Viewers of Sinclair Broadcast Group television stations are being barraged with lies about the supposed teaching of critical race theory in schools. Sinclair stations have aired segment after segment making false claims and failing to honestly identify the anti-critical-race-theory figures in interviews, Media Matters reports.

A key thing to remember anytime you read about Sinclair is that this is not Fox News—it’s not a known right-wing broadcaster that people intentionally tune in to. Sinclair’s list of TV stations includes 40 ABC, 31 CBS, and 25 NBC stations, among many other, lesser-known, brands. People who think they’re just turning on the local network affiliate can be getting Sinclair’s far-right messaging as if it was just … their local, trustworthy news. And Sinclair has spent months telling its viewers that critical race theory is coming for their kids.

An Aug. 18 Sinclair town hall on critical race theory was, thankfully, streamed on some stations’ websites rather than being shown on television. But, Media Matters shows, it was representative of Sinclair’s approach. Two legitimate scholars of race were pitted against a longtime Republican operative and Christopher Rufo, the think tank boy wonder who laid out the plan on critical race theory back in March.

“We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” Rufo tweeted. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

In other words, Rufo’s goal is very much not about what critical race theory actually is—an academic theory taught mostly in specialized graduate classes, with some insights that have been more broadly influential—but about what he can make the public believe it is. And what Rufo wanted the viewers of Sinclair’s town hall to believe was that critical race theory is “not about teaching history, it’s about indoctrinating kids in a divisive, reductive, pseudoscientific ideology that seeks to tell children as young as 4 and 5 years old that they are either inherently racist and oppressive or inherently suppressed and oppressed.”

That’s a set of lies about what critical race theory says and it’s an outrageous lie about the age of children being taught CRT. (Mind you, children as young as 4 and 5 years old should be taught that racism exists. Once kids are learning history, they should be learning that racism is a major part of U.S. history—that when they learn about slavery and the Civil War and Jim Crow, they’re learning about how racism shaped this nation.)

But Sinclair’s campaign of lies goes beyond a streamed town hall. Media Matters documents how Sinclair has interviewed parents claiming that their kids were thrown out of private school because the parents questioned the school’s curriculum on race and racism, but failed to mention that the school says the kids weren’t allowed back for this school year because the parents made school staff feel “threatened.” Why would school staff feel threatened? Maybe because the parents went on a far-right podcast where the hosts said they wanted to “rain down terror” on the school staff and that “we’re all about bringing pain to people that deserve it.”

In another case of blatant misrepresentation, the Colorado “dad” who showed up on a Sinclair weekday morning news show “is a longtime conservative pundit and activist in Colorado who runs his own political organization called the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives. He has also written extensively for right-wing websites, such as American Thinker, The Daily Caller, and Townhall. Wilburn and other people affiliated with his organization appear to be regular speakers at Republican Party organizations,” Media Matters reports. When was the last time you saw a left-wing activist and writer show up in a high-profile media interview as just a “dad” or a “mom” concerned for their kids’ education?

It goes on. Sinclair has aired interview after interview with Republican politicians working to redefine “critical race theory” as “anything about race I don’t like,” which basically means any acknowledgement that racism exists in anyone short of a KKK grand dragon. They just have to make it sound scary with the long, jargony-sounding name because the reality is that a large majority of people in the U.S. do think kids should learn about slavery and racism, and strong majorities of people think schools aren’t teaching enough about Asian Americans, Latinos/Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, or African Americans.

Since it doesn’t work for Republicans to just come out and admit that they want to ban any education about race or racism, “critical race theory” and “1619 Project” have become their dog whistle words.

For the record, critical race theory is an intellectual movement that holds, broadly speaking (and with many strains of thought within it), that, as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic explain in the introduction to Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, racism is “the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country”; that “large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it”; that race itself is socially constructed; that “the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market”; that “no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity” (an idea often discussed as intersectionality); and that people of color know things about their own experiences that white people should listen to.

Or, as Marc Lamont Hill explained it as he stuffed an anti-CRT Black Republican in a locker, rhetorically speaking, “It is a theory that makes an attempt to understand the law through the lens of race and it’s founded on some fundamental presumptions. One is the intractability of race and racism, meaning it’s an intractable problem in America and that we have to use the lens of race to make sense of things. It also is based on the use of counterstories, listening to the, as Derrick Bell, the critical race scholar, said, the voices at the bottom of the well, to make sense of the world and to make sense of the law. These are two big theories, two big pillars of it.”

Of course kids as young as four and five are not being taught about the social construction of race and how groups are differently racialized at different times. The teacher who could get those ideas through to kids that young would be the greatest living communicator and could, if she turned her attention from little kids, take over the damn world. But this is not what’s going on. What’s going on is that Republicans are worried President Joe Biden is not a scary enough bad guy to help them win in 2022 and 2024, so they’re lying to get white voters worried that their kids are being oppressed and indoctrinated. And Sinclair Broadcast Group is aggressively bringing that message to people who don’t necessarily understand that when they turned on their local ABC station, they were turning on the equivalent of Fox News or OAN.