\n<\/p>\n
Christopher Rufo took six months<\/span> to contradict his own advice. In February, the conservative activist wrote that social-media posts \u201cshould no longer be grounds for automatic social and professional annihilation.\u201d This view won\u2019t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Rufo\u2019s long crusade against left-wing cancel culture. By August, however, he had emulated his enemies, arousing outrage over a journalist\u2019s old tweets. The episode demonstrates not just his own hypocrisy but also why campaigns against unwelcome speech should always be resisted.<\/p>\n Rufo\u2019s about-face reveals something else too: The rules of the culture war are changing. Take it from Rufo himself. \u201cThe Right\u2019s longstanding proposal\u2014to \u2018cancel cancel culture\u2019\u2014might make for a good slogan,\u201d he wrote in the same essay from February. Now, with Donald Trump back in the White House, he says that conservatives have to be more proactive. \u201cWe should acknowledge that culture is a way for society to establish a particular hierarchy of values and to provide a way to police the boundaries,\u201d Rufo wrote. \u201cAnd then we should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward.\u201d<\/p>\n Judging by his recent campaign, however, Rufo seems to be less concerned with expanding discourse on the right than with limiting its range on the left. Instead of canceling cancel culture, he seems to want to reverse engineer it for his own priorities. \u201cAll cultures cancel,\u201d he has concluded. \u201cThe question is, for what, and by whom.\u201d<\/p>\n The story of Rufo\u2019s inversion<\/span> begins with Sydney Sweeney. The actress\u2019s American Eagle ad campaign\u2014an extended, breathy play on the words genes and jeans\u2014elicited an array of overreactions from the left. One of the most notable came from Doreen St. F\u00e9lix, a Black staff writer at The New Yorker, who used the occasion to argue that \u201cbreasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man\u2019s hunger for ass.\u201d She followed this with a contention that some of Sweeney\u2019s fans want to recruit her as \u201ca kind of Aryan princess.\u201d<\/p>\n Readers may have simply raised an eyebrow at these race-baiting assertions. But Rufo seized on them to instigate the kind of online outrage mob that he once decried. As with his successful campaign to topple Claudine Gay, the erstwhile president of Harvard, his tactics recalled those used by extremely online progressives in the 2010s and early 2020s, the era that spawned the term cancel culture.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a nebulous and contested phrase, but cancel culture nonetheless denotes something real. First, activists whet the appetites of onlookers by highlighting an initial violation. Then they scour the offender\u2019s past for further evidence of guilt. Cancel culture needs numbers like a fire needs oxygen, so the outraged scrounge whatever they can to grow the mob. Once critical mass is reached, they threaten\u2014explicitly or implicitly\u2014the livelihood of the accused.<\/p>\n As I see the phenomenon, though, cancel culture goes beyond punishing people for doing something deemed inappropriate. It\u2019s not just an internet pile-on. Cancel culture is more fundamentally about solidifying norms that haven\u2019t yet been established. To lose your job for calling someone the N-word or saying that women are inferior to men is not true cancel culture, I would argue. Such a definition obscures too much of what the 2010s wrought.<\/p>\n Back then, a broad range of norms was up for grabs. Could one insist on making a distinction between trans women and biological females? No matter what most of the country believed, a cohort of progressives decided that the answer was no, signaling to any future offenders that they, too, could suffer the mob\u2019s wrath. At the peak of the early-2020s moral panic, a museum curator was pressured to resign after saying that he would continue purchasing works produced by white artists. All at once, every curator in the country understood the potential stakes of following suit. Such campaigns became potent ways to prevent \u201cwrongspeak\u201d before it could happen.<\/p>\n Right-wing outrage mobs are nothing new, of course. Colin Kaepernick was hounded out of the NFL after kneeling during the national anthem, and Anheuser-Busch suffered serious backlash for its ill-conceived ad campaign featuring the transgender TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney. But during this early period, conservatives, perhaps hypocritically, still denounced the cancel-culture phenomenon in the abstract. Today, Rufo is overtly embracing it\u2014a reflection of the right\u2019s ascendant cultural might under Trump and a warning that much more canceling could be on the way.<\/p>\n After St. F\u00e9lix\u2019s article was published last month, Rufo surfaced dozens of ludicrous tweets that she had posted a decade ago, during the onset of an era when many writers of color were spouting racist nonsense without consequence. In 2014 and 2015, St. F\u00e9lix mused on Twitter: \u201cTbh whiteness fills me with a lot of hate,\u201d and \u201cWe lived in perfect harmony w\/ the earth pre whiteness.\u201d And \u201cOf course white people don\u2019t bathe. It\u2019s in their blood. Their lack of hygiene literally started the bubonic plague, lice, syphilis etc.\u201d And, not least, \u201cThe holocaust is the worst thing to happen to black people.\u201d<\/p>\n Anti-Semitism proved a fertile subject for St. F\u00e9lix, who proposed that the Holocaust, like 9\/11, allowed white people the opportunity \u201cto affect a fake racial psychic burden.\u201d In 2016, on Facebook, she espoused a lightweight kind of Black supremacy. \u201cIf black lives matter to you,\u201d she wrote, \u201cyou must upend your comfortable white life and live it in deference, in prostrated honor, of our existence.\u201d<\/p>\n This racist litany reminded me of the case of Sarah Jeong, a Korean American writer whom The New York Times hired to its editorial board in 2018. At the time, critics dug up tweets of hers from 2014\u2014about the \u201cjoy I get out of being cruel to old white men\u201d and how white people\u2019s skin makes them \u201conly fit to live underground like groveling goblins.\u201d Jeong epitomized this emerging sensibility by tweeting, \u201c#CancelWhitePeople.\u201d<\/p>\n Jeong wasn\u2019t fired for her tweets. Neither was St. F\u00e9lix, who went on to be included in Forbes\u2019s \u201c30 Under 30\u201d list and Brooklyn Magazine\u2019s \u201c100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture.\u201d Rufo\u2019s campaign hasn\u2019t prompted The New Yorker to do or say anything in response, other than block him on X. For his part, Rufo has said that he hopes the publication continues its silence, which he is choosing to interpret as an admission that \u201cthe entire premise of the BLM era was never about \u2018antiracism.\u2019 It was always a fraud.\u201d This is, among other things, a savvy way for him to claim victory, no matter the outcome. (The New Yorker declined to comment for this article.)<\/p>\n Even though Rufo is not calling for St. F\u00e9lix\u2019s termination, he is evidently trying to reshape institutional culture, just like his progressive forebears were. Rather than simply reinforce the already-established norms against the naked prejudice and racism on display in St. F\u00e9lix\u2019s posts, Rufo seems to want to overturn the conventional wisdom in many elite spaces that only white people can be racist. That cosmopolitan view begins with the premise that racism per se involves not only prejudice but also structural power. No matter the personal privileges or credentials of St. F\u00e9lix, Jeong, and other people of color, the thinking goes, white supremacy has stripped them of the systemic advantages afforded to white people. Therefore, nonwhites, no matter the bigotry or bias they espouse, are exempt from being racist.<\/p>\n This assumption has begun to falter in the post-\u201cwoke\u201d era that was ushered in with Trump\u2019s reelection, and Rufo might have just accelerated its demise. St. F\u00e9lix may not have lost a job, but her reputation has been complicated by a surge of negative coverage, and she has retreated from social media, deleting her once-prominent account on X. She is now a warning for anyone else who has thought that trafficking in anti-white tirades wouldn\u2019t come with a cost.<\/p>\n Rufo is blatantly unprincipled. But his moral purpose here seems clear enough: to establish the cynical norm that white people aren\u2019t the only ones who can be tarred by opportunists seeking to narrow the range of acceptable discourse. That is a terrible equality that must be disavowed no matter whose scalp is on offer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Christopher Rufo took six months to contradict his own advice. In February, the conservative activist wrote that social-media posts \u201cshould no longer be grounds for automatic social and professional annihilation.\u201d This view won\u2019t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Rufo\u2019s long crusade against left-wing cancel culture. By August, however, he had emulated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1671,1203,2486,956,13009],"class_list":{"0":"post-21204","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-atlantic","9":"tag-cancel","10":"tag-christopher","11":"tag-culture","12":"tag-rufos"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}