Loudoun County, Virginia, has become “ground zero” in the fight against critical race theory-based indoctrination in schools nationwide, according to the co-founder of a parents’ group taking on the local education establishment.
Critical race theory (CRT) must be uprooted because it “seeks to view everything through the lens of race and believes all institutions, traditions, language, and history of this country are systemically racist,” said Ian Prior, a parent who helped to found and is executive director of Fight for Schools, which is registered in Virginia as a political action committee.
Prior was principal deputy director of public affairs at the Justice Department in the Trump administration. He is now CEO of his own political consulting firm, Headwaters Media, and co-founder of the website The Daily Malarkey.
CRT proponents believe the nation’s supposedly racist nature can only be remedied by “viewing everything through the lens of race and discriminating in order to end what they believe is systemic racism,” he told The Epoch Times in an interview.
“And it ignores the individual in favor of identity groups, which means it is harmful to people of all races that believe in the concepts of Western liberalism, meritocracy, and equal opportunity for all.”
But Loudoun County, Prior said, is “ground zero in a movement by parents to retake control over what happens in the schools that they drop their kids off to every day.”
This is happening “primarily because of distance learning where we’ve received tips from hundreds of parents, walking by, during a class that they hear online and saying, ‘what is that?’ Or a screenshot or something where they’re able to observe it, where they normally would not have been able to,” he said.
“Parents have a lot more insight over the past year as to what’s going on, and I think that is really what’s driven the accountability and the spotlight on all of this.”
