This is not parody, at least not as far as I can tell. When a Virginia voter was pressed on his objections to critical race theory, he could not actually explain what that was but he knew he was against it.
When this Virginia gentleman was asked what his number one issue was, he told his interviewer it was "getting back to the basics of teaching children." When pressed on what he meant by that, he explained that it was "not teaching them critical race theory."
Critical race theory is taught in law schools as a way of analyzing law and policy for systemic racism. It is not taught in public K-12 schools, but Republicans have decided to make it their "death panel" issue for the 2022 midterms, and Virginia is their testing ground.
The reporter asked him, "What is critical race theory?"
"I'm not going to get into the specifics of it," he replied. "Because I don't understand it that much."
OF COURSE HE DOESN'T. Don't call this guy ignorant, just understand that he didn't learn this in school because...drum roll please....IT IS NOT TAUGHT IN SCHOOL.
This is what Republicans do. They take a scary term, they send it to Fox News and OANN and the right wing blogs and Breitbart and turn it into a scary thing that IS REALLY HAPPENING ALL OVER when of course it isn't. And people don't need to understand it because that is beside the point. It reaches right into their inner racist core and stirs up all the fears of the other.
Which is exactly the goal as Christopher Rufo explained some time ago. It's just another front in the never-ending culture war, and this one is a potent one.
Watch the interview below, via The Good Liars:
