In Which Christopher Rufo Heroically Fends Off Ezra Klein's Attempts To Paint Him As 'Reasonable'

At least he didn't call him a 'policy wonk.'

Like most centrists these days, Ezra Klein is very concerned about extremists on both the Right and the Left. Because, you know, on the extreme Right you have actual fascists, white nationalists, Christian Nationalists, Red Pillers, Groypers, people calling for the abolition of the 19th Amendment and for women to be forced out of the workplace and back into some kind of 1950s Stepford hellscape, anti-vaxxers, people who delight in using racial slurs and mocking the developmentally disabled, etc., and on the extreme Left, you have people who want everyone to have healthcare and child care and education, to be able to afford the basic necessities and to not be drowning in debt, who hate war, who are always saying real mean things about the police and even people who have just been in office for 87 years without doing much, and who are sometimes a little hyper-analytic and annoying about other people’s word choices on social media.

Horseshoe theory, amirite?

Well, recently, Klein invited fellow totally reasonable person Christopher Rufo — you know, the guy who got famous making up his own definitions of things like Critical Race Theory and DEI and then somehow managing to get the New York Times its very own self to fight to the death against all his bugbears — on his podcast. Boy, did they ever have some things to discuss. And agree on! And blatantly whitewash!

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Klein starts out:

Rufo is a very smart and often quite honest analyst of his own side. One thing I appreciate about him is he always says what he is doing clearly and in public. And if you listen to him, he seems uneasy.

You can feel a sort of disquiet, a sense that maybe the Right, this Right, is not becoming what he hoped it would be — that its attentional and informational sphere is polluted, that the administration is not getting as much done as he had hoped, intended, tried to help it do.

This is basically how the whole thing goes. Klein presents Rufo as a person with whom he disagrees but still sees as not only entirely reasonable, but as someone with generally honest and honorable intentions.

It is true that Rufo says what he is doing, though. He was very clear that he was going to lie about what Critical Race Theory or DEI actually are (and, in fact, continued to misstate what DEI actually is, in this very interview) and that he was just going to use the terms to describe everything the Left does that annoys terrible people and get people to go along with him on it.

As he tweeted at the time:

We have successfully frozen their brand—“critical race theory”—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

This was not the only example of his meta-Goebbelsing. He’s done it on multiple occasions, and has regularly managed to get the The New York Times to go along with it, even after blatantly saying “I am drumming up some very stupid outrage, watch me get some dumbass ‘center-left actors’ to go along with me on it!”

New York Times Kneels In Front Of Chris Rufo, Screams 'Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?'

New York Times Joins Chris Rufo In Mean Girls Finger-Snapping At NPR CEO

Klein was, in fact, so willing to “Yes, and” Rufo that he almost explicitly hit upon his tactic of “spreading untrue propaganda” and then allowed him to pretend that he is definitely opposed to such a thing, even if it’s towards what he believes is a “true aim.”

KLEIN: You’ve been connecting the question of propaganda to whether or not the end it is aimed at is true. How do you think about a scenario where you have untrue propaganda unleashing intense passions toward a true aim?

RUFO: That’s bad. Yeah, I don’t think that’s good. Aristotle has a great line in his book on rhetoric where he says that the truth has a tendency to prevail.

I love that. I love that because the truth doesn’t always prevail.

Yes, because there are a whole lot of people willing to go along with bullshit from a guy who has more or less said “I’m here to give people a nonsensical rationalization of their worst racist impulses and eat pie and I’m all out of pie,” over and over and over again.

But not only does Klein not challenge that, he then allows Rufo to claim that his “end goal” is “liberty, equality and virtue” while literally spitting out white nationalist propaganda about “Western, Anglo-American civilization.”

So what is your telos?

Well, politically speaking, and let’s leave it at that —

Yes, I don’t mean your family —

I want to have a restoration of the principles of our republic. If you’re thinking about our republic, you’re thinking about those guiding principles — where they have strayed over the last 250 years. I want to have a restoration of that, and so I’m constantly looking backward at the founding and trying to understand it better, to understand how to bring those principles forward.

You want to have the principles of liberty and equality. You want to have a functioning, healthy republic, and you want to have a culture that is organized according to virtue and, in particular, the virtues of our Western, Anglo-American civilization.

I’d love to know what he thinks those virtues are, actually, and how he believes they differ from any other group’s virtues.

Rather than pointing out the grotesque, ethnocentric racism pervading Rufo’s “philosophy,” Klein pivots straight to “Oh, so you think DONALD TRUMP is virtuous?” and then allows Rufo to uncritically make the argument that Trump was fighting for “liberty and equality” by embracing Rufo’s anti-DEI nonsense:

One of my big campaigns the last couple of years was the fight to abolish D.E.I.

Diversity, equity and inclusion was this idea that had been germinating in the 1990s and in the 2000s, but it really exploded into public life with universal adoption by most large institutions after 2020. And it was this idea that’s very simple: that there are oppressor groups and oppressed groups in the United States because of the historical realities of our country, and therefore, to achieve and to move toward equal outcomes, you have to treat individuals unequally according to their group identity. […]

In this case, and because this is the issue I’ve worked on and have been passionate about, I think that you can make an argument that liberty, equality and virtue have been restored.

No, that is Christopher Rufo’s deeply skewed interpretation of DEI. DEI is not about correcting historical injustices, but rather about correcting injustices and prejudices that still exist and are pervasive throughout our society and in the workplace. It is also not about “achieving equal outcomes,” so much as it is about recognizing the fact that if outcomes are so incredibly unequal, there might be some reasons for that beyond “white men are just better at their jobs than everyone else!” and we should perhaps investigate further.

Ezra Klein, naturally, does not push back. Rather, he then moves on to “corruption,” giving Rufo an opportunity to appear reasonable and willing to draw the line at not being cool with the Trumps making bank on crypto-schemes and other blatant examples of corruption.

I guess one thing I think about, when I think about Donald Trump and virtue, is corruption.

I see Trump taking a luxury aircraft from Qatar, I see his family getting involved in all kinds of crypto schemes — where the investors in their crypto schemes, in many cases, seem to be people who have business before the family, business before the country.

The New Yorker did, I think, a quite conservative tallying up of how much money the Trump family and Trump have made, or how much their net worth has increased, in connection with the presidency. The number was about $4 billion in this term.

It doesn’t look virtuous.

There are the issues that I work on, that I’m passionate about, that I feel like I have some control over or influence over, and there are the issues that I don’t. And I think I’ve been very straightforward in the areas where I think the administration has fallen short.

And certainly, the perception, and we’ll see over time — I’m sure that there will be inquiries, investigations, etc., into these business enterprises — the perception is bad. You’re not going to get me to defend it. I’m perfectly happy calling out the administration where I think it has strayed or erred. And this is one of those places.

Ooh! So reasonable!

Klein then offers Rufo the opportunity to say that the kooky conspiracy theories on the Right (not the normal ones like “DEI means punishing white men for things they never even did!”) are bad, which he was more than happy to do.

Well, one of the things I’m touching on here is, I’ve been watching your show, and I see a growing vein of discomfort from you on at least what parts of the right are becoming.

Sure.

This, really, is where Klein started working his absolute ass off to portray Rufo as a “reasonable” institutionalist (because he works for The Manhattan Institute) who is sometimes forced to sound like the “extremists” in his party in order to gain attention. Any time the man even comes close to making a halfway decent point — for instance, pointing out that while the Left may have been “annoying” about cancel culture but was ultimately absolutely correct about where the Right was headed … he immediately backs down.

One, there was way too much speech policing. There was too much cancellation. There was too much that, instead of being willing to have arguments, people just tried to make the arguments unhaveable. That all happened. I don’t deny any of it.

And on the other hand, a lot of what people — more on the left in that moment — were afraid of, or what they predicted, also happened. The alt-right moved much more from the fringe to the center.

The alt-right was totally destroyed after Charlottesville.

I think maybe we have a different view of what the alt-right represented, which is fair enough.

OK. Yeah.

So fair! Klein did attempt to point out the ways in which the “Great Replacement” and other extreme White Nationalist rhetoric has been mainstreamed on the Right, but was rather easily swayed by Rufo’s less-than-masterful pivots to “Well, those people don’t count, they’re just being inflammatory!” and “Don’t people have a right to be concerned about ‘rapidly changing demographics’?”

There are people who just don’t like the way their community is changing, and then there’s the K.K.K. Everything exists on a spectrum.

But would you say someone who is, for example, hesitant about rapid, large-scale demographic change is just a 1 percent white nationalist?

No, I don’t believe that.

Yeah, because that would be like the majority of the country.

Yes. I don’t think it is a problem, or unfair, or even wrong, to worry about large-scale, rapid demographic change.

Except when it’s explicitly racist. We see conservatives lamenting all the time that our immigrants are the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free, instead of Norwegians (while conveniently ignoring the reasons Norwegians have such little interest in moving here, like our health care system).

And Rufo has zero problem being explicit about the fact that he thinks Somalis, as a people, are bad.

If you talk to people with an expert in Somali culture, as we did, and the history of Somalia, as we did, you get the clear sense that in Somalia, there is a kinship and clan-based culture that is prevalent for a variety of historical and social reasons.

And because there has been a weak central government — a contested central government in Somalia in the modern period — there is a feeling that exploiting the central government is permissible. And the underlying point, which is very uncomfortable, not just for people who are small-L liberals, but even for many conservatives, is that, actually, all national cultures are not equal.

In fact, because immigration is a group-based, or national border-based system, you have to be prudent in which nations of origin you prioritize in immigration. And the record on Somalis, in the United States and elsewhere, on many of those metrics, is not good. You have low levels of education, high levels of welfare dependency, and you have these cultural incompatibilities, let’s say.

I am going to point out, as I have before, that Christopher Rufo is fucking Italian, and that literally every single thing he says about Somali immigrants was said about us when we came over here and in the years afterwards. People just like him cried that we were uneducated, that we were all criminals and anarchists, that we were too “clannish” and that the religion most of us practiced, Catholicism, was basically witchcraft and that said religion perpetuated dual loyalties.

This is something Klein could have pointed out and didn’t. Our country has always benefited in the long run from people who came here explicitly because they were struggling and wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Does there tend to be organized crime in these communities? There sure does! And a whole lot of that is caused not by some natural predisposition towards criminality (as the father of criminology, Cesare Lombroso, argued that Southern Italians had) but by people with prejudices like Rufo’s shutting members of these groups out of jobs, housing, and other opportunities. If you deprive people of opportunity, they will create their own. This goes for everything and every group of people, which is just one of the many reasons why views like Rufo’s are not just wrong, but poisonous.

Rufo runs circles around Klein in this part of the discussion, because all Klein has to offer is “But you don’t have proof of that,” every time Rufo lies, and then allows him to continue, spilling more lies and claiming that just because he doesn’t have proof for his beliefs, it doesn’t mean they’re not true. And they must be, he says, because “logic.”

After going back and forth about whether or not it matters if things are true or if it’s bad that spreading lies leads to people saying and doing horrific things, Klein gets to the core of why he’s not winning the discussion:

And look, you and I are not going to agree on a million things. My point is not to convert you to my politics. I’m not going to do that.

You should try. I mean, why not? I’m trying to convert you.

Rather than doing that, Klein criticizes the Right for its “inability to hold itself to certain epistemological or institutional standards … at the institutional level, at the federal government level” and accepting Trump’s actions, as well as being slaves to their “passions,” while still holding that “we need a strong Right.”

No, literally, he says that — and Rufo responds by (accurately) pointing out that the New York Times is now where he was in 2020.

We need a strong right in this country.

I’d ask you a question, then. Has the New York Times editorial line moved more in my direction since 2020, or have I moved more in its direction since 2020?

I’m not sure the way you have moved since 2020.

I haven’t moved at all.

OK.

So if I’m the base line —

I think you’re saying it has moved in your direction.

Of course. You look at the big piece on D.E.I. — you had editorialists saying that I was some sort of villain on D.E.I. And then the Times moves back.

Let’s agree you’ve won some fights.

I would not agree with that, but okay. I would agree that the New York Times has, as a publication, been entirely obsequious towards Rufo, but I would not argue that he has “won.” Of course, I don’t personally consider the New York Times to be a major bastion of left-wing thought. It is, after all, the publication that gave us Bari Weiss.

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I would, however, love to know what Ezra Klein thinks we need a “strong Right” for in this country, or anywhere, especially after having had a two-hour discussion with a fascist. Then again, he is the guy who called Paul Ryan a real “policy wonk.” It seems as though Klein is just on a never-ending search for a deeply intellectual, non-hypocritical, totally fair and reasonable Right that just keeps refusing to materialize for him. He wants a loyal opposition, about whom he can say “We agree on where we’re going, we just disagree on how to get there,” who will paternalistically tell the Left when it’s going “too far,” and police its own guardrails for those putting their passions (as Klein likes to say) ahead of a coherent, non-hypocritical worldview.

But that doesn’t exist (and I’d argue it never has). They do not want what Ezra Klein wants, or what the New York Times so clearly wants — but as this interview makes clear, they are more than happy to take advantage of the fact that they both want it so badly.

OPEN THREAD.

[Gift link NYT]