Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed right-wing propagandist, Christopher Rufo, along with other conservative Christian education-activists, to the board of the tiny, progressive New College in Sarasota, FL this past January.
They fired the president, installed prayer at the board meetings, forbade personal pronouns in faculty email signatures, and claimed DeSantis’s electoral victory gave them a constitutional mandate to make whatever changes they want.
The invaders frame this hostile take-over as a test-case model to “recapture” universities across the state and the country.
But who is Rufo really? He’s the guy behind the manufactured moral panic over Critical Race Theory that set conservative media, school boards and city council meetings ablaze with fear-mongering over “woke Marxism” in 2021.
New College is the latest conquest in his explicit long-game to remake the fabric of America, one sadistic lie at a time.
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I think of myself as an individual human being with my own capabilities, and I would hope that we could both judge each other as individuals and come to common values on that basis.
Fair enough.
I would argue, though, that the ability to say, I don't see race, I don't recognize our own whiteness, is an extraordinarily white thing to be able to do.
It's an exercise of power and privilege.
You can ignore the label of whiteness and still be able to enjoy all the spoils of whiteness.
I say I'm not black.
I don't see race.
I still can't get the cab.
I still work harder for less money.
I still don't live as long.
I still get longer prison sentences.
I still am more likely to be executed if I'm convicted of a crime.
I'm still more likely to die of COVID.
I'm still more likely to get suspended in school.
I'm still less likely to get pain medication in a hospital.
The idea of saying that I don't see my whiteness, I don't recognize whiteness is something we can say.
But to me, that is just as fantastic.
It is just as unimaginably unrealistic in real life as the things, the very things you're criticizing.
As you can see, Rufo is not really interested in debating actual political theory.
And he's been frank about his strategy, even gloating in these tweets that have been screenshotted and shared widely.
This is from March 15th, 2021.
He says, I agree with you.
The activists are realizing that their ideas, once put into practice, are generating discontent.
Their racial coalition is also breaking apart.
Asian Americans in particular are revolting against CRT, critical race theory, which punishes them more than any other group.
And then another.
This is part of the same comment thread.
We have successfully frozen their brand, critical race theory, he put in scare quotes, into the public conversation.
We have successfully frozen their brand, critical race theory, he puts it in quotes, into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions.
We don't get much more of an overt admitting of a propagandistic strategy than that.
of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.
You don't get much more of an overt admitting of a propagandistic strategy than that.
Now those two tweets are actually in reply to an original tweet by James Lindsay who
has been Rufo's chief ally in stoking the pseudo-academic woke communism red scare conspiracy
theory.
Lindsay, as I've reported on this podcast, has claimed that, and I'm quoting him here, the communists have a handshake agreement with the pedophiles.
He's implied too that Disney is part of that communism pedophile dynamic.
Both he and Rufo have linked gender ideology in schools to the same moral panic as critical race theory, with the latter saying that public schools are often hunting grounds for sexual predators.
Rufo's really successful media campaign got him noticed a lot by Republicans.
And then his interviews with Tucker Carlson on Fox News got him flown to DC to help draft Trump's 2020 executive order prohibiting diversity training in federal agencies.
But it is his relationship with Ron DeSantis that represents the next level of his propaganda strategy gaining explicit, ominous influence.
He's appeared with the Florida governor to share the podium and speak behind lecterns bearing slogans like freedom from indoctrination or higher education reform.
As DeSantis has gone on his tear legislating the Stop WOKE Act as well as what is often called the Don't Say Gay Bill by critics, that's the Parental Rights in Education Act.
This has led to book banning in Florida schools and libraries and a very public battle with the Walt Disney Company, driven in part by a personal vengeance from DeSantis against them for criticizing his policies as discriminatory.
So now, Christopher Rufo finds himself in the catbird seat at New College, Florida.
One of the first actions of the new board of trustees was to fire the president, Patricia Oker.
Here are her last comments at that board meeting, followed by some of Rufo's thoughts.
But I'm going to say publicly, I do not believe that students are being indoctrinated at New College.
To the students of New College.
I see you.
I offer these two final thoughts.
First, know that you are truly loved here.
Not just for what you do, but for who you are.
And second, the light that is within you.
Don't hide it under a bush.
Let it shine.
Thank you.
Look, on one hand, I'm sympathetic.
The president is a very nice person.
Of course, she's going to have emotions when her contract is terminated, when she's let go by the university in a very public fashion.
So I have sympathy.
Um, but ultimately this is also part of the problem and the tactics of left-wing administration.
Um, they resist all change through what you saw in the first clip, which was an appeal to kind of pseudo appeal to safety.
What you saw in the second clip, kind of deranged activist anger and protest used to intimidate people and sometimes works.
