Christopher Rufo has made his name reporting on DEI issues across the country, and he's done a lot of good investigative journalism on DEI's proliferation in American schools, media organizations, corporations and even in the government itself. More than any other, Rufo's work has helped demonstrate that DEI in theory has morphed into something much different in practice, and without him, it’s not clear that we’d be even half as aware of this as we are today, especially considering you simply can't read much about the kind of things Rufo has unearthed anywhere but in the City Journal (the website and magazine of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank based in New York City where Rufo is a senior fellow), or the New York Post, who often republishes his work. Most outlets simply won't publish or talk about the topics of his reporting, and in many cases they even view the issues as fabricated or contrived[1].
But I've twice now listened to Rufo in debates on DEI on one of my favorite podcasts, Bari Weiss's Honestly, and it seems like Rufo's time in the proverbial political "Arena" has predisposed him to go into gladiator mode at the drop of a hat, and to his own detriment. In the latest case (which can be found here: https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/4393f235/the-right-way-to-fight-illiberalism-christopher-rufo-and-yascha-mounk-debate), Weiss had Rufo and Yascha Mounk, a professor from Johns Hopkins University and recent author of the book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, on to discuss DEI, its origins, and what to do about it. Weiss previewed some of the forthcoming disagreements in the podcast at the beginning of the episode, but you could sense Rufo's irascible internal pot was just waiting to boil over at several points even before they got to their key point of disagreement: what to do about DEI.
It was here, in the last half hour or so, that things went off the rails a bit. Rufo was generally the more blamable party here, who took an essentially Trumpian approach to the debate by repeatedly talking over Mounk, saying he was lying, saying he wasn't going to let Mounk "get away with that" when he made a comment (admittedly probably one that was overstated) about Florida's Stop Woke Act, telling Mounk to "get out of here," and even at one point making a somewhat pedantic rebuttal claim to Mounk that "I'm just very educated." Ironically, the key disagreement they had was not that DEI was a big problem in and of itself. There, they were in pretty clear agreement, and the first hour of the podcast was not only extremely substantive in that regard, but it could have also easily led you to conclude that this was just a discussion between two people who were generally on the same side of the argument.
But in the second part of the discourse, things changed quickly and dramatically, and you would have thought Rufo was now debating Rachel Maddow instead of Mounk. Once Weiss turned to the topic of what to do about DEI, it was here that the gloves came off and the discussion turned into a debate, and one that sounded a little too much like the Republican presidential primaries than most of us care to hear again. It's great that Weiss has these debates on Honestly. We frankly have too few debates among public intellectuals these days. But if this is what they're going to look like, those of us who wish for more are going to quickly forget how much we missed them.
As noted above, what Rufo and Mounk disagreed on was what to do about DEI, and their disagreement here seems to be completely legitimate and justifiable, even though Rufo's outrage seemed to indicate otherwise. Rufo believes DEI is now too deeply entrenched into essentially all of America’s most important institutions to let reason, persuasion and patience put DEI—initially perhaps a good idea on paper but one that has become a bad idea in practice—into an early grave. Consequently, Rufo thinks more forceful action is needed, including not only firing people in DEI departments but actually legislating them out of existence. "The question you must ask centrist liberals who insist that they oppose DEI," he says in a January 30th post on X, is "Are you prepared to fire people, shut down departments, and take the heat for it?" "If the answer is 'no,' they do not really oppose DEI. They are merely posturing, and should be treated as such."[2] It is for this reason that Rufo has been a key driving force in several states that has rendered many DEI practices illegal, including in Florida, Texas, Iowa, and others. As Weiss commented a year ago and reiterated in this episode of the podcast, Rufo may be the most successful and formidable conservative activist in the country today.
Mounk, by contrast, thinks we should fight the ill-iberalism coming from DEI and other places on the Left with more liberalism, not with more illiberalism. DEI has created de facto bans on certain kinds of speech and ideas, but to Mounk, the legislation in Texas, Florida and elsewhere is merely Rufo's Republican version of that. Rufo and the Republican legislation could be thought of as simply a de jure ban from the Right in response to the de facto bans coming from the Left. At several points Rufo adamantly denied he was in favor of any speech codes, but ultimately Mounk has a point that a ban on a ban is still effectively some kind of speech code, even if it’s one very much in alignment with the spirit of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[3]
At the same time, however, Mounk’s repeated claims that Rufo & Co. are merely replacing one ideology with another is at least a little misleading, even if he may be technically right. By Mounk’s logic, it’s not clear how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 itself wouldn’t be the same kind of legislature-imposed ideology that the Stop Woke Act is. The core of Rufo’s mission is ultimately to make sure people are treated equally, and to not be coerced into subscribing to belief systems that teach us otherwise. If that takes new laws to help better enforce the old laws, he seems to say, so be it. That’s at least a defensible view.
Weiss at one point talked about how Rufo wasn't a pessimist and simply wanted a return to neutrality, and Mounk’s point got a little lost here. Mounk’s claim of Rufoian pessimism was based on the fact that Rufo doesn’t think higher education can fix itself. It’s simply too far gone, he believes, and the old-school liberals have flat out lost. This was a key point of differentiation. Mounk too seeks a restoration to prior principles, only Mounk still believes in the redemptive possibility of American universities reforming themselves, returning to "veritas," and again teaching the liberal (lower case L) education they were created to inculcate in the first place. Mounk's guiding light then, at least with respect to how to combat DEI, might be someone like John Stuart Mill, whereas Rufo's is something closer to Hobbes and his Leviathan.
You could sense that Rufo was particularly annoyed when he thought Mounk was misrepresenting Florida's Stop Woke Act by claiming he wouldn't be able to teach the courses he does under that kind of legislation. Having actually read the Florida bill that became known as the “Don’t Say Gay” act, it's hard not to sympathize with Rufo's frustration here. No one likes it when something they’ve worked hard on is deliberately misrepresented, and especially by people who 1) never even tried to give it a fair reading in the first place and 2) wouldn’t have liked anything in a bill that you came up with anyway. While Mounk probably doesn’t fall into either of these camps, as defendable of a position as it is to question the merit of these kinds of laws, those that do misrepresent the bills probably only further embolden conservatives like Rufo who think that government action here is the only way forward, simply because it only makes it clearer to them that all of our biggest and most important institutions are not only against them, but “captured” by the DEI mentality. Decree by power, they reasonably conclude, is the only way.
But that being said, while many of these bills haven't gotten a fair shake, and often times deliberately so, the free speech criticisms coming at these laws from people like Mounk or FIRE's Greg Lukianoff are completely legitimate[4]. It is an open question whether any government in the United States can effectively ban ideas or speech anymore, even if those ideas or speech do actually seem to be very much in alignment with things like the Civil Rights Act. At some point though, it seems likely there are going to be free speech cases brought against major universities (even the "private" ones) for some of the speech-chilling activity they've engaged in in recent years (including selective enforcement of speech codes), so it's not as if the idea of more free speech couldn't potentially work in conservatives’ favor in helping to solve the DEI problem. Some combination of better enforcement of both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the First Amendment (whether from the courts, or otherwise) seems like a completely plausible winning formula for conservatives here, and one that’s also likely to be less invasive from the government. But as we'll discuss more in a moment, the fact that conservatives now seem just as inclined to use the iron fist of the government as Progressives is striking.
Those arguing that these Anti-DEI bills are unconstitutional (including judges) will quickly run into a complex reality, however, which is that state and local governments are already heavily involved in the selection process of educational materials. To this point, curriculum choices by government are predominantly only for K-12 and tend to predominantly be done by (elected) local school boards. But their involvement goes far beyond simply choosing which math and science textbooks to use. To be sure, the participation is often largely "positive"[5] in that school boards allow teachers to pick from a list of books rather than “negative” actions that prevent or ban any particulars. But this is not always the case.
The history of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird demonstrates this well. The book was initially removed from the curriculum of county schools in Hanover, Virginia in 1966 due to the “immoral” depictions contained in the novel[6], but contention over the book lasted long after that[7]. And while the decision in Virginia came from the Right, today Lee’s book fields just as much fire from the Left, and it’s not just coming from the Leftists on the coasts either[8]. The school board in Biloxi, MS, for instance, removed the book from 8th grade mandatory reading lists in 2017 because its language was making people “uncomfortable.”[9] The Mukilteo school district in Washington State did the same for high school freshmen in 2021 because it “centered on whiteness”,[10] and the Burbank, CA school district also removed it from the mandatory reading list in 2021 as well.[11]
Like most political debates, however, this one too has nuance. Some “bans” are not actually bans, and not all bans are created equal. In the Washington case, the book was removed from the mandatory reading list but remained on the approved novels list[12]. In contrast, however, the Burbank situation seemed much more like a ban, given “the titles are available for individual reading and teachers can use them with small groups after the teacher has undergone training on facilitating conversations on racism, implicit bias, and racial identity.” The Burbank superintendent also banned the use of the N-word in all school classrooms as well (its worth highlighting that it seems as though the main use of the N-word in these classrooms was simply coming from students reading books out loud that had the word in it), something which also feels like it has constitutional free speech implications.[13]
In actuality, school districts “censor” all kinds of books and for all kinds of reasons. Take Sex Ed, for example. Though many have decried Florida’s perceived book banning rampage, most of this appears to be directed at putting books discussing complex gender issues out of the hands of kids too young to understand them, and for the same reason why we don’t teach kids in 3rd grade about Sex Ed. But what if a teacher—although not part of the mandatory curriculum—wanted to teach Sex Ed as part of a supplemental learning plan to 3rd graders? Could the state not prevent that? But if it could, why wouldn’t that be an infringement of the teacher’s right to free speech? If preventing teachers from (hypothetically) teaching Sex Ed to third graders isn’t a problem, why would it be any less constitutional for the state to say what a university can or can’t teach if it can do so for K-12 schools?
This by no means exhausts the difficult questions posed here: for instance, can the State of Florida influence how Sex Ed is taught in public schools in the state by using money to drive "standards adoption" or otherwise? The Supreme Court has already told Congress and the Executive Branch that they may not “coerce” state participation in programs[14], but it’s not clear that tying funding to educational materials would be any different at a state or local level. What if the school is a parochial or charter school that doesn’t get funding from the state?
Additionally, mandatory reading lists are common in schools. Does a school board’s forcing a teacher to oblige by this list violate their own constitutional speech predilections to teach what they want? Furthermore, can a school itself mandate any book to be read by all students, or even to mandate it for any individual student for that matter?
The reality is that state and local governments are already involved to varying degrees in the curriculums of education in K-12, and federal judges ought to be very careful about wading into these extremely complicated areas. As complex as they are, cases decided thus far involving religion in schools like Engel v. Vitale (1962), Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), or Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) actually present much easier questions than those that might arise in these cases. Saying yes or no to whether a school is promoting an established religion is much more straight forward than deciding what states can do to regulate education materials for schools within their own borders.
Freedom of speech is a bedrock American principle that ought to be protected as much as possible, but ultimately any rules, regulations or restrictions on anyone are limitations on freedom. Freedom without limits is anarchy, and if federal courts start venturing into muddy waters without thinking these things through, it could create more chaos than it solves. It’s not clear if people like Mounk and Lukianoff fully appreciate this when they say bills like the Stop Woke Act are unconstitutional.
Whatever the constitutionality of these Anti-DEI bills, an important political and historical irony here is how many Republicans in 2024 now seem just as keen to use the power of government to fulfill their own priorities (or simply to block Democratic ones) as Progressives do. Once upon a time, Republicans viewed government as the problem, not the solution, and not as a tool to be used, but rather as one to be kept in the shed. The rationale for this was not malicious, and it was never (or at least almost never) because Republicans thought helping people was a bad idea: they just thought that government efforts to solve complex social problems in even more complex societies more often than not does more harm than good, and such unintended consequences could very well make us all worse off than we were before. That was the philosophy.
It's not clear if those days are truly a thing of the past, or if this newfound Retribution Republicanism has only temporarily put the old GOP into hibernation. However you felt about the testimonies of the Harvard, Penn and MIT presidents in December, one of the most striking things that came out of those hearings was how few Republicans actually advocated for more free speech on campus as a way of combatting less of it (ironically enough, I actually didn't find any at all advocating this; instead, the only person I found that clearly said this was MIT president Sally Kornbluth). Instead, the Republican priority that day was simply to rub the presidents' noses in shit by pointing out how hypocritical it was that the DEI music conveniently stopped playing when a predominantly white minority group became the focal point of attack. Sadly though, as good as that probably felt for them that day, Republicans deciding that the only way to fight (Liberal) governmental overreach is with more (conservative) governmental overreach does nothing but inch us closer towards totalitarianism, just in their case, from the opposite side.
Rufo is right to point out the tactical problem with Mounk's strategy in that it may simply be too little, too late. Whether he's right or not is tough to say, but it's very hard to change institutions, especially ones as big, slow and stodgy as academia. Mounk doesn't seem to be exactly recommending a George Kennan style "Containment" theory here, but it's quite possible Mounk's approach is just too passive. Where Rufo could really have added value to the debate, however, was if he asked Mounk why he and other professors don’t simply vote with their feet, and leave the intellectually bankrupt universities they’re a part of and go somewhere that does believe in "veritas" instead. Why not leave the "very cushy" job Mounk himself criticized earlier in the podcast and send a message to these universities that there is still a competitive labor market for the best talent in academia? Mounk did say that he thought the Johns Hopkins president was doing a good job on DEI issues at present, which presumably has given him enough faith that his own employer is not irredeemably compromised. But for many other professors who are less hopeful, voting with your feet would in theory send a market-based signal that DEI is driving good talent away, and remind universities that what they do does in fact have consequences for their own labor pool, as well as those of their "competitors."
The problem with this, of course, is that there aren't many other institutions of higher education to go to that fit this mold. Sure there's Hillsdale College (a small school in Michigan where Rufo is also a professor now), and the new University of Austin (of which Weiss herself is involved), but the list probably isn't long enough to fill a blog post. This is sort of Rufo's point though: DEI is too far gone to be remedied with persuasion, and so many schools are already "captured" that a robust higher ed market away from DEI-ingrained schools no longer actually exists. That element of the “competition” has been rooted out. To Rufo’s credit then, it's not clear a laissez-faire market-based approach where the dispirited workers leave the big, old stodgy company they no longer believe in and go to the start-up that they do believe in is a viable strategy. At least not yet. The most credible long-term alternative strategy to DEI may be one that hinges on creating more competition and alternatives, but this of course takes time. What are we do to in the interim?
Near term, we probably do need some version of Rufo's activism to help push against the DEI tide while these other solutions find their footing. But it's hard to listen to Rufo in these Honestly debates (the other one with David French from July of 2021 can be found here: https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/40e1af9a/rufo-v-french-should-schools-ban-critical-race-theory) and not worry that he's flirting with trouble. Rufo is starting to remind me a little bit of George W. Bush after 9/11, where a likeable guy, with a likeable political philosophy (in Bush's case, Compassionate Conservatism) turned into one of the most divisive presidents (and administration's) ever. A huge player in all this of course was Karl Rove, Bush's longtime advisor. Rove's aggressive, Machiavellian approach to politics after 9/11 on both domestic "culture war" issues as well as national security questions without a doubt threw a gallon of gasoline on the fire of polarization that was already burning in American politics. Everyone knows politics is a dirty game and a blood sport, but Rufo now seems to have taken one page too many out of Rove's playbook and begun to treat politics as war, seeking to destroy the other side rather than defeat it. When he’s not angry, Rufo is a likeable guy and clearly very intelligent, but he's shown us an "other side" now that risks jeopardizing his entire mission.
With this in mind, an important part of winning the battle or even the war is actually knowing who your enemy is, that is, who to fight. After listening to Yascha Mounk for an hour and a half, it's hard to understand how Rufo seems to think that Mounk is the enemy. It's equally hard to understand how he could say that he doesn't agree that FIRE "is a good organization" when FIRE is clearly fighting the exact same fight that Rufo is, even if it does think there are constitutional problems with some of the Anti-DEI bills that Rufo worked on. Rufo treating Mounk and Lukianoff as enemies would be a little like Malcolm X calling Martin Luther King Jr. his enemy. Perhaps I'm wrong and he doesn't think either of these people are actually "enemies," but if that's the case, his combative approach and highly aggressive tone makes that difficult for listeners to see.
The DEI issue has given Rufo a great hand to play, but by treating anyone who doesn't agree with his power-centric approach to fixing the DEI problem as an enemy, he risks overplaying the hand he was dealt and alienating people beyond the GOP base. When Rufo presents his reporting on the worst strains of DEI in a tempered, just-the-facts-please manner, he’s going to keep winning. But when he presents himself as yet another political activist yelling and shouting about the topic du jour, he risks making DEI less about the issue, and more about a personality--his personality. Furthermore, by deeming anyone who doesn't agree with his method of implementation as an enemy, he's perfectly exemplifying a major shortcoming of American political debate these days (and one which we talked about recently here: https://www.citizenanalyst.com/post/on-bill-ackman-mark-cuban-dei-and-drugs), which is that any criticism of the means must also mean you're criticizing the end. In this particular debate, Rufo demonstrates this logical fallacy can just as easily come from the Right as it can from the Left.
Perhaps Rufo's been successful so far exactly because of his aggressiveness, not in spite of it, but this is probably only going to get him so far. The country is tired of Liberal overreach, no question about it, and this is something those on the Left don't seem to ever understand when it does occur (this has been especially true when it comes to explaining President Biden's low approval ratings). But the country is also tired of people yelling about politics in general. Eventually the substantial number of people who are already politically fatigued are not going to all of a sudden be persuaded by someone new yelling or talking over the guy they're debating, however fresh their face may be and however much they may sympathize with the issue. Being another contributing noise to the cacophony that currently exists in 21st century American politics ultimately will only fall on deaf ears.
Rufo's arc of career success at this point puts him in real jeopardy of making the same mistake I've seen almost every political figure in my lifetime make, which is to alienate the very people between the 40 yard lines who should and would otherwise be with you by overreaching to appease the most hard core "activists" on your side. I sincerely hope that success and hubris doesn't get the best of Rufo in the same way.
[1] See for example, How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory, New Yorker, June 18th, 2021; https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory
[2]https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1752407494633345202?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
[3] Per the US Department of Labor, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing.” This is exactly what these Anti-DEI bills are designed to do. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/civil-rights-center/statutes/civil-rights-act-of-1964#:~:text=In%201964%2C%20Congress%20passed%20Public,hiring%2C%20promoting%2C%20and%20firing
[4] See for example, here: https://www.thefire.org/news/fire-calls-florida-public-colleges-push-back-against-unconstitutional-stop-woke-act-provisions
[5] A 2022 Rand Study discussing improving adoption of High Quality Instructional Materials found that “Most states also incentivize adoption of HQIM by tying funding sources—such as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, grant opportunities, competitive funding, or other supports—to the selection of HQIM.” See How States Are Creating Conditions for Use of High-Quality Instructional Materials in K-12 Classrooms here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA134-13.html
[6] https://richmond.com/news/local/government-politics/book-ban-kill-mockingbird-hanover/article_72cfb4e4-0b8d-11ee-aa2a-53c6c589ed2e.html
[8] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/to-kill-a-mockingbird-remains-among-top-banned-classical-novels
[10] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/11/03/to-kill-a-mockingbird-book-ban-removal-washington/
[12] See WaPo article above.
[13] See University of Marshall’s discussion of Banned Books here: https://www.marshall.edu/library/bannedbooks/to-kill-a-mockingbird/
[14] See Funding Conditions: Constitutional Limits on Congress’s Spending Power; Congressional Research Service, July 1st, 2021; https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46827