Thread by @deonteleologist

At last, the meeting of minds we have all been waiting for: Jordan Peterson and Christopher Rufo. Arguably the country’s most ideologically influential conservatives at the moment.

I watched this whole episode, so here’s a short thread of some of the most revealing clips. 🧵

1. Rufo reveals something often overlooked: the moral panics about CRT and queer theory/“grooming” in schools—which he spearheaded through Fox News appearances and pseudojournalistic propaganda—began as a reaction to the summer of protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd.

Rufo often claims that he is simply reporting what is actually going on in federal government trainings and K-12 education. He is always lying about that. Here are just two examples, from a talk I gave last year.

2. Peterson gives some half-assed pushback against Rufo’s campaign to ban CRT—he makes sure to say that he is not claiming that Rufo has increased state governments’ power to censor ideas in education, which he unquestionably has done. Anyway, he says, “we’ll go back to that.”

3. Later, Peterson actually makes some very good points in response to Rufo’s insistence that America is the greatest nation on earth and that’s thanks to our free market system.

Rufo responds in the classic conservative style, by caricaturing Marxism.

4. Just an incredible Peterson moment: “I joke with my security people that half of the reason they’re there is to stop me from attacking other people, and I mean that. You know, it’s a joke, but it’s also not a joke.”

5. Why does the Left dislike Peterson and Rufo?

According to Rufo, it’s very simple: the Left “is trying to give advice to the working class that will end up destroying their lives,” whereas he & JBP “give advice to working class people that will make their lives better.”

6. At last, Peterson brings us back to his fears that Rufo is threatening academic freedom.

Rufo’s response: There is no such thing as academic freedom. If a red state has the votes to pass a law banning academics from studying racial inequality, they have the right to do so.

7. Rufo claims CRT and queer theory are conspiratorial plots by academics “in order to corrupt [and] achieve dominance over” American institutions. This is REVOLUTION.

He claims conservatives must counterrevolt by purging all American institutions of these unfavorable ideologies

At the end of that clip, he says: “The goal for conservatives should be to sever that connection between those ideologies and bureaucratic power. You can’t do that through mere persuasion…”

As he says in this screenshot, his approach is to “centralize ideological control”

8. Now, you might want Rufo to guarantee that he’s not a totalitarian fascist who is laying the groundwork for political persecution of people on the Left.

Rufo: “The only guarantee is that it’s an experiment that could be better than the status quo, and likely would be better.”