Christopher F. Rufo’s rejection of the proposition that the past racism persists in today’s United States is well known. Now a New Yorker report has detailed how he came to be the villain of the plot to makeover Florida ideologically.

Rufo’s journey from conservative documentarian and journalist to architect of the campaign against critical race theory began in 2020 when an unidentified Seattle city employee sent him anti-bias training materials. He followed up with Freedom of Information Act requests and determined that, under the auspices of Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights, employees were being divided up by race for what he saw as implicit-bias training.

Rufo wrote an article for the website of City Journal, organ of the conservative New York-based Manhattan Institute for Policy Research accusing the Seattle agency of “explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism—ugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago.”

Other people around the country sent anti-racism training documents to Rufo, who noticed that they cited anti-racism books by writers such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The footnotes “pointed to academic scholarship from the 1990s by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory.” Rufo found the writings of civil rights advocates Kimberlé Crenshaw and the late Derrick Bell Jr. particularly interesting. Crenshaw is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, specializing in race and gender issues. Bell, also a law

professor, is regarded as the father of critical race theory.

Those scholars have argued that, as Crenshaw once put it, “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.” Rufo, however, insisted that anti-racism seminars, in the words of The New Yorker, “did not just represent a progressive view on race but that they were expressions of a distinct ideology with radical roots. … If people were upset about the seminars, Rufo wanted them also to notice ‘critical race theory’ operating behind the curtain.”

Rufo also saw “the seed of their ideas in radical, often explicitly Marxist, critical-theory texts from the generation of 1968,” the writings of Angela Davis having “all of the key terms.” Davis, a Marxist and feminist political activist, is a University of California at Santa Cruz professor. Rufo noted that she had been a doctoral student of the late German American philosopher and political theorist Herbert Marcuse, regarded as “the father of the New Left.”

Rufo “felt as if he had begun with a branch and discovered the root,” The New Yorker said, He argued that conservatives were fighting a cultural war which they could not even effectively describe. “We’ve needed new language for these issues,” he told The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells. To Rufo, “political correctness” was “dated” because “elites were not enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits” but were “seeking to re-engineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race.” And “cancel culture” was “vacuous,” incapable of being translated into a political program.

Rufo also dismissed “woke,” which means being aware but which, like critical race theory, Republicans have converted into another conservative dog-whistle. He described woke as “a good epithet but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside.”

“Critical race theory is the perfect villain,” Rufo concluded. “Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’” He argued that, “Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American” and was anyhow “the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.”

Having found his windmill to slay, Rufo published several more articles in City Journal and discussed his theory about critical race theory on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News. “It’s absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every aspect of the federal government” and had become “an existential threat to the United States,” he said. Rufo urged then President Donald Trump “to immediately issue an executive order to abolish critical race theory training from the federal government. … to stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudo-scientific ideology.”

Trump saw the show, according to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who called Rufo to say that the President had “instructed me to take action.” Rufo subsequently flew to Washington, D.C., The New Yorker said, “to assist in drafting an executive order, issued by the White House … that limited how contractors providing federal diversity seminars could talk about race.” That set the stage for the ongoing relentless conservative attack on critical race theory. “This entire movement came from nothing,” Rufo later wrote to the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who, however, pointed out in his story that “the truth is more specific than that. Really, it came from him.”

Several Republican-governed Southern states speedily banned critical race theory from classrooms — even though it was not being taught in schools. They include Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis uses it as cover for far-reaching legislation which, among other things, limits academic freedom and censors books and he is now erasing diversity, equity and inclusion programs in a move to curtail teaching African American history. However, he downplays the term “critical race theory,” which is probably too intellectually challenging for some people, in favor of the more politically digestible “woke.” Florida, he boasts, is “where woke comes to die.”

DeSantis appointed Rufo to the reconstituted governing board of the liberal public New College which the governor is transforming into a Southern clone of Hillsdale College in Michigan, a Christian school which DeSantis has praised for its emphasis on Western traditions and its zealous promotion of charter schools.

As for the Manhattan Institute, it describes itself as an “important force in shaping American political culture and developing ideas that foster economic choice and individual responsibility.” It sees itself as “a leading voice of freemarket ideas, shaping political culture since our founding in 1977.” But Jacobin magazine blames it for fueling “hysteria” not only over critical race theory but also LGBTQ issues, while keeping secret the names of donors, many of them billionaires.

The Institute’s board, Jacobin reported, “is helmed by executives who are deeply invested in preserving the country’s entrenched economic inequality — and who come from a financial industry that has plundered massive wealth from communities of color.” Jacobin described the Manhattan Institute as “a fierce advocate of charter schools, a form of school privatization” and the campaign against critical race is just a cover for “the wholesale privatization of public schools.”

Some states are already moving in that direction, as well as using the manufactured protests over critical race theory to enact partisan legislation to advance conservative agendas, especially those with super majorities. Legislation in Florida, for example, provides for interference in grade school and higher education and a conservative regimen is being imposed on a state where Democrats and Republicans have been almost equally divided. It includes banning abortions after six weeks, carrying concealed guns without a permit, making it illegal to give any form of help to undocumented immigrants, curtailing the rights of LGBTQ+ people, restricting freedom to protest and of expression, including by Disney, and voter suppres. sion.

With DeSantis expected to run for president, Floridians can expect more such measures because, as he frequently proclaims, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Such measures are taken without meaningful input from those holding opposing views, while the governor maintains, in all seriousness, that “Florida is the freest state in the nation.”