Politico interviewed Christopher Rufo the new propaganda monister of fascist America. He’s very proud of himself for taking out a Black woman president of Harvard. What a coup.
Rufo isn’t shy about revealing the true motives behind his influence operations. Last month, he told me that his efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s legacy are part of broader ploy to exonerate former President Donald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon, he was equally frank about what motivated his efforts to get Gay fired.
The following has been edited for clarity and concision.
How much credit do you think you deserve for Gay’s resignation?
I’ve learned that it never hurts to take the credit because sometimes people don’t give it to you. But this really was a team effort that involved three primary points of leverage. First was the narrative leverage, and this was done primarily by me, Christopher Brunet and Aaron Sibarium. Second was the financial leverage, which was led by Bill Ackman and other Harvard donors. And finally, there was the political leverage which was really led by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s masterful performance with Claudine Gay at her hearings.
When you put those three elements together — narrative, financial and political pressure — and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the resignation of America’s most powerful academic leader. I think that this result speaks for itself.
How closely have you been coordinating with the other people in those three camps?
I know all the players, I have varying degrees of coordination and communication, but —
What does that mean, “various degrees of communication and coordination?” Have you been actively working together?
Some people I speak to a little more frequently, some people a little less frequently. But my job as a journalist and even more so as an activist is to know the political conditions, to understand and develop relationships with all of the political actors, and then to work as hard as I can so that they’re successful in achieving their individual goals — but also to accomplish the shared goal, which was to topple the president of Harvard University.
On December 19, you tweeted that it was your plan to “smuggle [the plagiarism story] into the media apparatus from the left, which legitimizes the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple [Gay].” Can you explain that strategy in more detail?
It’s really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Brunet and I broke the story of Claudine’s plagiarism on December 10. It drove more than 100 million impressions on Twitter, and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into the left-wing media. But the left-wing uniformly ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of a thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption scandal in Harvard’s history.
Finally, the narrative broke through within 24 hours of my announcement about smuggling the narrative into the left-wing media. You see this domino effect: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing Gay’s plagiarism, and then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all of those publications calling on Gay to resign. Once my position — which began on the right — became the dominant position across the center-left, I knew that it was just a matter of time before we were going to be successful.
Why is it so important to get the story into the center-left media?
It gives permission for center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then to editorialize on it. Once we crossed that threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign.
Do you think that playbook works on any issue, or do you think that the Israel-Palestine issue is unique, insofar as it’s already dividing elite liberal organizations?
I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful.
Why do you think you can be so open about your strategy and still have it work? Why don’t you feel like you need to be covert about it?
First, and most simply, because I’m telling the truth — and the truth has an inherent and innate power. I believe that if it’s propagated correctly, it has the power to defeat lies.
The reason that I announced my strategy in advance is both to demoralize my opponents — and it certainly does a good job at that — but also to teach my potential friends and allies how the game works. Machiavelli wrote The Prince not to teach people who already knew the principles of how power works, but to teach people who need to know — and in reality, the people who need to know about how politics works are American conservatives. So I tried to publicly narrate what I’m doing in order to teach my friends how to do it themselves. I think that this is a big service — with the added benefit that it demoralizes and deranges my enemies.
Do you think you understand how the left-wing influence ecosystem works better than the people inside it do?
Well, I spent 10 years directing documentaries for PBS, lived in large, left-wing American cities, and I’ve studied how the media, NGOs and universities circulate and legitimize information regimes. I’ve just applied that knowledge — and in some senses, I’ve stolen some of the earlier tactics from previous generations of the American left and weaponize them against the current regime.
What I’m doing is teaching conservatives how to hack that system and to use our asymmetrical disadvantages to our strategic advantage. We need to be very lightweight and very aggressive, and we need to be faster and smarter and rhetorically more sophisticated than our opponents — who, unfortunately for them, have grown complacent, lazy, entitled and ripe for disruption.
What is your broader objective here, beyond forcing the president of Harvard to resign?
My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.
In her letter of resignation, Gay said that she was troubled by “threats fueled by racial animus.” How do you respond to that?
It was absolutely not fueled by racial animus. It was fueled by Claudine Gay’s minimization of antisemitism, her serial plagiarism, her intimidation of the free press and her botched attempts to cover it all up. It had nothing to do with her race or sex and everything to do with her merit, her competence and her failure to lead.
How significant of a victory do you consider this campaign for the conservative movement?
I worked on critical race theory for a very long time before it yielded fruit, but this Claudine Gay story has shown that we can drive major, paradigm-shifting victories over a compressed timeframe. I’d like to engage in more experimentation on how we can cycle up some of these campaigns very quickly.
The amount of media devoted to this campus scandal is unbelievable. I can guarantee that the majority of Americans don’t actually give a shit.
Rufo is a propagandist and he admits it. Apparently, them media knows it and is perfectly fine being led around by the nose by him. It’s unbelievable.
Look at this:
Those are each different articles from the last two days about this “scandal.” I feel like I’m losing my mind.
I’m going to share this twitter thread from Dave Roberts who nailed this issue better than I can:
I just want to describe a certain pattern/dynamic that has replicated itself over & over & over again, as long as I have followed US media and politics. I have given up hope that describing such patterns will do anything to diminish their frequency, but like I said: compulsions.
The center-left pundit approach to these things is simply to accept the frame that the right has established and dutifully make judgments within it. In this case, they focus tightly on the question of whether particular instances qualify as plagiarism as described in the rules.
Inevitably, this is done with a certain air of self-congratulation. “Look at me, I’m making a tough call that goes against my side! I’m so judicious nonpartisan and independent!” And all the other center-left pundits nod soberly, noting — more in sorrow than anger! — how lamentable it is that all the left partisans out there lack this protean ability rise above it all and see clearly and apply standards equally to all sides.
And — the part that really chaps my ass — they refuse, almost as though it’s a matter of principle to ask the larger questions: Why are we talking about this? Is there any reasonable political or journalistic justification for *this* being the center of US discourse for weeks on end? Who has pushed this to the fore, and why, and what are they trying to achieve?
It is as though these questions are evasions or cheats or something, as though intellectual integrity demands only heeding those questions that the right has put into the frame. It is a kind of bizarre, proud naivete — gormlessness posing as wisdom.
“We must only discuss whether plagiarism is ok or not; those are the rules.” But why are those the rules? Why should the media and pundits ignore context here? It’s not like that context is secret –Rufo goes out bragging about it on social media frequently!
You could cite hundreds of examples of this kind of thing, but one I frequently think about is “Climategate.” Right wing shitheads stole a bunch of emails from a climate research org, sifted through them, plucked sentences, phrases, and even individual words out of context …
… and then demanded that the climate community defend these contextless bits. Of course the media chased the shiny ball and of course center-left pundits dutifully scratched their chins and said, “well maybe they have a point about this one, or this one.”
Then, as now, it was treated as some sort of partisan cheat to draw attention to the fact these were emails stolen by explicitly malicious actors who explicitly were trying to destroy climate science. “Sir, please focus on the contextless bits.”
Of course, after multiple extensive investigations, it all turned out to be bullshit. But the damage was done. Climate science was smeared and suffered reputational damage that dogged it for years.
In other words, the malicious actors got exactly, precisely what they wanted.
No journalist or pundit ever apologized for, or even acknowledged, the fact that they were used as instruments by bad people to achieve bad things. To my knowledge there was absolutely zero reflection from any journalistic outlet about it. They just went on to the next thing.
To return to the Harvard thing: why are we talking about this? Corruption is endemic in virtually every conservative Institution –the NRA, CPAC, the Supreme Court, you name it. Why aren’t we talking about them?
Antisemitism is endemic in RW spaces and has been for decades. Why aren’t we talking about that? House Republicans are trying to cut off aid and leave Ukraine stranded. Why aren’t we talking about that? The economy is booming. Why aren’t we talking about that?
There are a lot of important things going on right now. Why are we talking about this and not any of those?
We know why: the right is expert at ginning up these artificial controversies and manipulating media. Again, they brag about it publicly!
What I don’t understand is why media and center-left pundits are so *passive* in the face of this obvious, explicit manipulation. They just dutifully follow the right around, shrugging their shoulders: “I guess we have to talk about this now.”
I guess we have to talk about the “border crisis” now. I guess we have to talk about trans people in girls’ high school sports now. I guess we have to talk about Bud Light and Target now. I guess we have to talk about whatever the fuck they want to talk about. [shrug]
Equally maddening is the fact that the left, broadly speaking, and the D Party in particular, are also just as passive! They’ve watched this go on for decades, one fake scandal after another, one BS distraction after another, & they seem utterly helpless to do anything about it.
For as long as I’ve been alive, left pundits like @brianbeutler have been begging & pleading with Dems to do what the right is doing: take control of the discourse. Create controversies that focus attention where they want it. Create moments, create memes. Do politics FFS!
But no, they just drone on about policy and kitchen tables. They sniff with disdain at the idea of engaging in purposeful acts of symbolism. “There’s no point holding hearings about Clarence Thomas’s corruption because there’s no obvious policy recourse” kind of shit.
And so here we are, all of us, talking about what the right wants us to talk about, actively doing its bidding, actively helping it destroy higher education & smear black scholarship & distract from its institutional antisemitism. We are all Rufo’s bitches.
This exact same kind of cycle has now happened so many times that I frankly can’t believe anyone is unaware of how it works. It really looks like everyone — right, journalists, pundits — is happy with their role in these things. They feather everyone’s nest quite nicely.
Anyway, this went on longer than I intended and I should shut up now. My one, futile plea to everyone is simply: before you jump in with an opinion on the discourse of the day, ask yourself *why* it is the discourse of the day and whose interests the discourse is serving.
And maybe, just on occasion, have the courage to *talk about something else*, something *you* deem important, not just whatever the puke funnel has served up for you. </fin>
It’s maddening.