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Chris Rufo wrote “America’s Cultural Revolution” last year as a warning to conservatives about the radical Left‘s takeover of institutions—from business and government to education and entertainment. In addition to being an exposé, it also served as a call to action.
Now, a year later, Rufo is optimistic that Americans, including some to left of center politically, are “waking up.” He attributes the change to the gruesome and deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and the Left’s unflinching (and often antisemitic) criticism of Israel that followed.
“After 10/7, when those same people who were marching for [Black Lives Matter], who were pushing trans in schools, who were ramping up DEI, when they’re out there celebrating the terrorists who butchered, raped, and murdered innocent people, I think it caused this moment of horror, but also this moment of clarity,” Rufo told The Daily Signal.
The popular writer, filmmaker, and activist—whose work is available at ChristopherRufo.com—was in Washington, D.C., last week to accept The Heritage Foundation’s prestigious Salvatori Prize.
Listen to the interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast” or read an edited and abridged transcript below.
Rob Bluey: It’s almost a year since you published “America’s Cultural Revolution.” It was a call to action for Americans to wake up to what’s going on in the Marxist ideology that’s infused so many of the institutions in this country. Do you feel that people are heeding that call today?
Chris Rufo: I think so. You always want a greater number of people to heed the call.
The story that I told in the book was certainly revealed to be true at the time, but it took on a new dimension following the Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7 of last year. That has just accelerated this waking up that is happening in the United States, and in particular on the center-left. A lot of people who would say, “Oh, woke is so overblown, it’s not so bad. DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] is good. Maybe it’s not perfect, but maybe we can improve it.” But those were rationalizations.
Today is the day. My book "America's Cultural Revolution" goes into publication as the #1 bestseller on Amazon. I put my whole heart into writing this book, hoping to reshape the national narrative and create a path for a conservative counter-revolution.https://t.co/u0eGLgCaRL
— Christopher F. Rufo ?? (@realchrisrufo) July 18, 2023
And after 10/7, when those same people who were marching for BLM, who were pushing trans in schools, who were ramping up DEI, when they’re out there celebrating the terrorists who butchered, raped, and murdered innocent people, I think it caused this moment of horror, but also this moment of clarity, “Oh, all of that leads to this.”
I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re seeing a lot of shift right now, not just in public opinion, but in political alliances. You’re seeing a shift in financing people pulling back from giving money to universities, including the Ivy League universities.
Bluey: Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, says that he’s very optimistic that the American people will take back their country from the elites that have set us down this path.
Rufo: That’s the right attitude. That’s what I love about Kevin. Maybe it’s a Texas thing, a little Alamo spirit, but I share the same conviction.
And look, a lot of people on our side are down in the dumps. They’re demoralized, they’re feeling pessimistic. We all feel that at times, of course, but we have to also have some greater historical perspective and read the history of the founding, read the history of the Civil War, read the history of the Second World War, read the history of the ’60s and ’70s. We’ve been through much more difficult challenges in the past.
The question is, can we meet the standard of the past? That’s the real question. It’s a question of our own culture, our own spirit, our own character.
I certainly feel doubts about that sometimes. Even in the pre-revolutionary period, the Patriots of the American Revolution doubted themselves the whole time. Even in January of 1776, all of the smart opinion in the Colonies was that most Americans did not want revolution. Most Americans did not want to separate from Britain. Most Americans would refuse to participate.
History is full of surprises, and I hope that we’re fortunate again, as we’ve been so many times in our past.
Bluey: You recently hosted a conversation with some individuals who go by pseudonyms who have been doxxed by what you call the left-wing smear machine that is quite coordinated in some of its activities. But you also sounded somewhat hopeful that maybe things were changing in that regard.
Rufo: Absolutely, yes. There’s a whole range of reputational destruction mechanisms and some of them are formalized, like the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center], for example, which is kind of a sham organization that would try to put you on a list and refer you to law enforcement for protesting a school career. They’ve run out of actual true hate groups. So, they have now labeled everything a hate group. It’s absurd.
But then down to the doxxing. A lot of people online want to maintain pseudonyms. Again, America has a long tradition of pseudonyms. The Founders wrote under pseudonyms for many of their works. Thomas Paine wrote anonymously “Common Sense,” which is the kind of literary work that helps spark the revolution. And then, as now, unmasking people as a way to put them toward reputational destruction. There are even more personal tactics to intimidate you, harass you, whatever.
Counterrevolution #3: The Left-Wing Smear Machine by Christopher F. Rufo
Pseudonymity, doxing, and the dissident Right.
Read on SubstackTwo things are happening, though. Those tactics have lost their steam. Those tactics have lost their effectiveness. Conservatives are getting much tougher and much smarter and much more courageous and much more sophisticated and adept at responding to those reputational attacks. Our audience, our supporters, our people automatically discount them: “Oh, OK, another person on the so-and-so list.” “Oh, OK, another person gets a smear piece and the X, Y, and Z, The Guardian, whatever publication.”
It was so overused for a period that it lost its rhetorical force, and conservatives have successfully adapted.
It can still be damaging to people who are in a vulnerable position—if you’re an employee at a big corporation, yeah, maintaining your anonymity is probably smart. But if you’re in politics or in the political world, we now have the tools, and we have now the support where some of these reputational attacks can be successfully countered.
Bluey: What keeps you going? You are sometimes outgunned 100 to 1, 500 to 1, maybe more, and yet it doesn’t seem to deter you.
Rufo: I love it. I enjoy it. I love the challenge. I enjoy the fight. I savor victories when they come and then I try to learn from defeats, which are inevitable. But I love the process and I enjoy the drama. I enjoy the conflict. All the things that you’re supposed to not like about politics.
The longer that I’ve been studying it and then participating in it, I realized that, actually, that is kind of the core of political life. And for whatever reason, I’m suited to it. And I find it to be an intellectual challenge, emotionally challenging, professionally challenging. It’s challenging from a business perspective. Of course, I run my own little shop as well as partnerships with these great institutions. And so, every day is an immense challenge, and the odds are often stacked against you. And that, for me, is an ideal environment.
It’s an environment that I love and I hope that it also inspires others. And I know that it has inspired many others to kind of follow suit and to try to really get in the fray.
The other thing that has been helpful is understanding that politics hasn’t really changed in a long time. And so, I’m realizing over the last few years, it’s like, all right, I have many flaws and many limitations, but I maybe have one gift. And it’s in the art of rhetoric, broadly speaking.
And so, I’ve been reading a lot of the old works from Greece and Rome about rhetoric, and it could have been written yesterday. It’s amazing. You’re reading Aristotle’s Treatise on Rhetoric and you say, “This is incredible.” It’s like nothing has changed. These guys were going down and they were duking it out intellectually in the Agora or in Rome, in the senate.
And, of course, they have grandeur that we don’t have. We live in a different era, but you get a sense in participating in something greater, you’re participating in a tradition that we’ve had in the West. For me, that is also a source of joy, a source of sustenance.
Bluey: With that being said, is there a particular goal that you have for 2024 or something that you’re working on, an objective that our audience may be able to support what you’re doing?
Rufo: I’m still finishing up this campaign to abolish DEI, which we launched last year. That’ll take me through the summer. The 18-month campaign cycle is probably the max, where after that, you start to lose effectiveness.
My goal is always to launch campaigns, entrepreneurial, from scratch, and then hand them off to others once they’re well developed. Launching critical race theory, launching trans ideology in schools, launching abolish DEI, launching this campaign against Harvard. Now others have taken up the mantle on many of those campaigns.
I feel like almost like a venture capital investor, startup operator. The startup phase is exciting. I like it. And then I hand it over when these campaigns are mature.
I’ll tell you, though, I don’t know what’s next. I know that we’re going to wind down abolish DEI. I do know that I’ll be hiring some additional staff in the coming months, but coming up with a campaign is not a work of mathematics. It’s a work of art. And so, part of the artistic process is the mystery of inspiration. I know that is maybe contrary to some other organizations that are a bit more logical, a bit more rational.
I tell my funders and supporters, like, “Alright, supporters want to support the work.” And I say, “Well, what’s the next thing?” It’s like, I don’t know, we’ll figure it out. But something will happen. And part of the success in political activism is sensing opportunity. Some of the best campaigns kind of emerged spontaneously or emerged by accident. Like a novelist or writer, sometimes you’re just waiting for that moment of inspiration.
There’s no end point to politics. I know that as long as I’m alive, there will be something to think about, something to fight about, something to work on. It’s just a matter of time before the next thing comes up.
Bluey: What are some of the ways that you would encourage people to follow your work or financially support you?
Rufo: Follow @realChrisRufo on X. Follow christopherrufo.com. On Substack, small supporters can become paid subscribers, $8 a month or $80 a year. We have a huge and growing audience there. And philanthropic donors can reach out to me. There’s a contact form on my site.
On the support side, it’s been really unreal. We have incredible people in our country that want to see success. And I actually don’t do any outbound fundraising. I don’t do any solicitation. I don’t do any calls. But people have just come out of the woodwork saying, “Hey, I love what you’re doing. I want to support it.” That’s a very encouraging sign because what it shows is that there are people around the country that have the sophistication, the means, the inspiration, the capacity. They want to see something better.
P.S. If you want to support further investigations into plagiarism at America's Ivy League universities, become a paid subscriber to my Substack. I have already committed $10,000 to this project, with the potential for more: https://t.co/etKtrVPEmL
— Christopher F. Rufo ?? (@realchrisrufo) February 22, 2024
The voting public, if you measure public opinion, has the right idea on many, many issues, if not most issues. The limitation is not the public. The limitation is not the funders or the philanthropists.
I’m sure anyone in this world can grumble about specifics, but actually, limitation is us as political leaders, as intellectual leaders, as movement leaders. I’m more and more convinced that the raw materials are there. It’s really up to us to shape them, to direct them, to point them in the right place, and to mobilize people in the most effective way possible. And so that, to me, is the big limitation right now. And a limitation is just another word for a challenge.
There’s a rich vein of opportunity there. It really is truly a rich vein. How do we get these? I mean, Hillsdale College is incredible, the Manhattan Institute, The Heritage Foundation, a whole range of other groups. We have brilliant people, we have great supporters, and now it’s time for action. And that’s really what I’m hoping that we’re driving toward.
Bluey: What’s holding us back then? Do you think that there’s an impediment, or is there a challenge that you want to leave us with and our audience?
Rufo: Yes, there are many challenges. Conservative institutions have to radically modernize the way they approach politics. They have to have an understanding of how media works in the 21st century. They have to have an understanding of how politics works.
We have to reconnect with the essence of political life, and we have to understand politics for what it is. We have to really refine our rhetorical sensibilities. … And then, of course, translate into administrative success. We’re actually fairly well there. But the rhetorical part is really the missing element on the Right.
If you actually look at the great political leaders in history—from the Greeks and Romans to the American Founders, to [Abraham] Lincoln, to, I mean, even in a less classical way, but of course, [Ronald] Reagan—they were very serious about rhetoric.
I actually think that that is the missing link. And rhetoric in a postmodern environment means media activism, mass persuasion, elite influence, digital communications, all of those five areas are how modern rhetoric plays out. If we can really radically modernize on those five practices, everything that we do could be much more successful.
The post Defeating the Radical Left: Chris Rufo Talks Strategy and Resilience appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Shilo Sanders, the son of Colorado head coach Deion Sanders, is facing accusations that he is trying to hide is networth.
The post Deion Sanders’ Son Shilo Faces Accusations of Hiding Income After Losing $12M Settlement in Assault Case appeared first on Breitbart.
UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine has dropped in the rankings, and some faculty members are reportedly pointing to admissions decisions that "prioritize diversity over merit" as a likely cause.
The post Report — ‘Troubling’: UCLA Medical School Rankings Drop appeared first on Breitbart.
The University of North Carolina System, which oversees 17 schools, voted to repeal its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policy this week.
The post UNC System Board of Governors Votes to End DEI Policy appeared first on Breitbart.
Colorado Buffaloes quarterback Shedeur Sanders has engaged in a social media squabble with recent transfer Gavin Kuld.
The post ‘I’ll Spare You Only This 1 Time’: Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders Sends Former Teammate a Cryptic Warning appeared first on Breitbart.
A former diversity manager at Facebook and Nike has been sentenced to five years and three months in prison for stealing over $5 million from the companies, which was intended for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
The post Former Facebook Diversity Manager Sentenced to Prison for $5 Million DEI Scam appeared first on Breitbart.
UNC Chapel Hill Board of Trustees has voted to end its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs after anti-Israel advocacy.
The post UNC Chapel Hill Board Votes to End DEI Programs appeared first on Breitbart.
The following is an updated version of a column originally published in December 2022.
One of the bestselling books of the 1970s was “The Peter Principle,” a business management book by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull.
The book’s premise was that employees get promoted based on their performance in their previous jobs until they are ultimately elevated to a position in which they’re incompetent, since skills and success in one position don’t necessarily ensure success in the next. “In a hierarchy,” Peter explained, “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
If “The Peter Principle” were published today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre would be a case study in the phenomenon, now called “failing upward.” In Jean-Pierre’s case, that’s reflected in her work for the short-lived Democratic presidential campaigns of John Edwards in 2004 and Martin O’Malley in 2016, and now as the chief spokeswoman for the Biden administration. On Monday, she will mark her second anniversary in that role.
In recent weeks, however, with the 2024 election campaign shifting into high gear, there have been well-sourced reports that high-ranking figures in the Biden administration are not-so-subtly seeking to push Jean-Pierre out of the role—for which she was never qualified to begin with. Many of the same administration figures reportedly behind those efforts to oust her are, not surprisingly, denying the accuracy of the reports.
The New York Post quoted a source as saying the high-ranking administration figures “‘were trying to find Karine a graceful exit’ because of the ugly optics of removing her against her will,” especially because she thinks she’s doing a good job. (One face-saving exit strategy was to offer her the presidency of EMILY’s List, an abortion rights group.)
But as a textbook example of an affirmative-action hire, Jean-Pierre appears not to be going anywhere. An administration so thoroughly wedded to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion is, in this case, now finding it difficult to divorce itself from DEI. (More on that below.)
The most glaring evidence that Jean-Pierre, 49, has been promoted to her level of incompetence as White House press secretary is her near-total dependence on a binder full of administration talking points, which she often reads from directly at her daily news briefings to the White House press corps.
It’s so bad that Fox News commentator Jesse Watters has taken to referring to her derisively as “Binder,” and it’s so, well, cringeworthy that other critics deliberately mispronounce “Karine” as “Cringe.”
Just as an aside, recall how 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was ridiculed mercilessly in the liberal media for saying during the second presidential debate that he had “binders full of women.” That was his awkward way of referring to files of résumés of women he would consider for staffing his administration were he to win the election. Many of the talking heads’ “binder” jokes snarkily suggested that the squeaky-clean Romney was engaged in some form of BDSM with those women.
It’s standard operating procedure for a press secretary to have notes for ready reference. It’s quite another thing to stare down at them and read those notes all but verbatim.
As far as we know, none of the talking heads who ridiculed Romney has ever mentioned—much less made fun of—Jean-Pierre’s near-complete dependence on her press-briefing binders. Nor have they satirized her oft-repeated deflection—“I don’t have anything”—when she doesn’t have answers to questions for which she’s unprepared.
Nor have the liberal media (or the late-night TV comics) noted, much less lampooned, how Jean-Pierre has mispronounced or mangled words and phrases in the course of her press briefings.
On Dec. 13, 2022, Jean-Pierre touted “bicarmel” support in Congress for the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. “Bicarmel, bipartisan support was had for this piece of legislation,” she said.
But this was no one-off slip of the tongue: She used the term “bicarmel” three times to describe it in the course of the half-hour press briefing. It should have been “bicameral,” of course; meaning, support in both chambers of Congress.
The official White House transcript of the briefing was dishonestly corrected in all three instances to “bicameral” with no indication that it was not an accurate reflection of what was actually said.
On Nov. 28, 2022, in congratulating three Americans who had won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and economics, she mispronounced “Nobel” five times in 40 seconds as “noble.”
Two months to the day earlier, on Sept. 28, Jean-Pierre said that as part of Vice President Kamala Harris’ then-pending trip to South Korea, the veep would visit the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas. Jean-Pierre helpfully noted that it had been “nearly 70 years since the Korean ‘armtis’”—not to be confused with the Korean armistice.
Three weeks before that, on Sept. 6, Jean-Pierre conflated a Russian natural gas pipeline with an upscale American department store chain. She accused Russia of causing an energy crisis in Europe by shutting down its Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which she referred to as the “Nordstrom 1” pipeline.
One can only imagine how former President Donald Trump’s press secretaries, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and later Kayleigh McEnany, would have been pilloried by the liberal White House press corps had they made those sorts of repeated verbal gaffes.
One reason Jean-Pierre still has the high-visibility press secretary’s job, to which she was elevated on May 13, 2022, despite all of the gaffes, is because President Joe Biden is legendary for his own innumerable flubs and miscues.
“White House communications staff has had to correct President Joe Biden’s public remarks at least 148 times since the beginning of 2024, a review of official White House transcripts shows,” the Daily Caller reported April 29. Biden couldn’t very well hold Jean-Pierre to a higher standard, could he?
But the real reason Jean-Pierre remains in her post today is because of the identity politics to which the Biden administration and the Democratic Party have sworn undying allegiance. She is immune from criticism—and from reassignment to a less high-profile post—only because she checks all of the boxes of identity-politics “intersectionality” as the first black, first LGBTQ, and first immigrant White House press secretary.
In the Biden administration, Jean-Pierre demonstrates daily that meritocracy is an afterthought—if it’s thought of at all. The moral of this story: Live by DEI, die by it.
The post Biden Admin in a DEI Bind(er) of Its Own Making, Stuck With Incompetent Jean-Pierre appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced that faculty candidates will no longer be asked to provide diversity statements during the application process.
The post MIT Will No Longer Require Faculty Candidates to Write Diversity Statements appeared first on Breitbart.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices should be "abolished" within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the intelligence community, Cliff Sims, who served as the deputy director of national intelligence under former President Donald Trump, said during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday, adding that he was surprised to see the DEI office in the CIA headquarters and by the "politicization" inside the intelligence community.
The post Exclusive – Cliff Sims: ‘Really Shocked’ to See the ‘DEI Office’ and ‘Politicization of the Intelligence Community’ in the CIA Building appeared first on Breitbart.
Black college athletes do, according to the NAACP. The NAACP is urging black athletes not to go to college in Florida:
The NAACP asked Black student-athletes to reconsider their decisions to attend public colleges and universities in the state of Florida, in response to the University of Florida and other state schools recently eliminating their diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
In a letter sent to NCAA president Charlie Baker and addressed to current and prospective student-athletes Monday, NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson wrote, “This is not about politics. It’s about the protection of our community, the progression of our culture, and most of all, it’s about your education, and your future.”
The idea that black athletes at major sports schools like Florida and Florida State need DEI departments to…what? Prevent them from being discriminated against? The idea is laughable, as is the NCAAP’s apparent suggestion that DEI bureaucrats are somehow helpful to a student’s education.
My guess is that not a single black athlete who otherwise wants to play for Florida, Florida State or any other public Florida college will be deterred by the NCAAP’s advice. What this episode really shows is how useless the once-relevant NCAAP has become. And also, how Florida has taken the lead in adopting common-sense policies that have put the state in the Left’s cross-hairs.
I think the answer to that question is Yes. In reality, the whole point of DEI is bigotry, so the fact that its exponents keep getting outed as haters is not at all coincidental. The latest case comes from Johns Hopkins, where the Chief Diversity Officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine has resigned following a hateful outburst:
The Chief Diversity Officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine resigned on Tuesday after criticism stemming from her distribution of a list of groups she believes have “privilege.”
As Campus Reform reported, Dr. Sherita Golden sent the list of groups in a January email sent to staff members, which defined “privilege” as “a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group.”
Of course she wasn’t referring to welfare recipients, public employees or beneficiaries of political influence like “greens” or DEI officers.
Golden went on to name nine groups in the country that have been “granted” privilege “at the expense of members of other groups.”
According to Golden, these “privileged” groups are: “White people,” “Able-bodied people,” “Heterosexuals,” “Cisgender people,” “Males,” “Christians,” “Middle or owning class people,” “Middle-aged people,” and “English-speaking people.”
Doesn’t that cover almost everyone in the United States? The only “non-privileged,” apparently, are crippled, gay, female, Muslim illegal immigrants below the age of 40 who just arrived and haven’t yet learned English. That is a niche constituency, to say the least. It includes maybe three people.
“Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it. People in dominant groups often believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them. In fact, privileges are unearned and are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent,” she claimed.
The privilege fairy just hands them out. Work is superfluous.
Golden resigned as Chief Diversity Officer on Tuesday, but remains on the faculty at Johns Hopkins. After her email caused controversy, she apologized:
The “privilege” list was retracted shortly after it was sent out, and Golden said she “deeply” regretted her definition of privilege, adding it “did not meet [the] goal” to “inform and support an inclusive community at Hopkins. . . . In fact, because it was overly simplistic and poorly worded, it had the opposite effect of being exclusionary and hurtful to members of our community.”
Her email wasn’t “poorly worded,” but it certainly was “exclusionary.” Actually, it set out the DEI ideology very clearly, and exclusion of politically disfavored people is the whole point of DEI. But sometimes people notice, and a liberal needs to be sacrificed. So our condolences go out to Sherita Golden: she said what the Democratic Party believes, not poorly but too well.
Vaunce News 