Apparently, if you resist teaching your kids that they are racists, you are a QAnon conspiracy theorist.
At least that is what NBC News’s Ben Collins wants you to believe. In a piece titled “QAnon’s new ‘plan’? Run for school board” Collins paints a picture of disaffected QAnon adherents scrambling to run for “low-turnout local elections.”
The overall narrative seems pretty convincing, until you realize that Collins made one major mistake: He failed to establish a clear connection between anti-CRT movements and the QAnon conspiracy.
To support his hypothesis, Collins cites pieces from the Philadelphia Inquirer and San Diego Union-Tribune. However, the articles themselves do not establish a clear-cut relationship between opposition to CRT and QAnon.
The Inquirer piece, for instance, mentions Ada Nestor, a school board candidate who campaigned against the implementation of the 1619 Project. She was also one of eighty candidates endorsed by the Keeping Kids in School PAC.
Nestor was accused of owning social media handles that “seemed to follow the QAnon movement.” She has flatly denied the allegations. The founder of the PAC, Clarice Schillinger, told the Inquirer that she has seen the screenshots belonging to Nestor’s alleged social media handles. She wasn’t sure if they belonged to the candidate and promised, “If facts can be provided, we will investigate.”
At best, the allegations against Nestor are dubious. At worst, they demonstrate that the anti-CRT movement’s leaders have no desire to associate with QAnon either. It is also worth noting that the Union-Tribune piece contains no mention of the 1619 Project, anti-racism, or critical race theory. “Black Lives Matter” appears only once, in a quote from a National Education Association report.
Collins also conveniently ignores major campaigns that have captured the nation’s attention. Nowhere in his article does he tie the QAnon conspiracy to the school board victories in Southlake, Texas. Nor does he even try to magically concoct a connection between despondent “Anons” and the parents fighting the liberal school board in Loudoun County, Virginia.
But these facts do not matter. Already, the media’s darlings are seizing upon Collins’s theory and running with it. After “winning” her non-debate with Christopher Rufo, MSNBC’s Joy Reid accused CRT opponents of being part of the “insidious underbelly of the GQP culture war” and engaging in an “all-out war for power.” Shortly after, she invited Collins to repeat his QAnon speculation.
Here was Joy Reid promoting the belief that CRT critics are Q-Anon people, saying opposition to CRT and teaching students to hate themselves are part of the “insidious underbelly of the GQP culture war” and “an all-out war for power” that’s “steeped in…white nationalism” pic.twitter.com/zQ8TJoRpwy
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 7, 2021
This is not the first time Ben Collins has concocted a fictional connection between conservatives and the fringe right. Collins labeled a Virginia gun-rights rally a “white nationalist gathering” in a tweet. After receiving immense criticism from gun rights advocates and commentators, he deleted the original tweet and replaced it.
Since the start of our national debate, the legacy media has spread inaccurate information on critical race theory, as well as its opponents. Leftists accused conservatives of not knowing what CRT is, while some later admitted that they do. Then, they claimed that critical race theory was not taught in K-12 schools, even as the nation’s largest teachers union made a written commitment to CRT.
Now, some journalists are willing to falsely conflate earnest parental concerns about education with a delusional, far-right conspiracy theory. It’s like half the country’s being smeared as a “basket of deplorables” again.
