A friend who knows him describes a state Republican House member‘s simple campaign strategy:
● Listen for voters’ latest complaint
● Blame Democrats; turn it into a wedge issue
● Drive the wedge relentlessly
Christopher Rufo “all but singlehandedly bootstrapped [the] moral panic” on the right over critical race theory (CRT) using the same strategy. The Week‘s Ryan Cooper explains:
This panic, as I’ve previously written, has nothing to do with the actual arguments of critical race theory scholars. But that raises the question of what it really is about. The answer is the George Floyd protests of last summer and the ongoing surge of anti-racist activism.
Ben Wallace-Wells recently published an excellent profile in The New Yorker of Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who all but singlehandedly bootstrapped this moral panic. In Rufo’s own telling, it all started with someone sending him an annoying anti-racism seminar in July of last year. He then read books by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi about anti-racism that surged to the top of bestseller lists last year and followed the footnotes therein to older articles about critical race theory. Then he went on Tucker Carlson and delivered a carefully-prepared harangue about CRT; President Trump (of course) was watching, leading to a call from then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Trump began to attack anti-racist trainings and scholarship, numerous conservative states have passed laws attacking CRT, and here we are.
Find a wedge. Drive it relentlessly. The wedge issue itself unimportant. Classic Republican hissy fit.
Cooper adds:
Rufo straight-up admits that it was corporate and educational anti-racist trainings that motivated his crusade, not critical race theory itself; that the primary reason he selected it as a target was its ominous sounding name; and that he neither knows nor cares about the actual substance of CRT. “Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American,” he told Wallace-Wells. At a recent conference, he contemptuously scoffed at “pathetic … angry graduate students” who try to argue with him about CRT or other topics. “I don’t give a s**t about this stuff,” he said.
Here Rufo posts that admission to Twitter:
The George Floyd protests and subsequently videoed mistreatment of Black people by police took the national spotlight away from the grievances of White conservatives, in their minds the only Real Americans™. This could not stand. They demand that spotlight (and their country) back. Rufo shows them the way:
A new ideological construct was needed to sweep all this discontent about racial injustice under the rug, and Rufo eventually made one up. As the writer John Ganz argues:
Rufo and his cohort are in the process of creating an ideological space where the signifier “anti-racism” will necessarily imply bloody Marxism, the gulag, the end of American democracy, the seizure of private property etc., but mentions of “racism” will also imply Critical Race Theory, which in their formulation creates the “real racism” through even talking about race. [Unpopular Front]
Like much else on the right, critical race theory hysteria is a con, a distraction, a bid for attention from people who, Cooper snarks, “just five minutes ago were whining about campus snowflakes being a threat to free inquiry.” Now they demand that states thought-police what is taught in classrooms and punish those who refuse to put a sock in it about racial injustice. All this from an astroturfed smear campaign.
What is pathetic after all this time is how easily the press and Democrats get sucked into “teach the controversy” model conservatives use to promote their bogus wedge issue du jour.