Chris Rufo fact checks Newsweek who falsely ‘fact checked’ his story on racist indoctrination in public schools

"Remember: most fact-checkers are semi-literate partisan hacks. Treat them accordingly," Rufo commented on the reverse takedown Monday.

Newsweek's Feb. 26 review—entitled "Fact Check: Are Buffalo Schools Teaching Students That All Whites Perpetuate Racism?"—corrected the magazine's final decision from "half true" three days later on March 1.

Rufo had reported in the City Journal last week that Buffalo Public Schools in Erie County, New York, claims that "all white people" perpetuate systemic racism and forces kindergarteners to watch video propaganda of dead black children warning the elementary school students from beyond the grave about "racist police and state-sanctioned violence." The same grade-level is asked to compare their skin color with an arrangement of crayons. Fifth-grade students are taught that America has created this "school-to-grave pipeline" for black children and that by adulthood "one million Black people are locked in cages."

Rufo demonstrated his findings through several obtained whistleblower documents sent from within Buffalo Public Schools, a district that serves approximately 34,000 students in the state of New York's second-largest city.

The district's diversity czar Fatima Morrell, architect of the district's pedagogical revolution, had developed new anti-racism curriculum and told teachers that instructors must become "woke" and achieve "critical consciousness," a pedagogical concept created by Marxist theoretician Paolo Freire that trains students to identify and subvert their oppressors.

The associate superintendent's academic year initiative is derived from the national organization Black Lives Matter at School, an educator-driven movement advocating for racial justice in education.

Newsweek went on to generalize the guiding principles "aimed at expanding community understanding of racial justice," ending "zero-tolerance discipline," encouraging districts to hire more black teachers, and redirecting administration funds spent on police in schools to counselors for students.

Morrell told WKBW Buffalo that the materials are meant to be used as "fodder for discussion," not hard and fast facts, Newsweek relayed. She called the claims decontextualization pulled out to be "sensational," Newsweek defended.

"It's not our job to change someone's research. What we do is we give our students the research base, and we are teaching our students to critically think and to question all things that they learn in school," Morrell said following the backlash.

However, Rufo reported that Morrell had declared in her delivered presentation to faculty that America "is built on racism," all Americans are guilty of "implicit racial bias," and that "America's sickness" leads some whites to believe that black people are "not human," which makes it "easier to shoot [them] in the back seven times, if you feel like it." She referred to the shooting of 29-year-old Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which led to an onslaught of violence and civil unrest.

Fox News had reported on the district's mandatory Black Lives Matter curriculum, which required schools to commit to "dismantling cisgender privilege," creating "queer-affirming network[s]," and accelerating "the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics," according to lesson plans obtained by Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Rufo discovered that middle school students are taught that "all white people" play roles in "perpetuating systemic racism" and that "white elites work to perpetuate racism through politics, law, education, and the media."

Whites derive their wealth from slavery and are "unfairly rich," the children learn. Thus, American society was designed for the "impoverishment of people of color and enrichment of white people" and the nation's social system has "racist economic inequality built into its foundation."

Newsweek first ruled that while it's true that middle school students are taught that it's "important to recognize the powerful role played by White elites in maintaining this system," educators at Buffalo Public Schools are "not organizing lesson plans around that one phrase, which is for middle school students only, nor are they pushing any of the research as hard and fast facts."

The "half true" rating was later amended as updated information "has been added on Buffalo high schools." According to what Rufo revealed, the district's teenagers must begin "confronting whiteness in [their] classrooms," with teachers asking white students to atone for their "white privilege" and to "use their voices" to aid the anti-racism cause, he showed.

Students also learn the putative difference between white European and traditional African systems of justice. According to the lesson plans, whites have created this "retributive," "merit-based" justice system, which relies on harsh punishment and creates inequalities. Traditional Africans, allegedly, relied on this "restorative, "needs-based" justice system focused on healing, giving to each according to needs, and prioritizing "collective value" over individual rights.

After Morrell's presentation, one teacher reaffirmed this political imperative, declaring that students must become anti-racist activists and that public school teachers should begin preparing children as young as at four-years-old.

One veteran teacher, who requested anonymity, told Rufo that the new anti-racism program pushes "radical politics" into the classroom and has devolved into "scoldings, guilt-trips, and demands to demean oneself" to make another feel "empowered." Rufo expressed that educators are "afraid to speak out." Teachers must submit to these "manipulative mind games" and express support for Morrell's left-wing politics or risk professional retaliation.

Rufo revealed in the "Failure Factory" piece how disastrous Buffalo Public Schools is: by fifth grade, only 18 percent of students are proficient in math and 20 percent are proficient in English; one-third of all students fail to graduate from high school. The numbers are even worse for African Americans, who constitute 45 percent of the student population. And according to Rufo's inside source, the district's poor response to the pandemic has accelerated racial inequalities with virtual attendance rates as low as 30 percent in some classroom settings.