Radical think tank linked to Florida's Black history standards
The Claremont Institute contends those who love America are fighting a civil war with "woke communists" who teach that Black people are oppressed
As critics denounced Florida’s new African American history standards for teaching children that slavery came with benefits, one of the coauthors stepped forward to ease everyone’s mind.
His name is William B. Allen, a soft-spoken 79-year-old, retired professor. It didn’t hurt his credibility that he is also Black. On Fox News, he told Jesse Watters that critics of the standards, such as Vice President Kamala Harris, lie in their analysis because they have an agenda.
“They only want slavery to be told from a certain perspective,” he said, adding that it’s actually racists who “continue to propagate the false picture that the birth of the nation was nothing but slavery.”
Yet Allen has an agenda of his own. And a radical one. He is a fellow at the ultra-right-wing think tank, the Claremont Institute, whose chairman warns that the United States is embroiled in an existential civil war “between those who believe that America is good and those who believe America is bad -- those who want to preserve the American way of life and those who want to destroy it.”
The key to winning this war, Allen himself believes, is to defeat the “lie” that America is systemically racist and that black Americans are oppressed.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Deeper Look to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.