Mark Burns, an unabashed Christian nationalist Trump-loving pastor who is running for Congress in South Carolina, spoke at the ReAwaken America conference last weekend in Canton, Ohio, where he called on right-wing activists to launch a wave of civil disobedience to shut down America in an effort to prevent schools from teaching critical race theory.
The ReAwaken America event was organized and hosted by conspiracy theorist Clay Clark, who has been bringing various election, COVID-19, and QAnon conspiracy theorists together in churches around the country for the last year. The Ohio event featured the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and Eric Trump, who used his time on stage to call his father—”the real president”—from his cell phone, much to the delight of the crowd.
"Do you want critical race theory in your schools?" Burns asked the crowd. "Is it in your schools right now? Then what are you doing about it?"
"Are you organizing here in Ohio?" he continued. "What is the goal? To keep critical race theory out of your schools!"
"We should be organizing, Ohio. We should be shutting down school districts," Burns declared. "My spirit is going back to Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. You understand the civil rights movement of then is not the civil rights movement of right now? White people, I'm trying to help somebody. Are you all ready? The segregation that you've experienced for refusing to take the [COVID-19 vaccine], the liberal left is now making you out to be a second-class citizen. Congratulations. You know what it feels like to be Black."
"Just like [during the time of] Dr. Martin Luther King, God is raising up armies that we are going to start having civil disobedience in America," Burns proclaimed. "Just like the Montgomery Improvement Association that led the boycott that Rosa Parks led that shut down the busing system in Montgomery, Alabama, we are going to shut down this America that's led by the racist, liberal, race-baiting Democrats."
K-12 schools are not teaching critical race theory—a college-level legal framework that looks at how racism is ingrained in institutions—but the term has become a boogeyman for those on the right who want to prevent students from learning about Black history.
