Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine carried yet another pathetic softball interview for a leftist in their “Just Asking” feature. KK Ottosen rolled out the Black Lives Matter carpet for Kimberle Crenshaw, an architect of “critical race theory.” As usual, the Posties didn’t identify Crenshaw as a leftist, let alone a radical leftist. The interview began:
Recently, critical race theory burst onto the national scene in a way that probably is somewhat unrecognizable to those who have studied it. Having coined the term yourself, what has your experience been as you’ve seen it become this sort of intellectual boogeyman?
Well, one of the very first articles I wrote was “Race, Reform and Retrenchment.” The entire point was to anticipate that reform would inevitably reproduce retrenchment and backlash. That has been the history of progress around race in the United States: Modest reform creates tremendous backlash. And sometimes the backlash is more enduring than the reform.
Crenshaw slammed conservatives for leading “a tremendous resurgence of anti-democratic, anti-inclusionary politics.” Then came the dismissal of parent protest, which she dismissed as phony:
When you see all those parents out protesting at school board meetings about critical race theory being taught in the classrooms, what do you think?
I think that the Republican right-wing outrage machine is very, very powerful. I see the money behind it. I see the slick, high-production-value videos and booklets, and I see the common language and phrases, and I just know it’s a campaign. A campaign that is nicely framed as grass roots when, in fact, it is not. I see the fingerprints of the think tanks that for some time have been rooting around for something that would catch fire.
Ottesen and the Post weren’t going to ask anything challenging, starting with the idea that the so-called “mainstream media” is a patsy for the right wing. Last September, Crenshaw did a podcast titled ”The Lies They Tell: Mass Media’s Complicity in the Age of Disinformation.” It was summarized this way: “Over the last year, the Right has ignited a widespread disinformation campaign around Critical Race Theory — and mainstream media is fueling the fire. Mentions of CRT in the news grew exponentially this past year, with journalists often framing the conversation around education censorship as an equal debate between supporters and opponents of anti-equality legislation.”
Leftists get really upset at the notion of an “equal debate.” The podcast summary also lamented “mass media’s decision to legitimize faux debate.” Kinda funny when you claim to hate “anti-democratic, anti-inclusionary politics.”
In an interview with radical leftist Laura Flanders, Crenshaw complained: So this is a classic move, the right creates the story, often by lies and disinformation, they then are able to mobilize outrage around the lie. And then when mainstream media come along, they just report the controversy rather than how the controversy itself was produced.”
You would think the Post might push back on the notion that they’re a patsy for conservatives. But liberal journalists don’t do that. They’re down with what Crenshaw is selling, and seem willing to accept criticism from the radical left….to make them look “mainstream.”