Chris Rufo’s dangerous fictions

“This summer, Rufo published a book outlining the worldview behind his crusade. The book, titled America’s Cultural Revolution, argues that America has been quietly taken over by the ideological heirs of 1960s radicals. Ideas formulated by Marxist revolutionaries and Black nationalists, disguised in benign-sounding language like “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), have completed a “long march” through America’s major institutions — starting from universities and emanating outward to government and corporate life. The book’s subtitle, “How the Radical Left Conquered Everything,” illustrates the sheer scope of the argument.
But the more I examined Rufo’s work, the weaker it started to look. His worldview is built on a foundation of exaggerations and misrepresentations — distortions that make it difficult to trust even his basic factual assertions, let alone his big-picture analysis of American society.

Rufo claims that the American system as we know it has been overthrown, subtly and quietly replaced by “a new ideological regime that is inspired by … critical theories and administered through the capture of the bureaucracy.” Rufo’s “counterrevolution” is aimed at reversing this process; taking America back, starting with Florida’s universities.”

“His documentation of the far left’s follies and violent excesses can be damning.

But many of his assertions, like the claim of secret regime change in America, are far less defensible. When pressed in an interview to defend some of his most extreme positions, Rufo ultimately claimed to be writing in “a kind of artful and kind of narrative manner” that does not always admit of literal interpretation. The retreat was necessary given the glaring lack of real-world policy evidence for what he had written and said.

The seemingly credible evidence Rufo presents of radical influence — the mainstreaming of once-radical concepts like “structural racism,” for example — thus ends up undermining his case. When radical language goes mainstream without accompanying radical shifts in policy, that’s not actually evidence of a radical takeover. If anything, it looks like a win for the liberal mainstream, which seemingly has coopted radical ideas and redirected them toward more moderate ends.”

“It follows, then, that Rufo’s “counterrevolution” is not countering much of anything. His war on American institutions is not a defensive action against an ascendant post-Marxist left; it is instead an act of aggression against the liberal ideals he occasionally claims to be defending.”

“It’s certainly true that once-radical notions, like seeing racism as a core part of American national identity, have become more popular on the left in recent years. But this does not mean American democracy has been quietly overthrown and replaced with rule by DEI departments.

Rufo cites, as evidence of the influence of “critical theory” across America, diversity trainings at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon that used the term “white privilege” and similar concepts in their documents. This, he argues, is proof that “even federal defense contractors have submitted to the new ideology.”

But the notion that American arms manufacturers have been taken over by radicals is ridiculous. Lockheed Martin builds weapons to maintain the American war machine. It is not owned or controlled in any way by sincere believers in the Third Worldist anti-imperialism of the 1960s radicals; it is using the now-popular terms those radicals once embraced to burnish its own image.

Rufo is getting the direction of influence backward. Radicals are not taking over Lockheed Martin; Lockheed Martin is co-opting radicalism.”

“the main pieces of data once used as evidence of the ascent of far-left radicalism — things like cancellations of conservative speeches on college campuses — show a decline from previous highs. These numbers, which were quite low even at their peak, simply do not support the idea that the country’s major institutions are succumbing to Herbert Marcuse thought (even in an attenuated form).

There are counterexamples: Rufo makes much of the “defund the police” movement, as well as 2020-era policy victories by radicals in cities like Seattle and Portland. But Joe Biden, a man who wrote the 1994 Crime Bill and campaigned in the 2022 midterms using “fund the police” as a slogan, is president. The most common criminal justice reforms after George Floyd’s murder weren’t police abolition, but rather chokehold bans and personnel reforms. Even in West Coast cities, mayors and city councilors are backing away from police defunding.

Liberalism, in short, has made “structural racism” safe for Lockheed Martin. Whether you like that depends on your politics. But it is not evidence of a radical regime change in America.”

“n a series of 2021 tweets, for example, Rufo framed his writing about “critical race theory” as a form of political marketing.

“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” he wrote. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

What he’s describing isn’t a journalistic approach to “critical race theory.” It’s the mindset of a dishonest political attack dog, one that seemed to validate criticisms that he had played fast and loose with evidence. Rufo’s involvement with Trump and DeSantis further suggested he was less of a serious interlocutor than an operative.”

“Exaggerations weren’t just a problem with the book’s big-picture premise. The more I fact-checked what he said, the clearer the pattern of exaggeration and factual missteps became.”

“Rufo has practiced what he preached at the New College of Florida, where he has used his appointment to the board to fire the university president, eliminate the DEI office, and abolish gender studies. Now over one-third of all faculty positions are vacant, decimating the university’s course offerings in the fall semester. While enrollment is up, an investigation by the USA Today Network found that average SAT scores, ACT scores, and GPAs were all down. Some students were told to live at an airport hotel.

When I asked Rufo about the chaos, he compared his approach to remodeling a kitchen: “You do the demo and then you do the build.”

It’s a metaphor that only makes sense if you believe that the existing university is so broken that it can’t be saved in its current form.”

“Both Rufo’s operation in Florida and his broader “counter-revolution” can only be defended if the system is so captured by the radical left that the only solution is to burn the entire thing to the ground and start over. Otherwise, you’re attacking the same American institutions you claim to be defending.

This, ultimately, is why Rufo must exaggerate the influence of the radical left. The only way to reconcile the yawning gap between his restorationist rhetoric and burn-it-all-down activism is to claim that America faces an unprecedented threat — a “cultural revolution” organized by the intellectual heirs of literal Maoists.”

https://www.vox.com/23811277/christopher-rufo-culture-wars-ron-desantis-florida-critical-race-theory-anti-wokeness

The conservative push for “school choice” has had its most successful year ever

“It started with West Virginia in 2021 and Arizona in 2022, and then continued with a flood this year — Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana. More may follow.”

“The reform sweeping red America is slightly different from a voucher — it’s called an education savings account, or an ESA. In a voucher system, public funds go directly to schools. With ESAs, parents who opt out of the public school system get several thousand dollars in an account that they can use for private school tuition, homeschooling, or other education-related expenses.”

“Critics of these changes argue they amount to a wealth transfer to families with kids in private schools, and they fear it will result in the weakening or even the eventual privatization of public school systems. They also voice concern over the separation of church and state, since many ESA funds will go toward sending children to religious education.
For many supporters, those are features, not bugs. They characterize the new ESA laws as letting parents take “their money” — the dollars that would have been used to educate their kids — out of public schools they have no interest in using. They call this “funding students instead of systems.” Their critics say it’s the destruction of the common good.”

““In the short term, mostly it’s just going to be a funding giveaway to families that were already sending their kids to private schools,” said Douglas Harris, an economist at Tulane University who studies education policy. “In the long run, there’s potentially a much bigger story here.””

“What is the money producing? Again, the answer is unclear. The Goldwater Institute bragged in 2022 that Arizona’s ESA bill “does not have any testing requirements.” (Iowa legislators, in contrast, did include some.)

Critics fear state money will go to low-quality private schools that don’t actually educate children well — and that, without transparent testing requirements, we’ll never find that out for sure. “These policies being passed now are almost being evidence-proofed,” said Polikoff. “You won’t be able to say, ‘This isn’t working, we need to do something different,’ because there won’t be the data. The data will just be, ‘Look at all these people who’ve enrolled their kids.’””

“Arizona’s superintendent Tom Horne has said he would push to close some public schools if enrollment dropped, which is just what rural school voucher skeptics long feared.”

“Private schools have wide latitude to discriminate in admissions (though it’s illegal to do so based on race) — can it truly be called “universal school choice” if children can’t get into the school they want?”

https://www.vox.com/politics/23689496/school-choice-education-savings-accounts-american-federation-children

Don’t Let the Government-Shutdown Charade Distract You From the Debt Crisis

“While controlling discretionary spending is important for fiscal responsibility, for reducing government waste, and for negotiating the proper size and scope of federal activities, the current shutdown debate is largely symbolic. America’s biggest fiscal challenge lies in the unchecked growth of federal health care and old-age entitlement programs. Repeated shutdown fights and a slew of temporary continuing resolutions have gotten us no closer to reforming Social Security and Medicare.”

“The longer Washington waits to fix autopilot spending, the more damage they’ll do. The Congressional Budget Office’s latest long-term budget outlook projects that U.S government spending will consume nearly 30 percent of the economy by 2053—almost 40 percent higher than the historical average. Congress is expected to rack up more than $100 trillion in additional deficits over those 30 years—more than four times what the U.S. government has borrowed over its entire history. Who will lend the U.S. government such vast sums?
The main drivers of this increase are heightened interest costs and the growth in health care and Social Security spending. With Medicare and Social Security responsible for 95 percent of long-term unfunded obligations, according to the Treasury Financial Report, there’s simply no way any serious fiscal reform effort can leave these programs untouched. Every other part of the budget will either stay steady or decline slightly. Other so-called mandatory programs, including various welfare programs, retirement benefits for federal employees, and some veterans’ benefits, are projected to decline as a share of the economy. Discretionary spending depends on what Congress decides to spend each year; if historical trends hold, this part of the budget will decline by one-sixth. And yet this is the part of the budget that all this shutdown fuss is about.”

https://reason.com/2023/09/14/dont-let-the-government-shutdown-charade-distract-you-from-the-debt-crisis/

How cars ruin wild animals’ lives

“The lives of wild animals are defined by mobility. You have all of these different scales, both spatial and temporal, in which animals are moving. They’re moving daily, as they roam around their territories looking for food. They’re moving seasonally, as they migrate between different habitats as the year turns. They have to move, in some cases, once in a lifetime, to disperse through new territory, or in search of a mate.
All of those movements are absolutely imperative to the survival of both individual animals and wildlife populations. Roads terminate or truncate those movements, by killing animals directly, as roadkill, but also by creating a barrier of traffic, what some researchers call a “moving fence” — this kind of impenetrable obstacle that prevents animals from navigating their habitats. To take a really dramatic, stark example, there are herds of mule deer and pronghorn in Wyoming that starve en masse while trying to reach low-elevation valleys to find food in winter because highways have blocked their migrations.”

“One of the really eye-opening experiences that I had working on this book was taking part in some bicycle surveys of roadkill in Montana. When you’re rolling along at 10 miles an hour and you’re much lower to the ground, rather than seated in the captain’s chair of an SUV, you see all of those small lives that you would never see at highway speeds in a car. I was struck by how many birds we saw: raptors, magpies, ravens, songbirds. The avian life along the side of the highway was really, really visible.”

“Hearing is one of the most important senses that wild animals have. It’s absolutely imperative for both predators and prey.”

“Wildlife crossings are incredibly effective, paired with roadside fencing that guides the animals to the crossings.”

“For the most part, the wildlife crossings that we’ve built are aimed at large, common animals that endanger driver safety, like deer and elk and moose: the animals that will wreck your car and maybe end your life if you hit them. We need more of those. But we also need more crossings that benefit the animals that don’t kill drivers on a regular basis, especially reptiles and amphibians, which are some of the most road- and car-endangered groups of animals in the world.

There are turtle culverts and toad tunnels out there, but they’re few and far between. There’s a lot of focus on wildlife crossings that pay for themselves, that prevent enough car crashes to recoup their own construction costs. But I think we’re also starting to see the rise of wildlife crossings that are aimed at conservation, rather than cost savings.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23868483/cars-roads-roadkill-crossing-goldfarb-national-parks

The unconstitutional plan to stop women from traveling out of state for an abortion, explained

“a few jurisdictions in Texas are now breaking with this consensus. As the Washington Post reports, two Texas counties and two Texas cities have passed local ordinances making it illegal to transport someone through one of these counties or cities for the purpose of obtaining an out-of-state abortion.
Notably, this list of anti-abortion localities includes Mitchell County, Texas, a sparse community of about 9,000 people. This matters because Interstate 20, the route that many people traveling from Dallas to New Mexico to receive an abortion will take, passes through Mitchell County. Several other counties with major highways or airports are also considering similar laws.

These ordinances and proposed ordinances largely track model legislation, which anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson shared on Twitter, that is itself modeled after SB 8 — the statewide anti-abortion law that allows private bounty hunters to sue abortion providers and collect bounties of $10,000 or more.

In fairness, Dickson’s model legislation does prohibit such bounty hunter suits from being filed against “the pregnant woman who seeks to abort her unborn child.” But the legislation would potentially allow abortion funds that help pay for abortion care, or anyone who drives a pregnant patient to an out-of-state abortion clinic, to be sued.

Ordinarily, Kavanaugh’s preemptive rejection of travel bans would be a clear sign that these laws will not survive judicial review. But, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021), the Supreme Court effectively shut down federal lawsuits challenging unconstitutional laws that are enforced solely by bounty hunters. And Kavanaugh joined the Court’s decision in Jackson.

The upshot is that these unconstitutional Texas ordinances may succeed, not because they are lawful but because the Supreme Court has largely immunized them from constitutional review.”

https://www.vox.com/23868962/texas-abortion-travel-ban-unconstitutional

Is the future of energy … pouring water on hot rocks in the ground?

“If the economics can be made to work, geothermal would provide a renewable energy source that’s always on, and that employs plenty of ex-oil and gas workers, to boot. That has been its promise for decades. Maybe the 2020s will end up being the time that promise is finally fulfilled.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23825844/geothermal-enhanced-fervo-demonstration-superhot

Climate disasters will happen everywhere, anytime

“This summer has seen a rising number of “compound events,” disasters occurring simultaneously or hitting one after another, according to climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. In some cases, one event might accelerate another. A heat wave, drought, and wildfire can conceivably all hit the same area, for example, and even raise the risks of flooding if a storm finally comes, because the ground is too parched to absorb the influx of water.
And there may be worse to come. Disaster season — or at least, what we’ve historically thought of as disaster season — is hardly over yet. Summer and fall are typically prime times for extremes, but this year we also have El Niño, the natural cycle when Pacific waters reach higher-than-average temperatures, which is just starting to ramp up. This is why meteorologists expect an extraordinary fall to follow the unprecedented summer, likely filled with active hurricanes and warmer weather through the winter.

With El Niño amplifying the effects of climate change, what we can expect from seasons is rapidly changing. Instead of a singular type of disaster any given region must prepare for, but places all over the world can expect multiple events at once. That means our traditional idea of disaster season no longer holds. What we now have is an extended practically year-round calendar of disasters, which often all hit at once.”

https://www.vox.com/climate/23870591/fall-climate-el-nino-hurricane-wildfires