(LifeSiteNews) — Vice President Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her Democrat running mate for the White House continues to prompt a closer look at Walz’s record as governor, which most recently has drawn attention to one of his most radical appointees, Macalester College associate professor of urban and multicultural education Brian Lozenski.
As detailed at National Review by Stanley Kurtz, Walz’s administration tapped Lozenski to draft an implementation framework for the state’s “ethnic studies” standards, despite – or perhaps because of – his vocal radicalism for critical race theory (CRT), the doctrine that race is a social construct invented to “oppress and exploit people of colour” and that “racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites.”
Lozenski, founding organizer of the group Education for Liberation Minnesota, elaborated on his worldview in a 2022 Zoom video, in which he spoke approvingly about CRT, ending standardized testing, removing police from schools, “decoloniz[ing]” curriculum, and “black nationalism.”
“The first tenet of critical race theory is that the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with, it must be overthrown,” he said, calling for its advocates to own the fact that CRT is “insurgent” and that “it is anti-state. You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. Okay, it is an anti-state theory that says, the United States needs to be deconstructed, period.”
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Notably, Lozenski’s ethnic studies framework draft was supposed to have been released last month, in time for the public comment period, but has not. “Increasingly, it appears that, contrary to earlier promises, there will be no public release or public comment period before the October 31 statutory deadline to submit a finalized ethnic-studies implementation framework,” Kurtz writes. “There is good reason to believe that the implementation framework is being withheld from the public to prevent it from becoming an issue in the presidential election.”
Once unleashed on Minnesota schools, critics fear the still-secret framework could represent a turn even further to the left than the state’s already radical education policies, which require high-school students to “develop an analysis” of so-called “racial capitalism,” and “[a]pply methodologies of fugitivity to map-making, economics and education,” which Lozenski “defines as breaking the law or violating codes of legitimacy in pursuit of the kind of education that will dismantle an unjust system,” according to Kurtz, who quotes Lorezenski’s own example of teachers promoting CRT even when prohibited by state laws.
Harris and Walz are running on a comprehensively far-left agenda, and should they win the November election, their administration is likely to be staffed and/or advised in part by the individuals they have relied on for policy decisions in their current roles, such as Lozenski.
Harris currently leads her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, by 2% in RealClearPolitics’ popular vote polling average and by 3.5% to 3.9% according to RaceToTheWH (depending on whether former independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is counted), but margins remain extremely close in the swing states that will decide the Electoral College outcome.