This is no accident or misunderstanding that can be remedied with more words or more logic or a facile commitment to “speech.” We should call it what it is: a cultivated plan of ideological capture and control. The attacks on CRT are not about misapplications of its framework or bad thinking at the margins. (There is little evidence that “CRT” is enjoying the kind of widespread adoption in education or training programs that various critics now claim.) The stakes are much larger. Critical race theory in practice—the dynamic study of systems, institutions, state power, and race—is what Republican-led state legislatures are attempting to denigrate, if not ban outright. Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who is often credited as a prime instigator of this latest war on words, made this point clearly in a pair of tweets from March 2021: “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. . . . The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” Let’s believe him, and in doing that believe that the relative obscurity of the term critical race theory was the point—if no one has ever heard of it, you can say that it is anything and make its obscurity seem purposeful, sneaky. “Theory” (another bugbear of the Right) put to good use becomes underhanded indoctrination, a stealth attack on an unsuspecting public. Panic and outrage provide good cover for ideological warfare of your own.