Christopher Rufo

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

How Christopher Rufo is changing American education

As fire-breathing counter-revolutionaries go, Christopher Rufo seems notably mild-mannered. Perhaps it’s his northern California roots and Pacific Northwest home that keep him from embracing the based lifestyle pursued by so many conservatives in the Trumpian era. He doesn’t like sports. He doesn’t enjoy UFC. He allows his four kids to watch Disney movies and admits he was once a vegetarian. Yet it’s also possible that the Georgetown-educated PBS documentarian turned right-wing iconoclast is effective precisely for that reason: he knows the people he is criticizing.

Rufo

Tuesday

Cockburn

The New York Times guide to ignoring Kamala’s plagiarism

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo found five instances of plagiarism in Kamala Harris’s book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, he revealed in a Substack article Monday. Harris, or her ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton, lifted five passages almost word-for-word from an NBC News, Urban Institute and Bureau of Justice Assistance report, as well as a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release and, most embarrassingly, Wikipedia. The book, though some of the wording is changed slightly, cites none of these sources. “Taken in total, there is certainly a breach of standards here,” Rufo writes.

kamala harris plagiarism

Wednesday

David J. Garrow

Christopher Rufo’s new book is impressively erudite

When a new book by an author often characterized as a conservative polemicist earns a rave review in the staid Economist, independent thinkers take notice. Christopher Rufo’s articles on recent US radicalism for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal have long attracted wide attention, and now America’s Cultural Revolution has been praised as “meticulous” and “cerebral” as well as “persuasive and well-written.” All true, for Rufo’s book is impressively erudite, reflecting a breadth and depth of familiarity with influential leftist writings that will shame any number of “woke” academics.

rufo

Friday

Grace Curley

When they smear you as a conspiracy theorist, you’re onto something

Here’s how to tell when Republican politicians or journalists or activists are making headway: left-liberal media networks start accusing them of being — wait for it — conspiracy theorists. In recent days, for instance, NBC’s Ben Collins and Joy Reid claimed that the grassroots parent uprising over critical race theory in schools was being driven by QAnon. Or remember last February when Sen. Tom Cotton raised questions about the origins of the coronavirus? The New York Times headline read, ‘Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins’. In May, when Sen.

conspiracy

Tuesday

Ben Sixsmith

Right-wingers should stop concern-trolling the left

When YouTube banned the account of progressive advocacy group Right Wing Watch, you could hear the clink of champagne glasses among conservatives and reactionaries. ‘Epic backfire,’ scoffed the right-wing YouTuber TheQuartering. ‘Hahahahahahahahahaha!’, typed the noted documentarian Dinesh D’Souza, ‘isn’t it fun when you get a dose of your own suppository?’ ‘Congratulations once again to all the liberals and leftists — led by their journalists,’ wrote Glenn Greenwald, in more measured tones, ‘who urged censorship of political speech by Silicon Valley monopolists based in the belief that it would only be used to silence your adversaries and enemies but never your allies.’ In the time it took to fix a cheese sandwich, the Right Wing Watch account was restored.

right wingers

Sunday

Peter Wood

Meet the CRT burghers

I knew that critical race theory was spreading rapidly through America’s institutions, including not just schools and corporations, but also the military. But I was still taken aback when the burger at my favorite tavern arrived branded (literally) as a CRT special. It was, fortunately, mere coincidence. The Clear River Tavern in Pittsfield, Vermont was not after all making a political statement. But almost everyone else is.

crt critical race theory burghers