Illinois | Michael Patrick Leahy

Southeastern Legal Foundation’s Braden Boucek on Anti-Racist Training: ‘Pits Us All Against Each Other’

Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Southeastern Legal Foundation’s Director of Litigation Braden Boucek to the newsmakers line to discuss the antiracist training lawsuit filed with the Evanston-Skokie school district in Illinois.

Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line by our good friend, Braden Bosek, who is a director of litigation at the Southeastern Legal Foundation. Good morning, Braden.

Boucek: Good morning, Michael. A pleasure to be on.

Leahy: Well, when last we spoke, you were affiliated with The Beacon Center here in Tennessee. Now you’re the director of litigation at the Southeastern Legal Foundation down in Atlanta. Boy, do you have a case on your hands?

Boucek: We sure do. Yep. It’s been exciting.

Leahy: I read the outline of the allegations there and I’m gonna call these allegations “incredible.” That is hard to believe, not credible, that a school system would do what is included in these allegations.

I just go down the list of all the things that this White teacher in the Evanston-Skokie school district in Illinois says he’s being required to do. I mean, it’s a lot of stuff. He’s got to participate in antiracist training as evidenced by the lawsuit.

The training instructs teachers to accept that White individuals “loud, authoritative, and controlling.” Understand that being “less White.” “Less racially oppressive.”

Acknowledge that “White identity is inherently racist.” Denounce “White privilege and participate in, ‘privilege walks’ where they must stand in line and separate themselves according to statements relating to their race or color.” They aren’t really doing that in that district, are they, Braden?

Boucek: That’s exactly what they’re doing in the district. And you don’t have to take our word for it. It’s all based on documents that they publicly proclaim. It’s in their lesson plans.

It’s on their district’s equity glossary, which is on their website, and it’s in their vision statements. So they have bought in hook line and sinker into an antiracist training and they’ll publicly shout it from there after that.

Leahy: Again, I guess the word is incredible. I can’t believe it. It is so racist against this White teacher. What kind of reaction have you received after you filed this? And would you file this in federal district court? Where did you file the case?

Boucek: We filed this in federal district court in Chicago. And obviously, everybody is concerned about the sort of woke curriculum that you see here in Tennessee or in some of these other schools.

And what’s happening in Chicago is what happens when the woke curriculum that we see in Tennessee is allowed to grow up and bear fruit. And it was only a matter of time. But we’ve got to get these things before federal judges. We’ve got to allege the equal protection violation in the Civil Rights Act, and we’ve got to stop these things.

Leahy: Evanston-Skokie, isn’t Evanston a fairly affluent suburb of Chicago?

Boucek: Yeah, that’s my understanding as well. But this is an ideology that draws a certain type of progressive intellectual, and they find it irresistible. And District 65 has bought into it hook line sinker.

Leahy: The officials there are Devin Horton, who’s the Superintendent of the Evanston-Skokie school district. Latarsha Green, who is the Deputy Superintendent of District 65, and then Stacey Beardsley, who is the Assistant Superintendent of curriculum and instruction.

All three of those officials are part of the staff that put this together. And then there’s a Board of Education, right? Did the board actually approve this stuff?

Boucek: Oh, yes. This is a board-approved curriculum. And I’d invite anybody to go to our website if they want to actually see a list of these things because as you pointed out, they really just have to be read to be believed.

And you can go to Slfliberty.org, which is our website, and look for our coverage on this. Our complaint is there, which is the actual formal legal document that we filed. And in the third paragraph, we have an image from a book.

Leahy: I’m looking at it right now. (Chuckles) Describe it.

Boucek: The book from PreK. Well, the book is called Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness. And the image that you’re looking at that we put so prominently, no complaint is a picture of a White devil holding up a contract for stolen land and stolen property. And all you got to do is exchange your soul.

And the caption, says, “Whiteness is a bad deal and it always has been.” And again, that’s in the curriculum. And that’s shown to kids as young as Pre-K.

Leahy: I’m looking at it. Item three in your litigation in your complaint says what Superintendent Devin Horton means by ‘antiracist’ looks like the following image from a lesson taught to District 65 elementary school students.

And on one side of the page, it says, highlighted in red, Whiteness is a bad deal. It always was. And then it’s got one of these little air bubbles where it’s written in ‘dude, we can see your pointy tail.’

This is given to elementary school students. And then on the other page, it’s this White devil with a pointy red tail. And then it looks like a receipt with money on it. And it says, contract binding you to Whiteness.

You get stolen land, stolen riches, special favor. Whiteness gets to mess endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of color. Your soul, sign below.

Land riches and favors may be revoked at any time for any reason. This is what they’re teaching elementary schools in the Evanston-Skokie School District an affluent suburb of Chicago. How long have they been doing that?

Boucek: At least since 2017. And you’ve described in great detail what the curriculum looks like. But what it really is is it’s teaching non-White kids to hate. And it’s teaching White kids to hate themselves.

And all of it is unconstitutional. We’ve been through this before. There is a robust body of law about treating school children differently on the basis of race.

Leahy: You said something very significant. Our schools, at least this school system is teaching White children to hate themselves. We’ve seen a lot of reports here in Williamson County.

There’s a group I’m sure you’re familiar with them called Moms for Liberty. And they have brought in parents talking about their children who are upset with their own history. I think some even mentioned the kids were almost suicidal, didn’t want to go to school. It’s a terrible, terrible thing. It’s child abuse, in my view.

Boucek: It’s a dangerously destructive ideology. And I know the stories you’re talking about in Williamson County about the child of biracial parents that came home and said she didn’t want to be White anymore.

It promotes a view of race essentialism that lumps us all into various categories and then pits us all against each other. Oppressor or oppressed. And that just has no business in the school, whether in Tennessee or Chicago.

Leahy: It is, in fact, the antithesis of the American character of individualism and self-reliance, and respect for other people. You’ve got in your complaint, I think an excellent description of the difference between equity, which is all the rage these days among the elite, and equality.

Let me just read this and get your reaction. You say in the complaint, equity is very different than equality. Although the two are sometimes confused. Equality is a principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law through the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As District 65 in Evanston-Skokie, Illinois itself has recognized, equality is about sameness in treating everyone in an identical manner regardless of their race.

Equity is about so-called justice and individuals getting what “they need and deserve.” Said another way, equality strives for equal opportunity while equity strives for equal outcomes. How did equity replace equality?

Boucek: That’s exactly what’s going on is that they’re trying to swap out equality with equity. And we thought it was very important that we pull up these terms so people become familiar with them because equity is becoming a buzzword that’s being kicked around with a great deal of promiscuity these days.

And it’s an innocuous-sounding term. It’s even a noble goal. But the problem is, However desirable, equity, maybe equality is a non-negotiable constitutional command. Of all of the American freedoms, the self-evident truth that all men are created equal is the one that we have fought and bled for more than any other one. And I’m thinking about Valley Forge. I

‘m thinking about the blood-soaked fields of Antietam. I’m thinking about Marines rating across a coral reef and Tarawa. And I’m thinking about the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We have fought so long and hard to live up to the standard that all men are created equal based on race.

We just can’t and have afforded any kind of backsliding now. And that’s really what happens starting in 2017. They just decided we can’t wait anymore, we need to go ahead and tilt the scales to get to equity now.

But everybody needs to know what equity means. Equity is not equality. Equity is a license to punish Americans for their skin color. And it’s precisely why the Civil Rights Movement existed in the first place.

Leahy: Braden Boucek with the Southeastern Legal Foundation. Can you stick with us through the break? We’ll have more when we get back.

Boucek: Absolutely.

Listen to the first hour here:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Braden Boucek” by The Federalist Society. Background Photo “Classroom” by Educators .co.uk. CC BY 2.0.

Crom Carmichael Explains How Gun Laws Today Are Those of Jim Crow

Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio who outlined the convoluted gun requirements to obtaining a firearm in certain blue states while making it harder for lower-income people to own, and how these resemble Jim Crow voting laws from the past.

(Maxine Waters clip plays)

Leahy: That is Representative Maxine Waters, who is Black and who is a Democrat and was up in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, the site of the second police shooting of a young Black man or the shooting of a young Black man who was resisting arrest and sounds like inciting violence to me. In Florida Ron DeSantis doesn’t like that kind of idea Crom.

Carmichael: What Maxine Waters said there was, we need to stay in the streets, correct?

Leahy: That is what she said. Now, the Constitution allows us to peaceably, assemble to address the government with our grievances. That’s what the Constitution allows. What Ron DeSantis and the Republicans in Florida have done is they’ve passed legislation that essentially says that if your protest turns to intimidation that is by definition of their law, not peaceful.

And so mostly peaceful in Florida won’t fly anymore. And if it’s two or more people, two or more people. I remember seeing videos, for example, of all the riots all over the country. But I also saw videos in Washington, D.C., outside of the Capitol, where you had some protesters, and they were just like the protesters in so many cities across the country that were acting intimidatingly against the Capitol Hill police. In Florida that will be an arrestable offense. That will be a felony, not a misdemeanor.

Leahy: There’s no state law, apparently that addresses that in Minnesota although there are certain constitutional elements to it. Here’s the story about Waters, from Breitbart. Waters in her remarks to reporters, that a protest in Brooklyn Center, where thousands have been protesting the death of Daunte Wright encouraged people to ‘take to the streets if Chauvin (Derk Chauvin the officer charged with, I think second-degree murder in the death of George Floyd back in May) we’re looking for a guilty verdict,’ Waters said.

‘And we are looking to see if all of the talk that took place and has been taking place. And after they saw what happened to George Floyd, if nothing does happen, then we know that we’ve got to not only stay in the street, but we’ve got to fight for justice.’ That’s what she said. That sounds like inciting violence to me.

Carmichael: Sure does. I would like to compare that to anything that Trump said. Trump didn’t say anything like that.

Leahy: Nothing like that.

Carmichael: And they’re claiming that Trump said this. But if I could, Michael, let me do a Jen Psaki here and circle back.

Leahy: Jen Psaki, the incompetent Press Secretary for Joe Biden.

Carmichael: No, she’s actually quite competent. She just provides zero information. She’s very competent. She does have information. She does exactly what the Biden administration wants her to do.

Leahy: Which is to give no information.

Carmichael: Which is to provide nothing. But anyway, let me give you some more information. We’ve talked about this previously, the Jim Crow laws. First of all the Jim Crow laws were passed post-Civil War by the Democrats in the South. This is extremely important that we recognize as it was the Democrats in the South who passed the Jim Crow laws. What did the Jim Crow laws do? They did two primary things. Anyway, the two things: one is they imposed poll taxes to make it expensive to vote.

Leahy: Right.

Carmichael: And the other is they set up certain standards and certain procedures, things that you had to pass in order to have the right to vote. And those were disproportionate. They truly did subdue the Black vote.

Leahy: Absolutely.

Carmichael: Absolutely did that. Now, let’s look at Illinois, and let’s look at Indiana. Of the people in Illinois, less than have a firearm. In Indiana 20 percent have firearms. And in Indiana, the cost of applying for a firearm is $12. In Illinois, it’s $450. Democrats control Illinois. Are Democrats trying to keep low-income people from owning a firearm?

Leahy: From legally owning.

Carmichael: From legally owning. Great point. The violence in Illinois is terrible. The violence in Chicago is terrible. The people committing the violence, do not own legal guns.

Leahy: And there are usually illegal guns.

Carmichael: These are mostly illegal guns. And so in Illinois, it is the Democrats who are trying to have a poll tax as it were on the right on the right of self-protection. Now in Illinois, you have to have 16 hours of training. If you live in the city of Chicago, you have to drive a long long way away to get training. But you have to have 16 hours. And that’s also expensive because you have to pay for the training.

Leahy: Pay for the training.

Carmichael: But that means if you tried to do it in two full days, eight hours a day, you’d have to drive someplace and stay overnight. So what they’re doing is they’re making it as difficult as possible in Illinois for a low-income Black person in Chicago to own a gun.

Leahy: Legally.

Carmichael: Legally. That is the definition. What the Democrats are doing in Illinois to keep black people from protecting themselves is the essence of Jim Crow.

Leahy: It’s a Second Amendment suppression.

Carmichael: It is Second Amendment suppression. No question about that. But it is the tactics. It is the tactics that they’re using. They’re making it expensive, and they’re making it almost like you have to jump through all kinds of hoops. And the results are that Black people, especially in Chicago, the honest Black people, which is the vast majority they can’t afford the time or the money to protect themselves. And the police and the mayor simply aren’t able to do it. For whatever reason, they aren’t doing it. And so this is resulting in murder. This is resulting in death. And it’s all Jim Crow gun laws. Jim Crow Gun laws.

Leahy: You make a very fine point there, Crom.

Listen to the full second hour here:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.