OXON HILL, Md.—Wokeness is harming education and making America less competitive on the world stage, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., says.
“I want them to have the opportunity that we had,” Tuberville, a retired college football coach, said Thursday during a forum at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside the nation’s capital.
During the CPAC forum, Tuberville went on to talk about the push in schools for critical race theory; the influence of The New York Times’ 1619 Project contending that the United States was founded on slavery; and transgender athletes’ threat to girls and women’s sports.
“Today, they are being indoctrinated with all this woke—transgender athletes, CRT, 1619,” Tuberville said. “We don’t teach reading, writing, and arithmetic anymore. Half the kids in this country, when they graduate, can’t read their diploma. If you can’t read in the United States, if you are not taught to read, you can imagine what other countries are doing.”
Tuberville introduced legislation earlier this week to protect women’s sports from having men compete.
Tuberville, who was head football coach at Auburn University from 1999 to 2008, was joined on the forum’s panel by former acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who played football for University of Iowa. The forum was called “Sacking the Woke Playbook.”
“In my state, [Iowa] Gov. Kim Reynolds and the Legislature aggressively pushed a school choice bill,” Whitaker said. “A lot of states have picked up on the movement. Just as I’ve said on crime, every child deserves a safe front yard; I also think every child deserves a quality education.”
Although most of the discussion was on education, Tuberville said challenges from the woke Left loom much larger.
“Folks, we are in trouble,” the Alabama senator said. “Our country is in trouble, and it starts with education. Until we start recognizing what the Left is doing, trying to change the family, trying to change the things that define our own moral values, we’ve got no chance.”
CPAC, the largest annual national gathering of conservative activists, runs through Saturday at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, just outside Washington in the National Harbor development of Oxon Hill, Maryland.
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