This Went Pretty Much As You'd Expect

 Well, as I'd expect, anyway....

The 2020 Alabama legislative session ended last month, but [state Rep. Chris] Pringle [R-Mobile] is already primed for the next one. He recently pre-filed a bill — almost eight months before the next session is scheduled to start — and he’s been talking it up on the radio.

So what does his bill say?

“It’s pretty simple,” Pringle said. “All it says is you can’t teach critical race theory in K-12 or higher education in the state of Alabama.”

That is a short bill, if not a simple one. But it didn’t answer my question: What is this critical race theory educators would be forbidden to teach? Pringle has seen enough legislation to understand the law requires specificity. Many bills begin by laying out their legal definitions. How would his bill define critical race theory?

“It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin, period,” Pringle said.

That sounded very serious, indeed. Nazi-like, even. So I asked Pringle if there were any critical race theorists he could point to who have been spreading such toxic garbage?

“Yeah, uh, well — I can assure you — I’ll have to read a lot more,” he said.

I began to get the feeling that Pringle didn’t know as much about critical race theory as I had hoped. Were there other examples he could give me where critical race theory was being put into practice?

“These people, when they were doing the training programs — and the government — if you didn’t buy into what they taught you a hundred percent, they sent you away to a reeducation camp,” Pringle said.

In America!  In the tunnels under the abandoned Wal-Marts, where the lizard overlords gather and plot to take over the world!

Pringle was a little difficult to follow but this sounded serious. These people — whoever they were— sounded terrifying, and if there were reeducation camps operating in America, that would be big news someone like me should get to the bottom of. I asked Pringle, who were these people?

Pringle is a Realtor, a homebuilder and general contractor and he dug through what he called his “executive suite” (the cab of his pickup truck) looking for an article he’d read. After a few moments of silence, he began to speak again, this time a bit haltingly.

“Here’s an — it doesn’t say who it was, it just says a government that held these — these training sessions …”

Pringle trailed off and I told him that, if he liked, he could send me a link to the article, but then he began to speak again.

“The white male executives are sent to a three-day re-education camp, where they were told that their white male culture wasn’t their —” he trailed off again.

I was worried that we’d lost our connection. These sorts of conversations sometimes end abruptly, but Pringle was still on the line and after a little more hemming and hawing he retreated to a common safe-space of politicians who’ve crawled too far out on a limb: He just wanted to start a conversation, he said.

You know; isn't that what laws are for?  To get people to talk to each other?  Or maybe just be forced to be re-educated?  Because we already force kids to be educated once.  Re-education is...a bad thing?

“I introduced a very brief version of the bill to start the conversation, but it’s very difficult in this cancel society to have a frank discussion about racism in this country and this country’s history,” he said. “I mean, history is being rewritten and I’m not exactly sure of the accuracy of what’s there now and what they’re trying to change it into.”

It's the aliens tryin' to brainwash us out of our true history of white dominance of the world to save the little brown fellers fer Jeebus!

This was news to me, as I’d seen lots of lawmakers try to talk about race and history in the Alabama State House, but for whatever reason, they were always the Black lawmakers. It was the white lawmakers who usually tried to change the subject. I wanted to ask Pringle about this, but suddenly he was no longer at a loss for words and I didn’t want to interrupt.

Now, see, that's just racist right there, and it implies black people are better'n white people, and we just can't 'llow that kinda talk!

“This is still the greatest country that’s ever, ever been in the history of the world,” he said. “And the radical left is trying to destroy that and tear us apart and divide this country based on race and class, which is exactly what they do in communist countries.”

Lots of problems with different races in Russia China and Cube-er, ya know!  Yew can't deny that! (I still remember when Dr. King was labeled a "Communist.")

After bragging to me how he had BS-ed his way through his college political science classes by parroting the liberal bilge his professors wanted to hear, Pringle then said he had to get back to his day job and that he had employees waiting on him at a job site. So I let him go.

Wish he'd let us go as easily. 

Everything old is perpetually new again.