Chris Rufo strutted into a lecture at a school of business at the University of Texas, which you’d think would be a friendly environment for him. It wasn’t. He got torched to the ground.

Rufo brought his anti-DEI argument to UT on Monday and because he is – like many on the right – a catastrophist, he gave it an apocalyptic twist, claiming that initiatives like DEI have made public universities frightening, insecure places. I think people from across the political spectrum would acknowledge a sense of anxiety [at the universities], he said. A sense of fear. A sense of foreboding. Something has gone quite wrong.

I’m at a university. He’s got the atmosphere turned around about 180° — if there’s any foreboding, it’s over the fact that conservative cultists like Rufo are hell-bent on eviscerating liberal thought on campus — he said as much outright, announcing that “it is necessary to replace liberal voices with conservative ones at institutions like UT.” Combine that with Republican legislatures constantly cutting funding, and yeah, something has gone quite wrong. I’d start with the fact that philistines like Rufo get speaking engagements on campus.

I needn’t have worried, though. My professional colleagues stepped up to the plate and showed that Rufo was an idiot.

Afterward, Rufo took questions. Naomi Campa, a classics professor at UT, challenged Rufo to define what he meant by “truth, beauty, and goodness,” a standard he had repeatedly referred to in his remarks that he said higher education should re-prioritize. A numbing digression followed in which Rufo complained that leftists reject the concept of beauty. He did not, however, offer any insight into what he considers truth, beauty, and goodness to consist of. “I would like some actual examples,” Campa replied with a note of impatience, “not some argument that says beauty is anti-diversity. … I agree that people give word-salad as answers but I challenge you not to do the same thing – because that was word salad.”

I would like to see examples, too. Leftists do not reject the concept of beauty at all — after all, I find beauty in spiders. I suspect that what he means is that we reject beauty because we can see beauty where he can’t, because, like Jordan Peterson, he thinks the only true beauty is white.

He couldn’t give a specific answer because it would give away the game when he specified a bunch of white supremacist ideals.

Ten minutes later, Polly Strong, an anthropology professor and the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Rufo that she believed in intellectual diversity but that a commitment to the concept wasn’t what she heard from him. She said her personal hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom, due process, and neutrality in higher learning and asked if Rufo supported those values.

Rufo thanked Strong for her question but his words came faster and more insistent than before. He derided Dewey, saying it would have been better if he’d never been born, and dismissed his values. “Academic freedom, due process, neutrality – those are means, not ends,” Rufo said. “If you have an erasure of ends, what you get is sheer power politics, you get everything reducible to will and domination, and then you get an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” Rufo concluded by saying that academics who continue to adhere to Dewey’s principles, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”

Strong was completely unawed by the implied threat. “The ‘ends’ of academic freedom, due process, and shared governance is education for a democratic society,” she said simply. “That is the basis of John Dewey’s vision and many, many university professors believe that today.”

Oh, man, I could have told her ahead of time that conservatives despise John Dewey. The guy who said “Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous”? They hate democracy. “A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young” — they want students who recite cant.

I do wonder what Rufo thinks is “coming.” Is he already planning the pogroms?

The phrenology remark is amusing, because it’s the people who are backing him who believe in genetic determinism, that race is quantifiable, and who publish in their favorite ‘journal’ of phrenology, Quillette.

The audience was silent after Strong’s remark. It had become clear that Rufo wasn’t dominating his opponents. It got worse for him when Samuel Baker, a UT English professor, came to the mic. Baker reiterated that Rufo’s veneration of beauty and truth was meaningless if he provided no idea of what the concepts mean to him, and he criticized Rufo’s use of violent imagery like “laying siege” and deserving “what’s coming.”

“I just want to be honest with you,” Baker said, “your rhetoric in relation to barbarism and the way you smugly say that the university is not going to like what’s coming – I think that in the context of the world right now, where there is a lot of really tragic violence, that we ought to be careful to remove ourselves from that and from groups with white supremacist associations. I really think you should rethink the glibness.”

Wait for it. Baker doesn’t just point out how shallow Rufo’s ideas are, he nails Rufo on his racist, fascist underpinnings.

By “white supremacist associations,” Baker was referring to reports linking Rufo to the figures who constitute a new alt-right bro culture, including the recently disgraced Richard Hanania – a visiting professor of the Salem Center who was, in his words, canceled after revelations that he’d written pseudonymously for white supremacist publications a decade earlier. Rufo also associates with anti-democratic voices like Bronze Age Pervert, as well as people from the Claremont Institute, who advocate for the overthrow of the 2020 presidential election, and Charles Haywood, an extremist who has called for a war of extinction against the left through his “No Enemies to the Right” philosophy. (Haywood is speaking at a far-right conference in Austin next month, by the way.)

Rufo responded to Baker’s remarks directly: “Well, well – be straightforward. What are you saying? You’re alluding, you’re insinuating –”

“That you hang around with fascists?” Baker replied. “Is that what you’re insinuating I’m insinuating?”

And there it was. The colloquy between Rufo and Baker continued for a moment more before Rufo launched into a strident self-defense, claiming he is more sensitive to fascists than anyone because of his family’s history in Italy. But the damage was done. Minutes later the Salem Center’s Carlos Carvalho hustled him out of the building as Baker and Campa tried to continue the back and forth.

Excellent. I’m proud of my professorial colleagues for smacking that lying poseur around. Do more of that, everyone!

Or how universities work. If they did, they’d see that this short video illustrates a perfectly normal, routine event. Someone asks to make an announcement in an MIT math class, waits politely for the professor to let them go, and then leads students in a chant as they march out of the classroom.

This is a math class this morning at @MIT. This is the state of learning and ‘free speech’ at our top universities. It would not be happening without a failure leadership at MIT.

Imagine being a student who borrowed $250k to attend MIT or a professor who is trying to do… pic.twitter.com/w8C6Y6i3SU

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) November 10, 2023

Oh yeah? So?

I’ve had students ask to announce an anti-abortion talk in my class. I am ferociously against that idea, but I let her speak…then I continued on.

I’ve had a student raise a hand in class in order to inform us all that there was a talk by a creationist in a local church that night. Fine. I wasn’t able to go to that one, but I’m sure it was entertaining.

I had students announce a protest march against the Iraq war…oh, wait, I agreed with that, and joined the march that afternoon.

I’ve had advocates for climate change protests, BLM, conservation, vegetarianism, gay & trans rights, etc. take a moment to make announcements in class. It’s fine.

I can’t emphasize enough how totally unremarkable this sort of thing is. Our students have diverse views, we’re at a goddamn university, and we encourage students to be aware, to be activists, to express themselves. What I see in that video is a tolerant professor giving a minute of time to let students voice their opposition to an ongoing violent political event, and they then left to protest.

And now assholes are showing that short clip and announcing that “wokeness” has gone too far, that anyone they disagree with is abusing free speech. I am unimpressed. I take that back — I am disgusted.

This country has a weird cognitive impairment — we keep forgetting that we’re full of fascists. Our history is loaded with openly bigoted authoritarians who preach their garbage to widespread acclaim, and when the their raging Naziism gets smacked down hard by reality and events, we just blithely forget their sins to keep them on their pedestal.

I am reminded of this every time I fly out of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. The main terminal is named after Charles Lindbergh, the famous pilot who also just happened to be a white supremacist, an America Firster (AFC), anti-Semite, and, until the stories of atrocities started to trickle out of Europe, a Nazi sympathizer.

While the AFC garnered significant support from middle- and upper- class American gentiles, their highwater mark came on Sept. 11, 1941, when Charles Lindbergh gave a speech at an AFC event in Des Moines, Iowa — a speech that left the permanent stain on his memory to this day.

“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration,” Lindbergh said, before going on to add later about Jewish-American groups: “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government,” and that they were the only ones who wanted war over the resistance of the American public who did not.

We know he was an anti-Semite. We still put up statues honoring Lindberg. Where’s a neurologist when you need one?

Seth Cotlar provides a long list of the stuff we’ve forgotten.

We as a nation absolutely did not have to go easy on the memory of Kirkpatrick or Elizabeth Dilling, or Gerald LK Smith, or Henry Ford, or Charles Lindbergh, let alone put that last guy’s name on airport terminals. Normalizing such people as mere “anti-communists” or “fundamentalist Christians” or “ultraconservative patriots” or “principled isolationists” was a mistake. So was minimizing them as irrelevant “kooks” or “crackpots.” Both impulses did a real disservice to the nation’s political memory by weakening our antifascist defenses and atrophying our pro-democratic muscles. Gerald LK Smith, for example, had a mailing list of over 3 million names in the 1960s. The Liberty Lobby’s neo-Nazi radio show could be heard on over 470 AM radio stations in that decade. Calling these folks “crackpots” did nothing to stem the torrent of fascist bile they poured into the reservoir of our political culture on a daily basis, bile that was generally ignored as irrelevant by the vast majority of Americans and interpreted as perfectly normal, “patriotic, pro-Christian, anti-Communist Americanism” by the millions of people to whom it appealed.

It was the rare public figure in the Cold War era who would have either a) forthrightly labeled such people “fascists” or b) taken the anti-democratic threat they posed seriously enough to pay much attention to them. Because these fascists were white, because the majority of them were elderly, because the rank and file of these movements was working or middle class, because the wealthy people who funded these fascist movements were usually respected “upstanding citizens,” because most of them were Christians, because they called themselves “patriotic lovers of the Constitution;” all of their violent ideation, all of their hateful bigotry got written off as eccentric personality quirks, rather than features of an organized and enduring fascistic strain in American politics.

I blame the deep scars of the Civil War. In 1865, we were in such a mad rush to “heal” the damage of the war that we papered over the criminality of the Confederacy, and it just became a habit. We have never addressed the poison of racism and anti-Semitism in this country, which allows the infection to persist and flourish, and now it has completely taken over the Republican party.

I have to correct the statement below.

You cannot be a responsible teacher or researcher if you tolerate lies and demonstrably false ideas.

There is a line we have to draw where we openly repudiate bad ideas presented in bad faith. We should no more have a conference panel at a serious meeting on fallacious ideas about sex than we should have conference panels on creationism and flat earth…unless it’s to flatly reject them. And even then, that has limited utility.

Dr Ibram X. Kendi has a noble goal, combatting racism. To that end, he established a Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University that, by some metrics, was highly successful.

Since its announced launch in June 2020, just days after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the center has raised tens of millions of dollars from tech entrepreneurs, Boston-area corporations, and thousands of small donors.

At the time, Kendi, the author of the bestselling 2019 book “How to Be an Antiracist,” said the center would “solve these intractable racial problems of our time.”

Then the complaints started. There were accusations of mismanagement, that Kendi was unreachable, that all that grant money wasn’t being effectively used.

The organization “was just being mismanaged on a really fundamental level,” said Phillipe Copeland, a professor in BU’s School of Social Work who also worked for the center as assistant director of narrative.

Although most decision-making authority rested with Kendi, Copeland said he found it difficult to schedule meetings with him. Other staffers described paralysis in the organization because Kendi declined to delegate authority and was not often available.

Say it ain’t so! I’d want to see evidence that the center was being run poorly.

In recent months, Kendi had been on leave from the center, according to BU.

He returned last week and, in a series of Zoom meetings, told approximately 20 of the center’s staffers that they would be laid off, according to Spencer Piston, a BU professor and leader in the center’s policy office.

The layoffs “were initiated by Dr. Kendi” and represented a strategic pivot, not a response to any financial difficulty, Lapal Cavallario said. The center will now pursue a fellowship model “rather than its current research-based approach,” she said.

Uh, OK. Authoritarian mass firings and a complete redirection of how the center would be run is strong evidence of mismanagement, I would think.

Since Henry Ford was also a rich anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer.

The Washington Post continues it’s depressing dissection of Ales Hrdlicka. I wish we could say he was a forgotten relic of a benighted time, but no, some anthropologists were still celebrating his life in more recent years.

Rachel Watkins, a biocultural anthropologist, worked at the Natural History Museum in the early 2000s after the Smithsonian had reckoned with what he had done in Larsen Bay. She recalled when employees at the museum gathered around a cake to commemorate the anthropologist’s birthday more than 50 years after his death.

“He was … deified,” said Watkins, now an associate professor and department chair of anthropology at American University. “It’s like Thomas Jefferson at [the University of Virginia].”

Ugh. The old ghoul should be treated as a shameful embarrassment, but instead he’s lionized by some now as much as he was in life (he died in 1943). This newspaper article from 1926 is incredible, not only for how credulous the journalist was,but for how smugly and confidently Hrdlicka makes predictions about the future evolution of the American population — don’t worry about the flappers, they’ll be strict parents.

(You can click on this to get an enlarged article that is marginally readable.)

The modern white nationalists and racists didn’t just appear out of thin air. They’ve been here all along, provided with pseudo-scientific support from establishment scientists like Hrdlicka.