IT'S NO SURPRISE THAT THEY WANT TO BE LED AND ARE SO EASILY...:

CRT, in the Rufoist reading, began as an attempt to update Marxism. It supposedly inherited its structure of thinking from the "neo-Marxists" of critical theory -- he identifies Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin. Realizing in the 1960s "the actual failures" of Marxist "brutality," RCR insists that "the critical theorists abandoned the old economic dialectic of bourgeois and proletariat and replaced it with a new racial dialectic of white and black."

There are three related embarrassments to this vision. First, the only driving influences on CRT apparently are white German Jewish men. No Black, brown, Asian or women intellectual forerunners, American or globally, nor any non-Jewish whites. This is 1950s American anti-communism redux. 

Second, Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin restricted to antisemitism what little discussion they devoted to racism. This is perhaps understandable, given their own experiences. Hannah Arendt is one notable exception here. 

Third, in "Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement," a reader collecting all the original seminal articles and edited by for of the intellectual movement's principal founders, there are almost 1,500 footnotes (law articles are notoriously well-documented). There is not a single reference to Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin or Marcuse. There are more references to Black conservative economist and political commentator Thomas Sowell and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey (one each) than to Karl Marx. The references in the volume are overwhelmingly to U.S. legal cases, followed by the long tradition of Black American thinkers. 

The obvious rejoinder will be that the "neo-Marxist" influence is implicit, known to the initiated; the unprovable parading as given. "Critical," however, etymologically means the capacity to judge the truth or merit of the object of analysis. Rufo-inspired CRT criticisms exhibit none of these qualities.

Rufo quickly broadens his target. CRT, he says, "is usually deployed under a series of euphemisms, such as equity, social justice, diversity and inclusion, and socially responsive teaching." There is an obvious political strategy at work here: Renew the longstanding conservative hysteria over Marxism and communism by misreading CRT as substitutes for its terms. The goal is to set fire to the contemporary shift in American politics regarding race and racism unfolding since the George Floyd murder and BLM-inspired protests over a year ago. 

This past March, @RealChrisRufo was explicit about this strategy of fabrication on Twitter (it's almost as if tweets are the medium of the political unconscious today). He later added, "I basically took that body of criticism ... and made it political. Turned it into a salient political issue with a clear villain."

The result is Campus Watch for schools, effectively Dinesh D'Souza 2.0 -- a venomous brew. This is the lesson plan for the self-appointed thought police. While schools have been the principal targets, colleges and universities are now on the radar too. Critical Race Training in Education is a watchdog-style website recently established by Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson, with two younger activists, who together run the Legal Insurrection Foundation. Drawing calculatingly on the Rufoistic misreadings, they report on "more than 300 colleges and universities" nationwide for their training in CRT and antiracism (though courses in critical theory with no focus on racism are making the list too). The aim seems to warn "parents" away from sending their children to such institutions, including Jacobson's own, and by implication to pressure the institutions to restrict CRT-related courses. This is cancel culture with a vengeance.

Rufoists never engage in sustained textual analysis of CRT. They usually refer misleadingly to an idea or sentence from the far wider, much less coherent body of critical work in the human sciences that I shorthand as critical race studies.  The two most often dismissed by Rufoists are "critical race guru" Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, who are about as different in critical commitments, assumptions and arguments as they could be. Kendi has repeatedly insisted he is no CRTer. He sometimes expresses ideas that CRT advocates would reject as unworkable or incoherent, just as some diversity training programs are embarrassingly counterproductive. But they are ideas for critical discussion, not incendiary devices to end the Republic. DiAngelo's discussion of "white fragility" is not a position readily identified with CRT. Her reading of structural racism offers countering proposals that rely on personal, individual responses, leaving the structural conditions untouched. She is definitively no Marxist, neo- or otherwise. 

All this matters to the Rufoists as much as schools insisting they do not teach CRT. CRT is now the operative target in almost exactly the ways "Marxism," "communism," "socialism" and "liberalism" have been in the past. The Goldwater Institute, for which Heritage's Butcher once worked, includes Howard Zinn's "A People's History of America" under its CRT catchphrase, a text among others to be banned from school curricula. Zinn's classic work was first published in 1980, before CRT was even named, or even a thing!

Tweet   @brothersjudd