Team Biden’s love of CRT is real, not inadvertent

Bettina Love is a leading proponent of the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Stanley Kurtz calls her 2019 book We Want to Do More Than Survive “arguably the single most comprehensive and up-to-date guide to the ideology of the CRT movement in education.” I call it incendiary, and if you read Kurtz’s summary of the book, you will probably agree. So might Love.

Love is a co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN). Her group produced a booklet that asks teachers to “disrupt Whiteness and other forms of oppression.”

Recently, the Biden administration promoted this booklet. After being called out for doing so, the administration disavowed ATN and claimed that its touting of ATN’s program was an “error.”

An error, it certainly was. Little could be more erroneous than backing a group that equates “Whiteness” with oppression and wants teachers to promote anti-White sentiment.

But did the Biden Education Department commit this error unintentionally? Almost certainly not. As Kurtz says:

Bettina Love is all the rage among progressive educators (i.e., the entire education establishment), including leading members of Biden’s Education Department. . . .

Since the Biden administration was caught promoting ATN’s attack on “Whiteness,” a series of reports from Fox News have suggested that, despite disavowals, that was no mistake. Top Education Department officials have ties to Bettina Love.

The Biden Education Department clearly loves CRT, and that is the important point. The department’s supposed retreat from CRT in its priority criteria for grants in history and civics is smoke and mirrors. So is its disavowal of Bettina Love.

The links in these paragraphs document the ties between Team Biden and Love. For example, a top Biden Education Department appointee, Cindy Marten, hosted a diversity training session during which, in introducing Love, she praised the race agitator effusively. At the time, Marten headed the San Diego school system, which paid Love $11,000 for speaking at the event.

In addition, acting Assistant Secretary Donna Harris-Aikens, who heads the office that published the ATN booklet, was a senior official with the National Education Association when it hosted Love at an event in June 2020.

As for the claim that the Biden Education Department’s embrace of Love and her racist outfit somehow was a slip-up, former Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos says that, given the way the Department operates, that embrace could only have occurred with the sign-off of top administrators. De Vos adds:

We saw earlier this year, the grant process the department put out that basically was trying to bribe schools into using the 1619 Project in their materials. So this is just another reflection of the true nature of the Biden Department of Education.

The Biden administration isn’t truly backing away from Love, her organization’s booklet, or CRT. It is simply trying to hide the ball while congressional Democrats work to pass one of their “civics” bills. And, as Kurtz warns, “if congressional Democrats manage to pass one of [them], it will be easy for the Biden administration to route that money to advocates who will not only push the work of the Abolitionist Teaching Network, but many other versions of protest civics and CRT.”

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