Rufo’s latest piece, an op-ed in the WSJ. It’s largely a mashup of many talking points he espoused on his own website and in City Journal.
The feature that stands out: the piece cites no evidence; there is but one broken hyperlink referencing the NYT. 🧵wsj.com/articles/battl…
Rufo outlines the shape his argument will take: he will argue that CRT is not a benign academic concept, that the anti-CRT crowd are not a buncha white nationalists, and that anti-CRT bills aren’t about teaching history.
Ah yes, CRT is a “radical ideology that seeks to use race as a means of moral, social and political revolution. You may read this charitably and think CRT sounds a lot like the civil rights movement. But WSJ subscribers probably just think [[COMMIE ALERT]]
Once again Kendi has not done us any favors with that piece, which was silly and obviously catnip for the Right.
But invoking W. F. Tate IV was a new one I hadn’t seen Rufo use. Note Rufo replaces CLAIMS to X, Y, Z w/ “constitutional principles of freedom and equality”
Rufo’s just missing the point here. Liberal media outlets don’t think every parent in Loudoun was just waiting for a chance to unleash their inner racist at a school board meeting.
The point is that the right’s framing of “CRT in schools” is race-baiting demagoguery a la JBS.
And here Rufo is doing what he does best: LYING.
Receipts, Rufo.
Reminds me of the time he couldn’t go 5 minutes on @JoyAnnReid’s show without contradicting himself
Of course the issue isn’t going away, Chris, because then your salary would, too.
Highly recommend reading through @JeffreyASachs’ whole thread. His essays in @ArcDigi breaking down the awful legislative proposals in which the CRT moral panic has culminated are all fantastic. Essential reading for our times
This is a thread on the 2022 right-wing documentary UNCLE TOM II, a film based entirely on the worldview and source material of the John Birch Society.
It has been promoted by Charlie Kirk & Jack Posobiec as proof that MLK & the civil rights movement were secretly Communist. 🧵
1. Leading up to MLK Day this year, Kirk & Posobiec decided they were going to abandon the standard Republican ritual (quoting King out of context, depicting the civil rights hero as a colorblind conservative).
Instead, they wanted to vilify MLK and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
2. On the eve of MLK Day, Posobiec was promoting UNCLE TOM II and its narrator Chad O. Jackson as authoritative sources on King's connections to "Communists."
Kirk had already promoted UNCLE TOM II on Real America's Voice in 2022 after the film was released.
Because everyone is talking about Ibram Kendi: it is so deeply upsetting to me that when reading groups and book lists were popping up after George Floyd was murdered it was always the work of people like Kendi & DiAngelo. Imagine if everybody read Charles Mills instead 🥲
Robin DiAngelo made a shit ton of money telling other white people that white people are basically incurably racist and Ibram Kendi made a shit ton of money basically claiming to be the sole arbiter of what racism truly is and refused to acknowledge any critiques of his views
I get a bit more detailed with my critiques here, but I ultimately do have a lot more to say, been wanting to write something about this and maybe I will soon (if any media sites/mags are interested, DM me!)
Chris Rufo took a break from suing college students for "political violence" (read: getting spit on his shoes) to argue that conservatives should turn to Nixon "as our guide" in mobilizing a "counterrevolution" against things like CRT and DEI.
A quick thread on Nixon & Rufo 🧵
It is interesting that Rufo venerates Nixon, because Rufo likes to talk about how he is deeply opposed to racism, often pointing to the fact that he is in an interracial marriage and has biracial children.
Nixon was deeply racist. Ex 1: Nixon & Reagan discuss African diplomats
Being charitable, you might think that the Reagan phone call is not enough to call Nixon racist.
Ex 2: Nixon explains that, while he is against abortion in some cases, he thinks it is necessary to prevent the birth of interracial ("a black and a white") children.
The YouTube channel for Larry Elder’s documentary films uploaded the John Birch Society propaganda film ANARCHY USA, which claims the civil rights movement “is simply part of a worldwide movement, organized and directed by Communists, to enslave all mankind”
A thread, w/ clips🧵
ANARCHY USA was written & directed in 1966 by JBS member G. Edward Griffin, a prolific propagandist & first-rate quack. Griffin believes that HIV “doesn’t even exist” & that cancer is a dietary deficiency that can be cured with “an essential food compound” mediamatters.org/glenn-beck/who…
This upload of ANARCHY USA has become one of the most popular videos on the Uncle Tom YouTube channel. It has been viewed over 200k times in just eight months, whereas the film has been viewed fewer than 40k times in seven years on the official John Birch Society YouTube channel.
"Cultural Marxism" has entered mainstream political discourse, appearing in recent speeches by DeSantis and Hawley, Fox News broadcasts, and right-wing media from Breitbart to Ben Shapiro.
This is a thread, with clips, on the 25-year history of "Cultural Marxism" on the Right 🧵
1. We begin with the arch-conservative activist and TV host, Bill Lind.
He began his 1998 talk "The Origins of Political Correctness" by saying college campuses have become so authoritarian that he'd be put "literally on trial" for joking about women and shopping carts
2. Lind says political correctness is seen as something to laugh at, but in fact "it's deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead... the disease of ideology."