Condi Rice Schools ’Em

Condi Rice Schools ’Em

Appearing on “The View,” the former secretary of state thoroughly outclassed her progressive hosts.

When the conversation came to the Virginia governor’s race, which pits former Democrat governor and Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe against Republican underdog Glenn Youngkin, Goldberg brought up CRT — the issue that has roiled the state, awakened its parents, and tightened up a governor’s race in a state that Joe Biden carried by 10 points. Behar went first, throwing her weight behind the sanctity of “the curriculum” and essentially telling parents that they need to shut up “or they’re gonna have to home-school their kids.”

“Well, they’re actually home-schooling them in increasing numbers,” Rice replied, “and I think that’s a signal.”

Progressives love to invoke “moral authority” whenever it suits them, but here, with Rice, they were playing a dead hand. “I grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama,” she continued. “I couldn’t go to a movie theater or to a restaurant with my parents. I went to segregated schools until we moved to Denver. My parents never thought I was going to grow up in a world without prejudice but they also told me, ‘That’s somebody else’s problem, not yours. You’re going to overcome it, and you are going to be anything you want to be.’ And that’s the message that I think we ought to be sending to kids.”

From that foundation, Rice hit CRT head-on: “One of the worries that I have about the way we’re talking about race is that it either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past — I don’t think that’s very productive — or black people have to feel disempowered by race. I would like black kids to be completely empowered to know that they are beautiful in their blackness, but in order to do that I don’t have to make white kids feel bad for being white. … We teach the good and we teach the bad of history, but what we don’t do is make seven- and 10-year-olds feel that they are somehow bad people because of the color of their skin. We’ve been through that, and we don’t need to do that again.”

What a masterful way of putting it: In a civilized country, we don’t guilt-trip one race of children because of the color of their skin.

The mirthless Behar, whose career highlights include co-starring in an off-Broadway performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” could only respond with a weird non sequitur about the Third Reich: “You know, in Germany, they teach the Holocaust to every student. I met a German girl one time, and a school trip is a trip to Auschwitz or Dachau. They learn about their history, and there are not two sides to the story.”

Joy Behar met a German girl one time, she’ll have you know.

“Of course, and we teach slavery to every student,” replied Rice. “We all have to learn about our history, but we also have to recognize that we have to live together, and we’re going to live together better if we don’t make each other feel guilty.”