End white male mediocrity once and for all

Christopher Rufo got a big win this week. But some of us helped. Here’s what we can learn.

Christopher Rufo isn’t a genius. He’s clearly smart and strategic, and this week, he got a huge win. But there’s nothing original about what he’s doing or going about it. Though, I am impressed by his ability to convince so many people of his brilliance simply by saying the plan out loud as he goes. Truly, the bar is low for an upper-middle-class white guy.

This week, Rufo is taking a victory lap for forcing the resignation of Claudine Gay, President of Harvard and the first Black woman to hold the job. Gay was one of the university presidents who testified at the disastrous Congressional hearing ostensibly on antisemitism on college campuses late last year. Despite calls for her resignation, Harvard’s Board initially showed unanimous support for Gay, and in the immediate aftermath, it seemed like her position was safe.

But Rufo, a man known for ginning up disingenuous moral panics and outlining his strategy to the press and on social media in real-time, took advantage of the holiday break news cycle to go all in attacking Gay. Lobbing accusations of plagiarism and suggesting that Gay’s record of accomplishment was thin and she wasn’t qualified to hold the job in the first place. Since most people were checked out for the holidays, including many who might have stood up for Gay and her tenure, Rufo didn’t have to worry much about a counter-narrative.

Rufo always helpfully shouts his strategy from the rooftops, and he’s explicit in that success requires liberal media outlets to cover his attacks and that white centrists and liberals engage. Last month, Rufo tweeted, “We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.”

Here’s the thing: you don’t need Christopher Rufo to tell you this. People of color, especially Black women, have also shouted the strategy from the rooftops, saying for years just how easy it is for bad actors to divide and conquer using bad faith attacks. Especially when a person or organization from a marginalized community is at the center. Institutions and people with power often don’t have their backs, leave them in the cold, or join the pile on in hopes that the ire won’t be turned onto them. 

Or, in some cases, because they agree. A perfect example of this is Bill Ackman, another antagonist in this story. If you hadn’t heard of Ackman until recently, you might be surprised to learn that he’s a longtime and prolific Democratic donor. But Ackman is also a Harvard alum and donor, an early critic of Gay, and his social media presence elevates bad faith concern trolling to an art form.

Ackman was one of the first to pivot from pretending his outrage over Gay’s existence was about antisemitism on college campuses and acknowledging his real issue was with DEI (diversity equity and inclusion) efforts at Harvard. On December 6th, Ackman tweeted a lengthy whine about this. Here’s the key quote about Gay: "I learned from someone with first-person knowledge of the [Harvard] president search that the committee would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria. The same was likely true for other elite universities doing searches at the same time, creating an even more limited universe of DEI-eligible presidential candidates." 

This week, as part of his own victory lap, Ackman published a 4000-word essay about how to fix Harvard. He used "antisemitism" 4 times. He used "plagiarism" 7 times. He used "DEI" 39 times. 

The Christopher Rufos of the world rely on the Bill Ackmans of the world to succeed. But Rufo also needs well-meaning folks without an agenda to stay silent or back away from a target as well. Bad-faith attacks work best when the attacker can isolate their target from their community and civil society, leaving them defenseless. Initially, it seemed like Gay’s institution and her community would have her back and stand with her, but in pivoting from the Congressional hearing to ginned-up charges of plagiarism, Rufo managed to isolate Gay enough to get a win.

Now before you email me saying something along the lines of but what about the accusations of plagiarism a few things to point out. Journalist Michael Hobbes took the time this week to examine the instances and post about them on Bluesky. Hobbes concluded that “Of the 41 instances of "plagiarism" identified by Rufo, the vast majority are straightforward bullshit, cliched phrases pulled from clearly cited sources. I've seen a few examples that do seem to cross a line but we're talking about maybe three "real" instances, tops. A student would get a warning.”

It gets better, though. It turns out that Bill Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, an academic, also plagiarized parts of her own dissertation (the errors are similar to Gay’s, and like Gay, Oxman, owned up, apologized, and asked for corrections.) Rufo also has a history of misrepresenting himself as having a degree from Harvard, rather than Harvard Extension School. Strangely, no one is blaming these things on a culture of white male mediocrity or using these anecdotes as a reason to end white male mediocrity once and for all, though perhaps we should start doing so. 

Jokes about Christopher Rufo’s mediocrity aside, he won this round, and his allies on the Right are paying attention. The Right’s agenda is to dismantle American democracy and civil society to prevent us from becoming a true multiracial democracy. They’re willing to damage every institution and piece of infrastructure they can in service of that goal. No one is safe, and staying silent or pretending to be politically neutral won’t save you.

Gay herself, in an op-ed for the New York Times, one of the outlets that participated in the pile-on, tries to warn us as well:

“As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.”

I’ll end with a call for solidarity. Bad faith attacks and moral panics succeed because enough people outside of the usual Fox News bubble amplify them and give them oxygen. The only way we win is to stand together, say enough, and fight back. Let’s have one another’s backs instead of doing Christopher Rufo and his allies’ work for them. 

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ICYMI

The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again (Rolling Stone)

This from Anil Dash is the most hopeful thing I've read about the future online in years. I love the idea that perhaps we aren't looking for the next Twitter replacement but leaving communities that have been overtaken by corporate entities and creating new ones better suited to our needs and interests.

How a Conservative Group’s Videos Gained a Foothold in Classrooms With Help From Republican Officials (NBC News)

I once watched hours and hours of PragerU’s content for a client report. The videos geared to children were troubling, and I’m not happy to learn that they’re being shown in actual classrooms now. Yikes.

How Abortion-Rights Backers Changed Their Message—and Started Winning (Wall Street Journal)

A worthwhile read, especially if you’re thinking about how to talk to voters, or even your friends and family, about abortion as an election issue. I hate that it took losing Roe for people to understand what the right to an abortion really means but I am glad that we finally got there.

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Coda/Substackers Against Nazis

I talked to Justin Hendrix at Tech Policy Press about the recent Substackers against Nazis open letter that Ctrl Alt-Right Delete signed onto and the implications of co-founder Hamish McKenzie’s response, where he defended the company’s commercial relationship with monetizing Nazi influencers. 

"Substack's position on Nazis only makes sense if you ignore the last eight years of world events and tech policy debates," Melissa Ryan, the CEO of Card Strategies, an expert on far-right extremism, and one of the protest letter's signatories told me. "We know from experience that these choices have dangerous, sometimes deadly consequences." 

I was both happy to participate in Substackers Against Nazis, pleased to see so many users participate, and not at all surprised by Substack’s response. The sad truth is that there still isn’t much incentive for tech companies not to monetize hate, especially in this current moment of backlash that I’ve covered frequently here. We’ve all been through this enough times to know how this goes. Eventually someone gets killed or users get harmed enough that the pendulum swings back the other way, mostly because tech companies need to recover from several news cycles of being associated with hate crimes, mass shootings, genocide, etc. 

It would be nice if someone didn’t have to get killed or seriously harmed for a tech platform to do the right thing, but we don’t live in that world yet. 

Still, the pushback continues. Several prominent Substacker authors have left the platform, and Platformer, one of the largest and most prominent newsletters on Substack, has said that it will leave if the policy doesn’t change. I’ll keep you posted on how things progress.

That’s all for this week. See you again next Sunday!