
He may have missed the mark on this, both because no matter how much thoughtful history you have been exposed to, ruminating on it is not the first thing you do when you are swept into battle. I’m just guessing this, I have to admit. I have never been in combat. It is probably far scarier than having the airplane you are traveling in struck by lightning or having to make an emergency landing after one of your plane’s engines caught on fire, two (separate) situations I have been in. Neither one of them caused me to start thinking about our nation’s fraught racial history. “Man, I hope my ass gets out of this alive!” is about the most profound thing even the most adept of thinkers can manage when the oxygen masks drop.
The genius in Gaetz’s making a big deal about CRT is that most of the people who vote for him don’t know what “critical” means. They think that it means the same thing as “criticize,” and they don’t like to be criticized, especially by people that got A’s and B’s in high school. The only theory they know of is the theory of evolution, which they know is taught by Satan. So out in backwoods Florida, they’re nodding their heads in agreement with Gaetz, and saying, “That Matt Gaetz is a good congressman. Sure, he may have had sex with a 17-year-old girl, but we’ve all done that, and she wasn’t even his stepsister!”
After a brief break, and they finish thanking Jesus for PornHub, they flip on Tucker Carlson, and he’s also having a bizarre meltdown over critical race theory. Tucker wants teachers in the US to be required to wear bodycams to make sure they’re not letting slip any facets of CRT to American students. Carlson, who recently claimed he was being spied on by the government, and was wildly irritated by that, wants to make sure the government is able to spy on every classroom in America to make sure the version of history Tucker reads while his mom cuts his hair is the one being taught at schools. Tucker doesn’t mind castrating the First Amendment like it was a sweaty hog on a hot Iowa farm, apparently.
Meanwhile, his bosses at Fox News are blaring clips of Trump arguing that teachers should be armed. So, in the Fox classroom of the future, the teachers will wear a bodycam and pack a pistol.
At that point, who’s going to blame them if they get a sudden urge to kill unarmed black guys?