Christopher Rufo is making bank on hate
The New York Times profiled the right’s latest scumbag hero, Christopher Rufo, the man most responsible for making blatant racism and homophobia great again:
Mr. Rufo is the conservative activist who probably more than any other person made critical race theory a rallying cry on the right — and who has become, to some on the left, an agitator of intolerance. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, he has emerged at the front of another explosive cultural clash, one that he sees as even more politically potent and that the left views as just as dangerous: the battle over L.G.B.T.Q. restrictions in schools.
Mr. Rufo has taken aim at opponents of a new Florida law that prohibits teachers in some grades from discussing L.G.B.T.Q. issues and that critics call “Don’t Say Gay.” He declared “moral war” against the statute’s most prominent adversary, the Walt Disney Company.
[…]
On Friday, Mr. 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. Mr. Rufo, who 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.”
The signing was the culmination of Mr. Rufo’s long campaign to short-circuit corporate and school efforts at diversity and inclusion training. He has acknowledged twisting hot-button racial issues to achieve his aims. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote on Twitter last year.
Friday was also a milestone in Mr. Rufo’s latest fixation. As he looked on, Mr. DeSantis signed a second measure abolishing Disney’s special tax status in the state.
The retaliation against Disney emerged after its opposition to the Parental Rights in Education law, signed by Mr. DeSantis last month, which bans classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity for children below fourth grade, and limits it in older grades. The anti-L.G.B.T.Q. statute is part of a political brawl unfolding in an election year as both parties try to excite their bases. Republican lawmakers in multiple states have proposed measures similar to Florida’s.
He’s having a huge influence on the Republican Party because he’s giving them a new avenue to pursue their life’s work of being hate-filled bigots.
Mr. Rufo is convinced that a fight over L.G.B.T.Q. curriculums — which he calls “gender ideology” — has even more potential to spur a political backlash than the debate over how race and American history are taught.
“The reservoir of sentiment on the sexuality issue is deeper and more explosive than the sentiment on the race issues,” he said in an interview.
“Reservoir of sentiment” is a nice way of saying “fear and loathing” aka racism and homophobia. They hate ’em all. And they hate foreigners, feminists, liberals etc too.
Critics of Mr. Rufo, and of the broader right-wing push on L.G.B.T.Q. issues, say the attacks represent a new era of moral panic, one with echoes of slanders from decades ago that gay teachers were a threat to children. Some champions of Florida’s law, including Christina Pushaw, Mr. DeSantis’s press secretary, have labeled their opponents “groomers” — adults who want to sexually pursue children.
Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, said conservatives had falsely and intentionally linked child sex predators with opponents of the Florida law. Mr. Rufo, he said, had provided fuel for their arguments.
Yes he did. And he is devious and dishonest about it too. Of course.
After Mr. Rufo released the Disney employee videos, he shared mug shots on Twitter of Disney workers who had been charged in child sexual abuse cases over the years, based in part on CNN reporting from 2014.
He failed to note, in an article he wrote about the arrests for City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, that none of the cases in the CNN report involved children at Disney’s parks. Nor did he include Disney’s response to CNN that the arrests were “one one-hundredth of 1 percent of the 300,000 people we have employed during this time period.”
In another article for City Journal, Mr. Rufo claimed that American schools were “hunting grounds” for teachers, and that “parents have good reason” to worry about “‘grooming’ in public schools.”
He cited data from a decades-old survey, in a study for the Education Department, but he omitted the study’s declaration that “the vast majority of schools in America are safe places.”
Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute, defended Mr. Rufo’s work for giving voice to parents’ concerns about the “ideological climate in public schools,” specifically a “lack of transparency over the teaching of contentious subjects.”
Salam is supposed to be one of the “reasonable” Republicans. Uh huh. There is not such thing. I wish people would stop saying it. If you are a Republican these days, a member of the right, you are, by definition, unreasonable.
And he is a slimy, unctuous liar too:
Mr. Rufo denied that he had broadly equated opponents of the Florida law with groomers. “It’s wrong, factually and morally, to accuse someone of being a groomer with no basis and evidence,” he said.
“It’s become a powerful word that should be used with great responsibility,” he added. Nevertheless, some L.G.B.T.Q. people have reported an increase in harassment as the use of the term has surged online, echoing the QAnon conspiracy theory’s fixation on a cabal of “deep state” Democratic pedophiles.
He knows exactly what he’s doing:
He’s also a rank opportunist — of course:
Mr. Rufo, 37, lives and works in Gig Harbor, a picturesque boating town on Puget Sound south of Seattle. A former documentary filmmaker and, briefly, an unsuccessful candidate for Seattle’s City Council, he burst on the scene in 2020 by publicizing examples of diversity trainings in government that seemed to have gone off the rails, such as asking bureaucrats to examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy.” Diversity trainings, long a fixture in government and corporate America, typically support the idea that people’s unconscious biases involving race and gender can create hostile work environments.
His reporting in City Journal and posts on social media electrified readers, who leaked him more documents from anti-bias and diversity seminars.
Perusing footnotes, he discovered the field of critical race theory. Originally a graduate-level academic thesis before conservatives turned it into political shorthand for a variety of teachings on race, it holds that racism is systemic in American institutions, not just a matter of individual bigotry.
Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show in 2020, Mr. Rufo urged President Donald J. Trump to abolish critical race theory trainings in the government.
The next day, he said, he received a call from Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, telling him that Mr. Trump had seen him on Fox, and asking him to consult on an executive order. Framed in his home, Mr. Rufo has the pen that Mr. Trump used to sign the order, and a handwritten card from the White House: “Who says one person can’t make a difference?!”
Although President Biden quickly revoked the order, critical race theory became a volatile political issue as Mr. Rufo and allies accused school systems of indoctrinating K-12 students.
He’s getting rich doing it. The article opens with the anecdote that he built a TV studio in his home replete with uplink to Fox so he could more easily appear there.
His advocacy has been financially rewarding. Besides his Manhattan Institute position, he has a newsletter with 2,500 paid subscribers, and he runs a nonprofit entity to support his work, which he said had received over $500,000 in donations since late last year.
Mr. Rufo said he thought a great deal about selecting the right language to define what he opposed. A fan of postmodernist thinkers, he refers to the importance of “meta-narratives.” He said that to maximize voters’ anxieties about gender issues, he plans to write a series of articles on classroom practices he deems outrageous.
“You have to provide the vocabulary for people to talk about” gender issues, he said. “Once that happens, it’s going to be explosive.”
People are going to get hurt, many of them kids, because of this disgusting creep. It’s common on social media now to see people hurling homophobic slurs in a way I haven’t head in decades. It’s back. And you can thank this asshole nobody and his friend Tucker Carlson for it.
