Far-right talk radio host Michael Savage took conservatives’ latest moral panic to a bonkers new level during a Monday night Newsmax appearance, warning that the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in schools is akin to “exactly what was done to the Jews in Germany” and is the “road to the death camps” for white people.
Republicans and right-wing media have been mired in a months-long freakout over critical race theory, an obscure legal academic framework that conservatives now use as a catch-all term for any racial-equity training or anti-racist school curriculum. At the same time, NBC News recently reported that the battle over CRT that has invaded local school boards is largely an astroturfed effort funded by well-connected national political organizations and right-wing activists.
Prior to interviewing Savage on Monday night, Newsmax hosts Steve Cortes and Jenn Pellegrino griped that the left was trying to deny that critical race theory exists while claiming they” have the receipts to prove” that it is “permeating all of our culture and our schools.” They then turned to Savage, a provocateur long known for his inflammatory and offensive rhetoric, as their expert on the subject.
After taking issue with NBC News anchor Chuck Todd dismissing the right-wing outrage over CRT, saying he’d like to “reach through the screen and smack him in the face,” Savage then delivered an overheated diatribe about how the schools are literally abusing white kids.
I would laugh if it weren’t so sickening. The right has always been addicted to victimization but this evocation of Nazi Germany — in which the white supremacists portray themselves as the Jews! — is mind-boggling. They have worked themselves into such a frenzy that some of their brainwashed cultists now believe that teaching about slavery and Jim Crow in middle school (which is NOT CRT, but you knew that) is akin to rounding them up and throwing them in concentration camps.
It seems like only yesterday that asking people to wear masks during a pandemic was worse than being put in a gas chamber. Their desperate need to be victims is bottomless.
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