Kelly Schools Maher Why She Pulled Her Children From NY Schools Over Race Curriculum

Journalist and podcast host Megyn Kelly joins Bill to discuss whether progressives' overwhelming focus on race in the social justice movement will have the opposite effect of the one they intend.Show more

BILL MAHER: I want to talk to you about the schools because I read you took your kids out of the school in New York, and I have been hearing anecdotally the same very much the thing from many parents. Parents confide in me I guess because I don’t have kids, it usually starts with “you’re so lucky you don’t have kids.” Then I hear about their problems, just tells why you did this?

MEGYN KELLY: We loved our schools. We were in the New York City private school system our boys went to an all-boys school and our daughter went to an all-girls school. Loved our teachers, loved the students, the faculty, and the parents. And they were definitely leftist we are more center right, but that is fine. My family is all Democrats it wasn’t that I was bothered by the fact that they leaned left but then they went hard left. Then they started to take a really hard turn toward social justice stuff. At our boys school in particular, when our son was in the third grade they unleashed a three week experimental trans-education program on these eight and nine year old boys. It wasn’t about support, we felt it was more about trying to convince them like “come on over.” And the boys started to get confused, and they had to implement this system were they raised they hand if they were really confused put up a one.

MAHER: How old were they now?

KELLY: They were eight and nine at the time and we objected and so did a lot of other parents to the point where the school had to apologized which they rarely did. Then our kindergartener was told to write a letter to the Cleveland Indians objecting to their mascot. Now he is six, can he learn how to spell Cleveland before we activate him. He lives in New York City, we got buses, we got subways, we got crime, he got things to worry about other than social activism. And if he was going be activated, Doug or I should do it, not a kindergarten teacher that didn’t run it by us.

MAHER: This is what I have heard from parents, and these are all liberal by the way, that say “My kids are not ready to be told they’re white supremacists.” I’m not ready to be told that.

KELLY: On this issue, we are not left or right, black or white, this is a question of reason and unreason.

MAHER: You talked about this letter, that the school put out. “There’s a killer cop sitting at every school where white children learn. White children are left unchecked and unbothered in their homes…I’m tired of white people reveling in their state-sanctioned depravity and snuffing out black life with no consequences…Go reform white kids.” You know it bothers me so much that I have to be on this side of this issue because I have always been a civil rights advocated and don’t make me Tucker Carlson. You’re the f*cking nuts — this is insane. “As black bodies drop like flies around us by violent white hands … .” There is racist problems in this country, but this is hyperbole. And this is making people crazy. This is not the way we get to the Promised Land.

KELLY: It’s divisive, it’s racist, and it’s having exactly the opposite effect of the one they intend. It is not all of the black people in our school or other schools are in favor of this kind of talk. My friend Coleman Hughes, who is 24, he is a liberal, a Biden voter, he has been speaking out about this as a black man saying “how dare you presume to know how I feel?” It’s pejorative to him like “the whites are the one who understand, who are arrogant and in control and work hard,” these are all the terms that are associated with white supremacy. The white people feel bad because they are told they are white supremacist because of a pigmentation over which they have no control. It wasn’t just our school in New York, there was no place to move them in New York. There was a public school in the upper east side of Manhattan that just got in the news because they gave out eight categories where all white people fall. On one end is a white supremacist, and on the other white abolitionist. Everybody gets divided into ‘oppressed’ or ‘oppressor’ on racial identity, on sexual identity. Cupertino, California did the same thing they took eight and nine years old and made them deconstruct their racial and sexual identity to see if they are oppressor or or the oppressed, eight-year-olds. I mean, this is really damaging, and as you get older, what the studies show is these sort of implicit biased education efforts bring out racism. So if somebody’s having racist thoughts in the back of their head, it brings it to the frontal lobe, and more people act on their latent racism than they otherwise would have.