Rufo: The Enablers

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Jason Staley is a fucking idiot, for one thing. His involvement is almost sufficient for the thing to be a pile of shit:

   In a New York Times op-ed, co-authors David French, Kmele Foster, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Jason Stanley present themselves as a “cross-partisan group of thinkers” sending a warning signal about the threat of authoritarianism in states such as Texas, Florida, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and New Hampshire. All these states have passed legislation prohibiting public schools from promoting the core principles of critical race theory, including race essentialism, collective guilt, and state-sanctioned discrimination.
   These authors may imagine themselves to be defending liberal-democratic freedoms against the threat of illiberalism. But in practice, they enable, and would leave American families defenseless against, the worst ideologies of the Left. They advance three specious arguments—that critical-race-theory restrictions violate free speech, that state legislatures should stay out of the marketplace of ideas, and that citizens should pursue civil rights litigation instead—that would serve to usher in the concrete tyrannies of critical race theory, which explicitly seeks to subvert the principles of individual rights and equal protection under the law. Despite the superficial differences among the four heterodox authors, they all serve a single function: to prevaricate, stall, and run interference for critical race theory’s blitz through American institutions.

and:

   Is it possible that these writers simply aren’t aware of the illiberal nature of critical race theory? No. French, in particular, denounced critical race theory in 2012 as a dangerous cult that enforced its orthodoxy with “vicious” harassment on the Harvard University campus; in 2017, he described it as “racial poison” that “leads to sheer cruelty and malice.” In our recent podcast conversation, after I suggested that critical race theory was nearing hegemony within our institutions, he pushed back, arguing that if the critical theorists had truly achieved hegemony, our conversation would not have been possible—it would have been outlawed, censored, banned. This is telling: French understands that critical race theory is a totalitarian ideology that, if it were to achieve absolute power, would immediately dismantle liberalism, beginning with the right to free speech. But he and his coauthors neglect the obvious question. If critical race theory is “racial poison,” why allow it to seize control of our schools? If critical race theorists are “magnetic, preacher-like personalities” who seek totalitarian power, why defend their pursuit of this power in the name of liberalism?
   This argument turns tolerance into a farce. It purports to defend Enlightenment rationalism, equality under the law, and individual rights themselves while ceding substantive power to those who explicitly oppose these things. Those making such arguments wind up enabling the most intolerant voices in our society, who would end up perverting the very values they claim to cherish. Public school teachers forcing first-graders to denounce themselves as racists would become “free speech”; university diversity officers forcing students through race reeducation programs would become “academic freedom.” For these “heterodox” thinkers, the ratchet only goes one way: states such as California, Oregon, Washington, and Illinois can mandate critical race theory in their state curricula and teacher training programs; but if states such as Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, and New Hampshire prohibit it, that is an “un-American” threat to “the expression of ideas.”

But read the whole thing, as Insty would say.