John Klar: Critical race theory and anti-Semitism

The recent conflict over an anti-Israel resolution in Burlington highlights the inherent toxicity of “social justice” ideology. More, it exposes the dangerous anti-semitism of critical race theory (CRT) that the NEA and many Vermont school administrators — aided by an actively “woke” RINO Governor for years — have already implemented in Vermont schools.

The resolution in Burlington would have embraced the extremist Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which makes demands of Israel. Like BDS, CRT is blatantly anti-Semitic, and Phil Scott and others who have rushed to judgment against Vermonters as “white supremacists” have some question-answering ahead of them. How do they propose to implement the racist CRT doctrine they have so ardently embraced, when it is so evidently racist and anti-Semitic?

John Klar

The Burlington BDS resolution reveals the self-obsessed folly of disconnected “social justice warriors” who turn their angst against their own community. The city has serious — and growing — problems with homelessness, drug overdoses, rampant graffiti, and rising crime rates. The social justice agitators advanced a divisive campaign for a cause too extreme for Bernie Sanders, denounced by Mayor Weinberger, and opposed by people of good sense. City Councilor Joan Shannon observed, “This resolution is not going to improve the situation in Israel. It can only bring pain.” Councilor Karen Paul said, “We’ve got to be able to find common ground. … BDS is not about finding common ground.”

This is even more true of CRT — increasing division solely for political power, while doing nothing to improve the situations of the victims on whose suffering it stakes its moral claims. The Burlington resolution exposes the toxic, tribalist divisions sown by CRT, which is patently anti-Semitic. This is evident in the vitriol created by Burlington’s BDS resolution, and in the conflicts rising in Vermont schools concerning the curricula and teaching methods being imposed on a new generation of children.

As Daniel Friedman explains, the ideology of CRT mirrors that of far-right anti-semitism:

Progressives may try to define whiteness in a way that elides the existence of Jews, but theoretical jargon cannot alter reality. Jews still exist, and bigots still want to disappear us, and some of those bigots are pursuing their agendas under the guise of virtuous antiracism.… Antiracism went off the rails when its intellectual leaders decided they could use racial discrimination for positive purposes. That has evolved into the view, articulated by [Ibram] Kendi, that opposing discrimination is actually the real racist position. … Equality under the law, and equal treatment of individuals without regard for identity are core values of a free society. Equal outcomes among groups cannot be enforced without dismantling freedom and shredding individual rights. The idea that success, wealth, and opportunities should be seized and redistributed to create “equity” is totalitarian and all totalitarian movements, whether they’re found on the Left or the Right, whether they’re antiracist or white-nationalist are, in the end, alike. That’s why their propaganda looks the same.

CRT propaganda is unhidden:

As leading CRT “anti-racist” intellectual Ibram X. Kendi wrote in 2019’s “How to Be an Antiracist”: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” […CRT] is, furthermore, a logical fallacy committed to advancing profoundly un-American notions of racially hierarchical guilt and innocence. As we recall the most famous exhortation in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal,” we should consider just how antithetical CRT is to that most foundational American principle. That principle of real, genuine human equality, subsequently woven into our legal and social fabric via the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, sits in an irreconcilable state of tension with the crass and overt anti-white bigotry embodied by CRT.

Millions of Jews were executed (via a racist ideology) in the 20th Century, yet CRT theorists would dismiss this (along with an extensive history of genocide and persecution of Jews) in favor of an “America-centric” black slavery experience in which Jews assimilated and became “hyper-white” predators in the so-called “racist system”:

Insightful observers warn:

No group has been more forgotten in the broad assault on “whiteness” than the Jews. CRT, notes David Suissa, publisher of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, forces people of whatever background to allow themselves to be defined by their peculiar “systemic ethos”. This means that Jews are whites like any other, despite millennia of persecution in virtually every country where they have settled. Their right to a separate identity is denied; their unique history, obliterated.

Another Jewish voice explains:

At a time when the moral imperative is to “be less white,” there is no identity more pernicious than that of a once powerless minority group that, rather than joining the struggle to dismantle whiteness, opted into it. … Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil. This reflects the nature of antisemitism: No matter the grievance or the identity of the aggrieved, Jews are held responsible. Critical race theory does not merely make it easy to demonize Jews using the language of social justice; it makes it difficult not to….[L]ogic is itself seen as a tool of white supremacy, thereby invalidating it as a legitimate way of making a case. Perhaps this is how people who subscribe to critical social justice ideology can be blind to the inherent antisemitism within it. They must adopt the doctrine as a belief system rather than doing the critical thinking necessary to work through its internal logic.

Vermont is nauseatingly awash in this “Critical Race Toxicity.” Shocking anti-white “poetry-ganda” has polluted school curricula; students have been retaliated against for raising concerns; Ibram Ken is in school curricula; and anti-semites like James Baldwin are held up in school materials as role-models. (Baldwin loudly proclaimed “The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it.” How anti-racist….). But parents are lied to that “CRT isn’t taught in schools.”

“Poet” Rajnii Eddins, whose inflammatory white-hating poetry is taught as part of CRT in ESWU, echoes the racist anti-white core of CRT from cover to cover, including this revealing sarcasm:

Black people are whiners. Everybody knows the Jews are the most oppressed people in history. (Their Names Are Mine, p. 51)

Contempt for Jews is undisguised in the writings of James Baldwin, extolled as a hero in the Vermont Legislature during a racist rant against white Vermonters. History demonstrates that “Relying on whites to achieve an anti-racist enlightenment has never been a good strategy, in any era.” That is visible in 2021 Vermont, where white CRT converts bellow at their fellows:

Whether we agree or are aware or not, we are all, myself included, a part of a system of white supremacy that was fundamental to the birth of our constitutional government. If we were born in this country we were born into white supremacy. We have all been acculturated in it….

This re-casting of poor white Vermonters as white supremacist oppressors is colliding with a remembered cultural reality, just as the callous anti-semitism of CRT is grinding like ideological fingernails against the chalkboard of the lived experience of Jews in the holocaust and numerous other opperessions.

One champion of CRT who is hailed as a visionary in Vermont is School Principal Elijah Hawkes, who proclaims:

Many people in this country were surprised to learn, on the occasion of Trump’s June rally in Tulsa, about the massacre of black citizens in that city in 1921. This ethnic cleansing crime of great proportions was a shock to many because it was not taught to most. We learn a lot about mass graves dug in far-away Auschwitz, but little about mass graves dug by white supremacists in our own country’s recent past.

Yet the “massacre”  “of great proportions” in Oklahoma (which the federal government stopped) resulted in 39 deaths: 26 black and 13 white. How easily 6,000,000 Jews subsequently killed are minimized — where are the “mass graves” of blacks in America’s “recent past”? Race relations had steadily improved in that recent past, prior to the onslaught of this pernicious CRT racism.

It is time for Elijah Hawkes, Marie Cordes, Phil Scott, and Harold Colson — and all other SJW grandstanders proclaiming Vermonters are all white supremacists — to stand up and explain their race position on Vermont’s Jews. Do they view Jews as “Super white,” to be especially targeted? Maybe they view Jews as an exception, and will explain how their new race-centered retributive philosophy will shield Jews from the growing persecution being seeded by CRT. Or maybe they “feel” they can just lump Jews in with the impoverished white farmers they condemn as racists, and have no compunction about labeling the victims of the Nazi holocaust as “white supremacists”? They HAVE done so, for some time now — and owe Vermonters an explanation.

The toxic idiocy of CRT is unraveling before eyes that have recourse to logic. But for the cultish converts who spew hate under the guise of “antiracist work” are hardly standing down. The godfather of CRT is partisan agitator Ibram Kendi, whose shoddy works are being pushed in Vermont schools in lieu of much more scholarly works that do not incorporate harmful ideological perversions. Kendi’s book “Stamped: A Remix” is listed in some school curricula in Vermont. Kendi “disparages” Frederick Douglass and MLK as being too moderate, and elevates Black Panther antisemite Angela Davis to heroine status:

It’s not that Kendi absolves any of these individuals of antisemitism, or puts their antisemitic statements into any sort of historical or sociological context. It’s rather that he doesn’t mention antisemitism at all…. The notion that one can be antiracist while also promoting antisemitism should be anathema to us…. Moreover, obsessing over group differences in outcome rather than ensuring equal rights for individuals has been the precipitating cause of horrific inter-ethnic violence. This includes decades of violence against European Jews, culminating in the Shoah, by antisemites convinced that Jews’ success in business and the professions was a result of an anti-Gentile conspiracy.

Vermont’s NEA-lackey Superintendents and weaponized social justice warriors appear to perceive that they can simply hide behind the BIPOC skirts of Kendi and others who have not grappled with the obvious anti-semitism being nurtured in our midst. But as political leaders and those charged with the care of children, they must answer these vital questions for which Kendi has been given a pass. Simply ignoring the “Jewish question” is unacceptable.

The extremist effort to coerce the municipality of Burlington to embrace the anti-semitic BDS movement offers insight into the insidious ideology that has saturated Vermont’s schools and Legislature for years — without ever involving the rest of the citizenry. Instead this garbage is being thrust on children against their wills, and behind parents’ backs.

Vermont progressives  “pride” themselves for making Vermont the “first in the nation” in all things radical. This time they have bitten off more than sane Vermonters can chew, and are exhibiting for the nation the thuggery and lies that they are willing to employ to protect their own skins. Accountability for this scourge of hate is overdue. Proponents of CRT are the enemies of Jews, just as they are abusive predators against Vermont’s schoolchildren:

Instilling racially divisive poison in the minds of impressionable students is a recipe for disaster. No nation will long endure if its youngest generation is full of disdain, disgust and self-hatred.

 A recent survey of Jewish college students reveals that half of those polled conceal their Jewish identity to avoid harassment; 70% reported experiencing anti-semitism. CRT, and the BLM movement that embraces its tenets, are dangerous ideologies that will increase ALL racial conflict. This seems to be the intention.

The disgust over CRT is on the rise and won’t be quelled — Vermont has never been a racist culture, and will resist this invasive new manifestation. Real Vermonters know who Martin Luther King was, and the good that he did.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield, and the former pastor of the First Congregational Church of Westfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2021. All rights reserved.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

8 thoughts on “John Klar: Critical race theory and anti-Semitism

  1. I read True North pretty regularly and find insights that are often helpful to my own thoughts and writing. I do struggle with John Klar’s writing’s however, as his theses seem to be driven by his own ruminations and are rarely, if ever, supported with historical facts.

    • I think your remark is merely meant to disparage John, for what you wrote makes little sense. Of course John’s theses are his own pondering’s or rumination’s, who’s else would they be as he is his own author. And the historical facts of Jewish oppression are well known and articulated in John’s column. Your reply to John’s writing is nonsensical regarding his “ruminations” and plain wrong concerning John’s use of “historical facts”. Hence the conclusion I draw is that you were hoping to take him down a peg or two with a purposely bewildering statement.

  2. CRT needs to be stopped, but it seems to me that right now we have bigger fish to fry: stopping the Covid vaccine insanity as it reaches down for our kids.

    CRT is likely part of a far-reaching plan to divide us and get us to hate each other and ourselves. In this it’s similar to the pseudoscience of global warming (dirty humans are destroying the earth.) Both likely had tons of money thrown at their promoters and this is how they spread and became accepted.

    We’re being hit from all sides.

    The people who need to hear what John is saying aren’t listening: they refuse to listen. They’ve been sold a narrative that everyone who opposes global warming has been deceived by big oil money, everyone who opposes the recent election is a right-wing conspiracy theorist, everyone who opposes the Covid vaccines is a selfish “freedom” lover, and everyone who opposes CRT is a racist but they refuse to admit it.

    Control the media and you control the people.

    I listen to NPR all the time and it’s amazing how much BS they shovel. But, they’re cooing at us: they’re literally cooing at us, soothing us, tying everything to a “we’re all in this together, we’re get through it, just hang in there” narrative. Heard about the people dead from Covid? No? Here’s a story NPR is pushing on you. Shame. Real shame. But we can all get through this, together, as one good people. Not like those selfish freedom-loving dirty bastard conspiracy theorist racist folk on the right, you see: the ones opposing CRT, for example. Like John.

    This is what they’re selling us. This is the real enemy. This is how the Ministry of Truth operates, and thousands upon thousands of Vermonters are listening.

    • I don’t think it was “very twisted commentary” at all. I do think it was very dense commentary. John often packs a lot into his writings but at the end of the day his message is spot-on.

      Critical Race Theory is Marxist in its origins and CRT seeks the revolutionary change that Obama spoke of in “transforming America” and of Bernie Sanders’s organization titled “Our Revolution”. They’re not hiding their intentions. They’re hiding in plain site. John’s attempting to expose an evil that is antithetical to America’s founding principles and human freedom in general.

    • Please tell us what is twisted? You have a response, no doubt. CRT is extremely twisted, racist, and hateful. Tell us how healthy and good it is, please…..

    • And do know I wish to hurt the racist CRT cause. It is a vile “theory” being launched as an ideology with no science. That is indeed twisted. It has failed out of the gate, as it should!!

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