A whistleblower who works for the toy manufacturer Hasbro said during a recent interview that the company’s “mandatory” critical race theory training teaches employees that even babies harbor racist ideologies.
David Johnson, a packaging engineer contracted by the recruitment firm Harvey Nash to work for Hasbro, first raised the issue during an interview with Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe.
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“I decided to come to Project Veritas because I oppose the indoctrination of children that they want to push, and I felt that more people needed to know about it,” the contractor, who is black, explained. “They want to indoctrinate children into racial bias at an early age before they’re really able to understand what race and racism is.”
Johnson claimed during his interview with Project Veritas — as well as during a subsequent appearance on Fox News — that Hasbro has partnered with a group called The Conscious Kid to develop a training to expose employees to the philosophies of critical race theory.
In the training, Kate Ishizuka-Stephens, co-founder of The Conscious Kid, said, “Children as young as two are already using race to reason about people’s behaviors. … By three to six months, babies are beginning to notice and already express preference by race. … By age three, children are already starting to apply stereotypes. … They also may use racist language at this age.”
She reportedly went on to assert that, by four years old, children “are showing a strong and constant pro-white, anti-black bias.”
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Johnson, for his part, said such claims stand in opposition to “Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream,” calling the suggestion that infants and toddlers will espouse racist behaviors “an absurd concept.”
“If the next generation of children is allowed to be indoctrinated, believing that racial segregation is a good thing, I don’t think it will lead our country to anywhere good,” he told O’Keefe. “[R]acism exists. I think we’d be fools to say that there’s no racism in the world. But teaching children to judge others based upon race is not going to make a world with less racism. It’s going to make a world with more of it.”
The concerned contractor went on to argue critical race theory utilizes “a Marxist lens to look at people as oppressed and oppressors” and “divides people who have ‘whiteness’ as the oppressor and people who lack it as the oppressed, and, no matter what, you are split between those two groups.”
“It’s inherently divisive,” Johnson added, noting he’s primarily concerned that the “end goal for [The] Conscious Kid is to make sure that Hasbro is going to use their lens and that Hasbro is going to push their principles through all levels of their product marketing and packaging.”
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In a statement emailed to Faithwire on Wednesday evening, a representative for Hasbro said the report by Project Veritas “mischaracterizes” the company “and our values.”
“Our mission is to create the world’s best play and entertainment experiences that connect children, fans, and families around the world,” the spokesperson said. “We occasionally invite third-party speakers for optional sessions to discuss viewpoints.”
The statement further indicated the session in which Johnson participated “was not mandatory training” but was instead “an optional webinar attended by a small group of employees.”
“As always,” the representative added, “the views expressed by external speakers are their own and do not reflect the views of the company.”
During a separate interview on Fox News, Johnson told host Sean Hannity that he nevertheless opposes critical race theory trainings because they only serve to further inculcate divisions in the country.
Johnson told Hannity that, when he first learned about the critical race theory meeting, he felt he “should have the foresight to record it just in case,” adding that, once he heard the content of the training, he felt certain he should report it “because parents really need to know” what is happening inside the company.
In the wake of Johnson’s comments, Harvey Nash President Jason Pyle reportedly informed the contractor his access “has been suspended for the moment while the company investigates some sort of issue of breach confidentiality.”
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This story has been updated.