College employees across the country “contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to former Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner,” reports Campus Reform. It provides a map “to see whether employees at your university were among the more than 600 contributions totaling over $100,000 that Campus Reform traced to higher-education employees”:
Platner’s campaign was engulfed by a series of controversies well before he won the Democratic primary by a 50-point landslide. His scandals included resurfaced Reddit posts involving sexual assault, political violence, criticism of rural white Americans, and self-described communist views, as well as a Nazi tattoo, and an NDA dispute involving a former campaign aide. Despite this, he maintained high-profile support from the Democrat Party, and secured backing from Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer.
The scrutiny intensified with reports about his personal relationships, including sexually explicit messages sent while he was married and an alleged physical altercation with a former girlfriend. His campaign finally collapsed after rape allegations from a former partner, when major Democratic figures and organizations called for him to leave the race. On Wednesday, Platner withdrew.
Platner performed so well despite the controversies thanks in large part to his donor base, including university employees. Those donations were part of the more than $16 million raised by Platner.
Graham Platner also cheated on his fiancée and bragged his Nazi tattoo was a reminder that the “US was the evil bad guy.”
Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico pushed legislation to mandate DEI in public schools. In May 2021, Talarico temporarily derailed House Bill 3979—Texas’ measure limiting the teaching of critical race theory—by raising a procedural point of order in the House.
It is bad for schools to promote critical race theory (CRT), because CRT is a harmful ideology that is hostile to the free-market economy, equating it with racism: “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says the best-selling book promoting critical race theory, How to Be An Antiracist. That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate.
The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist is that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” writes Kendi in that book. Kendi is a leading “critical race theorist.”
Yet K-12 students are also being required to take classes in critical ethnic studies or critical race theory. Hispanic students in a California school district were forced to learn critical race theory. They hated it, reported Reason Magazine.
The progressive Arlington County schools have students read books by critical race theorists such as Ibram Kendi. Arlington distributed hundreds of copies of Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped to students at Wakefield High School. The book contains many errors and celebrates a Marxist anti-Semite. It also peddles conspiracy theories and is dismissive about Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass. At Arlington’s Washington-Lee High School, most students in 9th grade English were assigned to read either Stamped or a much longer book that would require more work to read. Virtually all students chose to read Stamped as a result.
“Less than half of high school students in St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS) are proficient in math or reading but” soon all of them “will be required to take a Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) course before they can graduate,” reported the Center of the American Experiment in 2022.
If progressive state education bureaucrats had their way, critical race theory would become more common in school curriculums. In 2015, under Governor Terry McAuliffe (D), Virginia’s Department of Education instructed public schools to “embrace critical race theory” in order to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems.’”
Detroit’s school superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, said critical race theory was deeply embedded in his school system: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you’ll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines. We were very intentional about … embedding critical race theory within our curriculum.”
Virginia’s largest school system, the progressive Fairfax County Public Schools, encouraged teachers to apply critical race theory. The Washington Times reported that a “slide presentation” in 2021 “instructed social studies teachers in Fairfax County Public Schools that ‘critical race theory is a frame’ for their work.”
The Loudoun County, VA public schools paid a contractor to train their staff in critical race theory, giving it $3,125 to conduct “Critical Race Theory Development.”
Under Democratic governor Ralph Northam, Virginia’s official “Roadmap to Equity” published by its Department of Education in 2020 thanked critical race theorist “Dr. Ibram X. Kendi” in its acknowledgments section, as having “informed the development of the EdEquityVA Framework.” Kendi says he was “inspired by critical race theory,” and that he cannot “imagine a pathway to” his teachings “that does not engage CRT.”
