When then-President Donald Trump called for mandatory “patriotic education” for all U.S. students in September 2020, Susan Rice (former national security adviser under the Obama Administration) slammed his authoritarian idea as profoundly unamerican and told CNN’s Erin Burnett, “I thought I was listening to Mao Tse Tung running Communist China.” Rice, however, isn’t the only one who sees parallels between Trumpism and the regime in Beijing. Never Trump conservative Max Boot, in a scathing Washington Post column published on July 5, argues that the Republican push to abolish the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools and replace it with “patriotic education” is exactly the type of thing the Chinese Communist Party would do.
“Woe to any person in China who challenges the official version of the past; that is a crime for which you can be sent to prison,” Boot explains. “The United States is different. We are a free country where nothing is off-limits. We can talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. Can’t we? Yes, we can — but Republicans are doing their level best to change that. How ironic that the GOP, which claims to be the ‘tough on China’ party, wants to make America more like China. As the party of white America, Republicans seek their own political legitimacy from history by trying to minimize the impact of racism.”
Critical race theory — which argues that in the United States, the racism of the past continues to have an impact on the institutions of today — has become a source of hysteria in the Republican Party and right-wing media. Far-right pundits at Fox News claim CRT is an attack on white Americans in general, which, of course, it isn’t. Continue reading.
