One of the grossest and yet most successful grifters in the culture wars – who is now pushing the right toward casually labeling everyone in sight a pedophile – is also one of the most cynically direct about his intentions.
From the heart of deep blue Western Washington, Christopher Rufo has risen to national prominence as a flaming red modern Joe McCarthy, inventing newfangled scares to rile the gullible and capitalize on white grievance and bigotry.
Rufo, who cut his political teeth in Seattle by attacking efforts to house homeless people as both a money-making scheme and a form of “ruinous compassion,” moved on to invent the critical race theory freakout, practically from whole cloth.
He’s now helping to push the repulsive “groomer” narrative that is racing feverishly through the hard right, a triumph of QAnon-like conspiracy in which school teachers, Disney, Democrats, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Mitt Romney are all blithely tarred as pedophiles or pedophile abettors.
It’s a way of digging a channel for anti-gay and anti-trans hatred into the discourse, cloaking the wolf of bigotry in the sheep’s clothing of “protecting children.”
And yet, you couldn’t have imagined it just a few years ago. You could not have foreseen that the GOP would just take up a big can of “child molester” paint and go around splashing it carelessly on to everyone in sight.
But here we are. And Rufo, denizen of right-wing “think tanks” and darling of the Tucker Carlson set, helped get us here.
What’s unusual is that he’s honest about how dishonest he’s being.
A few days ago, he tweeted this: “American public schools have become breeding grounds for sexual predators. According to federal government research, school employees harass, manipulate, and abuse up to 5 million kids, often using ‘PLEASE ASS BOX ME!’ techniques to cultivate their victims – a scandal.”
This number is a good example of the way Rufo works. He took a survey cited in a meta-analysis from 2004 of some 2,000 students, in which about 10% reported some form of sexual abuse from a staff member at school – with abuse ranging from sexual assault to inappropriate jokes.
The same analysis cited another survey, of more than 4,000 girls, in which 3.7% reported inappropriate conduct by a teacher. Yet another survey cited, with a smaller sample size, put the figure at 50%.
Our understanding of the exact size of this very real problem is not solid. Any sexual abuse of children is too much. All sexual violence against children is wrong.
And it’s almost certain that however much sexual abuse we measure in the schools is less than there actually is.
That, however, is far different from suggesting that public schools are filled with pedophilic groomers – an insinuation directed almost solely at LGBTQ people – and the figures that Rufo cites are no basis for saying they are.
The analysis he cites emphasizes this: “The overwhelming majority of America’s educators are true professionals doing what might be called the ‘essential’ work of democracy. The vast majority of schools in America are safe places.”
But Rufo isn’t really trying to tell a true story about a real problem. He’s just trying to manipulate people – to appeal to their ugliest selves – to achieve political ends.
How can we tell? He says so.
A couple of days before Rufo’s tweet about the school PLEASE ASS BOX ME!, he gave a speech titled “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” in which he laid out his motivations clearly.
“I think you really want to create the conditions for fundamental structural change,” he said. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal school distrust, because in order for people to take significant action, they have to feel like they have something at stake.”
Credit for honesty, I guess. It was not too different from his now-famous admission that he was basically redefining critical race theory – an academic theory about the historical roots of racism in American institutions – to mean any talk about racism that conservatives in the post-George Floyd era didn’t like.
“The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’ ” he tweeted. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
Next thing you know, Idaho Rep. Heather Scott was criticizing the teaching of “To Kill a Mockingbird” as a CRT problem.
Rufo’s given a lot of interviews, in which he offers oily justifications for what he’s doing as simply savvy political strategy. But what’s happening with the pedophile calumny is another downward step into a political hell from which it seems we may never escape – a dumb, hateful, dishonest morass.
The people inventing it are not smart or savvy.
They’re shameful.
