Left-wing Salon: Breitbart Began ‘Right-wing’ Pushback Against Critical Race Theory in 2012

Left-wing Salon.com gave credit Tuesday to Breitbart News for launching the “right-wing” pushback against Critical Race Theory, starting in 2012.

The radical theory is now a major focus of national debate, as corporations force employees to renounce “white privilege,” and the New York Times‘ “1619 Project” teaches students that the U.S. was founded on racism.

Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart first drew attention to Critical Race Theory shortly before his death in 2012.

As Salon noted:

Right-wing outrage over critical race theory spans as far back as 2012, in fact, when Breitbart unleashed a fury over former President Barack Obama hugging Harvard professor and critical race theorist Derrick Bell. During an acrimonious interview with CNN host Soledad O’Brien, then Breitbart’s Editor-In-Chief, Joel Pollak, exclaimed that “Derrick Bell is the Jeremiah Wright of academia. He passed away last year, but during his lifetime, he developed a theory called critical race theory, which holds that the civil rights movement was a sham and that white supremacy is the order and it must be overthrown.”

“Critical race theory is all about white supremacy,” Pollack [sic] added. “Critical race theory holds that civil rights laws are ineffective, that racial equality is impossible, because the legal and Constitutional [system] in America is white supremacist.”

Currently, most scholars define critical race theory as the academic practice of “recognizing race as a social construct embedded in many American institutions throughout history, with implications you can see today,” according to KSDK.

The full video of the exchange on CNN follows:

Last week, as Breitbart News reported, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) led 37 Senators in a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, urging him not to use U.S. taxpayer funds in grants to programs using the “1619 Project,” which claimed falsely that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.