Published October 29, 2024
A pro-Trump internet ad now running in the swing states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin focuses on Macalester College professor Brian Lozenski, the Tim Walz education appointee who calls for the overthrow of the United States.
The ad plays video of Lozenski describing the United States as “irreversibly racist” and calling for America’s overthrow. It finishes by noting that Walz’s education expertise was one of the reasons Harris selected him as her running mate. The ad was paid for by Restoration PAC.
I broke the story of Lozenski’s call for the overthrow of the U.S. here at National Review Online about a month ago. If you want context on Lozenski, his ties to Walz, and Walz’s radical education policies, you can consult my original story, this brief follow-up, or this big-picture piece on Walz’s education radicalism.
Lozenski is no outlier. He’s long been both the intellectual and activist leader of the movement to incorporate “ethnic studies” into Minnesota’s K–12 curriculum. Teaching ethnic studies may sound like introducing students to innocent stories about kissing the Blarney Stone and such. It’s actually the opposite. In the version Lozenski supports — radical or “liberated” ethnic studies — the field excludes ethnicities such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews, except perhaps to excoriate them as oppressors, or berate them for assimilating into American culture. Otherwise, liberated ethnic studies is confined to the treatment of blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans and retells their oppression by — and celebrates their resistance to — America’s dominant culture.
Lozenski and his followers only recently succeeded in having liberated ethnic studies incorporated into Minnesota’s social-studies standards. Until then, only California had mandated an ethnic-studies course as a prerequisite to high school graduation. Yet while a number of California school districts have pledged to teach liberated ethnic studies, other districts plan to offer a less radical version of the field.
In Minnesota, by contrast, every district in the state must now teach liberated ethnic studies. The radical principles of liberated ethnic studies must also be infused into every Minnesota grade level and subject, ultimately even science and math. California doesn’t go so far. Even California governor Gavin Newsom — no moderate — has distanced himself from the “liberated” version of ethnic studies.
Governor Walz, by contrast, has gone all in for the most radical version of ethnic studies and imposed it on every grade and course. What’s more, Walz has put Lozenski and his followers in charge of designing the “implementation framework” that will tell teachers how to convey the state’s radical new ethnic-studies standards. Technically, Lozenski is one among many on the committee that will decide how to implement liberated ethnic studies in Minnesota. In practice, however, Lozenski is first among equals. He is the expert, and a number of the concepts in the new ethnic-studies state standards come straight out of Lozenski’s 2022 book, My Emancipation Don’t Fit Your Equation: Critical Enactments of Black Education in the US.
Lozenski made his remarks advocating the overthrow of the United States in a 2022 YouTube video about his book. He was commenting at the time on the national debate over critical race theory. Ethnic studies in its liberated form is a kind of cousin of CRT. Lozenski is an authority on ethnic studies who considers himself a practitioner of CRT as well.
Although education has barely come up in the campaign so far, everyone knows that woke is on the ballot. The Trump campaign has made that point by running an ad on Kamala Harris’s record of support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prisoners and illegal aliens. It’s an effective ad, both because the idea is crazy and because Harris herself is on video supporting it. Rather than run ads on every leftist position Harris took during her 2019–2020 campaign for the White House, the Trump campaign has made use of this single striking example to typify her general extremism.
As for Walz, he’s offered up the easy target of dissimulation about his military record and more. As a consequence, Walz’s policy leftism and partiality to communist China have barely been targeted by the Trump campaign. On top of that, Walz’s opponent, J. D. Vance, has successfully deflected media attempts to portray him as a nasty hatchet man by maintaining a gracious manner and by stressing positive themes. The upshot is that education issues, and even Walz’s overall radicalism, have largely disappeared from the campaign. Walz’s invocation of “neighborly socialism” has faded, for example, in favor of jokes about his hunting misadventures, odd arm movements, and trouble with the truth.
You can focus on only so much in a campaign, and the Trump team has made some great choices. But that is not to say voters couldn’t use a reminder of the Democratic Party’s education madness.
To be sure, even your typical CRT-loving teacher, professor, or education bureaucrat will refrain from calling for the overthrow of the United States. Yet a goal of overthrow is the clear implication of CRT, liberated ethnic studies, and other forms of woke pedagogy. This is Lozenski’s point. If you read the transcript of his incendiary video (linked here), he argues that revolution is the logical implication of CRT and that CRT’s advocates are not being completely honest about what their own theory leads to. He’s right.
While Minnesota may be the most extreme state when it comes to social studies in general and ethnic studies in particular, other blue states are not that far behind (see “The Blue State Education Nightmare”). Minnesota is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to characters like Lozenski.
Properly speaking, these issues of education standards and curricula ought to be confined to the states. In practice, unfortunately, they are not. Obama used the Common Core to get around the prohibition on federal interference with the content of education. In 2022, we barely escaped a federal bill that would have effectively imposed CRT on the states by congressional fiat. The year before that, Biden issued a set of priorities for federal education grants designed to push schools into adopting the 1619 Project and work by people such as Ibram X. Kendi. A Harris-Walz victory means more of the same.
Harris has no education experience. Walz, on the other hand, as both a governor and a former social-studies teacher, has plenty. It’s a near certainty that a President Harris would delegate the education portfolio to Walz, just as vice president and former Indiana governor Mike Pence managed the education transition under President Trump. Given Walz’s track record in Minnesota putting Lozenski and his radical followers in charge of education, we should expect disastrous results. A Harris-Walz administration would tie strings to federal education grants designed to force Minnesota-style education radicalism on every state.
So the new ad isn’t a cheap gotcha about some crazy outlier professor. Sadly, the ad is an all-too-legitimate warning about what will happen to American education if Harris and Walz reach the White House.
Stanley Kurtz is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Beyond his work with Education and American Ideals, Mr. Kurtz is a key contributor to American public debates on a wide range of issues from K–12 and higher education reform, to the challenges of democratization abroad, to urban-suburban policies, to the shaping of the American left’s agenda. Mr. Kurtz has written on these and other issues for various journals, particularly National Review Online (where he is a contributing editor).
