As recently as 2019, the right rarely spoke of critical race theory. A furor erupted in the Southern Baptist Convention in June that year, when conservatives fiercely opposed its incorporation into church teachings. A year later, Fox News ramped up its use of the term as it covered the mass uprisings in June 2020 that followed the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Before then, mentions of the term were scant: Media Cloud, a searchable database of digitized U.S. news sources, sh