Tag: Christopher Rufo

Meanwhile Back on Planet Earth

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Busy day today.  Yard work in hazy, hot and humid conditions.  But physical activity is good for the mind.  It’s not good to dwell too much on the diseased condition of our politics.  And let’s face it, I’ve spent way too much time for the last week gorging on the panic on display in Washington.  What did Nietzsche say?  If you stare too long into the abyss, it stares back.  I think I’ll let Donald Trump worry about whether Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Morgoth will be the Democrat candidate in November.

We can check back in a couple of weeks or until the Left has a chance to cow Biden into withdrawing from the race.  It should be interesting to hear the excuse if he does withdraw.  I guess he can claim that the Almighty told him to.  Of course, to Biden it’s the Almighty Dollar that speaks to him.  Hey, maybe that’s what he’s waiting for.  He wants a bribe to drop out of the race.  Maybe a $100 million in one of Hunter’s off-shore accounts would convince Jumpin’ Joe that it’s time to park his Parkinson off-stage somewhere else.  Either way, that’s a comedy act for another day.

Probably the more useful thing for me to follow and consider are the people out there who aren’t waiting for the November election but are trying to fix things right now.  Christopher Rufo has been working on state level governmental efforts like the reform of colleges in Florida and Texas and some other places.  He’s on the Board of the New College in Florida and they’ve successfully demolished the DEI and other pernicious initiatives there.  Now he’s gotten started helping a whistleblower in Texas who reported a hospital for continuing a pediatric transgender program after it has been legislatively banned.  It seems that the federal government has gone after this whistleblower and Rufo is raising a flag over these retaliatory efforts by the Justice Department.

It’s going to come down to determined people in red states drawing a line in the sand and taking concrete actions to stop the federal government from crushing the freedoms that they no longer believe in.  If Donald Trump wins in November that might give us a little breathing room to rally the efforts of everyone wishing to stop the government’s encroachment of our rights and try to turn things around.  If Trump is lucky enough to get Republican Senate and House majorities then he can hope to make some meaningful changes to the laws.  If not, then executive orders can undo the damage Biden did with his orders.

But if Biden or some other Democrat is in the White House next February then it will be more important than ever that red state governors, legislatures and judges work tirelessly to find ways to obstruct all the damage that this new administration creates.

I live in a deep blue state.  I have always been a stranger in a strange land.  Every thing around me is imprinted with the code for the hive mind.  Even the local news station from the cable company is impossibly partisan.  I don’t need anything to raise my consciousness as a conservative.  Every day I search the internet for a trail to others like me.  There are a few of us out there and maybe one day we’ll figure out a way to focus our strength into something that provides real results.

I look at the devastation that the Tories in Britain brought down on themselves by lying about their agenda.  They tore down their own party, kind of like the Republicans have done here.  But then I see what Nigel Farage has done.  He’s started a reform party and even though he’s starting from scratch almost alone, he’s not riddled with fake conservatives.  He can try to do it right.  And that’s what I hope eventually happens here.

Correcting the Civil Rights Acts

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Chris Rufo has written what I think is an interesting article in the City Journal.  It’s called, “A New Civil Rights Agenda:

The only hope for a diverse nation is a regime of colorblind equality.”

Rufo points to the Civil rights Act of 1964 and some of the later additions to it for our unfortunate situation.  He claims that both Libertarians and the Dissident Right advocate solutions that he feels are unworkable.

“The question is what to do about it. Libertarians have long argued that the Civil Rights Act compromises core freedoms of speech and association to such a degree that only repealing the law can restore them. Another faction argues that the solution to minoritarian identity politics is majoritarian identity politics—that is, if the legal regime has become a racial spoils system, then Americans of European descent must develop “white racial consciousness” and fight for their share.”

Instead, he outlines three steps that he feels would eliminate reverse discrimination:

“First, reformers should outlaw affirmative action and racial preferences of any kind. … The next president should rescind Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order 11246, which established “affirmative action” and marked the initial deviation from the standard of colorblind equality.

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Second, reformers must eliminate the “disparate impact” provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and overturn Griggs v. Duke Power Co., both of which have entrenched the doctrine that disparate group outcomes are de facto evidence of racial discrimination.

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Third, legislators should abolish the DEI bureaucracies in all American institutions, which openly discriminate against disfavored racial groups, impose ideological orthodoxies on American citizens, and restrict freedoms of speech and association. In addition, federal legislators should radically reduce the size of the federal departments of civil rights enforcement.”

I am not a politician or a lawyer but even an uninformed layman can see that those changes will require either control of both houses of Congress and the president or the Supreme Court to get involved in outlawing whole bureaus of the executive branch out of existence.

I’m not saying it can’t be done but I can understand why there might be a high degree of skepticism on the part of dissidents.  Conservatives have been bamboozled by the Republican establishment into hoping for colorblind reform forever and it’s never happened.

But recently we had the Supreme Court strike down affirmative action in college admissions.  If they decide to strike it down entirely then possibly all of the three actions that Rufo outlines might actually be covered under this decision.  With a conservative president and the Supreme Court outlawing reverse discrimination we might see sixty years of injustice eliminated in short order.

Okay, enough happy, happy talk.  Rufo’s thesis is that conservative government would be well within its rights to eliminate almost all of the most obnoxious components of today’s racial reverse discrimination policies.  But what he describes would take a courageous Supreme Court and a conservative president willing to use his authority as head of the executive branch to bring the various agencies to heel.

Let’s just say that I completely understand the Dissident’s Right’s skepticism.  And all this depends on a conservative president.  Will we ever see another one of those?  Stay tuned till November.

Sour Fisking in the Arena

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I was reading a recent essay by Curtis Yarvin called, “Heroin Liberals and Cocaine Conservatives.”  Yarvin is a clever writer and he made some entertaining comparisons between what liberals get out of believing in their narrative (anesthesia) versus what conservatives get from their narrative (hope).  Clever stuff.

But later the essay focuses on one particular conservative story.  He fisks an article that Chris Rufo wrote in the aftermath of his part in the recent ousting of Harvard president Claudine Gay called, “The New Right Activism.”  This was a manifesto announcing the counterrevolution that Rufo declares as having already begun and he talks about what it must be, “The Right doesn’t need a white paper. What it needs is a spirited new activism with the courage and resolve to win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends.”

Later on, he says, “Rather, the New Right needs to move from the politics of pamphlets to the governance of the institutions.    …   We must recruit, recapture, and replace existing leadership. We must produce knowledge and culture at a sufficient scale and standard to shift the balance of ideological power. Conservative thought has to move out of the ghetto and into the mainstream.”

This is all very general stuff.  And Yarvin is very unconvinced about all aspects of what Rufo says in his manifesto.  And he’s quite snide about the fact that Rufo has one of his degrees from Harvard Extension.  And he portrays the manifesto and by extension Rufo’s writing in general as merely salesmanship for his books and career.

Yarvin is a good writer and he is clever and some of his points about tactics may be true.  Perhaps replacing institutions is smarter than trying to reconquer them.  Maybe.

But I detect a certain aroma of sour grapes in this article.  Sure, upending Claudine Gay isn’t going to change the world.  It may not even make the next president of Harvard less beholden to the DEI orthodoxy.  But the point is Rufo has been involved in direct action in several cases.  Down in Florida he’s been involved in purging a state college; New College of Florida, of DEI, critical race theory, LGBTQ orthodoxy and all the other ills that infect modern colleges.  He’s accomplishing something that hasn’t happened before.  He’s taking back an institution from the Left.

Of course, it is necessary to see how this experiment proceeds.  Will a new board make New College of Florida a successful learning environment?  If it does, I can see how other states will learn from this effort.  And if he fails, there will be things learned too.

I always liked Teddy Roosevelt’s essay on the “Man in the Arena.”

“Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievement of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

This is not to say that intellectual ability is nothing.  But as things currently stand, what we are lacking is not ideas, it’s results.  DeSantis and Rufo and some others are actually trying to change things for the better.  I’m more than willing to hope they’ll succeed.  As far as manifestos, I’ll check back on his progress from time to time.  If he continues to score winds, I’ll begin to believe in the revolution.  Maybe I’ll join him on the barricades.  Maybe.

Rufo’s Short Film on the “Cluster B Society”

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Christopher Rufo has made a ten minute video claiming to define the current psychopathology of the Left as the “Cluster B Society.”  It describes four different personality disorders that taken together allow for the phenomena that we see at work in the world today.  And being an academic he is able to draw the clearest examples from the college campus where narcissists, border-line personalities, sociopaths and hysterics have indeed captured the campus and established their own stable institutions that everyone else there must endure.

I don’t find myself competent to judge the accuracy or the importance of the details that Rufo is using to prove his thesis about the particular personality types that he points to in this video.  But the overall effect that he describes is familiar to everyone who has lived through the last ten years.  The feminized and hysterics-driven environment we find ourselves in is all too clear to those of us who grew up in a much saner world.

I’m not sure who is the audience for this video.  Maybe those with a grounding in psychology.  Even lacking that background I found it interesting.  But I’m not sure how it can be used to change the problem.  But I acknowledge that Rufo might find this explanation for the dysfunctional campus useful for someone like himself who is attempting to purge a particular college of its shrieking madwomen.  Kudos to him for that.

Rufo in Florida Shuts Down Gender Studies Dept. in His College

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Say what you will about DeSantis as a candidate for president.  He’s getting people to fix things in Florida.  He’s hiring good people.  And they’re doing valuable work.

Purging public colleges of these leeches and psychopaths is one of the highest priorities.  These departments are the spawning grounds for people who destroy the minds of young people and suck the resources away from useful educational opportunities.  For every gender studies department closed down open up a welding class somewhere else.

Witness to a Friendly Quarrel

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Back on Monday the 27th of February I found a link in my mailbox to Curtis Yarvin’s substack, the Gray Mirror, with his latest post.  It was a critique of Ron DeSantis’s efforts to replace the woke management of a small state college in Florida (called prosaically, New College of Florida) by replacing the board of trustees with conservatives.  DeSantis put Chris Rufo and some other conservatives on the board and told them to excise the cancer of wokeism.

Yarvin tells a parable about how a drunken man chops down the mighty oak that shades the town square in some mythical Lithuanian town and the townspeople decide to replant the rootless trunk.  But the wise man goes and scoops up acorns and plants them around the fallen tree’s stump.

Further on Yarvin explains that DeSantis and Rufo trying to reform Florida colleges is the town trying to replant a dead tree in the ground.

“The fallacy of replanting the tree is to believe that the past is something we can just have back. It isn’t. We can be inspired by the past. We can want a beautiful oak tree in our town square. But we live in the present and we have no oak tree, just raw lumber. We can build the future under the inspiration of the past—but it is not the past. And we have to be patient enough to wait for it, or we are just losers. Press F to pay regrets.”

But the wise man (according to Yarvin) is anyone who tries to build a new culture from the ground up by supporting coffeehouse artists in New York City that somehow aren’t woke.

“Do you want to win? Or do you want to wring your hands? Where did wokeness start? Among the cool kids. In the Village arts scene. To hear the story the world will be telling itself in 50 years, always listen to New York now. The future always starts at the center and at the top.”

So that’s one side.  Today I read a rebuttal by Rufo.  He calls Yarvin’s take “right-wing doomerism.”

“Yavin’s basic theme is that the progressive-managerial state, or Cathedral, is so powerful, that any action to challenge it will end up reinforcing its power. This is right-wing doomerism—if the beast is all-powerful, better to adopt the position of a prey animal and do nothing.

But I’m more optimistic than this. The takeover of New College has already changed the dynamics in higher education. We have a strong new president who has a mandate to change the administrative and academic trajectory of the institution. You’ll see changes in the next 120 days.

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I believe in an uncompromising new conservatism that attempts to restore the authority of the people over their government—and lay waste to woke institutional capture. The Republic is not yet dead. We have a duty to do whatever we can to save it.

I’m ready to fight—and win.”

Okay, so there is definitely a lot of rah-rah stuff here.  Rufo is cheerleading the efforts his people are making in Florida and anticipating victories and gains that won’t happen for years, or maybe decades.

But, so what?  The progressives worked at this poison for over a hundred years.  They worked away diligently and steadily.  And the results have been astonishing.  Horrifying, yes, but astonishing.  So why should we expect that our results won’t be slow and incremental.  As TomD said back a week ago or so in a comment “One step at a time is how we collectively got here and hopefully how we will get out.”

Sure, in my more pessimistic moments I fear that Yarvin is right.  The Elites control everything and they have all the money.  We can’t possibly win.  But then I think, “Then what have we got to lose by trying to win?”  So, I’ll take Rufo’s side in this cordial quarrel.

He’s making his play.  Let him finish it before we start declaring him the loser.  I hear DeSantis plans to roll out the same idea at other Florida state colleges.  They’re talking about eliminating things like gender studies and DEI and even affirmative action.  For all I know DeSantis is the next Pericles and Florida is the Athens of the new world.  It’s certainly no stranger than the original Athens having happened.

How in the world do you get the Plato, Aristotle and Thucydides from a bunch of bronze age barbarians like the Dorians toppling Aegean civilization and celebrating it in epic poetry?  Truly, the Afghanis aren’t that far removed in culture and lifestyle from the 9th century Dorian invaders.  Predicting the Parthenon from them seems a bloody miracle.

Maybe we’ll get a miracle too.  Our enemies aren’t geniuses they’re just better organized and better funded.  There is such a thing as luck.  And luck rewards persistence and intelligence.  It’s like the old saying, “God helps those who help themselves.”  If you’re just willing to lay down and die then you’ve already decided your fate.  Luck isn’t going to pull you off the ground, put your sword back in your hand and strike down your enemy.  You’ve got to try.  So, let’s give DeSantis and Rufo the benefit of the doubt and all the help we can think of.  Let’s cheer them on and provide all the rah-rah we can muster.

If DeSantis can turn around the Florida state colleges it’ll make guys like Abbott in Texas envious and might start a movement to clean up all the Red-State state-colleges.  And after that maybe it’ll spread to the grammar and high schools.  See what I mean?  Rah-rah is easy.  And it’s cheap.  What’s a few electrons rattling around in my computer?

Anyway, I’ll bet on DeSantis and Rufo in this quarrel.  Right wing doomerism just isn’t my cup of tea.