Xi Van Fleet, a Virginia mom, who fled from Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, scrutinized a Virginia school board over its continued support of Critical Race Theory.
Van Fleet was held to a one-minute speech where she chastized the Loudoun County School Board, citing references from her childhood in the Mao led China's Cultural Revolution that pitted people of different classes against each other, demolishing huge swaths of cultural artifacts in the process, and leaving anywhere between 500,000 to 20 million people dead from 1966 to 1976.
"I've been very alarmed by what's going on in our schools," Van Fleet said, according to Fox News. "You are now teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history."
Critical race theory is defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica as the concept in which race is a socially constructed category ingrained in American law intended to maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites. It holds the U.S. society is inherently or systemically racist.
She drew parallels between CRT and China's Cultural Revolution. Van Fleet's own son graduated from Loudoun High School in 2015.
The Cultural Revolution started when Van Fleet was six years old. It immediately pitted students and teachers against one another by hanging "Big Posters" in the hallways and cafeterias of her school where openly and publicly, students could write slander about anyone deemed ideologically impure.
"One of the teachers was considered bourgeoisie because she liked to wear pretty clothes. So the students attacked her and spit on her. She was covered with spit… and pretty soon it became violence," Van Fleet said.
"Everything that was considered 'old,' feudalist, a vase, Buddhas, everything was taken out and smashed."
But it did not stop there. Most pernicious of all was when members of Mao's party started to convict people of thought crimes.
"We were asked to report if we hear anything about someone saying anything showing that there's a lack of complete loyalty to Mao."
"The communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people," she added. "The only difference is they used class instead of race."
In recent months, the Loudoun County school board has doubled down on its efforts to promote CRT.
To Van Fleet's example, a group of Loudoun County parents and teachers were reported to be intimidating conservative parents who raised questions about the proposals. Members of the "Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County" allegedly started a list of conservative parents to track, hack, and "dox" them or scare them into self-censorship, according to David Gordon, director of the Virginia Project, a Republican PAC.
"I just want Americans to know that their privilege is to be here living in America, that is just the biggest privilege," Van Fleet said in a later phone interview. "I do not think a lot of people understand. They are thinking they are doing the right thing, 'be against racism' sounds really good. But they are basically breaking the system that is against racism."
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