Parents Should Oppose Critical Race Theory to ‘Save Our Kids’ from Left-Wing Indoctrination: AG Paxton

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference held in the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 27, 2021. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tuesday praised parents for pushing back against the teaching of the quasi-Marxist critical race theory in the nation’s schools, urging more people to speak out and arguing it’s the “only way we save our kids” from leftist indoctrination.

Paxton made the remarks in an appearance on Newsmax on Tuesday, after being asked by host Chris Salcedo to comment on the “growing rebellion of parents against left-wing indoctrination” in public schools.

Salcedo prefaced his question by noting that voters in the Dallas suburb of Southlake recently delivered a resounding victory to a slate of school board and City Council candidates who opposed the school district’s plan to teach critical race theory.

“It’s encouraging that parents are getting involved in this, that they care about issues just like this, that they want race to be treated with respect as opposed to with disdain like the Democratic party has pushed us to,” Paxton said.

Critical race theory—which espouses the idea that race is not natural, but socially constructed to oppress and exploit people of color—is an offshoot of the Marx-influenced critical theory social philosophy that was promoted by the Frankfurt School of thought.

Former President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning critical race theory training in federal agencies in September 2020 with the White House describing it as “anti-American propaganda.”

Then-President Donald Trump speaks at an event in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington on March 22, 2018. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

But this ideology has been embraced by the current administration, with President Joe Biden reversing Trump’s September 2020 executive order right after he came into the White House and pushing critical race theory training on a number of fronts.

The Biden administration’s efforts triggered widespread pushback from federal and state Republican lawmakers, conservatives, and related organizations, as well as parents.

Paxton said discussions around race should be about celebrating diversity, rather than vilifying any particular group.

“Instead of dividing us, it should be something that makes us realize that, while we all have different backgrounds, there’s a reason that we’re all here, that God created all of us and that that matters,” Paxton said.

“And so I’m really grateful for these parents. I hope more people will speak out. That’s the only way we save our country, that’s the only way we save our kids,” he said.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton at a press conference in Anzalduas Park near McAllen, Texas, on April 28, 2021. Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times

Critical race theory has gradually proliferated in recent decades through academia, government structures, school systems, and the corporate world. It redefines human history as a struggle between the “oppressors” and the “oppressed,” similarly to Marxism’s reduction of history to a struggle between the “bourgeois” and the “proletariat.” It labels institutions that emerged in majority-white societies as racist and “white supremacist.”

Several professional organizations also support the study of critical race theory.

“The best historical inquiry acknowledges and interrogates systems of oppression—racial, ethnic, gender, class—and openly addresses the myriad injustices that these systems have perpetuated through the past and into the present,” said a statement last year from the Organization of American Historians, the nation’s largest professional organization of scholars of U.S. history.

Roger L. Simon, an award-winning novelist and Epoch Times contributor, argued in a recent op-ed, that critical race theory is, itself, fundamentally racist.

“Many definitions and explanations of CRT [critical race theory] exist, a literal phantasmagoria of intellectual obfuscation, the stuff of theses and ’studies,' some of it quite brilliantly, if sophistically, executed, but CRT boils down to something quite simple,” he wrote.

“Martin Luther King Jr.’s justifiably famous dream that the day will come when we judge each other by our characters and not by the color of our skins has been turned on its head,” Simon wrote, adding, “The color of our skins is to be the be-all and end-all of our existences, no matter what, no escape.”

“Race is everything. In order to be considered good, you must acknowledge it, literally bow to it, and behave accordingly,” Simon wrote.

“And, it goes without saying, the Caucasian race (variously defined according to the situation—there is now something called a “White Hispanic”) has, in this construct, done virtually everything that is bad and is inherently the root of all evil,” he added.