The tech superstar understands the stakes.
Destructive Democrats
Tim Walz’s education guru wants to “overthrow” the U.S.
Does Governor Tim Walz believe the following?
The first tenet of critical race theory is that the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with, it must be overthrown…critical race theory is [not] just about telling our stories and diversi[ty.] It’s not about that. It’s about overthrow. It’s insurgent. And we, we need to be, I think, more honest with that…it is anti-state. You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. Okay, it is an anti-state theory that says, The United States needs to be deconstructed, period…. And that’s why I’m a critical race theorist?
Walz’s apparent answer is yes. He does believe it. Otherwise, Governor Walz would not have appointed the author of the above paragraph, leading critical race theorist Brian Lozenski, to spearhead Minnesota’s mandatory ethnic studies program, which is at the heart of the state’s social studies curriculum.
Throughout human history leading political thinkers (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Madison, and the American Founders) agreed that a positive attachment to one’s nation is central to sound civic education. But it appears that Tim Walz and Brian Lozenski disagree. They say that since the United States is beyond redemption—that is, “irreversibly racist”—students should work to “overthrow” American democracy.
Now, I’m a little confused. Would that be the highly touted “our democracy” that should be overthrown? You know, the same democracy that Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the entire progressive establishment, Bill Kristol, and the Never Trumpers keep telling us is in danger from Donald Trump and J.D. Vance?
In any case, let us take a closer look at Walz’s ethnic studies curriculum. We know what the goal is: to “deconstruct” and “overthrow” the United States. But how do we get there?
Education expert Katherine Kersten of the Minnesota-based Center for the American Experiment has examined the development of the Walz-Lozenski anti-American social studies curriculum project for the last several years.
Kersten reports that under Minnesota’s proposed new curriculum first graders will be required to “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation, and systems of power.” Fourth graders must “identify the process and impacts of colonialism and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.” Fifth graders will learn that “contemporary policing” has its “historic roots” in slave patrols that hunted down runaway slaves. “High school standards suggest the notion of criminality itself is racist.” In addition, Kersten notes, high school students are “taught to view themselves as members of ‘racialized hierarchies’ based on ‘dominant European beauty standards.’”
Further, Kersten reveals that the Walz Administration’s new ethnic studies standards include a standard titled “Resistance” that teaches students “to resist America’s ‘systemic and coordinated exercises of power’ against ‘marginalized,’ oppressed groups.”
Governor—and former social studies teacher—Tim Walz and critical race theory/ethnic studies/social studies educator Brian Lozenski are ideological soul mates.
Walz wanted to radicalize Minnesota’s social studies curriculum ever since being elected governor in 2018. His emphasis was, first, on denouncing our country’s so-called “systemic racism” and, second, on “liberating” the tendentiously labeled “oppressed” and “marginalized” groups.
Walz’s method to achieve this goal was to pack the state education committees with radical revolutionaries. He appointed leftist activists to the key committees that develop, design, write, and implement social studies/ethnic studies curriculum including Brian Lozenski, a leading member of the revolutionary anti-American Education for Liberation Minnesota. Walz knew exactly what he was doing in appointing Lozenski.
Ethics and Public Policy Center scholar Stanley Kurtz explains that Lozenski is a promoter of the concept of “fugitivity.” A benchmark in Walz’s Minnesota social studies standards declares that students are to “Apply methodologies of fugitivity to map-making, economics, and education.” Lozenski defines fugitivity as breaking the law and resisting today’s unjust American system just as slaves in the past broke the law by learning to read. An example of fugitivity would be teachers who violate state laws against Critical Race Theory and teach the concept to their students in order to help “liberate” them from an “oppressive racist” system.
Katherine Kersten recounts that Lozenski described the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020 as a “mass uprising against racialized state violence” which would led to “the inevitable death” of the “American social order.” Lozenski maintained that schools that reopened after COVID should “join the social unrest and actively combat the greater public health crisis of systemic racism.”
While Lozenski advocated for the rioters to tear down America’s “social order,” Walz—despite the desperate pleas of the left-wing mayor of Minneapolis to immediately send in the national guard—delayed fully mobilizing the guard until over 1,000 businesses and a police station had been burned to the ground. Meanwhile Kamala Harris urged the rioters “not to stop” and asked her fellow riot sympathizers to contribute to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to bail out BLM and Antifa criminals who were wreaking destruction on Minneapolis. It appears that Lozenski, Walz, and Harris all practice the arts of fugitivity.
If Brian Lozenski and Tim Walz are united at the hip, so too are Tim Walz and Kamala Harris. Why did Harris choose Walz as her running mate? It would have made more practical political sense to go with the seemingly moderate (pro-fracking, pro-Israel) governor of the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. Instead, Harris chose Walz, the governor of a relatively safe Democratic state, due to what clearly appears to be their close ideological affinity. Unlike Shapiro, Walz and Harris view America as “systemically racist,” and they want to “fundamentally transform” the United States.
As Tom Klingenstein wrote recently, “Kamala Harris selected as her running mate a man who wants to destroy America…. She chose Walz because she (or whoever is propping her up) supports his revolutionary ideology and policy. She ‘loves him’ as she said.” Klingenstein writes (correctly) that the American Right should not dismiss or ignore the Lozenski-Walz-Harris connection but “make Lozenski the face of the ‘destructive Left’ which now controls the (destructive) Democratic Party.”
The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.
The American Mind is a publication of the Claremont Institute, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, dedicated to restoring the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life. Interested in supporting our work? Gifts to the Claremont Institute are tax-deductible.
Conservatives and non-woke liberals must draw a line in the sand against racialized indoctrination.
The divisive racialist creed doesn’t add up.
Is a cultural renaissance in the works?
If we get real, sanity is in with a shot.
Destroying civil society to own the cons.