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
It’s true: I made a mistake. On Twitter dot com! So I issued a correction. The point Wokal is taking me to task for here is arguably the most inconsequential thing in the entire thread. Great place to start! 🧵
What Rufo wrote is a blatant falsehood. It amounts to “Commie Crenshaw says White bougie Black prole lulz.”
What Crenshaw claims in the excerpt is simple: both CRT and Marxism begin by appealing to a social ontology which is obscured by that society’s dominant self-conception.
This interview of Rufo from @JoyAnnReid was an endlessly entertaining, exemplary piece of counter-disinformation. The Right is brilliant at one thing: baiting the Left into accepting their framing and vocabulary 🧵
First, Reid exposes Rufo's distortion of Kendi & of "whiteness."
To anticipate a fair objection: It is true that CRT has become influential outside of law schools and exists now in depts of Sociology, Education, and Philosophy.
But even if we allow Robin DiAngelo to count as CRT, then what? Do we denounce History bc Holocaust deniers exist?
Reid asks: Where did the term "whiteness" come from?
Rufo doesn't acknowledge that the racial sense of the term was invented by white supremacists. In fact he doesn't really answer her question at all, instead tries to make it about the Cupertino story he lied to the world about
If you've seen Chris Rufo on your timeline over the past 24 hours, odds are you witnessed him proclaim a triumphant victory over the Washington Post, which he and several fellow anti-woke propagandists denounced as dishonest.
Buckle up folks, this is going to be a long one. 🧵
Many joined in on the dunk session. And note the tone here: these aren't quasi-neutral accusations of simple mistakes -- not even close. They're "major errors" or LIES from journalists who HATE Rufo.
Today, both Federalist & Post Millennial championed Rufo's heroic "exposé"
Here is how Rufo starts his debunking. Note the very serious-sounding, empty, bureaucratic diction: "the fabrication of a timeline" and "multiple smears that are easily proven by documentary evidence."