Of all the ways identity politics is used as a tool to sow hatred among people where there should be the potential for friendship, “critical race theory” is one of the gravest offenders. Every person of goodwill should know that judging people based on their physical characteristics is cruel and wrong.

This is not the nature of critical race theory, however. Rather, the insidious ideology is being used to promote estrangement rather than friendship, and hostility rather than goodwill. Indeed, the tactics used by proponents of critical race theory share many parallels with old tactics used by the Bolsheviks.

As such, federal employees and those who work for corporations that do business with the federal government sucked into the poisonous vortex of critical race theory can thank President Trump for ordering a stop to the promulgation of critical race theory. Thanks should also be sent to scholar Christopher Rufo, whose diligence brought the critical race theory venom to the forefront of Trump’s attention, and Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, who is working to root out members of the administrative state who defy that order.

It’s important to remember that because very few of its activists have shown much sincere desire to end racism, critical race theory should not be taken entirely at face value. If a majority of its supporters weresincere, they would be willing to have fruitful discussions in a civil society that supports civil discourse. Rather, critical race theory’s agitators are committed to tearing down civil society on the pretense that it is an incubator for “systemic racism.”

If you’ve any doubt about that, consider the Smithsonian display on “whiteness”that condemned all elements of civil society, including politeness, hard work, self-reliance, logic, planning, and family cohesion. None of those are “white” values, but critical race theory frames them just so. This sort of animus proves that critical race theory “arguments” are non-starters and merely serve as convenient pretexts for power grabs.

Doused with critical race theory, the Black Lives Matter organization and its related Antifa-infused mobs are organized for the same purposes as all cult recruits: to recruit more people and to implement the desire to divide and conquer. The phenomenon can be seen as they surround people in vehicles or restaurants, demanding their victims raise a fist and recite slogans under the intense intimidation and implications of violence.

Indeed, agitators who deploy critical race theory have zero interest in ending racism. Instead, they’ve made essentially the same point over and over again: Racism is an unsolvable problem. If you’ve been tainted as “white,” there’s nothing you can do about it. You are eternally a racist, especially if you don’t believe you are.

Robin D’Angelo explains it all in her best-selling book “White Fragility.” Your only option is the cultist’s option: submit to your critical race theory overlords, then recruit others to do the same. If, however, you’re a black person who disagrees with all of this, well, then, “You ain’t black.”

As with all forms of identity politics and intersectionality, critical race theory stokes divisions between people where few or none existed before. It’s all about relational aggression and predatory alienation.

Let’s look at a perfect example of this process, a parallel case from Soviet history. As peasant farmers tended to be overwhelmingly religious, traditional, and family-oriented, the Bolshevik government hated them with a fiery passion. Increasing the acrimony further, the peasants resisted giving up their family-run farms—a roadblock to the Soviet leadership’s desire to exercise complete control over the nation’s food supply.

To collectivize agriculture, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin devised a plan to stir up hostilities among the peasants where resentments had never existed before. As would be the case later with Mao’s Red Guard (and today’s radical statue-toppling, Molotov-cocktail-throwing radicals), the Soviets used mobs of youth to do the dirty work.

The communist youth league, known as the Komsomol, went into villages to propagandize and incite divisions, turning formerly peaceful neighbors against one another. In his book “The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia,” Orlando Figes describes the situation:

The villagers had never heard such propaganda in the past, and many were impressed by the long words used by the leaders of the Komsomol. At these meetings, the villagers were told that they belonged to three mutually hostile classes: the poor peasants, who were the allies of the proletariat, the middle peasants, who were neutral, and the rich or ‘kulak’ peasants, who were its enemies. The names of all the peasants in these different classes were listed on a board outside the village school.

This process is eerily similar to the way critical race theory — and all identity politics — has been applied in America. You can see the same three divisions: victims, oppressors, and those who might save themselves by becoming “allies” of the victims.

Note the reference to the Komsomol using impressive “long words.” Today our miseducated youth are easily impressed by new terms such as “systemic racism,” “intersectionality,” and “white fragility.” Finally, the wokesters identify and condemn those marked as oppressors — doxing and canceling them by name — in a written list of names posted in the village. Today such work is helped along by media and Big Tech.

The whole idea is to sow chaos where there was peace — or, at least progress. It is to disrupt and destroy any sense of community a person may have. Figes continued: “These divisions were entirely generated by the Komsomol. The villagers had no previous conception of themselves in terms of social class. They had always thought of themselves as one ‘peasant family.’”

They then use those newly established identities to “rub resentments raw.” In “Rules for Radicals,” agitator Saul Alinsky described the process:

The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression . . . an organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent; provide a channel into which people can angrily pour their frustrations . . . your function — to agitate to the point of conflict.

Conjuring up such hostilities is also the essence of what Karl Marx was aiming for in his call for “class consciousness.” The problem, as he saw it, was that people were busy with life and willing to live and let live. Or, to put it in modern terminology, they were “insufficiently woke.” All power elites likewise see social contentment as an impediment to their power.

In the same fashion, today’s critical race theory agitators call for a form of race consciousness that breeds in themselves the same sort of blind hate. Ironically, they’re like a photographic negative, a mirror image of the segregationists in Jim Crow days. We have been assaulted with many other forms of “consciousness” intended to sow hostilities and lawlessness: immigrant status, gender identity, sexual identity, and on and on. We are being overwhelmed.

Saddest of all is how critical race theory exploits the tragedy of racial divisions in America. The tragedy is thus reduced to nothing but a vehicle for a power grab by elitists in the circles of academia, media, and Big Tech. Ironically, those power elites are vastly and disproportionately white and in it for their gain. So, rather than serve as a balm for healing, critical race theory has proven to be poisonous to liberty, true community, and our common humanity.

President Trump is bringing some attention to the connections between this summer’s riots, the 63 percent of young Americans who believe America is racist, and the disaster that is civics and history instruction in U.S. public schools. He recently announced a federal commission to counter the saturation of anti-American ideology in American education institutions through “patriotic education.” He also “threatened to cut funding to schools that teach the 1619 Project.”

This is a start, but it’s going to take a lot more to address this serious problem. Significant structural changes are required, and state-level elected officials need to do most of it. Since schooling that teaches children to hate their own nation threatens its very existence, it’s past time to get serious about this.

The examples are myriad and expansive, and they are not limited to deep-blue locales (as if indoctrination is okay if local politicians approve). The College Board’s changes to its U.S. and European history Advanced Placement curriculum, which more than 800,000 American high school students take each year, are one major example.

Crazy Leftism Isn’t ‘Just’ In Higher Ed Any More

Because the College Board’s main selling point is making it possible for kids to earn college credit in high school, its courses both reflect the politicization of American academia and push that politicization into K-12. It is designed to reflect what the neo-Marxist, anti-American higher education-sphere teaches about American and world history.

Numerous K-12 school systems engineer their curricula to build up to AP classes in high school. Thus, although it is a private institution, College Board is highly, highly influential in determining what American children learn, and what it teaches is warped.

Its curriculum revamp a few years ago more deeply reflected academia’s anti-Western, anti-American bias. College Board removed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson from its curricula several years before protesters started tearing down their statues.

The bent of its curricula is to teach America’s best and brightest students to see their country and the Western heritage as racist, sexist, imperialist, and so on — as a story of oppressors and victims. It is not as blatantly offensive as critical race theory, but holds and imparts the exact same underlying anti-West, anti-American philosophy.

Obviously, such efforts to prejudice young Americans against their own country have been highly successful. We are now seeing the results on our Main Streets.

Using Public Resources to Support Anti-Americanism

This is just one prominent example of how deeply anti-Americanism is embedded in American public education. More abound, happening everywhere, all the time. It recently came out that Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia paid $20,000 to leading race-baiter Ibram X. Kendi for a one-hour webinar. Just last week in a Wisconsin school district, parents complained that their high-school son was asked in class to equate American police officers with Nazis because of George Floyd.

When the father complained of this to Superintendent Brad Saron, Saron “said he found the activity ‘rooted in our state standards,’” according to an email obtained by Empower Wisconsin. Saron banned the father from complaining to teachers about his son’s instruction, copying all the freshman teachers in the school, and the teachers of the couple’s other children in other public schools, on his reply.

Entire states like Oregon, California, and New Jersey now legally mandate racist and anti-American curricula in social studies and other domains. Oregon, for example, tells social studies teachers to undermine “Eurocentrist narratives” as part of the state’s newly mandated “ethnic studies” curricula in social studies. Teachers are now required to apply race and ethnicity tests to what they teach in social studies, to “decenter whiteness” and “center the experiences and perspectives of people of color.”

It is no wonder, then, that last year’s annual Cato poll found that 68 percent of Republican parents would prefer to enroll their children in private schools, if only they had the money. So would 59 percent of Independents, 57 percent of Latinos, 51 percent of blacks, and 55 percent of all American parents. Millions of American kids attend schools out of step with their parents’ values and desires because public financing for education is skewed towards such schools.

It’s Past Time to Stop Talking and Start Fighting

As I explain in detail in my book about Common Core, whistleblowers on the right have sounded the alarm about such endemic problems for decades, including the 1950s and 1980s flare-ups over “new math,” the 2010s battle over Common Core, and President Obama’s elimination of national civics assessments. We’ve been ignored, trivialized, and ridiculed, including by those ostensibly on our own side.

Republicans have talked a big game about school choice in response to deep constituent concerns about lack of influence over public education resources while at best creating tiny, overregulated choice programs controlled by the anti-American education establishment. Voucher school leaders will not say it openly for fear of endangering their bottom lines, but too often school choice programs enable leftist takeovers and regulatory strangulation of private education rather than opening escape hatches for families to access genuinely different and better schooling.

President Trump is the first prominent Republican elected official to boldly name and take serious action against the anti-American education establishment cultivating hatred and ignorance in the next generation of citizens. But if he’s the only or the last, America will lose this fight. Governors and state legislatures have to get their rear ends in gear and do the bulk of the work here, following his lead. It’s time for them to stop trusting the education bureaucracy and start making war on it — because it is absolutely making war on their constituents, and this situation is only one example of that.

Republicans, Repeat: Bureaucracy Is Your Enemy

As Trump has found out with federal agencies, telling bureaucrats to do something and them actually doing it are 100 percent different things. They have repeatedly defied the American people’s mandate for conservative governance time and time again over the past century, including Trump’s executive order banning critical race theory training in federal agencies.

Americans thus need Republicans at all levels of government to start openly championing their interest against the special interests. They have to stop accepting the legitimacy of the administrative state and start hacking it to pieces.

As Trump has realized, perhaps the chief way to do that is to starve these public enemies of public funds. His “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping” is genius in that regard, for it not only yanks federal funds from all racist, sexist indoctrination sessions in federal workplaces, it also pulls them from all private organizations that have taken federal grants.

This tactic needs to be deployed everywhere possible: Against universities, against public school districts, against state education bureaucracies. It should be deployed at the state level by Republican executives and legislatures as well, against every institution that participates in “offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating,” as the order puts it.

Republicans also need to stop talking about school choice and start doing it full-blown at the state level. The lack of competition in K-12 education enables this ideological monopoly. Legislators need to give every single parent the power to control his or her children’s education dollars, and not allow bureaucrats to force recipients to conform to leftist dogma to get it. If they don’t do this, they are allowing entrenched leftists to indoctrinate the children of their own voters, thus speeding the destruction of their party and, what is far more important, of our great nation.

State-level Republicans need to slash and burn their state education departments, which function as enforcers for top-down leftist control of the nation’s schools. They need to stop requiring teachers to be indoctrinated in leftist dogma through teacher certification mandates, which research has shown do not improve teacher quality.

Stop Funding Racism and Riots

Similarly, Trump and Republicans in Congress need to eliminate the U.S Department of Education and all federal involvement in education. The smart way to do it would be by “combining” USDOE with the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, folding in the few useful things USDOE does — mainly statistics collection — to these other agencies’ similar duties. Call it “government efficiency.” Then block-grant all federal education funds back to states with the A-PLUS Act.

Trump’s other job is using the bully pulpit, as he does so well, to inform the public of what is going on and to bully state-level Republicans to start fulfilling their decades of promises to deliver genuine school choice. The era of uniparty control of public education resources needs to end, and it needs to end immediately, for the sake of our great nation’s continued freedom.

When 63 percent of millennials believe their country is racist, their nation has failed in its duty to educate them. It shouldn’t take riots and the fanatical, anti-American extremism of critical race theory to get that to change. If they don’t make Republicans understand the urgency of this issue, nothing will.