It's easy to find ridiculously wrong beliefs held by conservatives (some prompted by Rufo) about what CRT is.

However, for a post that is supposedly dispelling phantoms, there's an awful lot of inaccurate and/or misleading information in this post.

The quote above is a prime example. You do realize that there is a field called "Whiteness Studies", correct? That Delgado and Stefancic, at least, claim it as part of CRT (though I think this is a somewhat dubious claim historically)? That it is overwhelmingly focused on white racism, white supremacy, maintenance of white power to the exclusions of others, and all sorts of things people ought to feel bad about having as part of their society? If you have an area with a subfield that literally gathers all the bad things one group has done, calls it "whiteness", and you try to teach it to white children...how do you expect they are going to feel about their "whiteness"?!

Now, you might reply: "oh, but we don't teach that per se in ethnic studies, because doing so is liable to be harmful for children". Well, then maybe it is reasonable for parents to be worried it might be taught anyway, and it shouldn't be much of a problem passing legislation saying it shouldn't be taught, should it?

Calling the concern "mind-blowingly ignorant" is mind-blowingly ignorant. Calling the concern overblown is probably reasonable.

You present several tenets of Critical Race Theory, but you forget several, too. Interest convergence states that you can't make progress on racial justice unless the measures are also in the interest of the whites who hold the most power, and actually reinforce racism (pretty fatalistic--ruling out that humans (or whites, at least) can be motivated by morality). Intersectionality states that people can belong simultaneously to multiple different identity groups (e.g. simultaneously black and gay), and that the specific intersection is its own identity and can be targeted by specific prejudices: it's not just the two identity groups added together.

When you add these in, however, the potential for healing is drastically reduced.

The first basically tells people there isn't any point in healing--whites are going to be self-interested and racist, and every change they make will just reinforce that. The second tells people that they need to identify strongly with small groups with the most tightly shared experience, making it ever more challenging to attain the healing that comes from seeing us all as fundamentally the same: human.

And these ideas, percolated into popular culture, are very very much a central part of the culture war. It's absolutely CRT, and you're absolutely wrong that the culture war doesn't touch it.

(The "white supremacy is embedded" is also a key point of contention in the culture war, and you admit that that's part of CRT.)

So although there are a lot of misconceptions too, and the culture war encompasses other things as well, the culture war is in part over exactly some of the key tenets of CRT. Waving it away as a misapprehension is...a...misapprehension.

You try to talk up the healing aspect of CRT by saying: "If all white people are racist it’s because we’ve been taught to think as racists." But this is contradicted by your own statement of the tenets of CRT: "White people from all walks of life tolerate racism because they benefit from it materially or psychologically". That's a totally different statement! It's not that they were taught to think as racist, it's that they like the status they have by embracing racism.

You claim, "The belief that schools are teaching critical race theory in K-12 lacks common sense and documented proof," but the tenets of CRT are documented to be present in K-12 curricula, so sense or no, you're just wrong (or schools don't teach "physics" either, because obviously they are only teaching a few tenets in simplified form, not the whole thing). For instance, "Understand and analyze the impact of systems of power, including white supremacy, institutional racism, racial hierarchy, and oppression." This is out of Oregon's (draft) ethnic studies guide, as a curriculum goal for third graders. You can find intersectionality, identity, narrative, and social construction of race in there too. While it's very dubious that it's possible to teach these things as stated at the grade levels they're slated for (and several teachers I've discussed this which have said as much to me), it's hard to see how this is anything but a CRT-containing curriculum.

Maybe it's good that it is there but you certainly can't claim it's not there.

Going from misguided to just silly, you claim that Trump has something to do with the funding of police officers in East Hartford. Do you understand how local governments differ from the federal government?!

You say that the problem is brainwashed people.

Unfortunately, you're displaying all the symptoms of "brainwashing" too--the confident statement of contradictory claims, parroting of talking points without checking evidence, selecting the nicest-sounding bits of some doctrine while claiming it's the whole thing. It's just the brainwashing of the far left instead of the brainwashing of the far right. (Actually, I think "brainwashing" is too strong. Rather, these are beliefs that identify one as a member of a group, and the support for the beliefs is predicated more on one's (desired) group identity than on the objective truth of the statements. It's the same as belief that the Rams are "the best". Objectively, by stats, they're not. But they are for you and fellow Rams fans because thinking so is part of what defines you as a Rams fan. The cognitive bias to maintain beliefs that cement tribal identity is extraordinarily strong (and well-documented).)

CRT has made some important contributions to our understanding of racism in the United States; it also has some massive flaws. Some aspects of CRT are opposed by people because of their racism; some aspects of CRT are opposed by people for other reasons; a lot of people oppose "CRT" because of nothing to do with CRT. As with everything, a frank discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of a position is the best way to build consensus and move forwards. (A frank discussion is not the best way to "mobilize the base" and may not be the best way to achieve justice (depends on details).)

You say, almost as if you recognize the problems with your post, "We’re not going to win over conservative misapprehension by proving the truth to them."

No, perhaps not. But you might win over the independents, the moderates, the undecided.

You might look a little less silly to people who have done enough homework to understand the situation more thoroughly.

And you also might, if you actually are committed to truth, be less wrong about what is actually the case and have better ideas of how to achieve meaningful improvements in people's lives.

Unfortunately, the absolutely biggest flaw of CRT, inherited from Critical Theory, is that it is a spectacularly awful way to figure out what is true. Only by being embedded in a society deeply committed to Enlightenment rationalism does it manage to retain a reasonably firm grip on reality. And yet, according to Delgado and Stefancic: "critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including...Enlightenment rationalism." (CRT: An Intro, p. 3).

But we don't have to blindly accept that part. We can take the good parts without being bound by the bad. CRT isn't a package deal. Even people who work in CRT as a legal theory don't agree on the tenets. We needn't either. But we should admit what they all are, and divorce ourselves explicitly from any that seem ill-advised.