President Donald Trump struck a blow against the Black Lives Matter and Antifa movements this summer when he directed the federal government to end all funding of training that involved “critical race theory” (CRT) – the radical philosophy contending that America is systemically racist.

In an interview with the Federal News Network (FNN), Project 21 Co-Chairman Horace Cooper said it was “amazing” and an “outrage” that taxpayer dollars had been allowed to perpetuate the notion that people are “more likely to be motivated by their race and their gender, than by the specific and individual experiences that they bring to bear.”

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought recently told The Epoch Times that the order “does not mean that this president is opposed to all diversity training.” What it does stop is teaching that “this country is fundamentally flawed” and that “all white people are systemically flawed and racist.”

Vought called CRT the “academic framework” for the promotion of this radical ideology. And, regarding this summer’s riots:

[C]ritical race theory espouses that when the system is flawed, it needs to be pulled down. When your institutions are flawed, they need to be pulled down. So why not light your cities and towns on fire, if there’s that kind of systemic problem?

Horace, in his FNN interview, compared CRT to the former South African government:

This type of mindset is a lot more akin to what was promoted during South African apartheid as a way of justifying to their population why certain groups were disfavored, and why other groups needed to be favored. This again, it’s an outrage, that this has been allowed to go forward, and no one had been paying attention to it.

Until now.

Project 21 applauded President Trump’s order when it was announced. In a subsequent Newsmax interview, Project 21 member Vince Ellison called it “ridiculous” and “anathema to freedom.”

Horace told FNN that he questioned its need:

In the 21st century, our federal workforce, our federal employment system or the federal government, is probably the most diverse employer in America. And the idea, therefore, that this particular employer, which sets remarkable accomplishments in terms of the number of minorities and number of women who are able to serve, that this employer is actually in need of instruction on it does raise an important question.

But it’s not that there is no value to diversity, there’s no value to racial tolerance training – there just is no value to either of those when they masquerade as saying that simply, we can just break it all down as if you’re white, and if you’re a male, you are the problem. Just imagine if we had a federal government training program that said, if you’re black, and if you’re female, you’re a problem? Everyone would immediately understand that that would not be appropriate.

And yet this program masquerades as promoting tolerance, masquerades as promoting diversity, when actually what it does is the very kind of thing that happened at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States of America. And we refer to it as Jim Crow policies that singled people out on the basis of their race as a way of deciding who would be rewarded and who would be penalized.

When asked about the existence of discrimination, and how it may be remedied without critical race theory training, Horace explained:

We have all too often made it possible for people to assume that only one group of Americans have setbacks, only one group of Americans have struggles, only one group of Americans actually ever experienced unfairness. All the other non-groups in that category, their lives are amazing and wonderful, and they never have setbacks.

Well, that’s false. And that’s why we ought to be focusing on individuals.

Circling back to his assertion that critical race theory is essentially fighting fire with fire, Horace added:

The idea of it being promoted as being useful and valuable does not change the fact that singling out people on the basis of physical characteristics that they have no control over is, in fact, an evil idea, and is always an evil idea.

To read the full transcript of Horace’s FNN interview, and to hear the interview in its entirety, click here.

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