You all remember Christopher Rufo, don't you? He's a right-wing activist who made his bones as an opponent of Critical Race Theory, DEI, wokeness, systemic racism, LGBT "grooming," and, in general, liberalism's "long march" to take over America's most powerful institutions. Just recently he was largely responsible for getting Christine Gay to step down as president of Harvard. About CRT he said, "The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’"
In other words, he's no shrinking violet. He wants the right to gain power and he's not shy about how it gets done. But apparently Twitter has become too much even for him:
Allie Beth Stuckey: There is no way to explain to a normal person what’s happening on conservative Twitter right now.
Rufo: It's getting insane. We have a problem on the Right. The economics of online discourse are increasingly at odds with forming and mobilizing a successful political movement.
Questioner: I think I know what you're getting at, but it would be nice if you could expand on this a little and maybe be more specific, although I can see why you might not want to do that.
Rufo: Kanye-style antisemitism, right-wing identitarianism, online grifting, extreme conspiratorialism, etc. None of these are right on the merits and they are a threat to a functional, popular conservative movement.
As always, I'd caution that Twitter is not a reflection of the real world. It's a reflection of the loudest and most extreme parts of the real world. Still, there's extensive evidence that right-wing Twitter did indeed become a whole lot more vicious after Elon Musk bought it:
I guess it's nice to see a conservative with impeccable credentials take on the pit of madness that right-wing social media has become. I just wish he could be a little more public about it.
"Impeccable credentials" is a curious phrase, because Rufo is basically a brownshirt. He's lately been more competent and focused and I think his complaint here is that he doesn't like being tied to the crazier, more flamboyant people on his side because they're distracting from keeping the anti-DEI trains running on time. This isn't a case of someone basically respectable voicing a complaint about the crazies, this is a high-functioning Nazi being mad that the low-functioning Nazis are getting in his way.
In other words, you do not "gotta hand it to him".
This. 💯
Agreed. He invented the whole CRT issue knowing quite well the whole thing was a sham. He even wrote about his nefarious plans.
It's not a sham. He's just guilty of popularizing a misnomer. The wokeness in schools, government, and the public sector is real and there is real animosity against it. Rufo just incorrectly labels it all "CRT". Having a common name for it all makes it easier to market and communicate.
It is a sham and you're a gullible rube.
How so?
Came here to say the very same thing. "regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
Rufo caused what he's complaining of. He is everything he is complaining of.
In this case X is a reflection of the real world.
The MAGA right in the house and in general is EXTREMELY FUCKING ONLINE. They "govern" to boost their profiles and rake in cash that way. This extends to lower offices in the states sometimes too. So to extent that online right degenerates it absolutely bleeds over into the real world.
wapo: NBC reverses decision to hire Ronna McDaniel after on-air backlash
Rufo is just upset that his revanchist vanguard is too weird for normies, so they're getting creamed in fair elections.
I would suggest making common cause with trolls like him about anything is a mistake. Scorpions and frogs, and all that.
Rufo is a two-bit Robespierre who helped release the leopards, and now he’s complaining that they aren’t eating the right people’s faces. That fetid garbage pile of humanity gets no sympathy from me.
I don't have a huge problem with any of this:
"He's a right-wing activist who made his bones as an opponent of Critical Race Theory, DEI, wokeness, systemic racism, LGBT 'grooming,' and, in general, liberalism's 'long march' to take over America's most powerful institutions. Just recently he was largely responsible for getting [Claudine] Gay to step down as president of Harvard."
But I do have a big problem with this aspect of Rufo's approach:
"He wants the right to gain power and he's not shy about how it gets done."
Wokeness is a very real and very dangerous phenomenon. If you can't accept that fact, then you're not really a part of modern discourse. Instead, you must be inside some kind of epistemically sealed panic room.
And, seeing as how the Far Left has proven itself to be such a genuine threat to our open society, I have no problem with Liberal (Lukianoff, Chait, McWhorter) or Conservative (Brooks) opponents of Wokeness: more power to them.
But I certainly do have a problem with activists who try to use the far Left's own methods of hysterical suppression against it. We will not put out a bonfire by pouring gasoline on it. And Rufo is clearly one of the more prominent examples of this type of counter-productive anti-Woke activist.
The DEI cult silences dissent and curtails free speech in the spheres of activity (academia, media, publishing, entertainment) that it controls. And Rufo unwisely and openly gloats about utilizing legislation to silence their free speech in return. That is not a constructive approach.
Wokeness needs to be countered with viewpoint diversity. DEI must be subjected to open inquiry. But Rufo promotes none of that. He wants to utilize power to squash his ideological enemies like bugs. What we actually need is persuasion to open recalcitrant hearts and minds.
Rufo is essentially the Far Right mirror image of everything he opposes on the Far Left. And, honestly, he really doesn't even seem smart enough to realize it.
You're an idiot.
+1
Define "wokeness."
Never mind. I'll let Ryan Newman, general counsel for Florida State Governor Ron DeSantis, do it for us:
Woke is "The belief that there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."
Ref: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/05/desantis-florida-woke-critical-race-theory/
Do you disbelieve that there are systemic injustices in American society? If yes, then my guess is you don't understand why America would need a justice system. Or are you against addressing systemic injustices? If yes, then my guess is you're one of the beneficiaries of systemic injustices.
@ Jim Carey:
Good Question.
Wokeness is at heart a loss of proportionality. As such, it is a direct threat to the rule of law, the United States Bill of Rights, and to any hope of a harmonious (let alone a just) society.
People commit injustices. The proportional response is to assume that they are innocent until proven guilty, collect evidence, and, if such action is warranted, give them a fair trial. The Woke response is to treat allegations as equivalent to a guilty verdict. To the Woke, we are all guilty until proven innocent.
People sometimes say or do things that others find offensive. The proportional response is to look at all sides of a given controversy in light of our rights to free expression. The Woke response is to instantly fire, silence, or in some way de-platform the supposed transgressor.
Societies are complex structures that often (if not always) contain serious flaws. The proportional response is to carefully evaluate historical and present harms and craft solutions that help to fix the issues in question without creating even worse problems. The Woke response is to demand a drastic, immediate, and almost certainly a counter-productive reordering of society.
And the only way this loss of proportionality is possible is through extremism. The Woke do not see their worldview as one among many, they see it as revealed truth. They are not intellectually resilient, they are ideologically rigid. They reject any sort of complexity that might thwart their unquestioned dogma and instead embrace reductive fundamentalism. That is Wokeness.
Okay, let's go with that definition. By that definition, woke is bad, and the Republican Party is infused with wokeness. My advice, vote Democrat.
@Jim Carey:
One of the genuinely fraught aspects of our current situation is that both the Right and Left are significantly impacted by their own forms of extremism. If it's MAGA vs Woke, there aren't really any good options.
Just about the only reason I am still willing to vote for Biden is that I do not believe that he is personally Woke. Nevertheless, he is at least in part a disappointment for his failure to sufficiently acknowledge or explicitly stand up to the Wokeness infecting the Left.
More than just seeing him stand against Right Wing zealotry, I'd like to see him stand for the principles of an open society. And that would mean calling out influential factions on both the Right and the Left.
Immaturity is inevitable. Immature people in positions of power is not inevitable.
The solution to the immaturity problem is to put mature people in positions of power. President Biden is mature, not a magician.
The current collective maturity of the Republican Party wouldn't get a passing grade in my classroom if I was a fifth grade teacher.
"Just about the only reason I am still willing to vote for Biden is that I do not believe that he is personally Woke"
He grabbed his employee by her pussy so how woke can he be?
Gee, and I thought it was basically "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" along with "teach people about history and modern society as they are not as you would like them to be".
It's basically "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" along with "teach people about history and modern society as they are not as you would like them to be".
@NotCynicalEnough:
You are not cynical enough.
To cloak the Woke movement in nothing but good intentions is to engage in gaslighting.
No one who gets someone fired for expressing an opinion deemed insufficiently ideological is doing unto others as they would like to be done unto themselves.
No one who joins a mob to chase an invited speaker off campus is doing unto others as they would expect anyone to do unto them.
And no one who insists that only their secular religion is allowed at their job, school, or community is doing unto others as anyone has ever wanted done unto their own kind.
Perhaps you're trying to be clever. Good try. But you are, in my opinion, taking a serious risk of racing right over the edge of a dogmatic cliff with a flock of Leftist lemmings.
Perhaps you should stop being a bigot.
Because that's what you are, every time you say you're against 'wokeness'. You are literally saying you're pro-bigotry.
The loss of proportionality is all yours.
@Crissa:
You are essentially making a religious assertion. You are condemning a heretic (otherwise known as an independent thinker). We might as well be in the Middle Ages.
+1
That is not right. The problem with wokeness is not their policy preferences, it's the refusal to debate and the total lack of tolerance for dissent. A healthy democracy requires respectful debate about ideas that people can disagree on. The woke won't take no for an answer when they fail to persuade. Their bad behavior makes the whole left look bad because they are the noisiest group on the left even though they are not the majority of the left.
You're confusing injustice with crime. Injustice exists, or develops; it isn't "committed". The "proportional response" is to root it out wherever it is found. In an institutional setting, this is done by systematically identifying injustice and its causes, and removing the latter. Right-wingers have reduced such programs to the acronym "DEI" so they can vilify them, just as they did with CRT.
Why are they so intent on these iniatives they misrepresent them? Because they APPROVE OF injustice. They APPROVE OF systemic racism. They regard them as essential to the functioning of an orderly hierarchical society, which it is the responsibility of conservatives to preserve.
You don't know what you're talking about. Or rather, what you're talking about would make perfect sense if it was about anything actually happening in the real world, instead of things only happening in your head/right-wing propaganda.
Mr. Carey is using the DeSantis definition of "woke." The word has been used by the afroAmerican community for a hunnert years to mean "Be alert to your surroundings because you never know when some white cop (for instance) is going to make your life miserable for no good reason." I paraphrase, of course. DeSantis retasked the word to use as a perjorative against left-of-center young white people the same way Rush Limpdick retasked the word "liberal."
@ gs:
I think you may be making a good point.
My own definition of Woke derives not from whatever the term originally meant but, rather, what the movement has obviously become.
Lol, the classic 'but i have black friends' CYA that never really works like the crusader thought it would.
Leos crusade against the wokes has a lot of echoes in the past. Hes not against black, err I mean, woke people per se, but just the black, no woke!, culture that currently threatens our safety, culture and sensibilities. But hes no extremist, he has a woke friend!
@ jdubs:
Straw men do not get stuffed any more full of straw than in your response. Try engaging with what people actually say.
"what the movement has obviously become."
Only in your empty head.
My point is that we should have a justice system, and it should always be used to restore justice, and never used to enable injustice.
"Woke" is the new "communist." It's just an epithet the racist right uses to attack things they don't like.
"Do you disbelieve that there are systemic injustices in American society?"
No
Maybe you'd enjoy some Mississippi policemen coming over to your house to explain it to you.
Wow the Glenn Youngkins of the world must really make you mad.
The written equivalent of a Gish Gallop.
Yep. Always has been. And its inevitable he would be so, because in this day and age you can't gain any attention without being so. So he's trapped.
You should seek help
If Twitter becomes "too much" just use the Following feed only. I never see the garbage, and if someone starts to complain too much about the garbage I stop following them too. Social media is what you make of it. You don't have to follow the sheeple and read everything no matter how stupid.
Is "a conservative with impeccable credentials" supposed to be code for "ignorant, dishonest, and dangerous culture warrior who wants to 'lay siege' to much of what makes living in this country worthwhile, including our institutions of higher education, so he & his right-wing fundamentalist brethren can turn our democracy into an authoritarian hellhole like Hungary"?
If that's it, I see your point.
I think by "impeccable credentials" he means a right wing nut job true believer. In other words not a Cheney, Romney, or other rightwinger that thinks the crazies are running the asylum and thus easily dismissed as RINOs by the other crazies.
CLAUDINE Gay, as Leo1008 noted above.
If you go to bed with a group of racist antisemites as you do in some areas of Twitter you will likely become infected.
This is a problem for both the left and the right. The sane center left and the sane center right haven't gone away, but on every platform that's run by an algorithm, they're getting muted while the crazy extremes are getting amplified. That is not good for anyone except the extremists themselves. Until they manage to train the machines to promote sane political content and suppress the nutcases like the old MSM gatekeepers, or until the algorithm-driven platforms become less popular in favor of human-driven ones, I expect this business of the center getting marginalized in favor the extremes online will keep being a problem.
Why do your posts show up on Twitter at least 20 minutes, and probably a lot more, earlier than they show up here?
I note that Rufo only objects to "Kanye-style" anti-Semitism and "extreme" conspiracy narratives. Presumably common-or-garden anti-Semitism and conspiracy narratives that Republicans in general believe (such as the 'stolen election') are fine.
Yeah, it's the 'how' not the 'what' to him.
Qatari royal family member invests $50 million in Newsmax,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/03/26/qatar-newsmax-investment/
The "popular" conservative movement in the US has always relied on bigotry. It was largely religious until the Civil Rights era, and then Republicans discovered they could win votes with racism as Democrats abandoned it. Rufo presumably preferred the less-blatant era of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes when the messages were in dog-whistles. Trump and others have taken power from the likes of Rufo by being more explicit - though still not enough for the media to fully call them out on it. Rufo's problem is probably more this loss of control than any real moral objections to MAGA excesses. He doesn't have the visibility and popularity that Kanye has or that Trump somehow got.
Twitter has recently put the adjective 'cis' plus the proper noun 'elon' in the autoflagger 'for being a slur'.
It's nuts.
Christopher Rufo worked to promote skepticism about the biological process* we call evolution. He's an ignoramus.
* can we please stop calling it the THEORY of evolution? That term has validity within science but is misleading in the public domain.
Rufo set his flying monkeys loose on social media and niw they say the quiet part out loud too often.
"Just recently he was largely responsible for getting Christine Gay to step down as president of Harvard"
No, Gay's rampant plagiarism and lying about Harvard's policy towards speech was largely responsibly for her stepping down as president while she held on to her $900,000 a year job teaching political science.
roboto cant be bothered with facts, hes just here to repeat what hes told to think. Rufo approves of this kind of bot.
Keep the racism and bigotry under the covers and just repeat the talking points. Follow along, do as your told, keep the crazy under wraps and nobody has a problem.
Parrot says what
Shorter Rufo: “The economics of online discourse are increasingly at odds with forming and mobilizing a successful political movement. Why didn’t you stop me!?!”
"Kanye-style antisemitism, right-wing identitarianism, online grifting, extreme conspiratorialism, etc. "
That and Trump ARE today's GOP. You think all those GOP pols are leaving Congress because the private sector looks so good? In Michigan the state GOP looks like an amateur production of "Marat/Sade".
First off, Kanye-style antisemitism, right-wing identitarianism, online grifting, extreme conspiratorialism, etc. IS the core of the party, along with racism, sexism and general assholism. Second, I like that he specifies "Kanye-style" antisemitism is bad, not just antisemitism. Hating jews is cool with rufo if you do it the right way, i supposed.
+1 - Nobody at MAGA rallies gives a shit about Hayek or Von Mieses or even Reagan nowadays. They like their politics raw and Trump, like any good entertainer, gives the audience what they want.
A conservative movement can either be functional or popular, not both.
Judging by previous outcomes, one had thought that Rufo knew this perfectly well? Who walked on his grave?
Yep, exactly, which is why I no longer consider myself on the "Right". Because this is true.
'Scuse, Mr Drum, but it's "Xitter", not "Twitter." Beware the wrath of the Evil Musk!
There's no redeeming Rufo, he's a propagandist of the worst kind and order, still a stiff price to pay for him ginning up this critical theory nonsense, which is undermining our very fabric. Congratulations to him in that sense, and a warning he's not stepped up to the best yet.
Hmm, maybe he should talk to Elon about it and put in some speech monitors, right?
As soon as he gets back from China
I realize this crowd might not like to hear this, but the world isn't all extreme right vs. extreme left. It doesn't really help anyone's case to take cherry picked examples and turn them into general commentary. There are a lot of people like me who can't stomach a lot of the stuff the left is doing, but we're not on the right either.
What brings this to mind is that I listen to some conservative commentary on YouTube, but none of it is through any of the services that are listed in the chart. There are a lot of smart people who are willing to talk intelligently online about the topics that the left has put off limits, but many of us would like to discuss. Where else are we going to hear honest debates about CRT or trans or Israel or global warming or COVID? And if your reaction is that there isn't anything to discuss on those issues, think twice. There's always reason to have a conversation about anything that's important.
Many of these commentators self identify as conservatives, but I don't hear them saying any of the crazy stuff that the left throws out as straw men. I'm sure there are some conservatives who say the nutty stuff, but that isn't 50% of the country.
For me that's what's missing on the left. I was actively working with the Progressive left until around 2015 when I felt that they were getting off track. The left isn't even the left any more. it's become a social movement that is losing sight of all the other important issues that we face.
Can you be more specific, if not I think we can easily ignore your sentiments.
Those services cover ~99% of conservative discussion. That you can find some randos on Youtube doesn't change that.
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