#also rufo

[ravenkings]

i s2g literally ALL of conservative politics is projection. EVERYTHING they accuse the left of doing are things they either do themselves or plan to do once they get just a tiny bit of power.

[dhaaruni]

Aside from the questionable morality and ethics of telling strangers on the Internet to kill themselves due to sociopolitical disagreements, I really don't think that method works if the goal is to discourage and deplatform ideas deemed harmful.

The only way to permanently discredit ideas is to prove them factually and materially incorrect and "This idea hurts people's feelings :(" does not cut it.

[seancurry1]

The problem with the previous ~10 years of the internet, an era defined by algorithmic social media feeds and endless growth, isn’t that the platforms have all my friends and their updates locked up in their walled gardens, although that’s certainly part of it. Nor is the problem that they’re all trying to make money, although that’s definitely part of it.*

The problem isn’t even the Nazis, white nationalists, Chris Rufos, TERFs, and all other manners of asshole that barge into spaces created and populated by well-meaning people, shit on the floor, and yell at everyone who asks them to clean it up and not do it again.

The problem is that the people in charge of those spaces won’t stop them from coming back.

What do you do when a party host won’t kick out the wild drunk that’s ruining the party? You find a new party. What do you do when the wild drunk shows up again and your new host also won’t kick them out? What do you do when this happens again, and again, and again?

What do you do when every single party you’ve been going to for the last decade keeps having the same wild drunk show up and shit on the floor?

I wrote about how the internet has changed, and how it’s changing again, over on my blog. Check it out!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alyssa Tirrell at MMFA:

Dr. Eithan Haim, a former medical resident at Texas Children's Hospital, was indicted in May for allegedly illegally accessing trans patients’ records, which he subsequently shared with Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo.  Right-wing media figures have since defended Haim and brought him in for interviews, often equating the care allegedly provided at Texas Children's Hospital — such as the prescription of "puberty blockers" — with harm or mutilation and alleging that Haim is the target of political persecution.  The campaign has successfully raised both Haim's profile and at least $888,865, which he claims will be used for both his legal defense and “offensive legal action against those who have abused their professional responsibility in service of radical transgender ideology.” 

Haim allegedly illegally accessed trans patients’ records

On February 18, 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion that qualified youth gender-affirming care as "child abuse", prompting Texas Children's Hospital to announce that it would stop proving such care. Although the opinion was not legally binding, the hospital released a statement announcing that it would stop prescribing gender-affirming hormone therapies. The statement, which also alluded to recent measures that Gov. Greg Abbott had taken against families of children receiving gender-affirming care, added that “this step was taken to safeguard our healthcare professionals and impacted families from potential legal ramifications.” [Office of the Attorney General of Texas, 2/18/22; American Civil Liberties Union, 2/23/22; The Washington Post, 3/8/22]

In late spring 2023, Dr. Eithan Haim allegedly accessed the records of trans patients at Texas Children's Hospital and shared them with Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo. Haim, a resident at Baylor College of Medicine who had previously conducted rotations at Texas Children's Hospital, shared redacted files with Rufo that allegedly demonstrated that the hospital was continuing to provide gender-affirming services to minors. [Houston Public Media, 6/10/24; U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of Texas, 6/17/24; United States District Court of the Southern District of Texas, 5/29/24]

On June 2, 2023, a Texas bill restricting gender-affirming care for children was signed into law. S.B. 14 prohibited “the provision to certain children of procedures and treatments for gender transitioning, gender reassignment, or gender dysphoria” as well as “the use of public money or public assistance to provide those procedures and treatments.” The law went into effect on September 1 of that year. [Texas legislature, 6/2/23]

[...]

Right-wing media figures platformed Haim in solo interviews, where he defended himself 

Since January 2024, with the revelation of his identity, Eithan Haim has appeared as a guest alongside many prominent right-wing media figures. In these interviews Haim neither claimed to have worked directly with trans patients nor disputed sharing the documents with Chris Rufo. Instead, Haim often alleged that he was being unfairly targeted and defended his case on the grounds that the care allegedly provided at Texas Children's Hospital was harmful to pediatric patients. 

Right-wing media defend Dr. Eithan Haim’s HIPAA-violating ways of illegally accessing trans patients’ records while at Texas Children’s Hospital in which he shared those records with far-right anti-LGBTQ+ agitator Christopher Rufo.

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

If you are not a close follower of American college campus politics, you are likely to be unfamiliar with a woman who has been making headlines for over a month in the US and increasingly around the world. The lady in question, one Claudine Gay, was President of Harvard, one of the most renowned educational institutions in the world, until earlier this week when she resigned over plagiarism allegations.

Why does or should anyone care about this? Well, Gay’s decision to step down is the culmination of long-running efforts to address the cancer at the heart of Western societies: the idea that the way to fix injustices of the past is to commit injustices today.

Following her resignation, Gay’s defenders were quick to emphasise the racial dimension of this story. Ibram X. Kendi, for example, tweeted that “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism”.

And while his claims of this being a racist campaign are absurd, it is true that Gay was not targeted solely for seemingly adopting the personal motto: “I came, I saw, I copied”. She became a focus of major Harvard donor concerns and a media campaign led by Christopher Rufo – a man I would approvingly describe as the diversity industry’s greatest enemy – in the light of her mind-boggling testimony in Congress. Her statements, given alongside the Presidents of MIT and UPenn, revealed the core of the ideology the entire Western education system is based on in all its glory.

The oppressor vs. oppressed mindset which is - no matter how uncomfortable this may make some readers - cultural Marxism, says simply that white people and “over-performing” minorities like Indians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese and Korean Americans should be discriminated against in hiring and student applications in favour of “underprivileged groups”. As a result, college campuses on which regular meltdowns have occurred for a decade over such “hate speech” as dressing in a Mexican costume for Halloween found themselves with nothing to say about pro-Hamas demonstrations and the harassment of Jewish students on their campuses in the wake of the October 7 attacks.

But even that is not painting the full picture. Yes, Gay, a darling of the diversity industry, was targeted for her plagiarism following her complete failure of leadership in recent months. But she was also partially targeted because of the assumption, if not outright conclusion, that the reason she was appointed in the first place was, to put it mildly, not merit alone.

After all, Gay’s primary achievement is not stellar academic work, exemplary managerial skills or even charisma and force of personality. She was appointed President of Harvard following a distinguished career in fields like “improving diversity” and researching “race and identity”. To put it bluntly, many people believe that she is a diversity hire and the reason she pushed the DEI ideology that eventually led to her appalling testimony in Congress is that she is herself a beneficiary of it.

To be clear, she has not been forced out for being black. She has been forced out for being placed in a position for which she had neither the skills nor experience to succeed and then failing in it. This is the rotten legacy of affirmative action, which, as Thomas Sowell explained decades ago in 90 seconds and in many of his books since, hurts the very people it is attempting to help:

If allowing students to enter universities in which they are destined to fail for the sake of diversity harms them, then what might be said about hiring people for leadership roles in major institutions in which they are destined to fail? This harms not only them but also the people who work and study at those institutions.

To be clear, I have no evidence that Claudine Gay was hired ahead of better, more qualified candidates. But it is not hard to imagine that a position holding the prestige, reputation and nearly $1-million-a-year salary the role of Harvard President commands could have been filled by someone with more executive experience, academic achievements and other relevant expertise.

This is the other curse of the counterproductive attempts to artificially increase the presence of “underrepresented” groups in employment and education. Because everyone knows that some people are routinely given unfair preferential treatment, it becomes easier and easier for the rest of us to suspect specific individuals of being there for reasons other than merit.

So here is the truth: we must return to pursuing the goal of a colour-blind society immediately. There is no such thing as positive discrimination. All discrimination is wrong. And because it is wrong, it will create precisely the kind of resentment that Claudine Gay is now facing. She is seen as the standard-bearer of the DEI industry and is being treated as such by people who have had enough.

All of us must be treated on the content of our character. When we refuse to follow this principle, we hurt everyone: white, black, hispanic, Asian, Jewish. A healthy society relies on the equal treatment of all individuals. The fact that we have to say this out loud in 2024 is a sign of how far we’ve fallen.

DEI must be dismantled. This will take years, perhaps decades. But, in recent weeks, for the first time in a long time, we have grounds for optimism.

[ghostpalmtechnique]

People spend a lot of time arguing about whether this or that use of "fascist" or "socialist" is excessively broad or excessively narrow, but regardless, these words get thrown around a lot. On the other hand, a word that I think gets less discourse than it should is "totalitarian."

A big distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism is that an authoritarian system doesn't care about the political commitments of its subjects, or rather, it doesn't want them to have any. "Leave politics to the people in charge, keep your head down, do what you're told, and you'll be fine." By contrast, a totalitarian system considers having no political commitments to be somewhere on the spectrum between disreputable and criminal. It demands ideological commitment even in private life.

When you have this framing in mind, it is hard to miss the totalitarian tendencies around you. On the one hand, the religious right (now sometimes fronted by people who aren't even religious, a la Chris Rufo) has always had totalitarian tendencies. And what else would you call making it a firing offense for a teacher to refer to her wife in casual conversation, or the attempt to ban people from choosing which books to read at the library, or allowing coaches to coerce student athletes into prayer sessions?

But the puritanical left is also like this. Not (currently) in the sense of using the law to compel ideology, but in the sense that they take "the personal is political" to an extreme. The idea that one might be allowed to just enjoy books or games without considering whether their content serves the needs of social justice is anathema to them. What is one to call the accusation that its some sort of obscene privilege to want to occasionally take a break from thinking about politics, because of the false premise that members of marginalized populations never have the opportunity to do so, if not "totalitarian"? (The absurd take that atheists lean right-wing is downstream of this; "atheism plus" is the totalitarian impulse to say that nothing can ever be about anything else except "social justice" as defined by its totalitarian adherents.)

This tends to get branded as people "making their politics their personality," which isn't necessarily incorrect, but also wildly understates how frightening it should be to have people like that in positions of power.

[odinsblog]

I have been very critical at the way that media has helped legitimize what essentially is a propaganda campaign. We need to call that what it is.

We know the actors. The actors are very explicit. They don't camouflage what they're doing.

In fact, one of the biggest actors, of course, Chris Rufo, regularly goes on Twitter and says, this is what we're going to do. He said he was going to turn critical race theory into a term that made white Americans think about indoctrination, their white children being treated as the oppressor. I mean, he lays it out, and then he lays out his strategy, which is we keep pushing this until we get some mainstream media to pick it up, and then the rest of mainstream media feels that they have to now pick it up or it will look like they're being biased.

So these folks have studied, I think, really the flaws in media and have exploited it. So what happens is this desire to be ‘balanced’ then actually means we obfuscate the truth.

The first thing we should have done as journalists is said, okay, show me in a classroom where this is happening.

Provide evidence that this is happening.

Let's define what Critical Race Theory is, and what it isn't.

And instead, we allowed bad faith actors to really define the terms in a way that I think has been very harmful because that's how propaganda works.

Attempted bans were against 1619 specifically. Then they came back with critical race theory. Now, of course, they're coming back with DEI and we just keep making kind of those same mistakes again and again.

I also just want to add that when we think about something like critical race theory, when we think about what should and shouldn't be taught in the classroom, part of what we did as a failure media is to ask what is the role of an education? And is it wrong to teach a theory? Is it wrong to teach things that every parent wouldn't agree with?

I mean, that is actually the role of an education.

—Nikole Hannah-Jones: The Attack on Black History

[eretzyisrael]

by Christopher Rufo

Portland, Oregon, has earned its reputation as America’s most radical city. Its public school system was an early proponent of left-wing racialism and has long pushed students toward political activism. As with the death of George Floyd four years ago, the irruption of Hamas terrorism in Israel has provided Portland’s public school revolutionaries with another cause du jour: now they’ve ditched the raised fist of Black Lives Matter and traded it in for the black-and-white keffiyeh of Palestinian militants.

I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents produced by the Portland Association of Teachers, an affiliate of the state teachers’ union that encourages its more than 4,500 members to “Teach Palestine!” (The union did not respond to a request for comment.)

The lesson plans are steeped in radicalism, and they begin teaching the principles of “decolonization” to students as young as four and five years old. For prekindergarten kids, the union promotes a workbook from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, which tells the story of a fictional Palestinian boy named Handala. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.” Students are encouraged to come up with a slogan that they can chant at a protest and complete a maze so that Handala can “get back home to Palestine”—represented as a map of Israel.

Other pre-K resources include a video that repeats left-wing mantras, including “I feel safe when there are no police,” and a slideshow that glorifies the Palestinian intifada, or violent resistance against Israel. The recommended resource list also includes a “sensory guide for kids” on attending protests. It teaches children what they might see, hear, taste, touch, and smell at protests, and promotes photographs of slogans such as “Abolish Prisons” and “From the River to the Sea.”

In kindergarten through second grade, the ideologies intensify. The teachers’ union recommends a lesson, “Art and Action for Palestine,” that teaches students that Israel, like America, is an oppressor. The objective is to “connect histories of settler colonialism from Palestine to the United States” and to “celebrate Palestinian culture and resistance throughout history and in the present, with a focus on Palestinian children’s resistance.”

The lesson suggests that teachers should gather the kindergarteners into a circle and teach them a history of Palestine: “75 years ago, a lot of decision makers around the world decided to take away Palestinian land to make a country called Israel. Israel would be a country where rules were mostly fair for Jewish people with White skin,” the lesson reads. “There’s a BIG word for when Indigenous land gets taken away to make a country, that’s called settler colonialism.”

Before snack time, the teacher is encouraged to share “keffiyehs, flags, and protest signs” with the children, and have them create their own agitprop material, with slogans such as “FREE PALESTINE, LET GAZA LIVE, [and] PALESTINE WILL BE FREE.” The intention, according to the lesson, is to move students toward “taking collective action in support of Palestinian liberation.”

The recommended curriculum also includes a pamphlet titled “All Out for Palestine.” The pamphlet is explicitly political, with a sub-headline blaring in all capital letters: “STOP THE GENOCIDE! END U.S. AID TO IRSAEL! FREE PALESTINE!” The authors denounce “Zionism’s long genocidal war on Palestinian life” and encourage students to support “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” policies against Israel.

The pamphlet includes chants that teachers can adopt in the classroom. Some imply support for militancy and political violence: “Resistance is justified when people are occupied!”; “We salute all our martyrs! mothers, fathers, sons and daughters!”; “Justice is our demand! No peace on stolen land!”

It’s not immediately clear to what extent the “Teach Palestine!” lessons have been adopted in Portland public school classrooms. But the teachers’ union claims that the district has been “actively censoring teachers” for promoting pro-Palestine ideologies; in response, it has assembled a legal guide for how teachers can keep promoting the lessons under the guise of meeting state curriculum standards.

[greensagephase]

let's think with a little imagination: if Miguel were real and he would have married you. And if he had said that after marriage he would start a football team with his own children, whether their children were girls or not. At the same time , if he said that he wanted a child very much, what would your reaction be? or would you have accepted? (imagine, you are living a happy life with Miguel, he cares about you and a few children🥺)

Anyway, I hope you're having a nice day !!! 🫶🫶

Hiii, nonny!! Thank you so much for the ask!! (I'm sorry for my long response btw!!)

Omg, first, I’d be so happy if Miguel were real and he married me! 🥹 But okay, so, what you’re saying is Miguel and I already have some kids, but he asks about the possibility of having another one because he wants a big family… Honestly? I’d have to think about it based on different factors. I know this is just imagination, but I’m being realistic here. 😭

As much as I love Miguel and would love to have kids with him, there would have to be a limit, just because of the toll a pregnancy takes on a body. From the actual 9 months to the birth, whether that’s a natural birth or a C-section, it all takes a toll on the person carrying the baby (and I say person to be inclusive since I know there are individuals who can get pregnant but don’t identify as a woman ((:). I don’t speak from experience since I don’t have any children (thankfully 🙏🏼 I’m not mentally nor financially ready for that; also that would be teen pregnancy /j (yes I’m 25 almost 26 but…🫣)). The closest I have to a kid is a fur baby named Rufo (he’s a doggo🥺), but anyway, I’m a bit knowledgeable on this as a woman, and I’d have to say no after a certain number of kids for my own health. I wouldn’t want to end up dying and leaving my kids motherless due to trying to have another child !! :((

So… really it depends on how many kids we already have (the most I’d have is four and that’s already one more than I’m comfortable with tbh)!

I do want to add that I think Miguel would be a very, very considerate man on top of being educated. He knows the risks and changes - everything that happens with the person who is carrying a child, and I don’t think he’d put his partner at risk for another baby after already having several, especially if the doctors are recommending against it, even if he really wants another one. So, that’s another thing to think about. I believe he’d be so happy and thankful for the children you and him have already, even if it’s not a whole fútbol team, hehe!!

Sorry for the long yapping session! I’m just being realistic with myself. Also, I’m scared of childbirth, so idk how many times I could go through it 😭 unless Nueva York is real and we have the super advanced health care and medicine, we’re sticking to what’s recommended on our current Earth.

Thank you so much for the ask, nonny!! I actually sat down for a bit to think about this one just because it’s Miguel. Any other man… immediate no. 💀

I hope you’re having a great week so far and pls take care!! 💖

Alondra❤️

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Emily Yoffe

Published: Jun 11, 2024

Eithan Haim, 34, is at the beginning of his career as a surgeon. He and his wife are expecting their first child in the fall. And now he is facing a four-count federal felony indictment for blowing the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital, where he worked while a resident. 

At TCH, he discovered the hospital was secretly continuing gender transition treatments on minors—including hormonal intervention on patients as young as 11 years old—after publicly declaring, in March of 2022, it would no longer provide such services.

The hospital unwillingly backed away from the treatments under pressure from the Texas governor and attorney general. But Haim found not only were the treatments continuing—the program appeared to be expanding. He recorded several online presentations by medical staff encouraging the transition of children—one social worker described how she deliberately did not make note of such treatment in the medical charts of patients to avoid leaving a paper trail. Haim told me, “They were talking publicly about how they were concealing what they were doing. You can’t take care of your patient without trust. For me as a doctor, to not do something about this was unconscionable.”

Haim, like a growing number of medical professionals around the world, had grave doubts about the safety and efficacy of the explosively growing business of youth gender transition medicine. When he looked into it, he found that children distressed about their biological sex often had multiple mental health challenges—conditions that were being ignored in the rush to put vulnerable young people on hormones, and even to perform surgical interventions. These treatments are profoundly life-altering, with a high risk of rendering a young person sterile. In the last few years, a growing number of countries have investigated these treatments for young people, found the evidence wanting, and have effectively banned interventions such as puberty blockers—drugs that prevent children from entering puberty.

Haim felt he had to act, but he knew the career risks of speaking out could be enormous. He contacted conservative journalist Christopher Rufo, who published an exposé without naming Haim. Before giving Rufo evidence that puberty blockers were still being surgically implanted in young patients, Haim made sure the patient’s names and other identifying information were redacted. This was both to protect patient privacy, and himself from violating the law known as HIPAA, which protects individual patient identities while also allowing various uses of medical information. The story Haim gave to Rufo was published May 16, 2023. The next day, the Texas legislature voted to ban the medical gender transition of minors.

Haim says there was no immediate aftermath: “Everything went quiet. I was anonymous and went on with my life.” Then June 23 of last year, the day Haim was to graduate from his residency, two federal agents from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed up at his house to have a little chat. Haim’s wife, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, a different division of the U.S. Attorney’s office than the one that has indicted her husband, advised him not to talk. 

As Haim later wrote in City Journal, “Before leaving, they handed me a letter revealing that I was a ‘potential target’ of an investigation involving alleged violation of federal criminal law related to medical records.” Haim then went public about the threat facing him in an interview with Rufo. (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas did not respond to a request for comment.)

Haim was indicted last week, but, as of this writing, he and his attorneys do not yet know the precise nature of the charges. One of his lawyers, Mark Lytle, told me it’s very unusual to bring felony charges for an alleged HIPAA violation unless there is a significant underlying crime, such as a hospital clerk selling a celebrity’s medical records. He said the indictment of Haim seems politically motivated. “The government is entering into the town square on the culture wars and didn’t like what Eithan had to say,” said Lytle. “I think they are looking to make an example of him.” Haim is raising money for his legal fees through this GiveSendGo account.

Haim told me despite the peril he is now facing he has no regrets about blowing the whistle and is committed to fighting the federal charges. He said, “If we don’t fight back, what world are we delivering our children into?”

--

[iteratedextras]

We'll see an intellectually-inclined 'man of color' with a white wife (or ex-wife) and 'mixed' children, like Wesley Yang, support post-racial liberal norms. (Also Razib Khan. Or from the opposite direction, Rufo's wife is asian, their kids are 'mixed,' and he's supporting post-racial liberal norms, even though he's willing to talk to people farther right.)

This makes a lot of sense, because they're trying to make a world that would be a good world for their children, and even if these men aren't perfect, that's something you can build a society out of.

At the same time, we'll see a 'woman of color' politician married to a white man, who presumably has 'mixed' children herself, go off and create 'BIPOC-only' parties or something.

This probably isn't statistically significant, just politically salient in terms of who gets promoted and platformed.

But still, what the fuck.

[rendakuenthusiast]

How do people like Chris Rufo not get sued into bankruptcy? He was quite open about the fact that his campaign to oust Gay had nothing to do with antisemitism or concerns about plagiarism. Why don’t the people he’s targeting for his bullying and harassment campaigns just band and sue for every penny he has for making their lives miserable?

Anyone can bring a lawsuit against anyone else for anything, but it's not actually illegal to publicize embarrassing facts about a public figure, even if the real reason you dislike them is for something other than a public statement they made that some other people claim constitutes antisemitism. Trying to make that illegal would clearly threaten basically everything that could conceivably be called journalism and is also probably a first amendment violation.

[beardedmrbean]

NPR defended embattled chief executive Katherine Maher against "online actors with explicit agendas" on Wednesday as her old social media posts continue to go viral for exposing her personal left-wing ideology. 

What seems like a never-ending supply of social media messages Maher posted before running NPR have been unearthed in recent days by critics of NPR, including Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo. 

Maher, who served as the CEO for Web Summit and Wikimedia Foundation prior to taking over NPR last month, showed her support for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 while regularly sharing liberal talking points and criticizing Donald Trump. Many feel that someone with such blunt partisan views running NPR on the heels of veteran editor Uri Berliner penning a scathing takedown that detailed the "absence of viewpoint diversity" at the organization could be troublesome, but the organization chalked up the resurfaced tweets as "bad faith" attacks. 

"This is a bad faith attack that follows an established playbook, as online actors with explicit agendas work to discredit independent news organizations," an NPR spokesperson told Fox News Digital. 

"In this case, they resorted to digging up old tweets and making conjectures based on our new CEO’s resume," the spokesperson continued. "Spending time on these accusations is intended to detract from NPR’s mission of informing the American public and providing local information in communities around the country is more important than ever."

Rufo has also unearthed old video of Maher saying the First Amendment makes it too difficult to censor "bad information." But much of the controversy surrounding her is the result of posts on X, the platform previously known as Twitter. 

Before taking over NPR, Maher tweeted essentially whatever was on her mind. For example, she once shared details of a dream where her and Kamala Harris were on a road trip together "comparing nuts and baklava from roadside stands" before she "woke up very hungry." 

Others were more political. 

Maher wrote on X in May 2020 that while "looting is counterproductive," it was "hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people's ancestors as private property." In another post on the thread, Maher said that property damage was "not the thing" Americans should be upset over. 

In another 2020 post, Maher is seen donning a Biden for president hat and said it was the "best part" of her efforts to get out the vote.

"I can’t stop crying with relief," she wrote after Biden won. 

Maher also took issue with the infamous New York Times Tom Cotton op-ed in 2020, saying it was "full of racist dog whistles." She argued it was based on the "false premise that the country is in a state of ‘disorder.'"

Several of her old posts that have resurfaced reference concern over White privilege and "White silence."

In June 2020, Maher declared "White silence is complicity." 

"If you are White, today is the day to start a conversation in your community," she continued. 

Maher identified herself as an "unalloyed progressive" supporting Clinton in the 2016 election. However, Maher had some criticism for Clinton at the time, saying she wished the then-Democratic presidential nominee "wouldn't use the language of ‘boy and girl,'" because it was "erasing language for non-binary people."

In 2018, she wrote, "I’m angry. Hot angry, slow angry, relentless angry. This anger is going to fuel and burn for a long time, and it will deliver back exponentially," during Christine Blasey Ford's testimony accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

Rufo joined Fox News on Tuesday to explain why he’s been busy circulating Maher’s old tweets. 

"I spent the last day or two digging through her tweets to show people exactly what she believes. It’s actually incredible. It is the most vapid, left-wing propaganda imaginable," Rufo said on "Jesse Watters Primetime."

"She’s been at it for year. She’s a supporter of BLM, she believes in the pseudo-science of White privilege, White fragility, she criticized her own Whiteness," he continued. "It’s like Mad Libs for left-wing women." 

In addition to the deluge of old social media messages being resurfaced, NewBusters reported on Wednesday that Maher has donated to Democratic candidates such as Stacey Abrams. NPR did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her donations.  

Berliner, who resigned after blowing the whistle on NPR’s liberal bias, doesn’t think Maher is fit for the job. 

"We're looking for a leader right now who's going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about," Berliner told NPR media reporter David Folkenflik prior to quitting. "And this seems to be the opposite of that."

Berliner also scolded Maher when he stepped down. 

"I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR," Berliner wrote in a statement published on X. "I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism."

"But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cited in my Free Press essay," Berliner continued.

[mitigatedchaos]

A great deal of the online or transgressive twitter right-wing 2017-2022 were engaged in a kind of highly transgressive political performance art, partly designed to open up the right side of the Overton window. It was a project of culture-jamming.

Many of these people are IQ 120+ or even 130+, by my reckoning. The most plausible candidate for the true identity of Bronze Age Pervert apparently went to Yale. They could easily run rings around many self-appointed censors, partly because the censors were boxed in to defending bad ideology, and often just weren't that clever themselves.

However, this is actually going to create a problem for the right-wing coalition in the medium term.

Memeing that literal phrenology is real, while knowing it's fake, was a powerful way to sort out who else was high-aptitude in the censorship environment, and leave opponents stumped and sputtering, as the opposition's cultural dominance, easy resort to censorship tactics, and coalition handling, had left them unable to make the actual argument to attack the positions directly and with sincerity. It also functioned as a moat against entryists, similar to constantly changing language norms within the left coalition.

So here's the problem.

Each coalition has a bunch of people who generate ideas, and appears to have a bunch of people who argue and spread ideas on an interpersonal basis. These people are probably about 1 in 20 or 1 in 100 in the population, while the ideology-generating part of your coalition are probably measured only in the thousands to tens of thousands nationally.

There is little in this performance for these intermediate intellectual officers to copy.

If you compress and simplify a performance that pretends that phrenology is real, but carefully winks to the audience that it is fake, that knowing wink will be lost in the compression!

This will cause the right coalition to lose some epistemic advantage over the medium term.

(The intermediates can much more safely copy someone like Christopher Rufo or Ben Shapiro, which (aside from morals) is part of why Rufo is following an invisible set of rules.)

To the degree that the identitarians can be marginalized within the left coalition, and antibodies have developed against their social power tactics (oriented around control of institutions), we can expect the left to intellectually re-diversify, and within that intellectual diversity there will be multiple groups with multiple takes which, after sifting for the best of the collection, will provide epistemic advantage again.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Rebecca Crosby at Popular Information:

Major corporations, including Mastercard, Meta, and Coca-Cola, are quietly sponsoring a Canadian conference headlined by Christopher Rufo, a far-right activist and crusader against diversity initiatives. Many of these same companies, however, champion diversity in their public communications.  Rufo is listed as a featured speaker for the Canada Strong and Free Regional Networking Conference 2024, which will be held in Alberta, Canada on September 21. The event, which was first highlighted by DeSmog, is billed as an “enriching exploration of conservatism in Canada.” On X, the organization promoted the event using a photo of Rufo with the text, “Fighting the left and wokism.” 

Rufo has been credited with creating the hysteria around Critical Race Theory (CRT) in educational settings. In 2020, Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox News and called on Trump to end CRT training. Within days, the Trump administration released a memo outlining a ban on diversity training in the government, and Trump issued the executive order shortly after.

When it became clear that CRT is a complex legal theory that is not taught in K-12 schools, Rufo shifted his attention to lambasting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Rufo appeared with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) as DeSantis signed the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which limits workplace conversations about diversity and race. (That aspect of the law has been enjoined by a federal court as unconstitutional.) Rufo has also been a leader in the crusade to ban discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools. On X, Rufo insinuated that people were attempting to indoctrinate pre-kindergarten students with information about “gender transitioning, exotic pronouns, and simplified Queer Theory.” Rufo has also said that “parents have good reason” to be concerned about “‘grooming’ in public schools.” 

In 2023, Rufo was appointed by DeSantis to the board of trustees at the New College of Florida as part of a right-wing takeover of the liberal arts college. In his newsletter, Rufo bragged that New College was “the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.” In an interview with the New York Times, Rufo said that New College previously enrolled too many women, which turned it into “a social justice ghetto.” On X, in response to pictures of dozens of books at the college being thrown away, Rufo said, “We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash.”  Companies who claim to support diversity are sponsoring the upcoming event promoting Rufo and his ideological agenda. Mastercard, for example, prides itself on being one of the leaders for DEI initiatives among major corporations. Mastercard’s website states that “[d]iversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are what set Mastercard apart by making us more adaptable, more innovative and more creative.” Mastercard says that DEI “makes us better” and is “part of our core values and underpins everything we do.” 

Why are major corporations sponsoring an “anti-woke” conference in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada featuring right-wing paranoiac Christopher Rufo.

Rufo helped foment the manufactured crusade against “CRT” in K-12 schools, LGBTQ+ inclusion policies, and DEI in businesses.

[misschanandlerbong-3]

I would like to know who at BBC thought that this was a reasonable, journalistically responsible headline. It should say “false allegations of plagiarism.” And it should include an analysis of the misogynoir, the white supremacy combined with misogyny, that is what actually underlies this smear campaign.

This campaign against Claudine Gay about supposed “plagiarism” began after the congressional hearing and is a smear campaign led by conservatives intent on capitalizing on this moment to tear down progressive institutions. It was not and is not concerned with academic integrity.

Christopher Rufo, one of the architects of this campaign, upon hearing of Gay’s resignation, tweeted “This is the beginning of the end for DEI in America's institutions. We will expose you. We will outmaneuver you. And we will not stop fighting until we have restored colorblind equality in our great nation. “ (https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1742253604222960000?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet)

If this isn’t a clear statement of the actual aims of these accusations, I don’t know what else is. I do not doubt for a second that this campaign was only started and is only as powerful as it is because we still live in a society where, not only is it assumed that black people in general are less intelligent than whites, but also that black women in particular are not as intelligent as white men. This is why we still talk about racism. This is why we cannot be colorblind.

It should not have taken me as long as it did to find that, as I suspected, the supposed “plagiarism” accusations do not really pan out. I was finally able to find that “An independent investigation commissioned by the [Harvard] Corporation concluded Gay had multiple instances of missing quotation marks and citations. Harvard called those mistakes ‘regrettable’ but said they did not constitute research misconduct.” (https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/harvard-president-claudine-gay-plagiarism-probe/index.html#:~:text=An%20independent%20investigation%20commissioned%20by,did%20not%20constitute%20research%20misconduct.) This is not plagiarism. At best, this is somewhat messy. But so are we all. And the fact that a black women is at the center of this makes me think, again, that, without a doubt, this is not about academic integrity. This is about using a moment of actual struggle to reinforce white supremacist patriarchy.

I could say so much more about how this connects to disaster capitalism, white supremacy, the culture of academia, and deviant gender expression, but I'll stop myself here, for now.