Time Magazine’s Phony ‘Conservative Case Against Banning Critical Race Theory’

Time has an article entitled “The Conservative Case Against Banning Critical Race Theory.” Given the conventions of opinion journalism, the first thing a reader would expect from an article with such a title in a national news magazine is that the author would be a well-known conservative, hence, a person one would trust to make a “conservative case” against a position advanced by many fellow conservatives. The reader is told only that the author is University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq. Fine, you might think; Chicago is a place with a fairly open tradition of conservative scholarship. Maybe, if you are not familiar with Professor Huq, you might assume that he is an academic with some conservative credentials and a record of conservative scholarship.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If you actually take the time to look him up, Professor Huq has a fine resume full of impressive credentials and many publications, but one that is full of glaring indications of being . . . not a conservative:

• Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court of the United States, Law Clerk, July 2003-July 2004
• Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law, Director, Liberty and National Security Project, November 2005-February 2009; Associate Counsel, Democracy Program, November 2004-November 2005
• Muslim Advocates and ACLU of Illinois, Cooperating Counsel, 2012-present
• Honorable Robert D. Sack, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Law Clerk, September 2001-September 2002
• Staff, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 1999

Ginsburg clerks who work with the ACLU are typically not the first people one turns to for the temperature of conservatism. His affiliation with the Brennan Center, an arch-left-wing outlet, included publication of a 2021 report “On the Origins of Republican Violence” talking about “the Machiavellian roots of the Second Amendment” and how “the events of January 6 allowed [an NRA] narrative of distrust to operate as a backdrop for the performance of citizenship in and through arms.” He has published multiple pieces in Vox, including comparing Chief Justice Roberts’s Trump travel ban opinion to the Japanese internment case. You get the idea.

Unsurprisingly, the piece is mostly a farrago of concern trolling, potshots, and acceptance of progressive premises about CRT. For example, he complains about how conservatives define CRT (a staple of progressive complaints) and goes on about how “at the core of the case against CRT is instead the simple idea that people shouldn’t be made to feel uncomfortable about their advantages or others’ disadvantages” and that the anti-CRT case demands “[t]hat speech can and should be curtailed because it makes some people feel uncomfortable or threatened” — a deliberate mischaracterization of what the statutes actually say — and adds, “Conservatives disparage arguments made by ‘snowflake’ college students. But the case against CRT is made of the same stuff.” Never mind that “free speech is free even if it offends you” was a liberal argument until the day before yesterday in our culture. No effort whatsoever is made to grapple with the actual conservative arguments against the use of schools to indoctrinate children or against the collective, anti-individual, racialist nature of CRT ideology. Professor Huq concludes, “if there is a lesson to be learned from the war on CRT, it has nothing to do with how to talk about race—and everything with how the Trumpian revolution continues to devour the principles of American conservatism.”

If Time wants to publish a progressive academic reciting the usual progressive case against anti-CRT bills, it is certainly free to do so. But it is affirmatively deceptive to its readers to bill this as a “conservative case” when it is not written by a conservative and does not take conservative premises or arguments as legitimate. Worse, it fails to tell the reader that this is not a conservative writer. One would think that minimal standards of journalistic honesty would demand that.