On September 2, 2020, Christopher Rufo appeared on the Tucker Carlson Tonight to warn conservatives that a far left racial ideology called critical race theory (CRT) had infiltrated every institution in America. It had become the “default ideology of federal bureaucracy,” declared Rufo, and he called on Trump to pass an executive order “abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government.”
According to Rufo, this appearance on Tucker Carlson was the fruit of “six months of research.” It began when Rufo used FOIA requests to uncover slideshows and curricula from implicit-bias training seminars held by the City of Seattle. “Under the banner of ‘antiracism,’” wrote Rufo, “Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights is now explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism—ugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago.”
Following the breadcrumbs, this brilliant investigator found that many of these training courses used books by Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and found that they cited some racial scholarship from thinkers such as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefancic—the critical race theorists.
Whether Rufo has read anything by those authors is difficult to say. He frequently says that CRT is “race essentialist,” while anti-essentialism is a foundational idea to CRT. He accuses them of emphasizing white privilege, while CRT differentiated itself from much racial scholarship by being critical of the concept of “white privilege.” In fact, CRT is rather skeptical of diversity training seminars in general, arguing that if racial prejudice disappeared tomorrow with some massive seminar or magic pill, there would still be racism.
CRT is a legal theory which has been somewhat influential in the social sciences. Most racial scholars will pull from CRT’s work without embracing the movement as a whole. Generally, antiracist pop writers like Kendi or DiAngelo will use CRT’s criticisms of standardized testing or structural critiques to demonstrate the existence of a systemic problem, while ignoring the meaning of the buzzword “systemic”—that changing general attitudes through inclusivity training will not fix structures which reinforce white superiority.
Rufo accuses CRT of being a Marxist school of thought, linked in particular to the Frankfurt School. He draws this tangential connection by noting that Kendi and DiAngelo also cite Angela Davis, a black prison abolitionist who studied under Marcuse. This is a nice tie in to a previous era of right wing panic regarding the Frankfurt School, despite the glaring fact that Davis isn’t part of the CRT movement aside from some thinkers using her work on prisons and gender.
This laughable amalgamation of weak scholarship and illiteracy worked. Trump did pass an executive order. Eventually this panic reached fears regarding the school system. Now, a year after Rufo’s appearance on Tucker Carlson, protests have swept school boards by parents fearful of CRT being taught in the classroom. The right wing hysteria has been kicked into full gear.
If you’re anything like me, you’re probably thinking, “Oh my God. This seems awesome. Rufo’s career is made now, and he basically just made shit up. How do I get in on this grift?”
Well, it’s not so easy. First, you will have to read a book. But after that, yeah, it’s pretty easy. Here’s how to create a right wing panic.
Step 1. Find a guy
Every right wing hysteria needs a scapegoat. If you want this hysteria to be particularly conservative in nature, you have to point to a moment everything went wrong. You want to look at one thinker who screwed up the world. You need to find a guy.
Ideally, this guy must be someone everyday people haven’t heard of, but who is still common enough to be found in a lot of citations. This perfect balance is important: they need to be unknown enough to seem shady, but well-known enough that they will appear everywhere. I’m going to use two examples.
The first is the radical educational theorist Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This will be a pretty easy one since Freire explicitly calls himself a Marxist (we’ll ignore that he explicitly calls himself a Christian also). This famous text was rather influential on educational theory, although no one really applies it in the classroom. The general gist is that Freire felt the typical educational style of reciting facts to a student was irrelevant to the lives of poor people, and that a more liberating style of education would focus on posing “problems” and discussing them. It’s really not important to understand what Freire actually means here, and it’s probably going to be easier to grift if you don’t.
The second guy I’m going to use is the philosopher of language Johann Gottfried von Herder. In After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition, the author Michael Forster argues that Herder was one of the most influential philosophers in Germany and that he deserves more credit for his impact on intellectual history. This is perfect: a guy who appears in footnotes everywhere and influences a bunch of other intellectuals, and Forster has done all the work for us.
To find your own guy, you just need to read a book or two. If you’re in college, just take a break from being perpetually drunk and do the assigned reading for a few weeks (that’s all you really need), and look at the footnotes. If you do it enough, you’ll see a lot of guys reference a lot of other guys’ work. Eventually, you can find one guy that shows up a lot, and there you go.
Step 2. Make it relevant
This is an important step. You want to make sure you interpret these thinkers from the standpoint of the culture war today. This guy needs to become the father of all the bad, scary things right now. For instance, Rufo conjured up CRT in the shadow of Black Lives Matter in 2020. You want to make whatever this thinker said relevant to current buzzwords and discourses.
Part of this process is also ignoring any of the guy’s ideas that aren’t relevant to the specific narrative you want. With CRT, this means never mentioning anti-essentialism or opposition to diversity training. With Freire, we’re going to make sure we ignore his anti-authoritarian side. Right now, the current trend among conservatives is educational libertarianism and opposing any “brainwashing” in schools. Freire agrees with this, so we can’t emphasize this. Instead, we are going to lean into his differentiation between oppressed and oppressor, and his unapologetic connection to Marxism. We’ll emphasize his connection to critical theory broadly, and we will mention that he is loosely associated with the theologian James Cone, who we will describe as a white-hating, black power thinker who influenced Jeremiah Wright and believed that white people go to hell unless they are converted to blackness. While this framing is not what Cone meant, we’re going to roll with it anyway.
Herder is going to be our connection to “wokeness” and “political correctness.” According to Forster, Herder greatly influenced a number of important thinkers: Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Franz Boas to name a few. What’s particularly great about Herder here is that he influenced other guys with scary German names that the average person won’t know. There’s even more potential for confusion here.
The basic idea behind Herder’s philosophy is that thought is bound by language, and that people and cultures are radically different in such a way that the process of transferring concepts from one person or culture to another is fraught with difficulties. This is an oversimplification of Herder, which is perfect for our goals here.
We will say that Herder is the father of wokeness because all thinking comes back to language and the words we use. Have you ever wondered why liberals are so obsessed with using the right words to talk about race or gender? This is why. They are trying to control your thinking. According to Forster, Herder held to a pluralistic cosmopolitan ideal. If you run that phrase through a synonym machine long enough, you can come out with “globalism.” Herder was a globalist seeking to control acceptable speech and, therefore, people’s thoughts.
Now we pull out those guys influenced by Herder. Von Humboldt is associated with the historicist school of thought and is held alongside Leopold von Ranke as one of the fathers of modern academic history. Now we have our connection between academic history and wokeness. Schleiermacher is even better: a theologian considered the father of liberal theology who was greatly influential on the Mainline churches until the neo-Orthodoxy of Barth and Niebuhr began to take hold. Now we have our connection to the liberal churchgoers. Lastly, and perhaps the best example, we have Boas, considered one of the fathers of anthropology. Forster specifically argues that Herder provided anthropology with the idea of cultural relativism which is another old conservative talking point. Ignoring that this is more a methodological ideal (don’t judge a culture you’re studying by your own standards, or it will mess up your data), we can point to Herder’s connection to the relativist, amoral, woke society of today.
Step 3. Make any debate impossible
When you get your monologue on TV or radio, make sure you frame this as the biggest threat to American society and traditional values we have ever seen. We will say that they teach Freire in most required theory courses for teachers, which is technically true. We will say that Herder’s theory of language is the birth of modern wokeness on campuses which teach his successors: Boas in anthropology courses, von Humboldt in history courses, and Schleiermacher in religion courses. Make sure it seems like you’ve uncovered some shady plot rather than just glanced at some footnotes and noticed some influential names. This is actually a way to cover your tracks. Most academics will be aware of the influence these figures have (because it isn’t actually a shady plot), so they will be stuck arguing that you can cite someone without being implicated in their entire viewpoint, but, at this point, everyone has stopped paying attention.
It’s also important to cover your tracks by intentionally misusing phrases so that your critics look pedantic when they try to criticize you. For instance, criticizing Rufo for misusing the phrase “critical race theory” is clearly a fool’s errand at this point; he has fundamentally changed what the word means, and it now refers to any acknowledgment of racism. Try to criticize his use of the word and you will sound nitpicky.
So we will call Herder’s thought the “German tradition.” This is nice and vague, and it loosely implies connections to Nazism or Marxism by nature of its Germanness. Eventually, this will make the term so loaded that it becomes impossible to know what someone means when they talk about it. For Freire, we’ll call it “radical educational theory” or “critical education.” These are, again, vague terms that could mean a lot of different things. Throw in occasional references to Marxism and humanism (ignore that he means humanism in the Catholic sense), and you have a perfectly scary thinker.
Conclusion
You really can do this with anyone. The right has done this with the Frankfurt School, Howard Zinn, Saul Alinsky, Hegel, Nietzsche, critical race theory, and many other thinkers or schools of thought. It works almost every time because they assume that you will not actually read any of these thinkers or know how citations work. In fact, they rarely do the assigned reading themselves.
In his 2021 book, American Marxism, Mark Levin continues to push some of these old conservative intellectual scares. Throughout the book and on his show he continually references the influence of the “Franklin School.” It could be shrugged off as a typo if he didn’t keep saying and writing it over and over. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but my point is this: the talking points have worked so well, you can be lazy at this point. Conservative commentators can call themselves experts on a schools of thought they don’t know the name of, and line their pockets by selling pseudo-intellectual books about guys they found that are tangentially related to current buzzwords.
And you can do it too by following the three easy steps I listed above.