I have no doubt that Martin Luther King would have understood what I'm saying in terms of helping people who actually need help. It's not an accident that at the end of his life, he was beginning to focus more on poverty in general than on the race question.
The idea is to help people who need help. The modern idea that microaggressions and how white people feel in their heart of hearts is what we should be thinking about to me is a detour. Frankly, the left has to get more honest about this sort of thing. If you want to say that Youngkin has exploited a certain kind of sentiment and maybe sometimes even racist sentiment, there's an argument there.
But for the left to say that there's nothing going on in schools that we need to talk about, that
critical race theory isn't in the schools because nobody's teaching the papers of Richard Delgado and
Kimberlé Crenshaw — that's a debate team feint. There is something going on in terms of how children are being taught in a lot of schools, and to pretend that it's not true, or to quietly think that that's the way it should be and so therefore we shouldn't talk about it as a new development: that doesn't work. There's a certain kind of maybe, regrettably, imperfect voter who is not fooled by that. And it's time for a more honest conversation.