#Republican Activist | Christopher Rufo

[xtruss]

© Getty Images/Yuliya

US Republican Clarifies Controversial ‘Cat Bounty’! Activist Chris Rufo Has Offered $5,000 For Proof That Haitians Were Eating Pets In Ohio

— 12 September 2024 | RT

Republican Activist Christopher Rufo has offered a $5,000 reward in order to fact-check claims that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town were eating people’s pet cats, but had to amend its terms to prevent abuse.

Around 20,000 Haitian migrants have been settled in Springfield, a community of less than 60,000 between Dayton and Columbus, over the past four years.

At Tuesday’s US presidential debate, Republican candidate Donald Trump brought up the rumors that people’s pets have been going missing, and that the migrants were to blame. His running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, also said that Ohioans “have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” citing reports his office has received.

“Alright, let’s settle it: I will provide a $5,000 bounty to anyone who can provide my team with hard, verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio. Deadline is Sunday. Go,” Rufo said Wednesday evening on X.

“I want to know the truth. Conservatives must be careful with the facts, and not let the narrative go beyond the evidence. Right now, the assumption is that this did not occur. But, if evidence emerges, it’s in the public interest to bring it forward,” he added.

Trump’s Running Mate Claims Immigrants Eat Cats! 🐈 🐈‍⬛ The White House has dismissed what it says are “Racist Conspiracy Theories” © Getty Images

The well-intentioned initiative had a major flaw that emerged in short order: most of the replies were people offering – seriously or in jest – to eat a cat in Springfield in order to collect the bounty.

“I’m off to Springfield, Ohio with my cat and a large pot. Five grand is five grand,” said one X user. “Does it count if we pay the Haitian migrants to eat the cat?” asked another. He was not the only one to realize that Rufo’s wording offered a “tremendous arbitrage opportunity,” in the words of one US lawyer.

It only took half an hour for Rufo to amend the terms of his bounty, noting that it “must be an incident that occurred prior to the presidential debate! No eating cats, people!”

So far, no one has come forth to provide the evidence that could qualify for Rufo’s bounty, although one of the respondents tried making the case with logic, rather than documentation.

“Ok, 1) Haitians eat cats and will tell you so themselves, 2) 20,000 Haitians were placed in Springfield, Ohio. Therefore, Haitians are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio,” argued a YouTuber by the name of ‘hoe math’. “The burden is now on you to prove that 20,000 people from a cat-eating culture suddenly magically stopped eating cats when placed on the magic dirt of the USA.”

Reports of Haitians eating wild birds and household pets disappearing have sparked a flood of political memes depicting Trump rescuing kittens and goslings from the cookpot. Meanwhile, Democrats have protested the “fake news” and insisted that accusations of cat-eating were simply racism.

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Unlocking DEI's Impact on Academic Success

Diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies foster a learning environment where all students can thrive and understand complex academic content. Photo by Matthew Bamberg What is the purpose of a university? For most of the classical liberal tradition, the purpose of the university was to produce scholarship in pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful. — Christopher Rufo DEI is so much…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate:

A Houston-based surgeon stands accused of betraying the privacy of transgender kids who weren’t under his care by stealing their medical information and handing it over to a far-right extremist who vehemently opposes transgender rights. The federal indictment, unsealed on Monday, details Dr. Eithan Haim’s alleged unauthorized access and disclosure of sensitive patient information at Texas Children’s Hospital. Haim, 34, completed his residency at Baylor College of Medicine and reportedly reactivated his access to the hospital’s electronic records system in April 2023. He is accused of illicitly obtaining patient names, treatment codes, and attending physician details, which he then shared with conservative activist Christopher Rufo. Rufo, known for his hardline stance against transgender rights, used the information to publish an exposé claiming the hospital continued to provide gender-affirming care for minors despite a public announcement to halt such services.

The indictment alleges Haim accessed this sensitive information under false pretenses and with malicious intent, aiming to harm Texas Children’s Hospital. Haim’s actions followed a 2022 opinion from Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, labeling gender-affirming care for minors as a form of child abuse. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, subsequently directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents seeking such care for their children. In response, Texas Children’s Hospital announced it would pause all gender-affirming services for minors to comply with these directives and protect its staff and patients from potential legal consequences.

Dr. Eithan Haim, who leaked the health records of trans kids to far-right anti-LGBTQ+ extremist Christopher Rufo, is facing charges of violation patient privacy.

[moontyger]

The aggressive campaign against the civil service parallels a long history of attacks against another type of public sector worker far more familiar to most Americans: teachers.

The current portrayal of civil servants as “deep state” bureaucrats pushing far-left ideology draws from the same playbook conservatives have long deployed against the 3.2 million Americans who teach in K-12 public schools. Examining these movements together reveals striking similarities in both rhetoric and strategy — and offers clues to the longer-term dangers ahead.

While the most immediate risks from the civil service attacks include a collapse of critical services, economic fallout, and a security vacuum, the consequences could reverberate far beyond this particular purge. Though civil servants have weathered previous onslaughts, the assault from the Department of Government Efficiency stands alone in both its scale and ambition. The warning signs are already visible in education — just as teaching has become an increasingly embattled profession, the prospect of joining the federal workforce may become so diminished and insecure after the DOGE ambush that we face a more lasting degradation of policy implementation, accountability, and enforcement. A nation that devalues its public servants ultimately devalues its own future.

Teachers were cast as “deep state” infiltrators first

Today’s attacks paint federal workers as “deep state” subversives, echoing the long history of targeting educators as dangerous ideologues. During the Cold War, public school teachers faced intense scrutiny as potential communist sympathizers, with hundreds pushed out of their jobs through what amounted to political purges.

Suspicions of teachers as secret radicals never fully went away. Instead, they morphed as American politics changed. Attacks ramped up during the Obama years, when conservatives began labeling ethnic studies courses as “un-American” and pushing back against a revised history curriculum they alleged cast US history in too dark a light.

The playbook took on new life during the pandemic. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who is now advising Trump on federal diversity and inclusion policy, helped transform vague anxieties about what kids were learning into specific accusations about “critical race theory” — a term that came to mean nearly any curriculum that refers to systemic or structural racism.

And when the “CRT” controversy started to fade from the public’s attention — largely because most voters just didn’t know or care about it — the political attacks shifted to claims about gender identity and “woke ideology” — a term increasingly used to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in schools and government. Republicans doubled down on these attacks in the presidential election, and within his first few days as president, Trump issued an executive order calling to “end radical indoctrination” in public education. In February, Musk tweeted that California teachers are “indoctrinating kids in DEI racism & sexism & communism” — capturing how these different accusations still blur together.

Undermining public servants puts all Americans at risk

As anti-teacher tactics spread to target federal workers, the battered teaching profession stands as a warning.

Decades of attacks on teachers have wrought serious consequences for schooling in the US. Research published last year by Melissa Arnold Lyon of the University at Albany and Matthew Kraft of Brown University found that interest in teaching among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 48 percent since the 1990s, and 40 percent since 2010. Over the last two decades, the number of people earning a teaching license annually dropped by over 100,000, and the proportion of college graduates who go into teaching is at a 50-year low.

The crisis isn’t limited to recruitment. For those who have chosen the classroom, deteriorating conditions and mounting frustrations are driving more teachers to quit. Lyon and Kraft find that teachers’ job satisfaction recently reached its lowest level in five decades, declining by 26 percent in the past 10 years. While many commentators point to the pandemic as the culprit, the researchers find that most of the declines occurred steadily throughout the last decade, preceding the Covid-19 crisis. This kind of sustained dissatisfaction has led to increased turnover, which is linked to poor student outcomes and a worsened school climate overall.

The consequences of pushing talented teachers out of the field and deterring ambitious young people from entering at all are becoming impossible to ignore. School leaders are struggling more than ever to fill empty teaching spots, and average teacher pay has barely moved in three decades, unlike other jobs that need a college degree. The teacher shortage has gotten so bad that some states are lowering their standards just to get more adults into classrooms — a desperate move that risks putting unqualified people in charge of children’s education.

Perhaps most importantly, these developments have hurt student learning. Teacher quality is consistently identified as the most influential school-related factor affecting student achievement, graduation rates, college attendance, employment, and lifetime earnings. The impact is particularly pronounced for low-income students, who stand to gain the most from quality teaching.

This should all serve as a wake-up call: If DOGE teaches a generation that working for the federal government, once attractive for its prestige, decent pay, and job security, is actually precarious and prone to attack, all of us will be worse off for a long time.

[darkmaga-returns]

Kamala Harris’s plagiarism is “more serious” than it first seemed, a New York Times expert has admitted after he initially downplayed more than a dozen examples of copied paragraphs in her book. The Telegraph has the story.

Ms Harris was on Monday accused of plagiarising several sections of her book on crime, including a story once told by Martin Luther King Jr. More than a dozen sections of the book were apparently copied from various sources, including Wikipedia. But The New York Times downplayed the story, focussing on the conservative academic Christopher Rufo, who brought it to light. The newspaper’s headline, “Conservative activist seizes on passages from Harris book”, was criticised by Republicans for failing to scrutinise the allegations. The story quoted Jonathan Bailey, a “plagiarism expert”, who said the extracts were “an error and not an intent to defraud”, and the Harris campaign, which accused Mr Rufo of launching an attack on the vice-president for political reasons. … Writing on his blog Plagiarism Today on Thursday, Mr. Bailey said that he had only been given five examples of the alleged plagiarism by the New York Times, and that he had not had a chance to review the full report accusing her of stealing passages from other sources.

Worth reading in full.

[reasoningdaily]

MSNBC: New College of Florida under federal civil rights investigation

A small liberal arts school that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has sought to transform into a bastion of right-wing thought is now facing a federal civil rights probe.

And conservatives in the state are up in arms.

The Republican governor hasn’t hidden his desire to transform New College of Florida into a place hostile to inclusive learning plans that address social inequality. In January, he appointed a bunch of conservatives to the public college’s board of trustees, and he has said he wants the Sarasota school to be a “little Hillsdale” — a reference to Hillsdale College, a Midwestern school known for right-wing indoctrination.

The new board wasted no time in ousting the school’s president, closing down its diversity, equity and inclusion office and moving to abolish the gender studies major.

There has been an exodus of students from New College, which has traditionally been welcoming to LGBTQ students in particular, and the school has seen more than a third of its faculty leave.

There has been an exodus of students from New College, which has traditionally been welcoming to LGBTQ students in particular, and the school has seen more than a third of its faculty leave. 

New College is now facing federal scrutiny. In a letter Friday, the U.S. Education Department said its Office for Civil Rights is investigating allegations that the school has discriminated against people with disabilities. 

That makes two civil rights complaints filed against the school recently, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The newspaper reported that the disability discrimination complaint was filed Aug. 24, two days after the Education Department received a complaint alleging that New College leaders had created a hostile and discriminatory environment for LGBTQ students, ethnic minorities and students of religious minorities.

The newspaper said the federal department has not responded to questions about whether it is also investigating the earlier complaint. In a statement provided to the outlet, a spokesperson for New College appeared to criticize the LGBTQ-related complaint and said both complaints are “without merit”:

We are aware of the anonymous complaint that was purportedly sent to the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice, a complaint that was first sent to the media and was never sent to the college. The anonymous complaint details many false claims meant to grab headlines, and it is important to note that the only claim that is being looked into is the disability compliance claim, of which we are confident the DOE will also find to be without merit.

A document published by The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet, appears to include the LGBTQ-related complaint. The document has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News.

The purported complaint includes claims that New College officials replaced gender-neutral bathroom signs with signs that don’t comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that school officials — including right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who’s on the board of trustees — have insulted students, parents and faculty by labeling them mentally ill and deliberately misusing pronouns. 

Rufo and DeSantis, in particular, are incensed over the federal probe. Rufo even called for the Education Department to be abolished.

And DeSantis appeared on Fox News on Monday, claiming the Biden administration is “basically saying that there’s a civil right to have things like gender studies and pronouns in our colleges and universities.”

The Biden administration has said no such thing. In fact, the Education Department’s letter to New College says “opening an allegation for investigation in no way implies that OCR has made a determination with regard to its merits.”

But the mere fact of being under review was clearly enough to roil DeSantis and company. They apparently don’t want anyone meddling with their efforts to meddle with Florida’s education system.

[foreverlogical]

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The newly-installed conservative board of trustees at New College of Florida ousted its current president in favor of former state education commissioner Richard Corcoran Tuesday, launching the initial move in reshaping the campus under the vision of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The decision came at the first board meeting since DeSantis appointed six new trustees with the idea of overhauling the liberal arts college in Sarasota into a more conservative-leaning institution. That track was accelerated Tuesday when the board paved the way for new leadership as students and parents protested the major changes that appear bound for New College.

“Some have said these recent appointments amount to a partisan takeover of the college. This is not correct,” said trustee Matthew Spalding, a constitutional government professor and vice president at Hillsdale College’s D.C. campus who was appointed by DeSantis. “It’s not a takeover — it’s a renewal.”

A leadership switch from President Patricia Okker to Corcoran as interim leader is one of several moves made Tuesday by the board, which also signaled its intent to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion programs on campus — all policies pushed by DeSantis. The changes are major developments at the school spurred by the new appointees, including Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who has advised DeSantis on critical race theory, and Eddie Speir, the co-founder of Inspiration Academy, a Christian charter school in Bradenton, Fla.

Tuesday’s meeting was met with apprehension from dozens of students and parents who protested what they called a “hostile takeover” at New College. They urged Okker to stay on as president and push back against the new mandates from the DeSantis administration to model the school as a “Hillsdale of the South” in reference to the private conservative religious “classical“ college in Michigan.

Okker in an emotional address told the board — and the campus — that she couldn’t continue to serve as president amid accusations that the students are being inundated with liberal indoctrination.

“The reality is, and it’s a hard reality and it’s a sad reality, but the vision that we created together is not the vision I have been given as a mandate here,” Okker said.

In remaking the board at New College, the DeSantis administration said the school was “completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning” and in need of change following downward enrollment trends. To move on from Okker, trustees agreed to a “generous” exit package that includes at least 12 months of paid professional development leave and benefits. Corcoran is unable to begin serving until March, leaving Okker’s chief of staff Bradley Thiessen in charge until then.

“New leadership is the expectation and I think it makes sense,” Rufo said at the meeting. “I don’t think it’s a condemnation of Dr. Okker, scholarship or skills or character.”

DeSantis’ changes at New College follow other efforts to reshape higher education in Florida. Earlier Tuesday, the GOP governor proposed several changes to Florida’s university system, including pressing the GOP-led Legislature to cut all funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to allow university leaders to launch tenure review of professors. Last year, DeSantis and state Republicans placed GOP allies in top university posts and pushed legislation that could limit how professors teach race.

New College is also now set to review its Office of Outreach & Inclusive Excellence at the request of Rufo as part of the state’s stance against diversity, equity and inclusion programs in schools. Rufo originally pushed to abolish the office outright, including four positions, and take other actions tied to diversity and equity, but decided to request further details on the program for a discussion in February.

Tuesday’s meeting was tense at times, with audience members frequently shouting over and at the new trustees as they spoke. Several parents and students addressed the board before they huddled, often criticizing their plans to retool the university and asking them to leave the college alone.

Some faculty said students felt “hopeless” about what could happen at the school, which is a unique college of under 700 undergraduates where students craft personalized education plans and don’t receive letter grades.

“Many students came here to feel safe and access the education that is their right as Floridians,” Diego Villada, Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, told the board. “And the impulse to make this a place where race, intersectionality and DEI are banned indicates to them that you want everyone to be the same – to be like you.”

Trustees, though, made it clear that the New College overhaul is fully underway, a message that came the same day DeSantis pledged to invest millions of dollars into recruiting faculty to the school.

“The campus needs a deep culture change. You sat up here, you called us racists, sexists, bigots, outsiders,” said trustee Mark Bauerlein, professor emeritus of English at Emory University who was appointed by DeSantis. “We are now in a position of authority in the college. And the accusations are telling us that something is wrong here.”

[thecapitolradar]

LGBTQ Nation?

You should know better than this.

Christopher Rufo has never been an "activist". He, like so many, labors in the vineyards of marketing and branding.

In 2021, the Republican Party hired him to sell an idea to the public: That Critical Race Theory was not a legal framework taught in law school classes, but a conspiracy to brainwash K-12 kids on race.

Next, Rufo sold the Rabid Right on the idea that LGBTQ folx we're "grooming" children to be sexually assaulted by queer adults.

Now, his target is pediatric hospitals, and you're helping.

Stop elevating Christopher Rufo to the level of "activist", and call him what he is: Just another Rabid Right scam artist trying to make a buck.

[feelingbluepolitics]

"[A] sophisticated, nationwide network of conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, media outlets, and GOP officials have seized on the term and, in the words of Christopher Rufo -- a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and a key player in the effort -- sought to render it 'toxic' and apply to it 'the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.' Republicans have proposed or passed a slew of legislation restricting 'critical race theory' and hope to use it as a core part of their political strategy in upcoming local, state, and federal elections.

"Fox, the leading propaganda outlet for the GOP, plays a key role in this strategy. The network has mentioned 'critical race theory' nearly 1,300 times over the past three and a half months. The purportedly sinister spread of 'critical race theory' provides a perfect framework for Fox’s technique of highlighting local concerns to fuel the culture war. The network supercharges the individual, at times dubious, stories that filter up with the help of nationally backed local activists, other right-wing outlets, and social media. Fox has targeted the purported influence of 'critical race theory' in corporate America, the military, and particularly schools, hosting parents, teachers, and other educators to talk about how they don’t want it taught in their communities.

 "In several of those cases, the locals Fox has highlighted are also Republican strategists, conservative think-tankers, or right-wing media figures -- ties the network has downplayed or ignored altogether."

Nearly a dozen of the Fox News guests the network has presented as concerned parents or educators who oppose the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in schools also have day jobs as Republican strategists, conservative think-tankers, or right-wing media personalities, according to a Media Matters review.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Chloe Simon at MMFA:

After a week of right-wing media spreading baseless smears about Haitian migrants abducting and eating pets, conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted a video allegedly showing a cat on a barbecue grill in Dayton, Ohio. Dayton police have issued a statement saying “there is no evidence to even remotely suggest” that any community is eating pets — but some in right-wing media ran with the story, claiming that Rufo’s video falsely “confirmed” the rumors about migrants and animals. 

Last week, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, promoted baseless and racist rumors about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets. During the September 10 presidential debate, Trump claimed, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Right-wing media also jumped on the narrative, calling Haitian migrants “locusts,” zombies,” and “weird Third World aliens.” [The Associated Press, 9/11/24; Media Matters, 9/10/24]

On September 14, Rufo posted a video purportedly showing a cat on a barbecue with the caption, “EXCLUSIVE: We have discovered that migrants are, in fact, eating cats in Ohio. We have verified, with multiple witnesses and visual cross-references, that African migrants in Dayton, the next city over from Springfield, barbecued these cats last summer.” Rufo did acknowledge in his Substack that “this single incident does not confirm every particularity of Trump’s statement. The town is Dayton, not Springfield; cats alone were on the grill, not cats and dogs.” However, he continued that the video “does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its ‘fact checkers’” and that “independent journalists are already on the hunt and could reveal more.” Prior to releasing the video, Rufo claimed he would “provide a $5,000 bounty to anyone who can provide my team with hard, verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.” [Twitter/X, 9/14/24, 9/11/24; Substack, 9/14/24]

Rufo, a senior fellow at conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, is a conservative activist known for his right-wing crusades against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and higher education. Media Matters has described his career as a long attempt to “inject bigotry and incorrect information into mainstream discourses about gay and trans people, drag queens, and the academic discipline known as critical race theory.” [Vox, 9/10/23; Media Matters, 1/6/23, 7/27/23; The Guardian, 2/21/24]

Dayton police have categorically denied that any group has “engaged in eating pets.” In a statement, the department wrote, “We stand by our immigrant community and there is no evidence to even remotely suggest that any group, including our immigrant community, is engaged in eating pets. Seeing politicians or other individuals use outlandish information to appeal to their constituents is disheartening.” Rufo’s video has also received a lot of backlash online, with open-source intelligence analyst Oliver Alexander writing that it was “clearly chicken you weirdo. Dude’s never seen chicken that wasn’t dino-nugget shaped.” In a further attempt to verify the video’s claims, CBS News reached out to veterinary experts who cited the image’s poor quality, while another “noted the legs looked ‘weirdly distended’ and in his opinion, did not look like cat legs.” [Twitter/X, 9/16/24, 9/14/24; The Independent, 9/15/24; CBS News, 9/16/24]

Right-wing disinformation purveyor Christopher Rufo posted a video purporting that cats were cooked on a barbecue grill in Dayton, Ohio. Dayton PD, however, shot down Rufo’s rumor-mongering by stating that there is no evidence of cats being grilled in Dayton.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jason Wilson at The Guardian:

New College of Florida, which has been the subject of a rightwing takeover that has reversed its previous reputation as a liberal arts school, has hired ideologically aligned rightwing faculty and staff for a range of positions, in a process that an internal open letter said “often replaced faculty expertise with administrative fiat”. New College of Florida (NCF) was targeted by the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who made transforming the liberal institution into a conservative one a centerpiece of his ill-fated presidential campaign that sought to take on liberal causes. Its board of trustees is now dominated by DeSantis allies, triggering campus turmoil and the exodus of some staff.

Some in the Republican party see the effort to transform New College as a model in a wider battle to take on American higher education, which the rightwing sees as dominated by left-leaning institutions and leaders. With Donald Trump returning to power after winning the presidential election last week, many rightwing activists could seek to replicate what has happened to New College across the US.

The Guardian has identified several faculty members who have a history of connections with rightwing media, far-right thinktanks and the so-called “New Right”. The hires are of a piece with the hard-right drift at the college since DeSantis appointed new members to the governing board of trustees including the culture warrior Christopher Rufo, which in turn appointed a new administration led by Richard Corcoran, a longtime Republican activist and former political candidate in Florida. In an internally circulated open letter to Corcoran written by the chairs of a key committee, staff members have complained that hiring processes now involved the “arbitrary replacement of searches in specific fields with open-field searches, searches with no requirement for a PhD in the field, insertion of candidates with no rationale, and job offers made without a recommendation from the search committee”. The Guardian emailed NCF for comment but received no response.

Rightwing hires

New College has appointed a raft of faculty and staff with a history in rightwing politics since Corcoran assumed control. The most prominent appointments – previously reported on by local news media and the college’s Catalyst student newspaper – are the new presidential scholars in residence, which are visiting appointments made at Corcoran’s direct discretion.

[...]

Pushback

Inside New College, faculty have pushed back on hiring processes for new faculty, which they allege have been subject to undue interference from Corcoran and his administration. The Guardian obtained a 31 May open letter from David Gillman and Nova Myhill, co-chairs of New College’s education committee, which relayed the faculty’s “deep concerns over changes at New College in the conduct of faculty searches”, which they say has “resulted in some hires that negatively affect the ability of programs, including interdisciplinary programs which depend on faculty hired into various disciplines, to fill the needs of students”. Without naming any specific hires, the letter said: “We see a breakdown of established processes with no new processes to take their place.”

The letter further alleges: “This has resulted in insertion of new lines with no rationale, arbitrary replacement of searches in specific fields with open-field searches, searches with no requirement for a PhD in the field, insertion of candidates with no rationale, and job offers made without a recommendation from the search committee.” Since Corcoran assumed control of New College, it has plummeted in national rankings of liberal arts schools; attracted controversy for dumping library books and materials from a gender and diversity center that the administration closed; and invited controversial speakers to campus. Last week, Inside Higher Ed reported on a brewing clash over changes to the core curriculum, which critics say is being “driven by conservative ideologues”.

The Guardian has an insightful report on how a former left-wing college campus turned sharply to the right under Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

That college is New College of Florida, and DeSantis helped turned the college far to the right as a linchpin on the war on all things “woke”.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Evan Urquhart at Assigned Media:

Dr. Eithan Haim has portrayed himself as a victim of politically motivated prosecution after he leaked information about trans kids treated at Texas Children’s Hospital to a notorious culture war activist. The FBI will bring felony charges against a doctor accused of leaking the private health data of transgender youth to conservative activist Chris Rufo. Dr. Eithan Haim has admitted to leaking partially redacted medical records to Rufo, records he accessed while working as a resident at Texas Children’s Hospital. 

Rufo is best known for his efforts to push the Republican party to pursue culture war flashpoints such as critical race theory and the idea that LGBTQ+ acceptance in schools amounts to “grooming” kids.  The records, which included multiple pieces of information relating to individual patients at Texas Children’s, were published on Rufo’s blog on May 16, 2023. At the same time, the write-ups of the leaks were also published in City Journal, the public policy magazine of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Stories by Rufo published to City Journal later revealed Haim’s identity and broke the news that he was under investigation by the FBI for misuse of patient data, Most recently, Rufo also broke the news on City Journal that the investigation has resulted in four felony charges for Haim. An update on Haim’s fundraiser on GiveSendGo, published on June 8, described how Haim was notified of the charges, in his own words.

The FBI indicts anti-trans Dr. Eithan Haim for leaking the medical info of trans kids to right-wing agitator Christopher Rufo.

See Also:

LGBTQ Nation: Dr. Haim faces federal HIPAA charges for leaking trans kids’ medical records to rightwing activists

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nathalie Baptiste at HuffPost:

For the last four years, conservative and right-wing activists and pundits have been engaged in a culture war that demonizes racial justice, the LGBTQ community and progressive ideals. So, when presumptive Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate on Tuesday, the culture warriors immediately dusted off their old playbook to attack Walz. Walz, a veteran and former teacher, has been a champion of LGBTQ rights, public education and racial equality — a platform that is anathema to Republican ideology. As governor, he approved a measure that would provide free menstrual products to public schools, including putting them in both girls and boys bathrooms.

Scandalized by the idea, Chaya Raichik, the person behind the Libs of TikTok account, which is dedicated to smearing the LGBTQ community, began calling Walz “Tampon Tim,” suggesting that he should be embarrassed by advocating for period products. But studies have shown that there is still a lot of stigma around menstruation, and 23% of students struggle to afford their own pads and tampons. Elsewhere, Fox News’ Jesse Watters recently took aim at Minnesota’s new flag, which debuted this year, and blamed Walz for the change. “This guy changed the flag of the state to look more like Somalia,” Watters claimed this week. The old flag, which was introduced in 1957, depicted a white man plowing the land while an Indigenous person rode horseback. Native communities in Minnesota asserted that the flag promoted the removal of Indigenous people from the land.

The new flag design was conceived by a state commission created by the legislature. While Walz did sign the bill creating that commission into law, he played no part in the design process. Also, the star design that conservatives allege was a copy of the Somalian flag was actually intended to be a literal representation of the state motto, “The Star of the North.” But that hasn’t stopped conservatives and right-wing figures from making false claims like this and others about Walz. During a recent Fox News appearance, Stephen Miller, who was a senior adviser to Trump, said Walz and Harris would “turn the entire Midwest into Mogadishu,” also citing Walz’s backing of refugee resettlement programs. Meanwhile, Angela Morabito, the spokesperson for the Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative nonprofit, posted claims on social media Tuesday that Walz kept “pornographic books in Minnesota schools” and “promoted critical race theory.”

These are popular lies among conservatives and right-wingers, who have spent the last three years attempting to ban books that promote racial equality or have LGBTQ themes from schools by falsely claiming they are sexually explicit or harmful to children.

But some of the most unhinged attacks have come from Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who is largely credited with manufacturing a panic about critical race theory and helping Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) takeover of the New College, a small liberal arts school in Florida. In a series of social media posts filled with lies, Rufo said Tuesday that Walz “shouts ‘trans women are women’ in the shower,” “knows that child castration is life-saving, gender-affirming care” and “speaks fluent critical race theory.”

The right-wing attacks on Minnesota Governor and Kamala Harris running mate Tim Walz are weird, especially the fake outrage about tampons in schools for grades 4-12 and the redesign of the Minnesota flag.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Robert Tait at The Guardian:

Republicans have identified recent college protests against Israel’s war in Gaza as the core of an election campaign narrative of chaos that they hope can be used to sink Joe Biden’s presidency. The approach was bluntly crystallised by Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, in a recent television interview when he mocked the encampments that have sprung up in recent weeks as “little Gazas” and lambasted the president for a perceived failure to unequivocally denounce instances of antisemitism.

“The Democrats have deep philosophical divisions on Israel,” Cotton told ABC’s This Week programme. “That’s why you see all those little Gazas out there on campuses where you see people chanting vile antisemitic slogans … For two weeks, Joe Biden refused to come out and denounce it. That is the 2024 election.” In fact, Biden did condemn antisemitism in a White House statement criticising the protests on 1 May, but also spoke out against Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice. Cotton’s comments followed weeks of turbulence on university campuses across the US that have seen riot police forcibly dismantle pro-Palestinian encampments in widely televised scenes reminiscent of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations of the 1960s. His labelling of the encampments as “little Gazas” was denounced as dehumanising by some who lauded the protesters for drawing attention to the death toll of Israel’s continuing military offensive in Gaza. While relatively few Americans identify the war in Gaza as a vote-influencer, Republicans are seeking to capitalise on the vocal minority who are expressing discontent over it.

The conservative activist Christopher Rufo spelt out the approach in a recent article on Substack. “This encampment escalation divides the Left, alienates influential supporters, and creates a sense of chaos that will move people against it,” he wrote. “The correct response … is to create the conditions for these protests to flourish in blue [Democratic-run] cities and campuses, while preventing them in red [Republican] cities and campuses.” GOP intent was signalled by the visits of delegations, including Mike Johnson, speaker of the House of Representatives, to Columbia University – centre of the recent protests – and to George Washington University (GWU) in Washington DC, where protesters spray-painted graffiti and draped a Palestinian flag on a statue of the US’s eponymous founding father.

“It’s what the protests say about American political society and culture that the Republicans are trying to pick up on,” said Patrick Murray, director of the polling institute at Monmouth University. “Biden has tried to make this election a referendum on what happened during the Trump administration, with his focus being ‘we don’t want to go back to the chaos of the Trump years.’ That argument can be undercut if people are seeing chaos from college campuses on their TV screens – Republicans are trying to say it’s no more stable and calm under Biden than it was under Trump.” Republicans are also expanding congressional investigations into antisemitism allegations in the protests, an approach that has already reaped political dividends after the presidents of two elite colleges, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, were forced to resign following criticism of their testimony in previous hearings.

The right-wing are weaponizing the Gaza Genocide protests on college campuses to create an image that the Democrats are pro-chaos and anti-law and order.