🔒 We Need to Talk About Christopher Rufo

For all the theatrical vandalism that Elon Musk and his groyper cohorts are wreaking throughout the US government it’s worth mentioning one of the less bombastic clowns in this carnival. Every few months the mainstream media goes into a raptured feeding frenzy over some alleged hive of far left blood-drinking communist antifa operating inside one of America’s treasured institutions, and when you dig into the origins of the story the same worm always pokes out like you’re blowing softly on Robert Kennedy’s ear.

 The latest Christopher Rufo™ Presents: Moral Panic involves transgender federal agents allegedly talking about transgender stuff amongst themselves. As we all know, transgender stuff means only two things: Weird sex stuff and a blistering hatred of Italians. 

 Christopher claims to have been handed these chat logs by some whistleblower, and I believe him, because if they were forgeries then he would have seen fit to manufacture some truly vile evidence worthy of the five alarm fire he’s raising hell about. As it stands, although he begs us to trust him that these logs contain the vilest, most reprehensible, sexually violent, anti-Italian(?) filth that you can possibly imagine, the worst examples that he’s able to present to the public are relatively mild discussions about pronouns. 

Of course, he’s a good honest Catholic so he likely believes showing the actual evidence of the stuff he promises exists would cause devils and imps to enter your body via the open Hell-computer screen-eyeball portal, and probably force you to become transgender yourself. So he instead kept the real evidence safely stowed away in the replica Ark of the Covenant he constructed in preparation for the Great Unveiling.

Nevertheless, Trump’s new National Intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard (that’s never going to sound like a sane thing to say) cited Rufo’s … reporting? complaining? … as her justification for immediately firing any and all agency employees who are transgender or gender nonconforming or maybe just manicure their beards too carefully and wear skinny jeans. 

 Some may ask “who the hell is Christopher Rufo and why does the media treat him like he’s the fucking Oracle of Delphi on all matters of anti-wokeness?” There’s no satisfying answer to that question. 

Rufo really is, at the end of the day, just a Random Dipshit. Just another smug, contemptuous Pollux who gamed his way into the high echelon of conservative politics due to the fishnet-stocking-porous barrier of entry to right-wing think tanks. If anything, he does dispel the illusion that there’s anything resembling meritocracy involved in rising to the most prominent circle of American right-wing influencers. This is an illusion that should already be dispelled by the mere existence of single-digit IQ master race ambassadors Dave Rubin, Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, and fucking brain donation survivor James Lindsay.

Rufo has almost no formal education to beef up his credentials as a high profile member of the right’s top intellectual brass. He likes to pass himself off as a Harvard Graduate, and when you think Harvard Graduate you think Oppenheimer, Kennedy, and you might be surprised to learn, Conan O’Brien. All of Rufo’s biographies state Harvard Graduate as his golden academic achievement.

 However, when folks started caring enough to look into this they found that Rufo’s degree (in Liberal Arts, no less) is actually from the Harvard Extension School. Unlike actual Harvard, the entry requirement to Harvard Extension School is getting either a B average in high school or having your Dad write a really nice letter.

 When the difference was pointed out publicly by Real Harvard professor Jennifer Hochschild, she was sadly forced to apologise and rescind her criticism after a bunch of other Harvard Jr mini-academics got a case of the sads over it. It turns out lots of these graduates really enjoy the prestige of technically being Harvard Graduates. Hochschild needing to walk back her criticism to avoid offending a bunch of other thin-skinned future podcasters was a significant win for Rufo, so as someone who isn’t playing politics in search of tenure let me step in and say, no, Mini Harvard is not the same as Harvard.

 But this little sleight of hand comes to characterise Rufo’s whole general thing. The word “Harvard” has awarded Rufo the public credential to do what he’s basically famous for doing—disingenuously “explaining” academia to outsiders, pretending to be a kind of whistleblower from within and doing for universities what QAnon did for pizza shops.

 What lends more weight to the perception of Rufo as some sort of intellectual is his fellowship with an impressive number of very prominent think tanks like the Danube Institute and the Heritage Foundation. But is it impressive, really? I’m not entirely convinced that conservative think tanks are much of a thing to begin with or that impressive academic chops are as important to obtaining fellowship as just being very conservative. Certainly you’ll have a hard time convincing me that there’s a lot of thinking going on in any room that has Jack Posobiec in it.

 I’m not calling Rufo an imbecile. He knows just enough about the language of academia to know how to misrepresent it. And we know that he’s deliberately misrepresenting it rather than misunderstanding it, because he says that’s what he’s doing.

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