We need everyone to do their part, first, by being "truthful."

Santa Ono, the sole finalist for University of Florida president, claims that "systemic racism is embedded in every corner of any institution," and says that "the only way to solve it" is for everyone to admit their complicity in racism and engage in BLM-style self-criticism. pic.twitter.com/T3KtRrvdyw

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 19, 2025

The best part is the background music. It really helped me experience the angst of the perfect blend of sincerity and insincerity. It felt like an excellent satire.

"Everybody has implicit, um, bias."

That "um" is important. He was doing his part by being truthful. Maybe it's not a big part, but it's a part. These parts may add up. If everyone would just exhibit a tiny twinge of discomfort....

"Progressives within the federal bureaucracy, regardless of Democrat or Republican being in the White House, have been advancing left-wing racialist ideologies and DEI programs for decades."

 "And so I don't have any doubt in my mind that what we're doing is, is, is the right course of action. It's defensible intellectually. And certainly I think it is actually a minimal and very restrained response to a long standing problem.... You know, I would certainly like to see much more dramatic action. I would like to see, you know, if, if, if they, if they are anticipating this as a, as a shock, I could easily imagine, you know, 10 times, 20 times, you know, 50 times more dramatic action that is, you know, within the realm of possibility.... We'll see... One thing I've learned is that you, you want to keep the, the, the larger ideas close to the chest and you wanna work incrementally up to them. And so we're doing some A/B testing, we're doing some prototyping. And as those things gain traction, I think it'll open up new lines of action. But what we're doing is really a counter-revolution. It's a revolution against revolution. And so I think we are the responsible party in this. But responsible doesn't mean weak. It doesn't mean self-effacing, it doesn't mean playing nice. I think that actually we are a counter radical force in American life that paradoxically has to use what many see as radical techniques."

Says Christopher Rufo at the end of today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast — "The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges."

What "50 times more dramatic action" do you think he has in mind? Criminal prosecution?

That quote is from the end of the interview. At the beginning, Rufo establishes his left-wing credibility:

Sitting within good information.

EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher doesn't just want to "stamp out bad information" on the internet. She wants to replace it with "good information"—i.e., left-wing narratives—and force the public to "sit within that good information" as "a collective."

Big Sister has arrived. pic.twitter.com/7kfq8VYHfj

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 18, 2024

I like the plants in the background, because she really is visualizing the people as plants. Watch for her snarky snicker when she knows she's characterizing NPR's news as manure for us to take root in and grow in the direction that pleases her.

"[P]ublic support for DEI has cratered.... [T]he political right has learned how to fight more effectively.... I watched the political dynamics develop from the inside."

Writes Christopher Rufo, in "How We Squeezed Harvard" (Wall Street Journal).

The key, I learned, is that any activist campaign has three points of leverage: reputational, financial and political. For some institutions, one point of leverage is enough, but, for a powerful one such as Harvard, the "squeeze" must work across multiple angles.

Journalists "applied reputational pressure" with charges of plagiarism. Donors applied financial pressure, "withholding a billion dollars in contributions." And the political pressure came through Congress, "exposing Ms. Gay's equivocations on antisemitism and threatening consequences for inaction."

This wasn't a secret. Rufo proudly credits himself with "narrating the strategy in real time."

What's on the Disney Channel?

Oh. pic.twitter.com/Om8TZJuOxg

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 10, 2023

Here's the Rotten Tomatoes page. From the critics reviews:

"The 'satanic panic' of the 1980s, a frenzy of accusations of ritual child abuse that resulted in the conviction of dozens of innocent people, was driven in part by deep anxiety..."

"... over working women and day care. Four decades later, the country is once again in a moral panic about monstrous things being done to children, with teachers and entertainers accused of 'grooming' them for abuse. And once again, it’s driven in large part by unease over rapidly changing gender roles and norms. ... Many middle-aged liberal parents I know have different ideas about gender than their more radical adolescent kids, and I assume the gulf must be even larger in many conservative families. Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist leading a crusade against Disney for its opposition to the Don’t Say Gay bill, told me a friend of his sent his middle-school daughter to an all-girls choir camp over the summer, 'and a third of the girls came back saying that they were nonbinary or queer or gender nonconforming.' Faced with a gender landscape that they find unnerving or worse, conservatives are trying to use schools to turn the tide.... The Trumpist website American Greatness recently celebrated the term 'groomer' as a right-wing attempt to do 'what the left always does: coin a novel political epithet.'"

From "Why Are Seemingly Functional Adults Falling for the ‘Furries’ Myth?" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT). The headline refers to the gullibility of some conservatives who believe some schoolkids are identifying as cats or dogs and that teachers are taking this seriously pursuant to a trans-friendly policy.

"The Washington Post's @laurameckler spent three weeks preparing a hitpiece against me."

"In this thread, I will expose five flat-out lies, from the fabrication of a timeline to multiple smears that are easily disproven by documentary evidence." 

So begins a Twitter thread by Christopher Rufo. 

Here's the WaPo piece he's attacking: "Republicans, spurred by an unlikely figure, see political promise in targeting critical race theory." From that article: 

Critical race theory holds that racism is systemic in the United States, not just a collection of individual prejudices — an idea that feels obvious to some and offensive to others. Rufo alleged that efforts to inject awareness of systemic racism and White privilege, which grew more popular following the murder of George Floyd by police, posed a grave threat to the nation. It amounts, Rufo said, to a “cult indoctrination.”...

“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 wrote. “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.”

Rufo said in an interview that he understands why his opponents often point to this tweet, but said that the approach described is “so obvious.” “If you want to see public policy outcomes you have to run a public persuasion campaign,” he said. Rufo says his own role has been to translate research into programs about race into the political arena.

Rufo, in his Twitter thread, says: "The Washington Post falsifies a direct quotation, claiming that I said it is 'so obvious' that my strategy was to 'conflate' unrelated items with CRT. I never said this and challenge the Post to produce the audio recording to support their claim—or retract it." The word "conflate" is WaPo's. It's a characterization of Rufo's idea of putting "various cultural insanities under" the CRT "brand." Whether he said "so obvious" or not, doesn't he to want to take responsibility for putting CRT at the center of the analysis of all sorts of "crazy" things we're hearing about?

"'Political correctness' is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits..."

"... they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain... Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’ Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American. [And critical race theory is not] an externally applied pejorative... it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.”

Wrote Christopher Rufo to Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who produced this New Yorker article: "How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory/To Christopher Rufo, a term for a school of legal scholarship looked like 'the perfect weapon.'"

Is that headline correct? You know, I've got a thing about headlines that begin with "how." Are we really going to be told "how" or only "that"? But is it even true that Christopher Rufo invented the conflict over Critical Race Theory? The article shows the Rufo has been collecting information about anti-racism training sessions and, since late July 2020, communicating about what he's found and what he thinks of it.

Rufo didn't invent the term. He took a term that already had a life and he exposed it and critiqued it. What did he "invent"? He's accused of — credited with? — inventing the conflict about it. If something is already out there — having an effect — and someone comes along and raises questions about it, has he invented a conflict? 

This is what activists do. It's the same thing the Critical Race Theorists themselves did. They looked at how systems were operating, and they "invented a conflict" about it. They said the systems contained racism, furthered white supremacy, even covertly and unintentionally. Their technique was to "invent conflict" — wasn't it? — just as much as Rufo's technique was to invent conflict. If we're going to use the phrase "invent conflict," he invented conflict about the conflict they invented.

Anti- Critical Race Theory advocate Christopher Rufo is asked "What do you like about being white?"

I don't see how you can come to any other conclusion than that Rufo really acquits himself well here. https://t.co/R6SLlq0hlM

— Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 (@thomaschattwill) May 26, 2021

"As [Christopher] Rufo sees it, critical race theory is a revolutionary program that replaces the Marxist categories of the bourgeois and the proletariat with racial groups..."

"... justifying discrimination against those deemed racial oppressors. His goal, ultimately, is to get the Supreme Court to rule that school and workplace trainings based on the doctrines of critical race theory violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act.... Rufo insists there are no free speech implications to what he’s trying to do. 'You have the freedom of speech as an individual, of course, but you don’t have the kind of entitlement to perpetuate that speech through public agencies,' he said. This sounds, ironically, a lot like the arguments people on the left make about de-platforming right-wingers. To [Kimberlé] Crenshaw, attempts to ban critical race theory vindicate some of the movement’s skepticism about free speech orthodoxy, showing that there were never transcendent principles at play. When people defend offensive speech, she said, they’re often really defending 'the substance of what the speech is — because if it was really about free speech, then this censorship, people would be howling to the high heavens.' If it was really about free speech, they should be."

From "The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness/How the right is trying to censor critical race theory" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT). 

Here's a good comment over there: "The problem with your argument is that Critical Race Theory is presented at schools and workplace sessions as the TRUTH, not just an (unprovable) social science theory. And it would be very uncomfortable (if not career or social suicide) to question this theory in front of one’s bosses and peers."

That makes me think of Justice Jackson's famous line, one of the most important points about freedom of speech: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." 

The problem is compelled speech. To be compelled to assert belief in what you do not believe is a severe intrusion on individual free speech, and that seems to be what is happening in these workplace training sessions. Is there some way to present the insights of Critical Race Theory as ideas to be understood and weighed against other ideas and debated instead of compelling attendance at events where the ideas are dictated and participants are forced to attest to the dictated beliefs?