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| Christopher Rufo |
If you were surprised by the sudden rise of critical race theory as the latest object of outrage by the Republican Right, you weren’t alone. The CRT controversy seems to have sprouted like cheat grass from our carefully groomed lawns. However, the controversy is anything but grassroots. It’s the brainchild of a former Seattle City Council candidate, Christopher Rufo.
Mr. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and a former director at the Discovery Institute, which promotes “intelligent design,” and has called global warming, “a fraud.” Rufo currently acts as Contributing Editor for the Manhattan Institute’s quarterly publication, the City Journal.
Rufo had become well known for the anti-progressive ideas he expressed in his 2018 Seattle City Council campaign, and in his white paper for the Discovery Institute, “The Politics of Ruinous Compassion,” in which he wrote of an “ideological war that’s currently being won by a loose alliance of four major power centers: the socialist intellectuals, the compassion brigades, the homeless-industrial complex, and the addiction evangelists.”
So, when in the Summer of 2020, a ‘right-thinking’ Seattle city employee participated in anti-bias training during a Zoom meeting, and sent copies to Rufo, the spurned candidate quickly recognized the opportunity for political WMD (weapon of mass disinformation). Using FOIA requests, Rufo started digging further, and found references to anti-racism books that pointed to academic scholarship of the 1990s by legal scholars, who “argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present.” They referred to their work as “critical race theory.”
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In her August 12, 2021, Perspectives on History, article Dr. Jacqueline Jones, referred to CRT as “an intellectual framework for understanding the many ways that governmental entities and private interests have put racial ideologies into practice in the form of laws, taxation policies, public works projects, regulatory guidelines, profit-making schemes, hiring preferences, and more.”
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Rufo quickly recognized critical race theory as something he could attribute to the “woke” culture, thereby painting, “stay woke,” as more than a black-activist catch phase; rather, it was the rallying cry for legions of “social justice” activists, which he saw attempting to reinvent American history not only to paint all Whites as racist, but to inculcate in them their inherent racism, shame them with it, and move them to make reparations, if not in monetary, then in policy forms.
Rufo kept fleshing out his thesis, and by the time he appeared on Tucker Carlson he was ready with his thesis that the purveyors of “woke’ ideology planned to use critical race theory as the academically respectable underpinnings of curricula designed to indoctrinate America’s children through the K-12 school system. Rufo made it clear that he saw critical race theory as an existential threat to the Republic, and called upon then-president Trump, to “"immediately issue" an "executive order and stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology at its root.”
It’s widely known that former President Trump was at the time a devotee of the Fox menu of “news” and opinion (he has since jilted Fox for One America News Network). He was watching Tucker interview Rufo and the next thing the intrepid reporter knew he was answering a call from Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Soon after that, Rufo was called to Washington D.C. to help draft an executive order limiting how contractors providing federal diversity seminars could talk about race.
Christopher Rufo is a committed, energetic, and ambitious conservative activist, and a prolific writer of invective, but he alone could not have brought about the explosion of outrage and coordinated assaults on the institutions of American education, which conservatives have long suspected of indoctrinating students in ‘wrong-headed,’ liberal thinking. Trump operatives in the White House clearly saw critical race theory as a promising way to distract Americans from Trump’s [first] impeachment, his disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and the lingering unease over his “very fine people on both sides” comment regarding the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to the death of the counter-protester, Heather Heyer.
White House operatives began working with and through the National Republican Committee, state Republican parties, and subsequently with quickly formed political action committees (PACs), such as the Education First Alliance in North Carolina (which offers “bootcamps” to train parents in how to fight against CRT), to raise the hackles of the Republican faithful and generate the energy needed to take back the House and Senate in 2022.
In my adopted home town of the Tri-Cities (population 244,000), in semi-arid, largely-conservative eastern Washington, the local paper, the Tri-City Herald, was so struck by the outpouring of grief and rage over the assault on their children by socialists wielding critical race theory that the Editorial Board felt compelled to publish an editorial in June stating that, “Contrary to a surge of misinformation online, there is no new law requiring Washington state public schools to adopt the controversial “critical race theory” curriculum.” According to the Board, parents in the Tri-Cities had already raised the issue to school boards, and the Herald had received letters to the editor expressing concern.
In the coming November 2nd local election Anti-CRT forces have chosen their leaders and they are running for city council and school board positions and their rallying cry is no masks, no mandates, no CRT, and no sex education [and by the way, no new taxes].
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“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.”
Christopher Rufo
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