Christopher Rufo and the Critical Race Theory Moral Panic
Category: News & Politics
Via: john-russell • 3 years ago • 50 commentsBy: Sarah Jones (Intelligencer)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Photo: Christopher F. Rufo/YouTube
Los Angeles public school teacher R. Tolteka Cuauhtin had Googled his discipline, ethnic studies, in March when he discovered he wanted children to honor the Aztec gods of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Should the state of California implement the curriculum that Cuauhtin had helped design, an article in the conservative magazine City Journal reported, students would "chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking 'healing epistemologies' and 'a revolutionary spirit. Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule."
Cuauhtin found himself in crowded company, the latest educator singled out by right-wing activist Christopher Rufo for crimes against public education. Rufo's article was picked up by American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher, who wrote it up in a blog post headlined "The Re-Barbarization of California." The Daily Caller grabbed it. So did Fox News's Laura Ingraham, who interviewed Rufo about his story. He has also captured the attention of liberals. He recently sparred with MSNBC's Joy Ann Reid on her show, visibly sighing as Reid explained the concept of whiteness to him.
Last summer, Rufo seemed to come from nowhere, arriving on the scene after a national uprising against racism to lead the charge against the supposed excesses of anti-racism education, branding it all with a once-obscure academic term: critical race theory. Armed with a prolific Twitter account and the backing of the conservative Establishment, he brandished "scoops" about the widespread infiltration of the theory and eventually caught the attention of the Trump White House. In short order, he had transformed himself from a limited kind of Twitter star to bona fide conservative influencer. The proof lies offline in the new moral panic he helped instigate. Republican operatives, legislators, and commentators, all professing concern for young hearts and minds, claim that children are being taught to hate white people.
A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal, Rufo didn't just bolt onto Twitter from the void. He is the product of a right-wing movement that has formed countless others from the same mold. A documentary filmmaker who graduated from Georgetown University's school of foreign service, Rufo possesses an impeccable conservative pedigree: Fellowships with unclear purviews litter his resume. A former visiting fellow for domestic-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, Rufo was also once a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute alongside James O'Keefe of Project Veritas. Later, he worked for a little-known Christian think tank based in Seattle called the Discovery Institute, where he wrote frequently on the subject of homelessness. Before long, Rufo's interests combined in a new cause. After last summer's protests, he wrote a piece for City Journal comparing the diversity training conducted by the city of Seattle to "cult programming" that was picked up by the New York Post. A week later, he promoted a story about the Treasury Department that has since been debunked by the Washington Post. In Rufo's account, Treasury allegedly subjected workers to a radical diversity training that urged them to "accept their white racial superiority." In reality, the document Rufo cites as proof said no such thing.
Despite the flaws in his reporting, Rufo's profile grew, and by last September, he had appeared on Tucker Carlson's show to urge Trump to issue an executive order "abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government." Three days later, Trump's budget director sent out a memo relaying Trump's desire that federal agencies "cease and desist" funding diversity programs that allegedly trained "government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda," as Yahoo News reported at the time. Trump would later issue an executive order banning programs that, in the words of the budget director's memo, taught government employees that the "United States is an inherently racist or evil country or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil."
Though he refers to himself as an investigative journalist, writing dramatically of whistleblowers and documents, Rufo is often responsible for propagating false or misleading accounts like the Treasury Department story and has arguably helped to incite a nationwide panic over the alleged presence of critical race theory in public schools, the federal government, and the workplace.
"There's no question about it that he's quite influential," said Charlie Sykes, a Rufo critic and former conservative talk-show host who broke with the GOP over Donald Trump. "People were looking around for some way to play this card of racial grievance. They were looking for another cause in the cultural war. And this happened to be it, and he happened to be on it."
Rufo's war often targets noncombatants like Cuauhtin. What Rufo published "are classically racist interpretations about indigenous cultures, fabricated lies about mass human sacrifice, lies that continue on a 500-year-plus trajectory," Cuauhtin said. Rufo got a lot wrong, Cuauhtin told me, posting short fragments of a curriculum that spans more than 900 pages and has multiple authors. The conservative writer didn't reach out to him for his side of the story either, Cuauhtin said.
Rufo didn't answer questions sent to him by email, responding instead that "New York Magazine is trash. If it stopped publication tomorrow, the world would be a better place." Nevertheless, it's possible to glean much about his motivations and worldview from his public writing. Rufo isn't interested in denying that racism exists. No, he says, racism is real — but the actual racists are those who are teaching and spreading critical race theory, and they must be deplored in public . What Rufo and his ilk really object to isn't critical race theory at all but the ugliness of history. When an educator exposes the racism that lurks within this nation, they often find themselves at the mercy of an onslaught from the right.
That's what happened to officials in Oregon's Tigard-Tualatin School District. In an article for City Journal 's spring issue, Rufo said he'd received "a blueprint" from a whistleblower. It purportedly showed that the district's new director of equity and inclusion, Zinnia Un, planned to transform "the pedagogy and curriculum" by adopting the theories of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator whose best-known work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, encourages teachers to work with their students as partners and frames education as an act of liberation and mutual humanization. This is a problem, Rufo said, because Freire was a Marxist. "Following Freire's categorizations, Un writes that the Tigard-Tualatin school district must move from a state of 'reading the world' to the phase of 'denunciation' against the revolution's enemies and, finally, to the state of 'annunciation' of the liberated masses, who will begin 'rewriting the world,'" Rufo wrote.
The school-district document Rufo cites does not say this. It references Freire's work but not, for example, revolution, its enemies, or the liberated masses. A spokesperson for the district said the presentation was used internally for an opt-in professional-development session and school-board discussions about implementing an anti-racist resolution; a revolutionary vanguard has yet to form.
Of an additional staff resource, Rufo wrote that it "assumes" whites are born racist, which he called "textbook cult indoctrination." The truth is a bit tamer: The guide urges white educators to move beyond the "belief that you aren't racist if you don't purposely or consciously act in racist ways," and according to the spokesperson, it has not been used in any formal settings, such as for staff training. Still, this hysterical interpretation appealed to right-wing commentators like Andy Ngo, and Rufo later went on Newsmax to promote the misleading story further.
Professor Cheryl Harris, a leading scholar in the field of critical race theory and the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Professor in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at UCLA Law, began to receive hostile emails so "distorted" that, at first, "I didn't know what they were talking about," she said. The emails came after Rufo referenced her in a March article for Hillsdale College's Imprimis magazine, claiming she had called for "suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines." He later included cherry-picked quotes from her seminal article " Whiteness as Property,"in an online "briefing book" on critical race theory.
"I was getting emails saying, 'Well, why don't you redistribute your property?'" she said. She realized then that it was because of Rufo's pamphlet, where he "explicitly says, I'm calling for the suspension of private property, seizing land and wealth and distributing them along racial lines." She added, "I've never said such a thing." Though the emails didn't contain any direct threats, she described them as "disturbing" and said, "Maybe I'm reading this in a particular way, but I know that when people believe that something like their property is threatened, or their children are threatened, they feel justified in doing whatever they need to do to protect them."
The curriculums and programs targeted by the right have little to do with critical race theory itself, according to Harris. "One of the challenges is there is what critical race theory is, and there's what it's being portrayed to be in the context of this disinformation campaign. So it's difficult to start out a discussion about what it is when what is being projected really bears no resemblance to it and has no intention of bearing any resemblance to it," Haris said. The theory started as a school of thought in law to examine how racial inequality persisted in society despite policies adopted to eliminate it, she explained.
In this context, Rufo's role is clear. He takes critical-race theory as a concept, strips it of all meaning, and repurposes it as a catchall for white grievances. "The goal," he tweeted, "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 an interview with the Post, he said the tweet described an "obvious" approach: "If you want to see public policy outcomes you have to run a public persuasion campaign."
That campaign might be working. InsideHigherEd reported in early June that lawmakers in sixteen states "have introduced or passed legislation this year seeking to limit the teaching of critical race theory within public institutions." The head of the Nevada Family Alliance recently suggested that schools outfit teachers with body cameras to make sure they aren't teaching critical race theory. Online, Rufo often cheerleads these anti-critical-race-theory developments to his nearly 200,000 Twitter followers, proof of a war going well. The militaristic overtones are hard to miss. Rufo's Twitter handle includes an emoji of crossed swords, which he has said means "swords up."
In form, the fight over critical race theory in schools resembles earlier panics over the teaching of intelligent design and its cousin creationism, over the teaching of LGBT themes, and over prayer and the Bible — remove God from school, and young people will tumble down the highway to hell. Mike Pompeo recently couched things in more secular terms, with the nation taking the place of the divine. "If we teach that the founding of the United States of America was somehow flawed. It was corrupt. It was racist. That's really dangerous," he tweeted. "It strikes at the very foundations of our country."
Rufo isn't the first to treat schools like battlegrounds. At both the K-12 and college levels, education represented a challenge for the Christian right to which Rufo's former employer, the Discovery Institute, belongs. Like many a young Evangelical, I encountered the think tank in the 1990s, when they battled the forces of Darwinism. They argued schools should teach intelligent design, if not as the sole truth of the world, then as a credible scientific theory. Rufo was surrounded by people long accustomed to classroom culture wars. "Teach the controversy," they urged. Decades later, with Rufo, they appeared to have changed their minds. When did it conclude that some controversies matter more than others?
I called up my old boss Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has repeatedly challenged the Discovery Institute and its allies over the teaching of intelligent design in schools. "It's really interesting, this question of public schools, because I've followed this for a long time, and there's this theory among Christian nationalist groups that the public schools are almost like laboratories for whatever social-engineering project liberals have come up with," he said.
That theory boasts many adherents, as my own experiences can testify. I was homeschooled until the mysteries of algebra defeated my mother. My textbooks told me that God had created the Earth in seven days, that abortion was murder, and that America was founded on Biblical principles. Against reality, each claim runs aground. But the last, about the origins of America, still consumes Rufo and conservatives in his orbit.
The teaching of evolution, sex, and LGBT themes to America's impressionable youth inflamed the Christian right, though, like Rufo, the movement never acted alone. It found common cause with its more secular conservative counterparts on issues of race. Years before anyone had ever heard of Rufo, the Texas board of education fought over where, exactly, to fit slavery among the causes of the Civil War. More recently, the 1619 Project has presented a direct challenge to the right's popular version of history and incited widespread conservative fury in turn. Republican legislators in multiple states filed bills to cut funding to public schools that teach it.
Rufo's punches don't always land. The California State Board of Education adopted the model ethnic-studies curriculum in March despite backlash from Rufo and others. But the battle he's fighting will likely persist. School segregation is not a matter of the past. Neither is white supremacy. Probably no one is teaching Harris's "Whiteness as Property" to elementary school students, but that doesn't matter to Rufo, Harris says. He isn't interested in facts but myths, and myths can be dangerous. "We have the experience now of witnessing how isolated incidents of voter irregularities have been marshaled now into a myth about voter fraud," she said. "What happens when that kind of myth is said? What it can actually engender is quite violent. It's not just voter-suppression laws. It's January 6th."
Rufo, meanwhile, is pursuing his new cause with his customary militaristic vengefulness. In April, he announced on Twitter that he had formed a new "center for narrative, legal and policy warfare," called Battlefront. "The time is now," he added. "Swords up."
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A smoking gun he used on himself. I think Rufo is quite happy to have "the left" criticize him in the media. He thinks that will keep his cash register ringing.
Rufo rufo rufo…
anything to try and distract from what the left is doing to indoctrinate kids with their racist world view.
I told you before, if you want to object to the way kids are taught social studies then do that.
Rufo's OWN WORDS are proof that "critical race theory" is a bogus issue. He IS the person who started the whole thing. How frigging gullible are right wingers?
He's reporting on what's happening. Witnessing is not "starting" As Andrew Sullivan wrote:
The left has fully adopted the Jeremiah Wright worldview. Rufo and others like him are documenting their efforts to indoctrinate it.
If it is indeed a bogus issue, then it shouldn't be taught in public schools.
Agreed.
We're being gaslighted by the left on this issue. CRT is not a critical examination of systemic racism within the legal system or other issues that intersect that. CRT is simply a tool invented to support a desired, predetermined narrative. It doesn't "discover" any truths. They manufacture a narrative and CRT is tailored to support it.
It's a good article that should be read for the parts you also left out.
Your comment is complete nonsense, repeatedly debunked.
How so?
Show us some of that "debunk".
[deleted]
Swill would be a kind description of this silly compilation of phrases taken out of context and assaults on history.. When Rufo's attackers are reduced to claiming that his factual claim Aztecs engaged in ritual human sacrifice as " fabricated lies about mass human sacrifice" , the author makes Rufo's point for him.
Lotta cutin' and bleed'n were goin' on
Sean, Rufo did all this to make himself "somebody" and get paid. It is as plain as day.
There are many many white people , tens of millions, who do not want to believe that their ancestors did anything wrong, precisely because then they may feel a collective "guilt" and won't know what to do with it.
The country cannot become post racial until the past is fully accounted for.
Are there still Aztecs around advocating for human sacrifice?
We have many millions of people in this country who wont even acknowledge the Civil War was fought over slavery. Completely different situations.
Slavery existed.
Not a person today in this country participated in it in America.
Nothing for present day folks to be ashamed of, as they weren't the ones doing it.
It makes no sense for white people today to feel guilt over something that happened before they were even thought of.
But many progressive liberals seem to think otherwise for some strange reason.
There are people alive today who took part in legal discrimination against people of color. Your hero Donald Trump would be one of them. (The Trump company was sued more than once by the government for housing discrimination.)
Should the people alive today who took part in racial discrimination and denial of services feel guilty?
Texan, how many white Texans do you think there are that are ashamed of Texas past history of racial discrimination against people of color?
And, why wouldnt present day Texans be ashamed of their state ?
Why are you changing the subject now?
I don't have heroes. Please stop pretending you know me.
Will that make anyone feel better? Will it change one iota of history?
Don't know, don't give a fuck.
Because it is a great state! There are always things that can be improved upon (like in every single state in the Union) but that isn't a cause for shame.
Now, if some progressive liberals want to feel shame, that is ALL on them!
What age demographic would that be?
OLD!!!!!!!
You seem to think that racism is a thing of the past. Donald Trump is alive and he was the head of the Trump real estate company when it was sued for racial discrimination in violation of housing laws. I'll keep it simple for you - should Trump feel guilty?
And what was the outcome of that lawsuit?
Show us where Trump or his father plead guilty or were found guilty.
Please tell the truth.
It seems that way to YOU.
Of course, that and reality are miles apart.
I see, as always , you can do nothing but double talk and dodge. What a shame.
No, you just let your TDS get the best of you and went off on some tangent about Trump when he doesn't have dick to do with the conversation.
own it.
Racial views of Donald Trump - Wikipedia
Pre-presidency Housing discrimination cases. In 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice sue d Trump Manageme nt, Donald Trump and his father Fr ed, for discrimination against African Americans in their renting practices.. Testers from the New York City Human Rights Division had found that prospective black r enter s at Trump buildings were told there were no apartments available, while prospective ...
========================================================
A new federal government document has surfaced which details the housing discrimination practices of Donald Trump and his family’s vast realty holdings of the private Trump Organization in New York City’s outer boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn.
This first time that tangible proof of Donald Trump’s history of racial discrimination practices has been quantified, firmly, in an official record.
This is undeniable.
Trump Organization Management Actively Discriminated Against African-Americans
The New York Times reported in August that Trump’s property managers - both New York and Cincinnati, Ohio - marked minority housing applications for denial whether they were segregationists or more likely following their orders strictly. One manager spilled the beans on Trump’s discriminatory practices:
That wasn’t only reason to date why the federal Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division monitored fully 2/3rds of the Trump family’s realty empire for racial discrimination in the 70s.
Case records like the one provided by DCAT below show that Trump’s manager would tell prospective tenants that their neighborhoods were safe, “because there were no blacks around.”
Furthermore, as in many housing discrimination cases, the below court document also documents testers visiting the Trump Organization’s buildings and coming out with different results based on the skin color of the prospective tenant.
There is much more to it than that but I will just leave it at that for now.
It is a complete waste of time to try and engage you. You dont want to worry about racism because you say it is in the past. I give you an example of racism by a living person and you say it is not the topic.
This is my seed Tex. I decide what is or is not the topic.
As always, you are in over your head.
You do know it’s a wasted effort right? There is no serious discussion to be had with some folks around here.
No doubt, but since he seems to want to use Trump as his example, I would assume he means 75 and up. I wonder what percentage of that roughly 7% of the population he thinks should feel guilt for being alive? And how does that insignificant percentage play into the idea that racism is rampant?
Certainly is a waste when one can't even be honest about what I have said. Quote me or just admit I didn't ever say racism was in the past. I get tired of these claims about what I said and the pathetic attempts to argue what people invent I say.
I will say that i am not worried about past racism because there ain't one damn thing anybody can do about it.
That is NOT the same thing as saying racism is in the past no matter how hard it gets twisted.
I know who seeded the article, JR.
Like the commercial says--"You're cute when you're wrong,"
Your argument is that very few people under the age of 75 could be racist today? Is that actually your best thoughts on this topic?
What percentage of Texans think the Civil War was not about slavery? Im not talking about dead people, I'm talking about Texans that are alive today.
No, my argument would be that there are alot fewer racist today than there were then. I was trying to figure out what relevance that age group seemed to carry for you.
I have no idea.
Do you?
Tex, in 2019 a poll showed that over 40% of Americans do not believe slavery was the cause of the Civil War
Poll: Americans show limited knowledge about slavery, but ...
Aug 28, 2019 · A 52 percent majority of Americans know slavery was the main cause of the Civil War , as opposed to 41 percent who blame “another reason.” Younger adults, ages 18 …
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Would you say the number of Texans who believe that is over or under 41% ?
People who in 2019 did not know the cause of the Civil War, are probably not dead now. You would agree , right?
In 2019 a polled showed that 41% of all Americans believed that there was another main cause for the Civil War, not slavery. I think it is a fair supposition that the figure in Texas would be considerably higher than 41%.
Texan, are you familiar with the Declaration of Secession by the state of Texas in 1861 ?
Don't know, don't care.
What is your point?
...
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color–a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
For years past this abolition organization has been actively sowing the seeds of discord through the Union, and has rendered the federal congress the arena for spreading firebrands and hatred between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.
By consolidating their strength, they hare placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.
They have proclaimed, and at the ballot box sustained, the revolutionary doctrine that there is a “higher law” than the constitution and laws of our Federal Union, and virtually that they will disregard their oaths and trample upon our rights.
They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture, and have repeatedly murdered Southern citizens while lawfully seeking their rendition.
They have invaded Southern soil and murdered unoffending citizens, and through the press their leading men and a fanatical pulpit have bestowed praise upon the actors and assassins in these crimes, while the governors of several of their States have refused to deliver parties implicated and indicted for participation in such offences, upon the legal demands of the States aggrieved.
They have, through the mails and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.
They have sent hired emissaries among us to burn our towns and distribute arms and poison to our slaves for the same purpose.
They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.
They have refused to vote appropriations for protecting Texas against ruthless savages, for the sole reason that she is a slave-holding State.
And, finally, by the combined sectional vote of the seventeen non-slave-holding States, they have elected as president and vice-president of the whole confederacy two men whose chief claims to such high positions are their approval of these long continued wrongs, and their pledges to continue them to the final consummation of these schemes for the ruin of the slave-holding States.
In view of these and many other facts, it is meet that our own views should be distinctly proclaimed.
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States. By the secession of six of the slave-holding States, and the certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no alternative but to remain in an isolated connection with the North, or unite her destinies with the South.
For these and other reasons, solemnly asserting that the federal constitution has been violated and virtually abrogated by the several States named, seeing that the federal government is now passing under the control of our enemies to be diverted from the exalted objects of its creation to those of oppression and wrong, and realizing that our own State can no longer look for protection, but to God and her own sons – We the delegates of the people of Texas, in Convention assembled, have passed an ordinance dissolving all political connection with the government of the United States of America and the people thereof and confidently appeal to the intelligence and patriotism of the freeman of Texas to ratify the same at the ballot box, on the 23rd day of the present month.
Adopted in Convention on the 2nd day of Feby, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one and of the independence of Texas the twenty-fifth.
Probably read it in school for Texas History class.
Why?
I have never denied racism existed or exists.
I am not concerned about the past because there is nothing I can do about it.
I prefer to focus on the present.
The point is you've got , probably millions of, people in Texas who dont know true history.
So we need true history not Christopher Rufo's bullshit.
You dont have to care. Dont complain about the people who do care either.
Well, damn, why didn't you just lead with that?
we need something besides your pointless bs to fill up this seed.
I admire your steadfast dedication to the task.
So nothing to prove that any Trump was found guilty or plead guilty to anything.
No surprise.
Again, it’s just a way to get conservatives to open their wallets. CRT has been around for decades and no one knew anything about it until a few political operatives needed a new issue to sell their books.
The new boogie man for the right.