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Christopher Rufo: Critical Race Theory ‘S**t-Stirrer’/DeSantis’ Chief Anti-Wokester [1]
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Date: 2023-08-21
Christopher Rufo has written a book e-i e-i-o
And in this book he embraces America’s culture wars e-i-e-i-o
Herbert Marcuse here/Angela Davis there/Cultural Marxists everywhere
Christopher Rufo has written a book e-i-e-i-o
From almost out of nowhere on the conservative politi-scape, comes Christopher Rufo, who has traversed a winding path to become one of the most prominent right-wing influencers and culture war initiators in the country. Over the past few years Rufo has single-handed made the term critical race theory, into an all-purpose salient culture war catchphrase.
Writing in The New York Times last year, Trip Gabriel pointed out that “Rufo appears on Fox News so often that he converted a room in his Pacific Northwest house to a television studio, complete with professional lighting, an uplink to Fox in New York and an ‘On Air’ light in the hall so his wife and two children don’t barge in during broadcasts.”
“Rufo has been quite open about his strategy of trying to get people to associate everything they don’t like with the term ‘critical race theory,’ saying ‘[w]e will eventually turn [critical race theory] toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” Matt McManus and Nathan J. Robinson write recently in Current Affairs. “The goal is to have the public read something ‘crazy’ in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”
According to his bio posted at The Manhattan Institute, Rufo “is senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute. He is also a contributing editor of City Journal, where his writing explores a range of issues, including critical race theory, gender ideology, homelessness, addiction, crime, and the decline of American cities.”
Rufo has written a new book called America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. In his take on the book in a piece called “What Happens When a Carnival Barker Writes Intellectual History,” Atlantic Magazine’s Graeme Wood calls Rufo a “shit-stirrer—a particular type of troublemaker whose game is to find something stinky, then waft its fumes toward the noses of those mostly likely to be outraged by it.”
The book has received heaps of praise from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Governor Ron DeSantis, Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, and Glenn Greenwald.
As Len Gutkin reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Rufo, the architect of the conservative legislative campaign against perceived left-wing indoctrination in schools and colleges across the country and a member of the Board of Trustees of Florida’s revamped New College, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s experiment in the right-wing usurpation of higher education, has written a book, [which] is an ungainly blend of intellectual history and right-wing political propaganda.”
According to The New York Times’ Trip Gabriel, “Rufo appeared with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at the signing of a bill known as the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which bars teaching in workplaces and schools that anyone is inherently biased or privileged because of race or sex.” He also “consulted on the bill, warned Disney that an in-house program it had run that urged discussion of systemic racism was ‘now illegal in the state of Florida.’”
Rufo’s advocacy for anti-LGBTQ laws, demonizing transgender people, and pushing so-called parental rights, has resulted in chaos at school board meetings across the country. “This is the stock-in-trade of Rufo’s brand of activism — creating these very negative brands and then associating things that might have much more popular support with those brands to put people on the defensive,” Dr. Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, said. “That’s the through line you see between the C.R.T. stuff and the current ‘groomer’ effort.”
Charlie Sykes, a founder of The Bulwark, a political site for anti-Trump conservatives, said Rufo’s association with the Manhattan Institute provided “intellectual cover” for flawed and inflammatory work.“It gives him this veneer of being a conservative scholar,” Sykes said. “He basically says, ‘Anything you don’t like about race becomes C.R.T.’ Now, all of your anxieties about sexuality or gender become grooming.”
Rufo, a former documentary filmmaker, recently joined host Ryan Grim on the Deconstructed podcast for an interesting and totally civil conversation. Among other things, Rufo told Grim about his family and early influences:
I think that I was on the hard left growing up in my teenage years. I come from a long family of Italian communists, so my aunts and uncles in Italy are still card-carrying unreconstructed communists to this day.
Some of my formative political memories are visiting my family and then seeing my aunt — my favorite aunt, actually still my favorite aunt — her complete collection of the works of Lenin. Totally unironically, I mean really, truly, the Lenin, and they gifted me the Che Guevara flags as a kid.
So that was kind of my formative political thinking.”
Rufo told Grim that while he protested the Iraq War, he grew disillusioned with what he termed the inauthenticity of the left. According to Rufo, “The main narrative arc of the book, it tells the story of the so-called ‘long march through the institutions.’”
So, this was the strategy adopted by the radical left theorists and activists that moved from the period of excitement in the late 1960s to a period of disillusionment in the early 1970s, and they concluded that their violent Marxist-Leninist revolution against the state had failed. It had been disrupted by Nixon, by J. Edgar Hoover. It had turned public opinion against them. Even The New York Times op ed page had really started just violently attacking or, rather, strenuously attacking the radical left at the time.
And so, they said the way forward for the left is to burrow within the established institutions, to bring our ideology in from the outside, and then slowly start to conquer these institutions from within, and bring our ideas, bring our theories, bring our values and principles into them. And so, I trace the origins; the book begins in 1968, to the conclusion, which is the summer of 2020.
The story is really how these fringe and radical ideas of the left wing at the time, with Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and then, a little bit later Derrick Bell. [They] were outsider ideas that then became the conventional wisdom of all of America’s cultural institutions.
(For a Counter Points interview with Rufo, where he talks about embracing “culture wars,” and discusses many issues related to his book, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OXKTkt4jk&t=830s, and, for more of Grim’s interview, who called Rufo’s book “well-written, well-researched, [and a] well-crafted book,” see
https://theintercept.com/2023/07/28/deconstructed-chris-rufo-culture-war/).
Rufo proposes an ambitious counteroffensive in the war of ideas. “The most urgent task for the enemies of the critical theories,” he writes, “is to expose the nature of the ideology, how it operates within the institutions,” adding that “the opposition must ruthlessly identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of the revolution, then construct its own logic for overcoming it.”
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/21/2188613/-Christopher-Rufo-Critical-Race-Theory-S-t-Stirrer-DeSantis-Chief-Anti-Wokester
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