A California city fell under the national spotlight last week after protesters descended on a critical race theory (CRT) workshop organized by the newly elected conservative-majority school board.
In December, the Temecula Valley Unified School District (TVUSD) in southern California swore in three conservative school trustees who quickly moved to ban CRT, fulfilling a campaign promise to constituents.
The March 22 workshop at James L. Day Middle School was intended to inform parents about what CRT is, how to identify it and why the school board voted to ban the school of thought from K-12 classrooms. But, the six expert panelists who hoped for a civil and engaging discussion with the community were drowned out for much of the special meeting.
Activists, parents, teachers and students arrived to protest the ban, heckling and yelling over one another and rendering the proceedings largely inaudible. Several arguments among the crowd broke out. Security eventually removed at least three people from the auditorium.
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Protesters expressed various concerns about the CRT ban. Signs carried by the protesters claimed the resolution would lead to a ban on Black history and ethnic studies, despite panelist assurances that would not be the case. Some activists felt the workshop and priorities of the board would lead to less inclusivity, hurt the rights of trans youth and exhaust resources on an issue they believe does not exist.
Jenn Wiersma, a mom who ran for the TVUSD school board and currently serves as the clerk, pushed back on many of the claims made by activists and expressed disappointment in their behavior at the meeting.
"It was evident that there was a plan in the room for disruption and chaos and hopefully to cancel the meeting," she told Fox News Digital.
Wiersma strongly believes that if you want to get something done in the community, the school board might be your best shot at change. She wants a classroom without content that "weaponizes skin color" and "bullies kids into hating themselves." She instead wants to focus on bringing things back to the basics.
"Classrooms devoid of the ideological division, that was our whole entire point. Not to censor conversations," she said. "Students are allowed at an age-appropriate level to discuss what CRT is, but we don't use it as a lens to determine how every discussion and how every historical event has happened. That's the difference."
Wiersma also revealed that her supporters and other school board members have allegedly been intimidated by activists over the last few days. She said citizens in the town feel like they can't attend another board meeting, pointing to online memes of wanted posters with local faces on them, doxing and the intimidation of businesses.
"They want to cancel people and make them afraid to be a part of this, and I'm going to continue to fight for those voices and those people because that's what America's about. We need to have the conversations," she added.
Fox News Digital had the opportunity to sit down with five of the six panelists involved in the CRT workshop to hear about their expertise and view the materials that had protesters irate.
Dr. Brandy Schufutinsky takes no specific stance for or against CRT. She is a mother of four kids and wife to a Navy veteran first. She also holds a doctorate in International and Multicultural Education, working as both an educator and a social worker.
Speaking on CRT, Schufutinsky laid out two main points.
First, you can teach subjects and make them inclusive and academically robust without implementing divisive ideology. In her opinion, it takes away from student learning. Second, like any critical theory, CRT has flaws and if you use that as a framework to teach certain things, you could erase pieces of history and the experiences of Americans.
"We can teach history, the good, the bad and the ugly, you know, American history and teach it from a social studies or historical framework versus any type of ideology that can be erasive or marginalizing," she told Fox News Digital.
Wenyuan Wu is the Executive Director of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation. She is also the co-author of "The Great Parent Revolt."
Wu said she works to expose the harms of CTR being immersed in k-12 education, not as a course or theoretical construct, but as a dogmatic ideology or teaching method incorporated into some of the formal disciplines, including ethnic studies.
"The problem is not CRT in general," Wu said. "It's about how it has been infused and incorporated as an ideology, as a doctrine that's hijacking, even math."
In her lecture, Wu established the three common threads of practices that can be traced back to CRT as its ideological or theoretical inspirations. These practices include diversity, equity and inclusion, racial justice, social-emotional learning, culturally responsive teaching, and anti-bias anti-racism training.
The three threads are
-Race and racism are front and center in all human enterprise
-All disparities are due to discrimination
-In order to fight racism students, one must engage in anti-racism or a political call for action
According to Wu, some core tenets of critical race theory include teaching America is a systematically racist country, White privilege and unconscious bias.
"These ideological concepts are propagated not as one perspective among many but as unchallenged and unfalsifiable truth," Wu added.
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Panelists Walter H. Myers III and Chris Arend tackled CRT from a historical and theoretical perspective.
Arend, a qualified attorney in both California and Germany, said CRT is not a scientific theory but rather a doctrine or ideology. He noted that there is a large difference between CRT and Critical Thinking.
"Critical Thinking is what we want our students to learn, namely, evidence-based, rational analysis. Critical Thinking is a methodology, in other words, an open-minded way of analyzing a subject in which the outcome is uncertain," Arend said.
Meanwhile, critical theory is a "dialectic, simplistic ideology."
Throughout history, ideologies like CRT have been used to startling effect. Karl Max divided people up along economic and class lines. Later, the Frankfurt School devised its own "San Andreas fault line," as Arend calls it. That line was race and paced the way for what is now known as CRT.
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Myers, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member of the Orange County Classical Academy, added that CRT is based on critical legal studies and the thought of Italian Neo-Marxist Philosopher Antonio Gramsci (who influenced the Frankfurt School).
Eventually, the Frankfurt School was thrown out of Nazi Germany and landed at Columbia University.
Myers, who also holds a master's in philosophy and serves as an adjunct professor at the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, said that the Neo-Marxists in America then took advantage of the racial turmoil occurring in the 1950s and 60s.
"When you think about CRT, you cannot separate it from its neo-Marxist roots. All of the CRT theorists are Marxists. They're not shy about it. It's in the source materials. You can't miss it," Myers said.
However, the scholars of CRT also held a variety of viewpoints, ones that Myers said are not all bad.
"Schools have resegregated, it is true. There are educational inequities and what I don't think a lot of people understand about CRT is the CRT theorists are not a fan of urban public schools. They think they're bureaucratic, lack innovation and they think teachers' unions are a huge part of the problem," he said.
Despite claims from CRT supporters, Myers said the theory has nothing to do with African American or Native American history.
"It's certainly not something I think should be, other than maybe taught as a subject. It should not be something where its concepts or premises and prescriptions should be something we would want to include in k-12 schools," Myers added.
Finally, Dr. Joe Nalven, the former Associate Director of the Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias (at San Diego State University), used a pair of sunglasses as a prop to illustrate how CRT is a lens that one can put on and take off to view a subject from different styles of Thinking.
According to Nalven, that critical lens is something you put on to understand the world through race consciousness or oppressed oppressor. But, as Nalven notes, the question is whether teachers want students to stay in that perspective to understand the world or whether they want them to take off that lens and look at it through critical Thinking without that ideological framework.
But to Nalven, the main problem with CRT is that it is not comprehensive.
"The argument either gets lost in stopping the history or saying that past history continues and dominates thinking today without taking into account major changes going on in society," he said.
