Bryan Cranston recently stated on Bill Maher’s podcast…

Bryan: Our country still has not taken responsibility or accountability for the history of systemic racism that’s in this country… I think it’s essential to be teaching Critical Race Theory.

Bill: Depends on what you mean by that… If you mean we should honestly teach our past then of course, but if you mean more of what the 1619 book says and it’s just the essence of America and that we are irredeemable, that’s just wrong.

Bryan: Yeah, I agree with that, but we should be teaching our past and being honest and owning up to who we are as a country and the history of it.

This is why in any political discussion it’s important to define your terms or else you end up talking past each other.

“If you don’t know who I am, then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly.” — Walter White

Everyone agrees we should teach our past. Duh.

It’s similar in idea to the discussion around “white privilege” where if you mean that all else equal it’s generally easier to be white than purple then sure, but IQ, attractiveness, and wealth offer much bigger advantages.

Ultimately, CRT isn’t “teach the dark spots of our nation’s past,” which to be fair to Cranston it’s hard to blame him for being so misinformed on this topic because virtually everyone in the government and legacy media have sold it as such.

Cranston comes from a generation where “the narrative” was relatively fair-minded whereas today “the narrative” has been corrupted via ideological monopolization and instant gratification digitization.

Critical Race Theory is a theory that believes “to fix past discrimination there needs to be current discrimination.”

CRT looks at how past injustices created modern disparities in order to justify reparations, affirmative action, and a large nanny state.

Even if you support CRT can you at least see how conservative parents and taxpayers might have a problem with promoting it in our schools?

It’s gaslighting for the Left to pretend like we’re being unreasonable racists by calling out, in my opinion, unreasonable racists.

And yeah, we don’t know how much CRT is actually being taught in our schools because some have sought to disguise it, but when you see a group being dishonest then the rational response is to penalize their dishonesty by erring on the side of overestimating it.

And we can tell that at least the fundamentals of CRT is being taught by looking at the beliefs of teachers, textbooks, and students.

Over 87% of teachers are Democrats. A master’s degree in education is a bunch of woke nonsense. History textbooks are written with a strong leftwing bias, e.g. the Great Depression was caused by too little Wall Street regulation. The flagship journal of academic historians has also gone more woke, which again isn’t a surprise when you consider that over 95% of historians are Democrats. And then just look at the final product themselves: students have never been more unpatriotic and Democratic.

White people have never been less proud of their whiteness and black people more proud of their blackness (pew).

Finally, advocating for teaching CRT is even more absurd when you consider how the US spends more on education than virtually any other country on Earth and yet they’re so many kids who graduate high school unable to read, write, multiply, or tell you who attacked us on 9/11.

If Cranston really cared about improving education then he’d advocate for charter schools and Education Savings Accounts, which would undeniably make students more knowledgeable and useful rather than just producing another generation of political pawns.

And then if we’re to narrow our discussion to how to improve history lessons then, first, I’m of the view that it should be a state, local, and parental issue so if LA wants to talk about how “gringo bad” then you do you, but at least red states should primarily teach American history from the lens of the greatest political document in human history: the US Constitution.

Republicans have always believed we’re Americans first and foremost because only through our shared national identity rooted under the supreme law of the land will our government have any chance at serving the national interest instead of racial, sectional, and partisan ones. If this shared national identity crumbles then all that is left is for various tribes to compete to “get theirs” at the expense of the whole. As in Africa, power becomes merely a vehicle to enrich your friends and family whereas the US Constitution has been successful in checking power and thus far has been a vehicle for unprecedented human progress.

In US Constitution 101, each class should start with a lecture about how a section came to be and its effects on society with the class ending in a discussion about it. By the end of the year, students should hold a Constitutional Convention on what to amend and whether to vote for it as a representative of one of the 13 colonies.

Using the constitution as our portal into the past is not only more relevant to voters-to-be, but it’s harder for leftists to magnify historical events like Tulsa where 21 people died over say a WW1 battle (I bet you can’t name one!) where millions of people died. If your goal is to paint America as bad then magnify the former whereas if you want to more accurately paint America as great then magnify the latter.

If we were to have a second American history class then it should be US Biography 101 because by reading a lot of biographies you become more empathetic, inspired, and rational. I would know. You become more empathetic because you see how the powerful are neither angels nor devils. If you can correctly find a lot of admirable qualities in George Washington who owned slaves then you can find a lot of admirable qualities in virtually any politician of today, except Adam Schiff. You also become more inspired by reading about the greats who often started with less than you and yet were able to rise up to give back to this country that gave them so much. And you become more rational because you need to understand atoms to understand molecules to understand cells. In politics, too often people skip over understanding human psychology to pontificate about even more complex political groups and ideas because the latter gives them an identity to latch on to.

I love biography so much that a few years ago I even read Bryan Cranston’s, which is one of the reasons why despite some of our political differences I can still see many admirable qualities in him, such as his ability to step into a biographical role with gusto, “You clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No! I am the one who knocks! I have white privilege!”