Chris Rufo's Tactics Explained.

Christ always tells people what he doing and makes the metapolitics explicit. Here is why that strategy works.

I have spent the past several years working alongside Chris Rufo, and I have come to the conclusion that nobody either on the right or the left really understands what it is that we are doing or why the tactics Christ developed are effective. So I will explain to everyone what we are doing, and why it works.

To begin, we are not engaged in the typical leftist tactics related to activism. The left seeks to use boycotts, activism, and pressure to force their opponents into a situation in which they have no good options. This idea is to engineer a situation in which their opponents are on the wrong side of the optics no matter what they do. This is accomplished through a combination of activism and control of the cultural narrative which allows the left to box their opponents in and pressure them to giving the left what they want. This is not what Chris and I are doing because this assumes that the clout, prestige, credibility, legitimacy of an institution is the product of “optics” or “the narrative.” The left thinks if they control the optics and the narrative they can threaten the legitimacy of institutions and force them to give in to the demands of the left. This is not what we believe.

It is our view that the institutions are corrupted by a combination of moral cowardice on the part of centrists/moderates and by the activism and advocacy of radical leftists who have marched through and hijacked the institutions. Progressive leftists and radicals have taken over the institutions, politicized them, and are using them to enforce their moral values and political ideology on everyone. Thanks to leftist activism, even centrist institutions tolerate radical leftists and their extremist views as simply "the cost of doing business" in an institution that values diversity, while maintaining that even the mildest conservative is the equivalent of Hitler and must be purged. This state of affairs has become normalized across the institutional landscape.

This situation creates an enormous Achillies heel for our institutions. What the left gets wrong is that institutional legitimacy and credibility is not about “optics.” The prestige, clout, influence, resources, credibility and legitimacy of institutions rests on the assumption that they are mission focused, truth focused, rigorous, even handed, competent, and so fourth. What Chris has been doing for some time (and I have joined him) is not trying to subvert legitimate institutions the way the left did, it is showing that the institutions have already subverted themselves. The left subverted the competence, standards, criteria, mission, and values which gave the institutions their legitimacy, credibility, and influence to begin with, and they succeeded because centrists and moderates were cowards who refused to stand up to those leftists. In the process, they undercut their own intellectual an moral integrity.

We are simply drawing attention to this fact.

When we expose the fact that the institutions have lost their integrity, and that they have been subverted and hijacked the reaction is always that the institutions make things worse, like a man thrashing in quicksand as he tries to escape only to find that it makes him sink even deeper. The reason for this effect is that the things required to restore trust and integrity in those institutions are lacking. The standards of truth and rigor have been subverted so there are no guard rails, and the institutions are staffed either by leftists who agree with that subversion, or liberals and centrists who lack the courage and character to tell the left "no"

There is no one in the institutions capable of making the right decision and then following through on it. The result is that they can never actually correct course, and so they do things that only serve to make things worse for them by further revealing the degree to which the institutions have been subverted by leftists who have hollowed them out and are using them as vehicles to advance an extremist political ideology.

This is one of the reasons Chris believes it is so important to tell the left our strategy before we do it. In fact, Christ and I have, since at least 2021, made a point of ensuring that the left knows what we are going to do before we do it because it is very important to tell everyone what we are going to do before t we do it. I will explain why. Our strategy has always assumed the institutions are corrupt and totally lacking in integrity, and this is why telling them our strategy works so well. When we reveal our strategy ahead of time, it lets the institutions know what's coming so they can strengthen their reaction to our exposés. However, since they lack integrity, courage, truth, and objective values, their reactions always backfire and blow up in their faces. By increasing the strength of their reaction, we increase the amount of blowback they impose on themselves and the damage they inflict on themselves by reacting in the wrong way. Making the meta-politics explicit forces the institution to act while attention the the political character of the choice is highest, thus denying them the ability to hide the political import of their actions.

In this way what we are doing is the exact opposite of the left. The left assumes truth is socially constructed, and that therefore what is true is a matter of who controls the narrative and the discourse and they can. We are doing exactly the opposite: we assume that truth is objective and that reality doesn't care what anyone thinks, and we force institutions to react in a way that exposes their corruption regardless of who controls the narrative.

Thus our tactics destroy their immediate power by showing that the institutions they control are corrupt, incompetent, and illegitimate, while also destroying their meta-level theory about how society and power actually work. We destroy their power and their ideology at the same time. Every time Chris does this (Claudine Gay, CRT in schools, The NPR CEO, The New Yorker) he forces both the true believing leftists and cowardly centrists/liberals/moderates into an existential crisis and the only way out is to have integrity - and they just can’t do it.

It is tempting to think that Chris has merely adopted and adapted Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony to our own purposes. This is a mistake. In working with Chris our goal to understand how the left operates, why their tactics work (if they work), and what their theories get wrong. In this case we discovered an Achillies heel: the left thought they could win by ignoring reality and focusing on controlling the narrative. Since this doesn’t work, and everyone knows that it doesn’t work, whenever the left does this it gives us an opening to test to see if the institution is committed to truth or if it is committed to advancing a political ideology. When institutions show they are more committed to their politics than they are to truth and are willing to bend, warp, and ignore the truth to accomplish their political goal, then those institutions lose their legitimacy. Accordingly, the strategy adopted by Christ Rufo is simply to put institutions in a situation where the institution is forced to reveal whether it is committed to truth, rigor, and competence, or whether the institution is committed to using it’s influence to advance a political agenda. All of the damage that is inflicted by Chris Rufo’s tactics occurs when the institutions reveal that they would rather side with their political allies, advance their political causes, and chase the approval of their peers rather than seeking truth and protecting the integrity of their institutions.

What Chris Rufo has mastered is the art of finding interesting ways to force institutions to reveal whether they are committed to truth and integrity, or if they are committed to advancing their politics and chasing influence and social approval.

This is the tactic that Chris and I are using.

Chris recently said on X that with respect to his recent activism against the New Yorker, he doesn’t care if Doreen St. Felix gets fired.

The reason he does not care is that the point of the activism against the New Yorker is not to get Doreen St Felix fired, it is to illicit a response from the New Yorker that tells us if the New Yorker is a trustworthy publication dedicated to truth, a leftist publication dedicated to leftist politics, or a cowardly publication that is to afraid of leftists to enforce editorial standards. The goal is not to get anyone fired, it is to reveal the true character of the institution so we know whether or not that institution can be trusted.

This is what we are doing.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.