Eric Schmitt, Missouri’s lawsuit-happy attorney general and Republican Senate nominee, recently declared that school children are being exposed to “radical ideology.” He’s right: Any kids who happen to follow political news in Missouri are seeing the worst kind of radicalism being advanced by Schmitt himself.
Schmitt was asked Sunday whether children are “under threat” in schools. They are — by the determined refusal of Schmitt’s party to allow commonsense gun restrictions. But that’s not the threat Schmitt has in mind.
“I think what’s happened in a lot of our school districts is crazy,” Schmitt said. “We’ve exposed a lot of them with this radical ideology, critical race theory, and people who tell you it’s not happening in our schools, that’s not truthful.”
As is so often the case, it’s Schmitt who isn’t being truthful here. Critical race theory is an academic concept in law schools regarding institutional racism, one that isn’t generally taught in elementary or secondary schools for the simple reason that it’s too advanced. Schmitt presumably knows this, since his campaign of litigious harassment against Missouri school districts has included hounding school administrators to turn over critical-race-theory curriculum that isn’t there.
But then, Schmitt and other Republicans who fixate on the term are just using it as barely concealed code, anyway, for any curriculum that merely touches on race — a topic they don’t believe white students should have to endure at any level. In a nation with as long and impactful a racial history as America’s, attempting to wrap the whole topic in a veil of silence is, in a word, radical.
Schmitt’s radicalism also includes multiple other lawsuits against school districts and local governments over masking policies, based in part on the medically ridiculous argument that masks don’t inhibit the transmission of the coronavirus. For someone like Schmitt, who has no medical training, to suggest he knows the topic better than the medical professionals at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is an inherently radical position.
And consider Schmitt’s stance regarding former President Donald Trump’s unlawful hoarding of classified documents that belong to the government. Hours after the FBI peacefully executed a court-ordered search warrant of Trump’s home in August — a last resort after months of attempting to get Trump to return the records willingly — Schmitt tweeted that when he is in the Senate, he will “take a wrecking ball” to the Department of Justice.
Schmitt has also joined legal action attempting to overturn results of the 2020 presidential election, embracing Trump’s thoroughly disproven claims of mass voter fraud. Court after court has found Trump’s democracy-undermining assertions to be based on, literally, nothing. Yet there’s Schmitt, helping spread Trump’s falsehoods in his capacity as Missouri’s top legal official. Anyone searching for toxic radicalism in Missouri today need look no further than that.
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