In the summer of 2020, while the United States was immersed in the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd became the catalyst for a national reckoning with persisting systemic racial injustice despite decades of civil rights efforts. While many Americans from all backgrounds became mobilized for justice, others perceived this movement as a threat, and politicians seized this opportunity to capitalize on that fear as a way of gaining political support. The academic concept of critical race theory (CRT) was quickly usurped as the catch-all term for any anti-racist effort, though few politicians or Americans understood what CRT is or what it aims to accomplish. Here, we provide a brief overview of CRT and how it has been intentionally misrepresented for political purposes since 2020. Then, we present a frame analysis of state and federal policy actions taking an anti-"critical race theory" stance in education and illustrate how an evasion pedagogy is being enacted across the United States that is grounded and fueled by extreme ideological thinking.