#christopher f. rufo

[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.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Madeleine Rowley

Published: Jun 25, 2024

The fragile facade of transgender ideology has cracked over the past year. Whistleblowers from within the medical profession have emerged to provide damning evidence that doctors are performing procedures based on shoddy scientific evidence under the label of “gender-affirming care,” as outlined in the WPATH Files and the Cass Review. Former patients who received “gender-affirming” care as adolescents have now detransitioned and are suing the doctors who cut off their breasts and put them on hormones that permanently damaged their bodies. Businesses ranging from Target to NFL teams are scaling back or eliminating Pride-themed merchandise and promotions. The public, too, is increasingly turning against transgender ideology. The tide is shifting.

The Left has adopted a new approach in response: political persecution of those speaking out against trans dogma. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice indicted Eithan Haim, a surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) who exposed the hospital’s secret continued use of irreversible sex-change procedures on minors after having publicly stated that it had stopped. By indicting Haim, the DOJ is seeking to silence future whistleblowers and to signal its disregard for the mounting evidence that gender-affirming care is harmful, and often irreversible.

Haim had anonymously sent City Journal’s Christopher Rufo documents proving that doctors at TCH were still prescribing hormone replacement therapy drugs and implanting puberty blockers in minor-age patients more than a year after the hospital announced it had stopped its pediatric gender-affirming care program. A month after Rufo published his article in May 2023, federal agents from the Department of Health and Human Services knocked on Haim’s door to let him know that he was a “potential target” in an investigation of alleged violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This week, an unsealed indictment revealed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas is charging Haim with four felony counts of violating HIPAA. A press release on the indictment alleges that Haim accessed patient information “under false pretenses and with intent to cause malicious harm to TCH.”

According to a letter written by Haim’s lawyers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari admitted that she hadn’t reviewed the purported evidence against Haim and was instead relying on what FBI agents told her. In the same discussion, Ansari insisted that the documents Haim sent to Rufo included children’s names, but nothing in the documents Rufo saw identified any individuals. All were redacted. The prosecutor then asked Haim to admit wrongdoing, telling him that he should apologize to the families of the children who received transgender medical interventions at TCH if he wanted her to help him avoid a felony prosecution. When this tactic failed, Ansari intimated that the families would sue if she didn’t bring criminal charges.

Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy for the Heritage Foundation and a former HIPAA regulator at the Department of Health and Human Services, called Haim’s prosecution “outrageous.” As Severino notes, Haim blew the whistle in good faith in a state “where it’s illegal to do these experimental surgeries on minors.” (In September 2023, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton announced that SB 14, a new law banning gender-transition procedures for minors in Texas, had gone into effect.)

Ansari’s zeal to prosecute Haim is especially strange, given her lack of knowledge of HIPAA law, as noted in a letter from Haim’s lawyers. In the past, Ansari has prosecuted cases involving doctors who falsified patient-care documents to receive higher insurance payouts, a health-center owner who scammed Medicare out of millions based on fraudulent claims, and a pharmacist who submitted false claims to Tricare and other federal insurance programs while pocketing $22 million. Yet she moved to indict Haim in this case, despite his having no profit motive, and despite the Texas Attorney General’s Office declining to act on the case for six months.

Dan Epstein, vice president of America First Legal, a conservative public-interest law group, calls the Haim indictment an overreach of epic proportions. “The fact that Texas state attorneys decided not to bring action on this case says that there wasn’t much public concern over it,” Epstein said. “This is a policy matter, and as a prosecutor if you’re enforcing legal policy and statute, you have to exercise some level of discretion.”

Paragraph 19 of the indictment alleges that Haim’s disclosures to Rufo resulted in “financial loss” to TCH, and that Haim blew the whistle out of “malicious intent.” Haim, for his part, observes that he swore an oath to “do no harm” and believed he had a duty to disclose alleged TCH’s secret gender clinic to prevent further harm to children undergoing procedures for which there is a lack of long-term evidence of efficacy (or safety).

This week, Vanessa Sivadge, a former registered nurse at TCH, came forward as a second whistleblower, alleging not only that the hospital was running its gender clinic in secret but also that doctors were illegally billing Texas’s Medicaid program to pay for the transgender medical interventions. Sivadge had spoken with Rufo for an article last year as an anonymous whistleblower, denouncing TCH’s gender-affirming care treatments for minors. Shortly after she did that, two FBI agents knocked on her door and, according to Sivadge, told her that she was a “person of interest” in the investigation involving Haim. They threatened to “make her life difficult” if she tried to protect him.

Unfortunately, these examples of politically motivated prosecutions aren’t new and will likely continue. Case in point: the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has chosen to prosecute cases like that of 75-year-old Paulette Harlow, recently sentenced to two years in prison for a demonstration at an abortion clinic. Meantime, pro-Hamas demonstrators who violated D.C. law by covering their faces with masks and keffiyehs and defaced statues near the White House run free, and anti-Israel protesters who barricaded themselves in Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall have seen criminal charges against them dropped.

Texas Children’s Hospital is a flashpoint. Haim faces up to a decade in prison and a $250,000 fine. What happens next could discourage future whistleblowers in the health-care industry.

“When it comes to health care fraud, you prosecute those that are going to have a strong deterrent effect and where prosecutorial resources justified spending taxpayer dollars on the matter,” says Epstein. “And here, I think, this is a clear case of prosecutorial overreach.”

[exprimis]

Christopher Rufo is a known transphobe, but I read this essay in Hillsdale's Imprimis, adapted from a speech that Rufo gave, and burst into laughter.

The essay contains many serious issues, including:

Uses trans people's post-transition names, but misgenders them in the most amazing ways: "[so-and-so] now identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. [...] She works as...."

Talks about "the transgender movement" as if it was something that only started in the late 1980s

Says that the transgender activists are trying to use transgenderism to support a Marxist revolution, and then does not try to split this gender-political coalition, thereby ceding ground to his ideological opponents

Discusses percentage-based demographic statistics without talking about population sizes

Hypothalamus-produced hormones are effectively the divine spark which grants life and humanity

Describes the evils of minimally-invasive robot surgery

There are also some things which I applaud this essay for:

Discusses MTF, FTM, and non-binary perspectives

Liberally quotes trans and non-binary writers

Provides the first mainstream citation for "nullification" surgery that I've yet seen

But that's not the funny part.

The funny part is Rufo's analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

In [Susan] Stryker’s best-known essay, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” he contends that the “transsexual body” is a “technological construction” that represents a war against Western society. “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” Stryker writes. And this monster, he continues, is destined to channel its “rage and revenge” against the “naturalized heterosexual order”; against “‘traditional family values’”; and against the “hegemonic oppression” of nature itself. [...]

In 1818, Mary Shelley wrote the famous novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The premise of the book is that modern science, stripped from the constraints of ethics and nature, will end up creating monsters. “Trans-affirming” doctors are the post-modern version of the book’s protagonist, Doctor Frankenstein. [...] Jennifer Pritzker, Maureen Connolly, Blair Peters, and their ilk occupy the heights of power and prestige, but like Doctor Frankenstein they will not be able to escape the consequences of what they have created. They are condemning legions of children to a lifetime of sorrows and medical necessities, all based on dubious postmodern theories that do not meet the standard of Hippocrates’ injunction in his work Of the Epidemics: “First, do no harm.” Although individuals can be nullified, nature cannot. No matter how advanced trans pharmaceuticals and surgeries become, the biological reality of man and woman cannot be abolished; the natural limitations of God’s Creation cannot be transcended. The attempt to do so will elicit the same heartbreak and alienation captured in the final scene of Mary Shelley’s novel: the hulking monster, shunned by society and betrayed by his father, filled with despair and drifting off into the ice floes—a symbol of the consequence of Promethean hubris.

Did Rufo even read Frankenstein? The tragedy did not come from the creation of The Creature, who Dr. Frankenstein and society shunned because of his looks. The tragedy was engendered by social rejection, and by physical attacks upon The Creature. It was this violence that led The Creature to swear revenge on Frankenstein and humanity, not some quirk of monstrous morality.

If Rufo wants to avoid the tragedies brought by shunning and rejection, instead of demonizing trans people and their sculptors, he should advocate for acceptance of ugliness, and for improvements in surgical technique to avoid that rejection.

[z0mbiechylde]

How the Trans Movement Conquered American Life | The Transgender Empire This cancerous tumor must be cut out of human society. It is sickening what’s being done to vulnerable people.

[1americanconservative]

Christopher F. Rufo 

@realchrisrufo

EXCLUSIVE: Kamala Harris plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal-justice book, Smart on Crime, according to a new investigation. The current vice president even lifted material from Wikipedia.

We have the receipts.

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

"There is a creeping sense that our society has turned upside-down. Healthy debate is replaced by activist hysterics. Speech is declared violence; violence is excused as speech. Masculinity is condemned as “toxic,” while men in dresses are celebrated in the public square. It feels as if we are in the midst of a society-wide mental breakdown.

One might be tempted to laugh at these manifestations as the outbursts of small but vocal minority, but the compromised health of our body politic is no trivial concern. A strange new pattern of psychological dysfunction has infiltrated all our institutions, from humdrum bureaucracies to the highest offices. Wherever we turn, that creeping feeling sets in: our society is sick; our institutions are out of balance; our public life has been consumed by a cluster of disorders that appeal to our worst instincts and derange our most vital social functions." Christopher F. Rufo

[bllsbailey]

Report: Harris Accused Of Plagiarizing Co-Authored 2009 Book 'Smart On Crime'

Several paragraphs from Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s 2009 book “Smart on Crime” were found to closely resemble—or exactly match—wording from other sources, leading to accusations of plagiarism against the vice president.

Together with ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton, who told the New York Post outlet when contacted on Monday that she was shocked to hear about the alleged copying, Harris, who was the district attorney of San Francisco at the time, penned the book advocating for a reform-minded approach to criminal prosecution.

Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, released the claims on Monday and attributed them to research conducted by Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber. Rufo shared screenshots of five instances on X where the book’s wording closely mirrors other sources.

In all instances, the purported source material predated the vice president’s book publication date.

The five side-by-side excerpts suggest that Harris may have copied text from a 2008 Associated Press article, a 2008 draft of a Wikipedia article, a 2000 Bureau of Justice Assistance report, a 2004 Urban Institute report, and a 2007 award press release from John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The original verbiage’s source is mentioned in footnotes in at least two of the cases; however, quote marks are not used around the words that seem to have been copied, and in other cases, like the Urban Institute study, passages seem to be completely uncredited.

In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the… pic.twitter.com/9FpsxQE8Sz— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

“Kamala Harris fabricated a source reference, inventing a nonexistent page number. The self-promotional content from Goodwill Industries was copied verbatim without citing the source (Goodwill Industries was her ‘primary partner’ on in [sic] the ‘Back on Track’ program),” Weber claimed. “In many other instances, even when a source was cited with a footnote, the text was directly copied and pasted without using quotation marks. Quotation marks would have been the most transparent and honest approach, also in non-academic books. Further signs of dishonesty may be evident when sources were copied but specific details were altered, such as replacing a Subway store owner with a sandwich shop clerk (p. 124) or highlighting Southeast Asia in the context of the US gang problem (p. 184).”

Nevertheless, politicians have survived similar scandals in the past. For example, former President Joe Biden misappropriated the family background and public statements of British politician Neil Kinnock during his 1987 presidential campaign and plagiarized a paper in his first year of law school.

Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts

[prensabolivariana]

“Con 5.000 dólares podría comprar comida de verdad”, ironizó un comentarista. El periodista e investigador Christopher F. Rufo ofreció esta semana una recompensa de 5.000 dólares por pruebas que confirmen las afirmaciones de que inmigrantes haitianos están comiendo mascotas en el estado de Ohio (EE.UU.), pero tuvo que precisar sus condiciones para evitar abusos. Continue reading “¡No coman gatos!”: Periodista aclara polémica recompensa sobre migrantes en EE.UU.

[peachyteabuck]

Peachy!! im so sorry i completley forgot i wanted to ask about your reward aka the book trolley :D First off what was the best and worst book of last year? What was the easiest to listen to and the hardest, and with the trolley itself are you going to leave it as it is or are you gonna maybe add stickers or something to it? I had a random thought you could do some quilting inserts for the books to sit on, or something to put around the edge. I'm happy you reached your goal. what about this year?

hello!! I'm currently going to leave the Book Cart as is. I already have a drop off spot for stickers I get for free from random places, and I like the clean look of the cart currently. I do like the idea of quilting something for it, but I think that's just because I like the idea of a bookshelf quilt (but I uhhhhh have too many UFOs to start something big and new like that right now). Inspired by a coworker, my goal for 2024 is to read 105 books, and I've read 5 so far! I found another library that does free non-resident cards so Libby is my lifeblood right now for audiobooks.

best book(s) of 2023:

how the word is passed by clint smith

kill anything that moves by nick turse

this is how you lose the time war by Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar

yellowface by r.f. kuang

salvation day by kari wallace

worst books of 2023:

Animal by Lisa Taddeo

a court of thorns and roses by sarah j. maas

hardest to listen to:

Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman (it was good, just so fucking long. and maggie haberman narrates the book, and she's very much a journalist rather than a voice actor, so it's so monotone)

America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything by Christopher F. Rufo (conservatives are just...so dumb and wrong about things, to a degree that is legitimately painful)

best to listen to:

killers of a certain age by deanna raybourn (it's about assassins, so there are tons of accents, and the voice actors did an excellent job with all of them)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alyssa Tirrell at MMFA:

Dr. Eithan Haim, a former medical resident at Texas Children's Hospital, was indicted in May for allegedly illegally accessing trans patients’ records, which he subsequently shared with Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo.  Right-wing media figures have since defended Haim and brought him in for interviews, often equating the care allegedly provided at Texas Children's Hospital — such as the prescription of "puberty blockers" — with harm or mutilation and alleging that Haim is the target of political persecution.  The campaign has successfully raised both Haim's profile and at least $888,865, which he claims will be used for both his legal defense and “offensive legal action against those who have abused their professional responsibility in service of radical transgender ideology.” 

Haim allegedly illegally accessed trans patients’ records

On February 18, 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion that qualified youth gender-affirming care as "child abuse", prompting Texas Children's Hospital to announce that it would stop proving such care. Although the opinion was not legally binding, the hospital released a statement announcing that it would stop prescribing gender-affirming hormone therapies. The statement, which also alluded to recent measures that Gov. Greg Abbott had taken against families of children receiving gender-affirming care, added that “this step was taken to safeguard our healthcare professionals and impacted families from potential legal ramifications.” [Office of the Attorney General of Texas, 2/18/22; American Civil Liberties Union, 2/23/22; The Washington Post, 3/8/22]

In late spring 2023, Dr. Eithan Haim allegedly accessed the records of trans patients at Texas Children's Hospital and shared them with Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo. Haim, a resident at Baylor College of Medicine who had previously conducted rotations at Texas Children's Hospital, shared redacted files with Rufo that allegedly demonstrated that the hospital was continuing to provide gender-affirming services to minors. [Houston Public Media, 6/10/24; U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of Texas, 6/17/24; United States District Court of the Southern District of Texas, 5/29/24]

On June 2, 2023, a Texas bill restricting gender-affirming care for children was signed into law. S.B. 14 prohibited “the provision to certain children of procedures and treatments for gender transitioning, gender reassignment, or gender dysphoria” as well as “the use of public money or public assistance to provide those procedures and treatments.” The law went into effect on September 1 of that year. [Texas legislature, 6/2/23]

[...]

Right-wing media figures platformed Haim in solo interviews, where he defended himself 

Since January 2024, with the revelation of his identity, Eithan Haim has appeared as a guest alongside many prominent right-wing media figures. In these interviews Haim neither claimed to have worked directly with trans patients nor disputed sharing the documents with Chris Rufo. Instead, Haim often alleged that he was being unfairly targeted and defended his case on the grounds that the care allegedly provided at Texas Children's Hospital was harmful to pediatric patients. 

Right-wing media defend Dr. Eithan Haim’s HIPAA-violating ways of illegally accessing trans patients’ records while at Texas Children’s Hospital in which he shared those records with far-right anti-LGBTQ+ agitator Christopher Rufo.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Skeptic

Published: Oct 4, 2024

Christopher Rufo

Skeptic: You are a controversial figure for your work in the area of Critical Race Theory (CRT). What led you to this subject?

Rufo: My professional background is in documentary filmmaking. The book writing process was totally different. I hope what I was able to do with the book is bring my narrative training to telling stories that engage people and move them at an emotional level.

Skeptic: Well, you did that. It’s a highly readable book in which you present a history of ideas. One of the difficulties is drawing causal connections between thinkers across generations. How do you address that problem?

Rufo: There was a lot of looking for explicit connections. For example, I profile Angela Davis, who I think is really kind of the godmother of CRT. She tied the original critical theory from the early part of the 20th century to American race politics in a deliberate way. Her thesis advisor was the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, who is also profiled in the book. Then I connect Davis to the modern Black Lives Matter movement; she is the personal mentor to a number of BLM leaders. I tried not to make any specious connections, and I wanted to be charitable to my subjects, to see the world first through their eyes and treat them fairly. Only then did I layer on my criticism or my critique.

Skeptic: On that political front, how do you distinguish between old-school liberals, such as Steven Pinker, and the more radical progressive thinkers of today?

Rufo: The critical theorists I profile in my book are explicitly anti-liberal, such as Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derek Bell, the father of CRT. Their whole movement is explicitly and deeply anti-liberal. It’s against the concept of individual rights, private property, and Enlightenment values. So, I hope that I can also speak to some of those estranged liberals and explain how the movement that has really taken over the institutional left in the United States has deviated from that small ‘l’ liberal tradition and really originates from something much more radical, revolutionary, and Marxist in nature.

Skeptic: Walk us through these influences, starting with Marx.

Rufo: Over the course of the 20th century, there was a deviation from orthodox Marxism as people became more infatuated with the new left, the more activist 1960s youth movement, and racial unrest. Angela Davis was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, and she ran for vice president of the United States on the Communist Party ticket. She was deeply influenced by Marx (although she had written her graduate thesis on Kant) and was also well-versed in the Western philosophical tradition. Paulo Freire—the same. He was working with Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries in the Third World, and his idea of critical consciousness originates in Marxist concepts that he had learned when he was a student in Brazil.

However, the most interesting case is Derek Bell, who was a Harvard Law professor, and in many ways the founding figure of CRT. His students at Harvard Law and other elite law schools around the country, inspired by Bell, established the discipline of critical race theory in the late 1980s. Bell grew up in the Pittsburgh area, served in the U.S. Air Force, went to law school, and was a very successful—even brilliant—student. Then he became a lawyer for the NAACP, handling cases in the Deep South desegregating schools in places such as Mississippi. I think he oversaw something like 300 school desegregation cases. He was a civil rights advocate and activist, a small ‘l’ liberal at the time.

However, Bell became disillusioned with the Civil Rights Movement and utterly disillusioned with Martin Luther King-style civil rights activism that turned to the Constitution, focusing especially on the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. He thought these were all illusions in that they provided the appearance of freedom but were actually used to reinforce secretly and covertly the structures of racial domination. It is this aspect of Bell’s work that survives and is really the foundation of what we now see as critical race theory.

Skeptic: There’s this push to find deep root causes of specific events among politicians. Is this a useful approach?

Rufo: It’s amazing because it’s totally backwards. Politicians say, “Well, no, we’re not going to do the thing that actually could have a significant and immediate impact, and instead we’re going to implement the 1619 Project and focus on the first arrival of African slaves in North America.” That certainly is something of historical importance and scholarly relevance, and should even be part of the public debate, but what do you do with that? Short of having a time travel machine, you can’t change the past 400 years of history. Nor can you show any real relevance to today beyond a very broad and metaphorical interpretation of current events.

When you go back and look at the civil rights movement, against which Derrick Bell rebelled later in his life, you had, for the most part, people who wanted to cash in the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence. They wanted to conform to not only the system of individual rights in the United States as a form of law, but also conform to middle class or bourgeois values as a matter of culture. Look at these great civil rights marches in the 1960s. Men were dressed in suits and ties and the women in dresses. And these weren’t necessarily wealthy people. They were mostly working-class African Americans. However, the image that they wanted to convey was one of dignity, self-respect, and an immense hope for equal participation in American society. I’m still really moved and struck by some of those images.

Compare those images to the kind you see of Antifa or BLM activists in 2020. You have deranged-looking mugshots of people. You have people that visually look quite disordered, committing sprees of violence. And in the name of what? It was never quite clear what they wanted beyond defunding the police or just having a justification for violence. Those two images, if you look at them side by side, reveal the kind of fundamental change in the modern left.

Skeptic: What do you think is the right approach to social change?

Rufo: When you ask people in surveys, “Do you support affirmative action? Do you support race-conscious college admissions? Do you support mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training?” They overwhelmingly say “No.” This is true for people of all political affiliations and all racial backgrounds. And yet, all of those things are now required in nearly all of our major institutions. So, you have this mismatch problem where public sentiment is against something, but all of our institutions and even our public policies are for it. Why is that? If we live in a democracy, shouldn’t majority sentiment eventually translate into public policy?

The answer is that, in my view, there are concentric rings of influence on these issues. You have the tightest ring, which consists of the fanatics, the people who are deeply committed to it. They work in it. These are the DEI administrators. These are the critical race theorists. These are the BLM activists. Then you have another concentric ring of people that say, “Well, you know, I more or less buy into the premise of this. I want more diversity.” That’s roughly 30 percent of the public, maybe a little bit more depending on the issue. Then you have an even larger concentric ring of people who are neutral, slightly opposed, or even quite opposed to it, but they don’t speak out because they fear the consequences. This creates an opinion environment in which those very committed activists can really run up the score and impose their point of view as the de facto policy.

That’s the environment we live in. The people who care most about it have figured out where the levers of power are. They’ve gone, in most cases, around the democratic process to impose their will. And they essentially say—as we’ve seen recently with Harvard and the University of North Carolina [the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment]—“We know what we’re doing is unpopular. We know what we’re doing is likely illegal and unconstitutional. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

Skeptic: Erika Chenoweth and Maria Steffen’s research on political violence demonstrates that since 1900, nonviolent campaigns worldwide were twice as likely to succeed outright as violent insurgencies. This trend has been increasing over time. In the last 50 years, civil resistance has become increasingly frequent and effective, whereas violent insurgencies have become increasingly rare and unsuccessful. No campaigns failed once they achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population, and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.

Rufo: That’s right. I think academic critique is still valuable. However, what we really need is political opposition because this issue has moved from the realm of academia to the realm of politics. So, it also has to be fought politically. That’s what I’ve done, and I’ve gotten an unbelievable amount of criticism for this approach.

I’ve taken the battle out of the realm of academic discourse and into the realm of practical politics. I’ve been very explicit about that. I said I want to change public perception; I want to turn critical race theory into a brand, and I want to destroy it not just in the realm of public opinion, but also in the realm of public policy.

If it’s in the K–12 school curriculum, it’s a policy question. If it’s in a public university DEI bureaucracy, it’s a policy question. If it’s in our criminal justice system, it’s a policy question. These are political questions, and those who think that we can resolve them through discourse are really doing a disservice. They’re not grappling with the actual difficult nature of statesmanship and political activism that’s required.

If we want to have a society that says, “No, we’re not going to engage in racial scapegoating. We’re not going to judge individuals based on a racial category. We’re not going to imbibe in notions of hereditary blood guilt,” the only way, I think, is through political pressure, by changing the laws by which our institutions are governed.

Skeptic: What are your thoughts on systemic racism? What is your explanation for racial group differences in income, wealth, home ownership, representation in Congress and the corporate C-suite?

Rufo: What is the standard by which we measure systemic racism? How do we define systemic racism? There’s an interesting bait and switch here, because they say, “Well, all of this is systemic racism, from chattel slavery to the fact that a Lakeisha Smith is less likely to get called back than a Lisa Smith.” [“Call back” studies submit the same resumés to businesses and compare the response to identifiably Black versus White names]. You have this transition in the mid-20th century from explicit, formal, and legal racist policies to what amounts to implicit racist policies. Well, what do they mean by that?

They mean that when you measure things statistically, that there is a disparate impact on outcomes. Lisa versus Lakeisha Smith is just one such example. You can say that there are no outright racist policies in policing or housing or geographical distribution, but there are still disparate outcomes. Is it because people are secretly and subconsciously racist? That’s the unconscious bias theory, which has been debunked. [It has been demonstrated that The Implicit Association Test, often cited as confirming evidence, does not measure racial bias but rather reaction time to familiar versus unfamiliar terms.] Are police more likely to shoot a Black suspect than a White suspect? Roland Fryer at Harvard showed that this is not the case. [Although he did find that White police rough up Black people they pull over more than White people.]

Then you have to ask some uncomfortable questions. If, for example, there are more African American men in jail than Asian American men, is it because our society is systemically racist against African American men and systemically giving privileges to Asian American men?

You could make that argument, but I think that on the face of it most people realize that it’s not true. Then you ask about the rate of criminality—do African American males on average commit more crimes than Asian American males? You might find that it’s not racism that is operative. It’s another set of background variables. Robert Rector published some papers on this subject 20 years ago that are still foundational to my thinking. He showed that if you control for those background variables, you find that the argument for active systemic racism vanishes across a whole range of things, not just Lakeisha versus Lisa Smith, but for things that are especially meaningful. For example, if you control for the mother’s academic achievement, the mother’s participation in state welfare programs, and household family structure, the gap between White and Black childhood poverty disappears. It’s zero.

If we aim our public policy towards fixing those variables, we’d be much better served and we’d be much more likely to reduce overall inequalities.

Skeptic: Those causal variables are largely left out of the conversation. Maybe it’s taboo to talk about them right now?

Rufo: I think it is, because it’s a very inconvenient disrupting narrative when you have minority groups that are enormously successful in the United States. The most successful ethnic groups in the United States today are majority non-White ethnic groups, including some Black ethnic groups, particularly Nigerian Americans. Part of that may be due to a selection process—immigrants from Nigeria are disproportionately better educated, have more resources, etc. So, it’s not quite a one-to-one measurement.

Nonetheless, there’s a huge range in success among ethnic groups in the United States. The ones that have stable family structure, commitment to education, a strong work ethic, mutual support within a community, etc., are very successful. Those ethnic groups that do not have those attributes do very poorly on many measures, including income. Appalachian Whites do very poorly while Nigerian Americans or other recent immigrants are doing extraordinarily well.

Skeptic: Are you optimistic we can achieve a colorblind society?

Rufo: There are reasons for optimism and for pessimism. The reason for optimism is that the American people really despise the DEI affirmative action principles of governance. Even in California and Washington state, where I live, voters have rejected affirmative action policies when they’ve been put to a ballot initiative. And the majority of racial groups also oppose these kinds of policies. Despite all of the media dominance, academic dominance, and bureaucratic dominance of the DEI movement—the American people want equal treatment for each individual, regardless of group category. They want colorblind equality, not racial favoritism and enforced equity.

The case for pessimism is that it’s going to be difficult. The problem of racial equality is a thorny one. It is one that has vexed the United States for its whole history and is, frankly, likely to continue. As long as there is visible inequality—statistically measurable inequality—the narrative of critical race theory will have a base of support. It will have the political, emotional, and intellectual grounds that can feed that narrative. This puts us in a bit of a conundrum because paradoxically, the remedies of critical race theory are actually likely to make inequality worse. And for the people who are running a critical race theory style regime, inequality justifies their claims to power. So, they have no incentive to make things better in the real world. If we go in that direction, we face a very long, very brutal, and very disillusioning politics in our future.

Skeptic: Do you see any role for any kind of reparations for formerly oppressed peoples or even currently oppressed people?

Rufo: I have certainly opposed any kind of race-based reparations payments. I think it’s absolutely the wrong direction to go for a host of reasons. Historically, if you look at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society anti-poverty programs, these were to a large extent a kind of race-based reparations policy that was—they thought—backed up by the latest discoveries in social science, deployed at federal mass scale. These programs now are spending about a trillion dollars a year, disproportionately to African Americans, especially descendants of slaves.

These are policies that sound great, and that’s why they’re often passed in legislation. But we have to be sober and level-headed in analyzing whether they actually work. Do they help us achieve the stated intentions? The evidence that it has helped in any way is lacking. In fact, the most persuasive evidence, in my view, shows that it has had negative, though unintended, consequences. In my reading of it, both statistically and as someone who spent three years researching and documenting public housing projects in Memphis, Tennessee, and getting a first-hand look at their impact, I just don’t think that reparations would work.

[ This interview was edited from a longer conversation that took place on The Michael Shermer Show, which you can watch online. ]

[foxonly]

The Rise of Ethical Cannibalism

We should have seen this coming! The flagship publication of Hillsdale College, Imprimis, which the College claims has a readership of more than six million, has recently published an article by the current enfant terrible of conservatism, Christopher F. Rufo, entitled “Inside the Transgender Empire.” The article explores the question of how transgenderism became so successful, and especially…

[fuojbe-beowgi]

"D.E.I. Programs Are Getting in the Way of Liberal Education" by Christopher F. Rufo via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/opinion/christopher-rufo-diversity-desantis-florida-university.html?partner=IFTTT

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Diversity Programs Miss the Point of a Liberal College Education by Christopher F. Rufo

By Christopher F. Rufo Highly ideological D.E.I. programs erode the environment of open, substantive debate that is the basic prerequisite for liberal education. Published: July 27, 2023 at 05:00AM from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/lV5gmAT via IFTTT

[sbalich]

Oregon’s Castration Machine

The Will County News Home  #government  Oregon’s Castration Machine #government #health/Medicine #maga #Money #philosophy #politics #sbalich #Science #teaparty #trump #twill Abuse of power law LGBTQ Medicine/health Oregon’s Castration Machine By  Steve Balich  – July 18, 2023 0 1 Christopher F. Rufo Oregon’s Castration Machine A public hospital in Portland is using a…

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

by Christopher F. Rufo | In 2015, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors led a delegation to the Palestinian territories, so that the group’s activists could learn from the “Palestinian struggle.” She condemned Israel as an “apartheid state,” and the running theme of the trip was revolution, “from Ferguson to Palestine.” The same year, Cullors signed a statement drawing parallels between the…