SPECIAL EPISODE: Critical Theory: From Marx To Modern America

All right, let's go ahead and begin let's get started. I Yet there for you turn the music down for me you got it. John MacArthur recently said that one of the most insidious and Wicked attacks inside of Christianity is coming from critical race theory.

It's something that if we don't understand it, we could be led astray by a false gospel and that's what it is. It's a gospel Presentation that has a false view of salvation a false view of sin a false view of everything.

And then that how Satan normally works that he takes something very subtle and he twists it. It makes it seem reasonable and then before we know it we're Far down the path and wondering how we got there.

It's one of our privileges. This is the first time we've ever done anything like this to have dr. Sunshine come and be with us today. I met dr. Sunshine a couple years ago at an event at Genesis called perspectives.

Which is a it's a class on the history the history of missions. From biblical all the way through the history of of how missions have gone and in really great class, but I met dr Sunshine there got a chance to talk to him and the lecture was was wonderful.

I don't want to put any pressure on you, but it was it was it was great. Became friends with Glenn and then I just noticed him posting things on critical race theory. Which was something that I was starting to understand starting to get a hold up and I ended up on YouTube and watched a lecture.

That dr. Sunshine gave my mind was just blown my eyes were open. I was like, this is amazing. We've got to get this at Shepherds and then I did what any reasonable person would do. I messaged him on Facebook and said you got to come to you got to come to our church and he's like, who are you?

But it's our privilege it's our pleasure to have dr. Sunshine's here. So if you would would you welcome him this morning?

The Roots of Critical Theory in Marx, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School

Thank you after that introduction. I'm kind of anxious to hear what I've got to say. First of all, let me ask you the question. How many of you have heard of critical race theory? Okay, that's most of you.

What I'm going to tell you right off the bat is that critical race theory is really a misnomer. Because it's not really just about race. Okay now the other thing you got to understand is I'm a historian and So for me the best way for you to understand what's really going on with critical theory critical race theory and so on is to Look at where the ideas come from because if you understand where the ideas came from and you understand how they develop.

It will help you make sense of a whole lot of things that frankly don't make a lot of sense. Okay, so that's where we're going to begin. Our first slide here. We're looking at the again the roots of critical theory now I'm using the word the phrase critical theory rather than critical race theory intentionally critical race theory Suggests that race is the race is the the what it's all about and The fact is that the way the word is being used the way the phrase is being used on a popular level.

Race is only one of many elements That are part of the agenda now race is there and it's sort of the tip of the spear in a lot of ways. But there's a whole lot of other stuff that comes along with it.

So I'm using a broader term here critical theory to discuss what we're talking about and the roots of it. Start with the guy on the right there. That's Karl Marx now. Marx Actually prefer Groucho, but but Karl here is the guy who's really important for our purposes.

Marx believed that Society that the history of civilization is the history of oppression and That oppression was based on economic categories who has economic power and who doesn't and He believed that history follows an inevitable inevitable process Where the people who don't have economic power gradually more and more of them get economic power until you get to the point where?

Economic power is spread equally over all of society. Which is a communist state and that's going to be the end of history. This is the trajectory that history moves on but it's always this battle between the oppressor and the oppressed the haves and the have-nots.

That was Marx vision history. He predicted that There would be an uprising of the proletariat the urban working classes. The factory workers and things like that who would seize control of the means of production.

They take control of the factories and this was going to be the thing that would move you into the communist utopia. Now at that point the guy in your bottom left there Antonio, Gramsci comes in. Gramsci was an Italian communist between World Wars one and two Actually died in prison by Mussolini, but Gramsci was completely baffled as to why The Communist Revolution never happened.

Why didn't the workers rise up and He concluded that the real conflict was not economic it was cultural. That in fact the people who have power in society Essentially controlled the worldview of society.

They determined how everybody saw things. With the net result that the people who were oppressed in society didn't even realize that they were oppressed. Because they bought into the ideology of the oppressors.

So the solution for Gramsci is to well, it's not just economic people who are. Oppression isn't just economic it hits a whole lot of other things. So the solution is to try to wake the lower classes up To their oppression now, he calls the ideology that drives society.

He calls it the hegemony just word used so the alternative is you need to get the intellectuals and the workers together to create a counter hegemony an alternative ideology. That would undermine the ideology that dominates the society and therefore lead to freeing the oppressed people.

That idea was picked up by the group on the top left. That is the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany known as the Frankfurt school. They picked up on Gramsci's ideas and started to move with them started to develop them started to work with them and Then Adolf Hitler came into power.

So they moved to Geneva and then they were invited to the United States. I believe by Dewey and they relocated to Columbia University and so the Frankfurt school is really centered in Columbia University and they start a Movement that is known ultimately as the new left new be new because it's not it's sort of neo-marxism.

It's a new version of Marxism. Based on Gramsci's ideas of this idea of it being an ideological rather than an economic struggle. Next slide. Now anybody who is as old as I am, which is very few of you Will recognize some of the terminology here what the new left said is That the problem is there are all of these groups in society that are oppressed there are blacks.

There are women there are ultimately Gay people, you know, and so on all of these oppressed groups in society have a false Consciousness they have bought into the ideology of their oppressors. So the object then is to raise consciousness.

By making people aware of the fact that they are oppressed and what this will then do is lead to class consciousness, which is the root of of Group identity identity politics things like that where you see yourself primarily in terms of the group that you belong to Rather than as sort of a unique individual and all those kinds of things.

The idea is to develop a counter hegemony as Gramsci would say an alternative worldview. So that the people who are oppressed will recognize they're oppressed and then all of these various oppressed groups will join together to overthrow the system.

Okay, that's the program of the new left and that is really what's at the root of critical theory. In fact, the term critical theory comes from these guys. Okay. Now it turns out though. We have to add one other wrinkle into this next slide.

Um the sexual revolution. It turns out although we don't really normally recognize this the term sexual revolution Was actually coined by the guy in the bottom left there. That's a guy named Wilhelm Reich.

Wilhelm Reich was a member of the Frankfurt School, although he got sufficiently weird that they kicked him out Died in prison. There's a bunch of things there, but he was a psychiatrist and What he did is follow the guy ideas of the guy in the top left that Sigmund Freud but mixed them with Marxism.

Now, how does this work? Well Freud says that. Okay. Society is really built around Sexual taboos. He really believed that that was the root of society. The reason is that people he said have sex drives.

That we instinctively want to fulfill but society says you can't do that and What this does is two things first of all It's what produces mental illness according to Freud and unhappiness and all of those kinds of things but on the other hand it forces people to redirect the energy that they get from their sex drive into new areas and That redirection of the energy is what produces civilization.

That's why you get great artists architects. You know all of the different things that drive society forward drive civilization forward come from redirecting the sex drive. So one of his main books is called civilization and its discontents.

Civilization comes about because of the repression of the sex drive. So you've got a positive with civilization, but you have a negative. It's discontents because it produces unhappiness mental illness all those kinds of things.

Well Reischauer comes along and combines that with Freud but with with Marx so you get a kind of Freudian Marxism here and the way this goes is Freud says society comes from repression. Marx says society is oppression so Reich takes takes Marx's idea and says well if society is really oppression and Freud is right that it comes from these sexual taboos, we've got the solution to getting rid of oppression has to be found in getting rid of the sexual taboos and so in the 1930s he wrote a book called the sexual revolution in which he Advocated the complete elimination of sexual taboos and things like that as a way of leading into the Marxist Utopia he argued with actually Marx himself that the natural family husband wife children is the root of Bourgeois society which to a communist is the enemy and so in order to get rid of bourgeois society, you've got to get rid of the family and This fits in very nicely with Freud's idea of eliminating sexual taboos and those kinds of things so you've got undermine the family you've got to replace the family and you've got to have basically sexual free-for-all and That's what will lead to the Marxist utopia.

And as a Freudian it's got the additional benefit of eliminating mental illness. He's wrong. Okay, dead wrong. In fact Freud was wrong Marxism. But this is what they believe and so Reich begins pushing this and this is picked up by people like the guy on the right.

There that's Herbert Marcuse a key figure in the Frankfurt school he is going to be one of the people who's going to be pushing this idea of Eliminating the natural family as a critical element of leading to this new utopia.

The Long March Through the Institutions and Repressive Tolerance

Now next slide. How are they going to do this let's talk tactics. The first of them is something called the Long March through the institutions. The term Long March comes from Mao Zedong. Mao did the Long March across China where his communist forces swept across China and basically turned the whole Country communist the nationalists who were opposing him fled to Taiwan and through this Long March Mao conquered China.

The guy on the left there, that's Rudy Dutschke. Dutschke Used what Mao did and said what we want is another kind what we need to get to the communist Utopia is a different kind of Long March. We need a Long March through the institutions we need to go through the various institutions of society and gradually infiltrate them and convert them into well entities that have class consciousness that are aware of oppression that have raised consciousness and all these kinds of things and when we have the Institutions will get the society.

Because the society is built around these institutions now. The term Long March of the institutions is usually associated with Marcuse right here rather than Dutschke. And that's because Marcuse have picked up on the terminology and the idea in his book counter revolution and revolt.

He popularizes the term. He popularizes the strategy and In particular he believed that the way you turn society around as you focus on the media if you get control of the media. You will move society in the well, I would say the right direction, but in his case, it's the left direction.

Okay, so Think about the media in the United States. Would you describe it as being primarily leaning to the right or to the left and How far left is it the Long March of the institutions worked? They've gotten control of the media, but it doesn't stop there next.

Max Horkheimer another member of the Frankfurt School Said this the revolution remember we're talking Marxism here. The revolution won't happen with guns rather. It will happen incrementally year by year generation by generation.

We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices. Transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move toward universal Egalitarianism, so we've got the media now.

We're also going to look at education. We're going to infiltrate the educational system and we're going to infiltrate politics and as we gradually Transform all of these things we will move the society to Marxism.

Have you taken a look at what's going on in education. He's saying this in the early 70s. This has been a long systematic approach that these guys have taken to get in control of the levers that move culture and.

They've done it frankly very successfully. But this isn't the only tactic that they've got. They've got another. There were several others. But the other big one is our next slide. It's a thing called repressive tolerance.

Repressive tolerance is a term again Marcuse who came up with this one. Repressive tolerance is the idea that we can we should tolerate ideas coming from the left but not ideas coming from the right. We tolerate liberal ideas, but not conservative ideas and Marcuse argued that we need this.

We need to do this because if people hear arguments conservative arguments or arguments from the right. It will prevent them from actually objectively considering arguments from the left. So we only give them arguments from the left and this is in the name of freedom of thought.

Okay, so he says this has to take place in education. We only educate people from with Perspectives from the left it's going to it. Indoctrination from the left is perfectly okay, but not from the right.

We need to promote this and even violence needs to be Understood and supported if it comes from the left, but not if it comes from the right case in point. Think about the treatment that we see in the media of Antifa and the riots not just the protests, but the riots in the wake of George Floyd.

Now not everything that happened to the protests in the wake of George Floyd were riots. But there were riots. Think about the way those are treated in the media versus what happened in the Capitol. Now I'm not justifying what happened in the Capitol.

That was that was stupid and Frankly the people, you know, the a lot of it needs to be prosecuted. But that's also true of Of the Antifa and it's also true of the riots elsewhere and yet you have mayors who when the people are arrested release them.

We're gonna tolerate violence from the left, but not the right. Anyone who questions the new left or its agenda? Cannot be tolerated. They should be silenced or to use modern terminology cancelled. These ideas this this approach this strategy has been in place for decades and It's just now becoming blatant enough to be really obvious.

Postmodern Language, Power, and Political Correctness

Okay, next slide now most people who deal with Critical theory talk about it in terms of cultural Marxism, which is okay. But you need to go beyond that you need to in particular bring in ideas from a movement known as postmodernism.

There are a bunch of thinkers here who are important I'll just narrow it down to one key figure this guy French thinker by the name of Michel Foucault. Foucault was really interested postmodernists are really interested in language.

And the reason they're interested in language is first of all They don't believe that it is possible to be objective. Objectivity is impossible. What what counts as knowledge for them is number one subjective if it's not objective.

It's subjective, but number two it is also very tightly tied to language because the words we use Shape or help determine how we think. Okay, this is something called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Don't worry about it.

And there are different versions of that out there so this connection between language thought and Well knowledge all of these kinds of things is a central issue in postmodernism. The way Foucault took this is You get the the impossibility of objective of objective knowledge.

But he goes he then takes the next step and says that knowledge what counts as knowledge in any society is Determined by the people who have cultural power in other words the elites in society Determine what that society thinks of as knowledge.

Okay, so knowledge Is and it's well to go back to Gramsci knowledge what what you think of as knowledge is an expression of the hegemony. The people who control the ideology of the society. Now the difference here is that Gramsci believed that there were things that were objectively true.

Foucault doesn't. Further he's going to take the next step and say that language is a way that these the power structures in society reinforce their own power. So the way the words we use the expressions we use all of these things Shape our thinking and all of that is either deliberately or unconsciously Designed to maintain the people who have power in power to maintain their power.

So Foucault sees language as being a critical element of the existing power structures and if in fact you are Like Foucault influenced by the left and you think the power structures are intrinsically oppressive.

One of the things you've got to be thinking of is what do you do with the language? How do you change the language to move things in the right direction? Foucault is also by the way going to argue that sex and sexuality are social constructs.

He's one of the first people who will do this. This should sound very familiar if you paid any attention to LGBTQIA plus stuff. And he says this is tied to power. It's tied to the existing power structures in society thus society supports Heterosexuality because this somehow reinforces the people who already have power.

He himself is homosexual. So this is the way he's arguing this and thus The power structures use language and other things to delegitimize LGBTQIA plus people. So that's Foucault. Foucault comes into the mix with Cultural Marxism he begins shaping a great deal of what's going on in cultural Marxism.

Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and Standpoint Theory

Next slide. So you get what I would describe a second-generation critical theory. First generation is just the stuff coming out of the Frankfurt School but what we have here is. You've got Gramsci's idea of the hegemony the the cultural ideology and the calls for a counter hegemony and alternative ideology.

You have the new left's concept of oppressed classes and identity politics add to that Foucault's concept of the use of language to reinforce power and The result of this is the conclusion becomes language is a tool of the people who control society.

It's a tool of the hegemony. It's a tool of the ideology of the oppressors therefore Language must be part of the focus of the battle against the people who have power. It's got to be a tool to counter hegemony as well.

And therefore you are political correctness. This is what's behind political correctness, okay, think about it like this, okay I'm going to use a concrete example that I I can tell you just from growing up when I grew up.

I was born in 1958. So I remember the riots in 1968. I grew up near Newark, New Jersey. My mother taught in Newark and In between the riots my mother and father during the day drove us into the area where the riots were taking place to tell us.

To show us and say look this happened here. This happened there. This is why the riots are happening. You need to understand what what the situation is. They actually, you know, it's 10 years old. They took us in showed us this.

When I was a kid, there were certain words that were slurs against black people that were obviously slurs. But there were other terms that were considered perfectly acceptable a word like Negro. That was that was an acceptable term in that period and in fact, it still survives in something like the United Negro College Fund still exists or Referring to blacks as colored people was acceptable.

We see this in the NAACC NAACP which stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons both of those terms were Rejected as being prejudicial as creating bad impressions of black people.

And so they began looking for alternate words. So black became popular except the problem is not all African Americans are black. They've got a range of skin tones. Duke Ellington wrote a piece called black brown and beige.

Okay, so Black was considered know that that and besides, you know We talked about the guys with the white hats and guys with the black hats white magic black magic blacks associated with evil. So we're not going to use black.

We'll call them Afro Americans and Then for some reason Afro American was viewed as being inappropriate so it turned into African Americans and That one's still okay, but black has made a comeback. But at the same time, although you can't say colored persons you can talk about persons of color.

What's going on here? The reason why you have all of these different terminologies trying to come in is because of the belief that language shapes thought and therefore if you want to eliminate prejudice against African Americans people of color or whatever term you want to use currently if you want to eliminate Discrimination bigotry prejudice against them you do it through controlling language because if you can come up with a sufficiently neutral term to describe them it will be impossible to be bigoted.

Because your language itself it's it's an attempt frankly at reshaping culture reshaping thought by reshaping language. Okay, that's what's going on through all of this and that's just one example political correctness now extends into all kinds of crazy areas.

But the point to note here is that some of this is from a very admirable perspective. But it ends up. I mean the goal is good in some cases. But it ends up leading you into all kinds of other things because of.

The way it is being used as a tool within this broader ideology. Okay, next slide. Now here's where we get into critical race theory proper. We need to be a little bit careful here because critical race theory is used in two different senses today critical race theory proper critical race theory in its technical sense is a theory of law.

Developed initially primarily by this gentleman Derek Bell who's a professor of law at Harvard. What Bell argued he's somebody who is by the way influenced by the Frankfurt School. What Bell argued is that US law is intrinsically white supremacist.

That US law is specifically written and designed to protect and to promote the power of whites over blacks. You know, he believes that this is systemic it is embedded deeply into the entire system of American law.

So It's designed to keep blacks in their place. It's designed to keep blacks down now. What what Bell? Argues is that you know, well people would as a counterargument. Well, what do you do with the Civil Rights Act?

I Mean blacks have made tremendous strides, haven't they? Bell's argument is interesting. He says well, you know advances in civil rights actually only occur when they really benefit white people. Now that seems on the face of it a bit bizarre, but consider his evidence.

He says if you look at State Department communiques during the era of the Civil Rights Movement. What you will find is that the State Department was getting reports from people all over the world saying look.

You know the issue of how blacks are treated in America is a major foreign policy issue. This is really hurting the u .s. And the u .s. Is reputation overseas. We need to do something about this and so Bell's argument is the Civil Rights Movement was put in place as a way of whites Preserving their power, but also Their reputation and the power of the United States meaning the white people in the United States overseas.

So the argument may not be quite as strange as it seems. I don't believe he's right. But it's it's an argument that is made not without at least a certain amount of support. I think that there are other ways of understanding it, but you know, he's got that there.

So anyway, that's Bell and this becomes the basis of critical race theory. Which is a part of a broader field called critical legal studies, which we don't need to get into. Next slide. Okay, so critical race theory makes a couple of There are a couple of different premises and there are different ways people do this.

I'm gonna simplify it down to a few of them. First of all the idea that race is a social construct that is to say race does not have any Objective reality to it and the fact of the matter is they're right.

The critical theorists are absolutely right about this consider the Changing definitions of the word race. I'm a historian remember when you go back to the 18th century You Will find discussions of race in which the British race is Distinguished from the French race the German race and the Italian race in other words race was originally Almost synonymous with with nationality culture that kind of thing.

Then as you move into the 19th century things begin to change and they begin to change for a couple of reasons. One of them is Darwin. One of them is that the European powers are busy trying to figure out an excuse for what they are doing and when they're going out and in the Neocolonial period beginning to dominate in Asia and Africa and so many other areas what justifies them doing this.

Well, what they do is they develop an idea that is technically referred to as scientific racism. Scientific racism is actually a way of analyzing Humanity and it divides them up into different categories.

There are three primary categories here, by the way. Well, I'll show you the connection in a moment one of them is the Caucasians Caucasoids the second are the Asians. The Caucasoids are obvious Europeans.

The second is the Asians the Mongoloids named after the Mongols and the third are the Africans the Negroes. Okay. In case you're wondering where they get these Shemham and Japheth. The next point in this is alright, so we've got these three races.

The next point in this is that when you look at Darwin Darwin tells you on the basis of survival of the fittest that there are certain Individuals or groups that are going to rise to the surface in any population.

Remember Darwin does not refer to competition between Species it refers to competition within a species. Which of this group which of which group of ants out competes the other so that they survive? Which group of humans out competes the other so that they survive and the argument goes That because Europeans live in such a harsh cult a harsh climate.

They had to be tougher and smarter than other people who live in a much much more gentle Climate. I mean after all It's so much easier to live in Africa than it is to live in Scandinavia. Said people who've never been to Africa and I'd also like to point out that I spent some time in Mongolia.

Remember Mongoloid Ulaanbaatar the capital of Mongolia is the coldest national capital in the world. The average temperature there is 30 degrees. For the year the average temperature is below freezing.

I've done. I actually when I want to complain about the winter here I actually kept Ulaanbaatar on my weather on my phone, so I could always check what it was there. I've seen it at minus 40. Yeah. The Europeans are in so much of a harsher climate.

Okay, but this argument allows them to use racial thinking to justify their domination of the non-caucasian peoples of the world and This is an indication that I see all the time anyone who emphasizes race in this sense of the word.

Anyone who puts a huge emphasis on race Inevitably becomes a racist. Now in case you're wondering when I say race is no objective identity or no objective biological marker. Think about it like this no matter what Trait that you're going to use to define race.

There's no clear break point. So if you're gonna use skin color I've seen people who have skin nearly as black as coal and people who have skin nearly as white as paper and Everything in between. Where do you draw the line?

Hair color eye color. What are you gonna use? There is no biological metric for race. So they're correct. It is a social construct and it is used to perform a social function. Said whenever you start putting a lot of emphasis on race sooner or later it becomes a which one's better.

Now that brings us to the second point here definitions of racism. This also has changed over time. When I was a kid growing up racism was thinking another race was inferior to you or Viewing them with contempt or something like that.

Then that changed. It changed to add the concept of Access to power or having cultural power to it. So it is thinking another race is inferior when you are in a position of strength when you're in a position of cultural power.

Okay, in other words people who do not have cultural power cannot be racists. Which means that whites can be racist and blacks can't. That's where that goes now the problem with this Has to do with the notion of what it means to have access to power.

Consider for example now this didn't show up first with regard to race it actually first showed up with reference to feminism when I was a grad student at the University of Wisconsin I one semester. I was a teaching assistant actually two semesters, but first semester.

I was a teaching assistant. I had to take political now. I had to take sexual harassment awareness training okay, and When I got there among other things what they told me is that males were in a unique position to sexually harass women.

Because they had access to institutional power. Okay. Now as a TA I was in a classroom that I was TAing European economic history at the time. The class immediately before ours in that classroom was a class that was headed that was taught by an endowed chair of women's studies.

Now for those of you who don't know the academic food chain an endowed chair is that is as high as you get in academia. There really isn't anything above it. So there's this endowed chair in women's studies who by the way did not allow men into her classes.

Which I would argue is illegal, but in any event that we're not going to go there. One day I went I'm a chronic reader. I'm an academic. I read everything that gets put in front of me. I used to read cereal boxes.

Okay at one day I walked into the classroom and there were handouts left over from the class in front of it one of the handout that what the handout said I was about pornography and One of the main statements in it is pornography is a textbook teaching men how to treat women.

I Looked at that and said, okay. Now at this sexual harassment training workshop, I Heard this thing about institutional power and all of that. So I went up to during the break. I went up to the the guy who was leading this and I said to him I'm not putting in a complaint here.

This is not a complaint. I just would like clarification and I told him about this handout and I said to him now if I were Stupid enough to make a statement is idiotic as Harlequin romances are textbook teaching women how to have relationships with men.

I Could be brought up on sexual harassment charges, right? He said, oh, yeah, absolutely. I said so what's the difference between that and what the professor handed out? He said to me with a straight face Well, you have access to institutional power.

Now think about this I'm a grad student TA. She's an endowed chair, which of us has access to institutional power. She could have crushed me like a bug if she wanted to except I think I was beneath her notice this idea of what constitutes access to institutional power is Problematic.

Okay, but it goes beyond that. So the newer definition you can't be a racist unless you have access to institutional power therefore only whites can be racist moves to the next step where you get people like Robin D 'Angelo white fragility whites are racist period.

Because you have access to institutional power you are implicit in a racist system therefore you're racist that's where this goes. Now that is not academic Critical race theory. It's not academic. It's not a critical race theory in the formal sense but it is the way critical race theory gets translated on the popular level and Robin D 'Angelo's book is mandatory reading in a lot of Anti-discrimination kinds of workshops and places around and if you don't want that one, it's anti-racism by Abram Kendi.

That makes essentially the same kind of argument the cultural hegemony to put it in Gramscian terms Really revolves around white supremacy and white privilege. We'll talk a little bit more about that later but basically what it's saying is that the whole system is rigged to make it beneficial to whites and To hold back anybody else.

Okay, Alex. It will return to some elements of this later now one of the reasons why I need to emphasize the distinction between critical race theory as an Academic theory as part of critical legal studies and the way it is applied popularly with Abram Kendi with Robin D 'Angelo With Black Lives Matter all of these kinds of things.

One of the reasons why I have to emphasize that is something that's technically known as the Mott and Bailey fallacy. Mott and Bailey is a castle design from About year 1000. Okay. The word Mott is an old English word meaning a mound.

So what they would do is they would dig up a ditch and pile up all the dirt in a mound. You'd put a palisade around a larger area with the mound inside it and you would that's called the Bailey or the courtyard and you had so you've got a mound and a courtyard mound in Mott and Bailey and On top of the mound you would build the keep this is the the final stronghold if everything else falls.

This is the place that you can defend yourself from. Okay, so that's a Mott and Bailey castle a Mott and Bailey fallacy is When people are using a word like critical race theory In the the broad sort of popular sense someone like Kendi or D 'Angelo or those are the two big ones.

When they're using it that way, that's like the Bailey and if you start attacking the arguments there. What they do is they retreat to the mound they go to the to the keep on the top of the mound and they say Oh, no.

No, that's not what critical race theory is. Critical race theory is part of critical legal studies. Case in point they're teaching critical race theory in schools. Oh, no, we're not. We're not teaching critical race theory in schools.