceled in the public forum. Until a more democratic form of local governance can be restored to the Town of Barrington, the Barrington United Veterans Council will remain the community’s and the town council’s conscience…

Professor Wilfred Reilly, Political Science at Kentucky State University (04:43):

I’m an Associate Professor of political science at Kentucky State University, one of the many great historically black colleges in the U.S.A. and the author of the books, Taboo, Hate Crime Hoax, and The Fifty Million Dollar Question. And the focus of the prepared part of my talk today, I understand we’ll also be answering some questions, is 1) what CRT or Critical Race Theory, and more broadly, the kind of Dr. Kendi version of anti-racism are and 2) what some of the problems with these theories are in terms of teaching them in a high school or using them for diversity training purposes in a business… Language here is often intentionally used to manipulate people. So, an example of this would simply be the word “racist” or “anti-racist”. The huge majority of Americans today are “anti-racists” in the classical sense of disliking those who are personally bigoted against other people… So, in this context, almost everyone wants educational curriculum to reflect the diversity of our country’s history…

CRT curricula, and training programs, if you look at the materials you use to market them, are almost invariably billed as something which sounds innocuous like “diversity education” or “sensitivity training”, perhaps “anti-racist education”. But speaking as an academic, that’s not a fair or honest description of what CRT is. Critical Theory is, as most of those watching probably know, a long established, often Marxist-associated, paradigm in higher education. And critical race theory is simply the branch of CRT that deals with “people of color” instead of the poor or the working class as the victimized group that is being focused on… There are three core principles of every one of the critical theories or critical paradigms that I have read, I welcome challenge here, that deal with race. And the first principle is that facially neutral systems such as the SAT aptitude testing, or the practice of arresting people for crimes, such as rape, are in fact set up to oppress…

But we hear this often when it comes, for example, to the claim that all tests are subtly biased. The second claim is that disparities between groups are in and of themselves proof of discrimination. And again, I don’t want to focus entirely on this gentlemen, but Dr. Kendi has said this quite openly. He may have said it in your community. The argument is that the only two possible explanations for group gaps on, for example, an exam, are genetic inferiority, one where no one wants to go, and to racism, however subtle, however difficult to find. So, the fact that there are different white and black and Hispanic scores on the SAT proves the test is racist if you accept the basic CRT paradigm… And finally, virtually all crits have a proposed solution to this problem, which is what they call “equity”, and equity basically just means proportional representation by group, regardless of performance.

This is what colleges are pursuing when they abandoned all entering examinations, like the SAT, ACT, and GRE… So that’s the paradigm, just pretty much lifted from what’s called Frankfurt School, Crit Barrier, Critical Economic Theory. 1) Major systems are set up to oppress 2) Disparities mean discrimination, so they indicate that this oppression is happening right now, and 3) The solution has equity. Watch for that word. “Equity” is very different from equality. It means something almost diametrically opposed to the idea of starting line equality. And getting into part two of my little talk, to quote a line from high school debate, “The problem with all of this is that it’s wrong.” So serious scholars going back to at least Tom Sowell in the 1980s, Orlando Patterson has touched on this, [as has] June O’Neill, but [they] have pointed out that the idea that group disparities in anything has to be due either to one genes or to racism is almost stupid.

“Extraordinarily, methodologically unsophisticated” is the term I believe Sowell used. So obviously we see disparities around us all the time. The NBA is seventy-percent African-American. This is a league made up of centimillionaires. I don’t think anyone would view that as being due to bias against Caucasian, former high school and college star athletes. More seriously, economists like Sowell, and like O’Neil point out that virtually all gaps in, for example, income between blacks and whites close, if you adjust for cultural or environmental variables that also vary between the two groups and that, while some of them surely may have been influenced by past bigotry, past ethnic conflict, don’t have much of anything to do with racism today. So again, we can discuss past conflict when we look at some of this, but this rule that these simple paradigms collapse, when you simply look at things other than race and groups, other than blacks and whites, is true almost a hundred percent of the time.

The same is true with gaps in arrests and police shootings between whites and minorities, and I will note between men and women, if you simply adjust for crime rate, the fact that men are eight or nine times as likely as women to be arrested for say the crime of armed robbery doesn’t mean that our police departments are wantonly sexist against males. It might be that young men commit most of the crime… The United States certainly has a very racist history. I’m a proud black man. I don’t deny that, but it is also simple historical fact that slavery ended, and our constitution literally changed following the Civil War in 1865. We ended at least de jure segregation in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. We made most forms of discrimination, literally illegal, civilly and often criminally, via the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

If we date affirmative action to Mr. Nixon’s Philadelphia Plan in 1967, which I probably would, we have literally had 54 years of pro-minority preferences, with Asians perhaps exempted from that minority category. But, in place in academia and many other fields, that’s close to three human generations. So in this context, one of the least discussed, least surprising, and most important stories in the United States is minority success. That eight of the top 10 income earning groups in the USA right now are not white…

It’s impossible to square any of this with the almost nonsensical claims we often hear of modern “white supremacy”. For example, it’s not that CRT is too edgy and challenging or that it makes white people afraid that makes many serious social scientists disagree with it. It’s that in a world where Asian and African guys make up 25% of the students in the Ivy’s and are suing to expand that, a lot of it is basically just wrong. It strikes me personally as a series of dated ideas that basic analysis proves to be wrong. So that is why I oppose it…

Professor William A. Jacobson (11:52):

Paul I found out about because he wrote a piece for Barry Weiss’s substack that really rocked the world in many ways, rocked the education world. And it was called, “I Refuse to Stand By while my Students are Indoctrinated.” And he is essentially a whistleblower, but he really is one of the heroes of what’s going on in secondary education because he spoke out.

Paul Rossi, Educator and Whistleblower (12:21):

Thank you, Bill, really appreciate being here and having the chance to talk about my experiences and hopefully some things I’ve learned since I was relieved of my teaching duties as a result of events that started really [on] February 24th at a racially segregated meeting of 200 students and about 40 of my colleagues. And since I’d written the article, I’ve received a lot of questions from teachers and parents and students… pouring out their heart to me and saying, “I’m in your situation at my institution. They’re pushing CRT. What should I do? What’s the most effective way to make a difference?” Essentially, do I dare disturb the universe? And if so, how? And so, I realized I’m trying to answer this, that I essentially lost my job.

So, in so many ways I’ve failed. But I had to try to help people; I wanted to go back and think about what was the most dangerous thing that I did. And in other words, what was the way I disturbed the universe? What was “the good trouble”, the necessary trouble in the words of John Lewis? And when I thought about it, it was really the question that I asked in the chat at that meeting, in front of those 200 kids, in order to try to break the ice and model for them, how people might challenge the orthodoxy that was being presented. And the question I asked was, “Others may identify me as a white person, but I don’t identify as white. Do I have the right to identify myself or must I accept how society identifies me?” (…)

What trouble did this question cause? It was substantial. So they had meetings about the meeting. They had to process people running around like headless chickens. Many statements were made at meetings that I attended with faculty that were also segregated, things like “identity work is anti-racism 101” and “We are white since birth. We are all white since birth. That determines our experiences from birth.” And most revealingly colleagues said, “I do not believe that our white students should be able to say that they don’t have to identify as white” …This “logic” that refusal to identify racially would lead to all of these other things was a clue for me that this must be a real core of what I’m challenging, if it’s such a heresy.

It starts in kindergarten. The Pollyanna curriculum, which our school used, they have eight lessons devoted to color, right from the beginning. And at the end of those eight lessons, students [and] teachers are challenged to say, “Well, if you feel like it’s the right time, you should link this color awareness to racial identity”… The kids are drawn to identify with their socially imposed identity. In terms of the pedagogy, once this sort of operating system is installed, they can run all these programs on top. Once the child is racially identified and identifying themselves as a race, they can say, “Okay, because you’re white, you’re complicit, you’re privileged. Here’s [how] you should be an ally. Here are your marching orders.” You’re good. [They also say] “Because you’re black, you’re oppressed. in case you don’t know that already. Many do, but you can expect people to treat you badly.”

“Your job is solidarity and liberation from oppression. Here are your marching orders. Good.” So, by my challenging identity, as the fulcrum of this ideology… I put my hand on the third rail… By the time most teachers and parents and students encounter this ideology, it’s too late to argue anyone out of it. I mean, the board is signed on, the mission statement’s published, the hires have been made, the curriculum’s in place. So, what do I propose to people that asked me this question in a context where this indoctrination is playing out at the level of identity? …but looking back, I was like, “What would I do now if I had the awareness I do now?” And so what I might have done is I might’ve said, calmly and rationally, “I acknowledge the reality of racism in the world, but I also understand that race is a social construct.”

“It’s a false concept, instantiated into the world to perpetuate and rationalize oppression. And because it is false, I refuse to identify with lies. I identify as a human being. I assert that my personhood is my individuality, my conscience, my agency, and my principles.” And then I would pick a spot in the room, preferably in the center, and calmly announce that I was in an affinity group of one, the human affinity group. And I would welcome anyone else that wanted to join… Sometimes in my imagination, I do this as an American instead of a human being. But the same thing could work… I think it would have to be done not as a half measure because if you do it as a half measure, if you’re plaintiff or whining, if you say, “Well, why can’t we all get along?” from your seat, if you say, “Why can’t we just see each other as human beings?”, that’s not going work.

You have to make a statement. You have to take an act, the act of disobedience to put yourself on the line in front of your colleagues or their parents or your peers to make oneself a focal point and force the moment to its crisis… It will make the facilitator or the institution racialize you in order to proceed with the training you will have. They will have to come out as racists in the sense that they will be saying, “You are actually white. Despite what you say about yourself,” or “You are actually black, despite what you say about yourself.” And so, I think there are many lawyers here. I don’t know what the legal issues would be, but imagining what would happen to a person who took this act of disobedience and kept their hands on the third rail and persisted with this, what would be the outcome?

I don’t know. Now racial “de-identification” would neither imply that racism is over or even that colorblindness is the way to go. You could still talk about inherent biases that linger in the present, based on our history, the effect of racism in society. We can work to eliminate racial disparities. All of these things are good. We should do those things. We can acknowledge that we still live in a race society because most people still see each other in this fashion. But it’s my personal thinking that, having gone through these trainings, the de-identification would make it actually easier to work on biases than identification, which they want to force on you, ever did, because it would take the problem out of the sphere of your personhood and put it in a place where you could talk about it without having assumptions being made about you necessarily… I imagine if 10 people did this, it might have an impact if it was videoed, it might perhaps inspire a hundred people or a thousand people, or 10,000 people. Who knows? (…)

Asra Nomani, Author, Journalist, V.P. For Strategy and Investigations, Parents Defending Education (19:18):

I’m really inspired by all of the conversation that we’ve already had. The stories that we’ve heard are of people who have taken risks; they have taken remarkable risks in their lives. There are people of different identities. They are people of different stories and biographies. They are people who fit in different places in this oppression matrix that the ideologues of Critical Race Theory are trying to thrust upon us, but what they all are is courageous. They all have something that’s critical in this battle. And that is moral courage.

And I want to try to just connect the dots for you in my own story and in the battle that we’ve been facing here in America because I do believe that what we are facing right now is a battle for the future of America. It is a national security battle. It is a battle for the hearts and souls of our children. And it is a battle for our own personal lives. It is very existential. And I want everybody to really feel the magnitude of what this moment is that we are in.

It is no coincidence that we have veterans sponsoring tonight. It is an issue that we have to really recognize as a vital one, for our future and our survival. And I’ll tell you why I realize this. I came to the country as a four year old girl. I was just another immigrant, like many have come to these shores. I knew no English. My father came from India with my mother for their education. My parents had literally fought white supremacy in India. My grandfather was the attorney for the freedom fighters that fought British colonial rule.

I was the first generation born out of colonialism. I came to America because my parents did not have hate in their heart for white people. They believed in the values of America, the values of the American dream. And it was here that I prospered. It was here in Morgantown, West Virginia, that I had a white teacher named Mrs. Alkie who gave me a journal in seventh grade and taught me to write my thoughts. A teacher like Mr. Rossi, who believed in me. And that little girl who knew no English when she arrived on these shores, became a reporter for the Wall Street Journal at the age of twenty-three. That is America. That’s the amazing, amazing joy of America… I have here this book, called I Am Jewish. On January 23rd, 2002, my colleague and friend from the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped off the streets of Karachi, Pakistan.

He had just left a home that I had rented. I had literally waved goodbye to him as a family of parrots sang overhead. When the men who kidnapped Danny discovered that he was Jewish and had Israeli ancestry, they murdered him. And his last words were, “I am Jewish. My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish.” That amazing young man died because these men thought his identity put a target on his back. Not once in this country, did I feel that awful sectarianism that took my friend’s life. Not once did I grow up, even growing up in West Virginia, did I feel that bigotry and that systemic racism that the critical race theory people like to talk about. I only knew it on June 7th, 2020, when our principal, sent us an email and told us that we, the minority parents, the mostly Asian, mostly immigrant parents, of [Thomas Jefferson High School], had to check our privilege…

…just because our kids happened to be in this school. And she challenged the colonial mascot that was a mascot. We have in the chat, one parent Suparna Datta, who came to this country, just like I did, as an immigrant with dollars in her pocket. And over this past year, we have faced this, this doctrine that’s called Critical Race Theory. All of these pages have now become worksheets, curriculum, just like Mr. Rossi described. They have become the stuff that is separating and segregating our children using, just as we heard earlier, fancy words like “affinity groups”. But what I want to tell you all is that we have remarkable, brave parents standing up and fighting back, Suparna, Harry, Glen, Yoo-Yeon, parents in our Northern Virginia community who have taken to protest with an American flag, and they have gone to court.

And as you just heard, we have gone to court, and we have [fought] this racial discrimination that took away the merit based test at our school in the name of Critical Race Theory. It’s racist against Asians. And I have good news. Just on Friday, we won sanding. We, the parents who started as a Facebook group, we won standing, and we are going to go to court. And from the bench, the judge ruled and said everybody knows that this policy is race-based.

And what is driving all of this? White Fragility, How to be an Antiracist. I listened to Ibram Kendi for that hour that the Barrington, Rhode Island council sponsored him to speak. And he railed against the kind of beautiful America that we have learned to appreciate…

I want everybody to know that we are resisting in shadows, and we are fighting back, and I want to support all of you. And we want all of you to know that you’re not alone, that wherever you stand up with moral courage, we’re with you. So, thank you so much for all having such courage…

Ian Rowe, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (26:14):

The identities, the hats I wear are as a member of 1776 Unites, and I have to call in my compatriot, Wilfred Reilly, who is also a member of 1776 Unites. And if you’re not familiar with that initiative, it’s a black-led, nonpartisan, and intellectually diverse alliance of writers, thinkers, activists, really crafting solutions to our country’s greatest challenges in education, family, upward-mobility. It was launched in February of 2020 by civil rights veteran, Robert Woodson, and a number of black leaders who acknowledge America’s history of racial discrimination.

We recognize that there are pathways that have been taken by millions of black people past and present who are not bound by a defeatist ideology that we consider Critical Race Theory. And we’re determined to spark a movement to liberate tens of millions of Americans of all races to become agents of their own uplift and transformation by embracing the true values of our country.

But my biggest “identity” tonight is really as an educator. And I was so inspired by my time running the network of elementary and middle schools. I’m now launching a new network of character-based, International Baccalaureate high schools that will launch in the south Bronx in 2022, next year. And the core, operating set of principles of this high school network will be equality of opportunity, individual dignity, and common humanity across race. That’s the core element of how we want all of our kids. We’re not seeking to reduce the identity of our kids or the faculty to the singular reductionist, immutable characteristics, and then ascribe negative or positive characteristics to those. It’s the opposite of equality of opportunity, individual dignity, a common humanity, and we think we need more models of excellence like [these]…

Like much of Critical Race Theory, there’s a theory that any racial disparity in terms of percent differences in achievement levels must be caused by structural racism as Dr. Reilly said before… Since 1992, every administration of this exam, there has never been an instance in which a majority of white students are even reading at proficiency or at grade level. It’s a stunning realization because Critical Race Theory just continues to posit “white supremacy”, “white domination”. And the fact of the matter is, we have a large majority of white kids who were not reading in our country. Is it because of systemic racism that that is happening? And so it conflicts with the narrative of black people, just constantly being this oppressed group. And in Rhode Island in particular, because there is some legislation being considered to ban Critical Race Theory, there were similar discussions around the percent of white kids reading at proficiency levels is higher than the percent of black kids reading at proficiency levels.

And that is true. But when you actually look at the data in 2019, the number of eighth graders in Rhode Island who are reading below proficiency in 2019, there’s 784 black students; there were 2,233 Hispanic students, again, not reading at proficiency in eighth grade; and [for] white kids, there were 3,429, nearly 3,500. And one of the dangers of Critical Race Theory is that it sucks the energy out of any other explanation. Again, as Dr. Reilly was saying, what about issues of lack of school choice? What about issues of lack of content-rich curriculum? What about issues around teachers not being effectively able to teach reading? What about the explosion in non-marital birth rate? So kids are being born into unstable family structures. There’s a lot going on that we need to attack, but Critical Race Theory becomes this mono-causal solution.

Because if you think these disparities are solely based on systemic racism, then you will only develop mono-causal or mono-solutions that are all race-based. So that’s why you start to see these implementations of race-based or segregated “professional development”, where, as Paul Rossi was saying, you’ll have white teachers go over here, all the nonwhite or “BIPOC” teachers go over here. The white teachers have to confess their “white privilege”. In part, they admit that they’re oppressors. The BIPOC group has to “explore their marginalization”. It’s the most defeatist orientation for adults and for kids. And I think what’s starting to happen around the country, just as Asra just said, is that the oxygen of a Critical Race Theory, is these very divisive practices.

One of the challenges is, how do you ban Critical Race Theory? It’s very hard to ban an idea, but you can ban the practices associated with Critical Race Theory, which are the oxygen. We as a country, we fought racial segregation before, and I believe the same apparatus that we’ve used to fight segregated water fountains is the same apparatus we can use to fight the practices associated with Critical Race Theory… We already have the apparatus to fight racial discrimination. We’ve done this before, and I think we can really take advantage of that infrastructure. The power of these things is it’s giving us a framework for how to start to fight Critical Race Theory. Something that’s happening across the country, a number of states are seeking to ban the idea of critical race theory. It’s kind of a slippery slope, because the only thing worse than a compelled speech is suppressed speech.

And we don’t want the fight against Critical Race Theory to fall prey to some of the same tactics that the people pushing Critical Race Theory are using to cancel speech, which is why I think the apparatus of Title VI, the provisions that already exist to fight racial discrimination, the provisions that already exist to fight compelled speech, I think those are much more effective tools to leverage against some of the things we see happening across the country… We have a literacy crisis in our country and what Critical Race Theory is becoming is a massive distraction from the focus on excellence for all. And so, I obviously tried these issues on a national level, but I saw some of these issues happening in my own town with an equity audit.

In my own hometown, I decided to write a critique of that document. I’m happy to share that with folks. I think it can be a useful tool. And I ran for school board in my own hometown, and it was a very arduous battle, but I won, and it was, I think, a very resounding victory. And I don’t want to nationalize, because you know, this is a local community, we’ve got a lot of local issues. But I do think it’s important to know that you can be victorious by fighting a very principled fight for what’s best for all of your kids… And so maybe I’ll just end with one of my favorite phrases from Tocqueville’s America. He said, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” (…)

Professor William A. Jacobson (34:42):

I think there will be a lot of people are exploring legal avenues now. And I think running for school board, forming a parents’ group, people a lot of times will say, “Well, I feel so helpless. This seems like it’s coming at us from every direction.” And I think what I would say is do something. Do something, whatever you can do will help…

Paul Rossi (35:10):

Yes. I just want it to end maybe on a hopeful note. Since I published my article, and I’ve been speaking with parents and teachers across the country. So many parents, in particular, they’re just realizing that this is a problem perhaps in the last year. And if the sample size is accurate, would suggest that there are many more that are just waking up to this as a problem. So that gives me hope. And I’m very sanguine about the prospects for moving the needle on these issues and, and for changing this country for the better.

Kemberlee Kaye, Director of Operations and Editorial Development, Legal Insurrection Foundation (35:50):

So, first of all, I want to thank everyone who joined us this evening. And I want to thank our fantastic panel for taking time out of their Sunday evening to share their expertise, their work, their thoughts, and their encouragement with all of you. I am a parent myself, and after doing a deep dive into Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Training, we actually opted to homeschool our children for the foreseeable future. And I just want to encourage you. I realize that that’s not an option for everyone, but I want to encourage you to keep in mind that our children are worth it, and our kids are worth it… It’s always my mission to remind you that you are not alone. You are here with how many other people who are all engaged in this fight, who are all engaged in this issue.

And so though one side of this issue seems to have a very, very big loud microphone, you are not alone here… If you take nothing else from this, just remember that you are not alone. And there are a lot of people working on this issue behind the scenes, but it takes every single one of us doing something. You cannot rely on the people on this panel or on anyone else to take care of the future of your children and their children and the future of our country. It is up to every single one of us to do whatever it is we can, even if it’s something small, to help push back against this.

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