“Anti-CRT Parents Win School Board Victories Throughout America,” declares a headline on the far-right Breitbart News website today. The article goes on to claim that “triumphs in local school board races hold special significance for those parents who fought big battles against leftist tyranny and Marxist-based Critical Race Theory (CRT) right in their own communities.”
Right Wing Watch has reported that many political groups have been mobilizing and training right-wing activists to take over local school boards via dishonest campaigns against teaching about racism in American history and institutions. Critical race theory is an academic framework for studying the existence and impact of systemic racism. It has been distorted and weaponized by right-wing activists with a major assist from Fox News and former President Donald Trump.
Right-wing groups are hoping that anti-critical race theory messaging deployed in school board races and in Glenn Youngkin’s successful race for governor of Virginia will help them win broader victories in the 2022 midterm elections.
Breitbart’s story was based on tweets from the 1776 Project PAC, which is bragging about victories for its school board candidates in Virginia, Colorado, Kansas, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.
The PAC describes itself this way:
We are a political action committee dedicated to electing school board members nationwide who want to reform our public education system by promoting patriotism and pride in American history. We are committed to abolishing critical race theory and ‘The 1619 Project’ from the public school curriculum.
Like many other right-wing groups this year, the PAC encourages people to report schools that are supposedly promoting critical race theory.
