Chris Rufo Has Ties To Yet Another Fascist Racist Right-Wing Rag, Surprise Surprise!
Dude's a one-man clearinghouse for the worst 'ideas' around today.
Imagine a bunch of logs in the woods. Each log represents a far-right think tank or publication. Reporters keep venturing up to these logs. They keep turning them over. And what keeps slithering out is a fascist Howdy Doody doll d/b/a Christopher Rufo.
Rufo’s list of illustrious employers and publishers include the Manhattan Institute and its nutty City Journal, the intelligence-design-friendly Discovery Institute, and scientific racism-spouting doorstop Aporia, just to name a few.
So it comes as no surprise that The Guardian has a piece on Wednesday revealing Rufo’s relationship with a magazine called IM-1776, a journal of the “dissident right” with quite a few anonymous contributors (almost universally not a good sign when talking about right-wing publications).
IM-1776 is the sort of magazine that publishes sentences like this with a straight face:
The public schools in [Los Angeles] were essentially ghetto daycares, but without having the good sense to segregate by ethnicity.
That’s from a piece praising Nayib Bukele, the right-wing president of El Salvador who has, among other things, sent armed troops into his nation’s legislature to intimidate legislators into approving a $100 million loan from the United States that would have gone towards his controversial gang crackdown program that involved the suspension of civil liberties so authorities could round up alleged gang members.
We won’t even talk about the admiring obituary for the Unabomber or the review of Rufo’s own book that refers sneeringly to “the so-called Civil Rights Act.” Or the interview with the French white nationalist who coined the term “The Great Replacement” for the theory that has motivated more than a few massacres of religious and ethnic minorities.
The Guardian also has yet another moment of Rufo admitting out loud his entire discourse strategy, which somehow still manages to fool every freaking mainstream reporter, no matter how many times he says exactly what he’s doing to scare your Fox-loving uncle into believing that white kids at the local high school are being caged, mocked, and forced to eat Jell-O molds:
On the Pirate Wires podcast earlier this month, he told host Mike Solana of his own activism: “I try to play that game, I try to lay traps, I try to provoke certain reactions, I try to launder certain words and phrases into the discourse.”
WE KNOW, FASCIST HOWDY DOODY, WE KNOW.
Another favorite [of IM-1776] is Russian president Vladimir Putin, of whom a pseudonymous author asked at IM-1776 this week: “Is this the last real statesman?”
No Ukrainians were available for comment, presumably because they are either dead or busy fighting off Vladimir Putin’s “statesmanship.”
On Charles Haywood, a right-wing nutter who is openly making plans to be the “warlord” of an “armed patronage network” after America’s inevitable collapse:
Waller, the political analyst, included Haywood as one of three case studies in a working paper on writers providing “advocacy in favor of genuine authoritarian regimes – ones which outright reject the basic structural and constitutional premises of modern electoral democracy”.
In conversation he said that he included Haywood in the paper as one of the writers who “ … think democracy is bad, and that actually an authoritarian regime is good … it’s rare in the contemporary period for someone to be that open about these sorts of things.”
Oh, we dunno. We think Rufo and his ilk have been very, very, very, very open about what they are trying to do here.
Make the dissident right mad by helping fund Wonkette.
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These pseudo intellectual people like Roofie are too busy being impressed with themselves and their trolling to actually learn anything about the history of authoritarian regimes. These same people claim to despise oppression, while at the same time fantasizing about how the right fascist would punish all their enemies and elevate them to the top of the hierarchy where they belong. They always think they will be spared the oppression, the violence and the cruelty that comes with the absence of due process. Do they know how well things turned out for German citizens in the 1940’s? Or how happy the average Russian citizen is today? Or how many Chinese people are risking their lives to escape China to the U.S. via the Darien Gap? Our democracy may be fragile, but we are still lucky to have the freedoms we do have.