Chris Rufo is a grifter who is leading the right to disaster. His alleged victories against wokism are almost entirely imaginary.

Whenever someone criticizes Rufo, he likes to compare his track record to theirs. In his own words, these are the highlights of his career:

“We broke BLM, CRT, Kendi, Gay, etc., and my conversations with the New York Times over the past five years, which are a good proxy for elite consensus, have shifted very favorably in our direction, meaning that those ‘elites’ sense we have damaged woke and reduced its relative status. We’ve also set the stage for the president to defund the Left, tame the universities, abolish DEI, and rescind affirmative action.”

Let’s examine these claims one by one, and then consider why the right always loses in the end.

Helping the Left Take Out Its Own Trash

A couple years ago, Rufo helped get Harvard’s DEI President Claudine Gay booted on the pretext of plagiarism. As I predicted would happen, she was simply replaced by someone worse. Under the more effective leadership of Alan Garber, Harvard continues to flout the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, and it is spearheading the resistance to Trump.

The Left Has Moral and Intellectual Standards

At the height of the Great Awokening, Ibram X. Kendi was the doyen of DEI. Kendi (whose SAT scores barely cracked 1000) gave us insights such as defining “racism” as “a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.” He received a MacArthur Fellowship (aka “genius grant”) and set his speaking fee to $35,000 an hour. In July 2020 he became the founding director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University funded by $55 million in donations.

After several years, Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research failed to produce anything resembling research. He fired half of his staff because the money had disappeared to who-knows-where. The whole operation was shut down in 2025. Kendi left BU and now directs the so-called Institute for Advanced Study at Howard University.

The fall of Kendi is a testament to the left’s capacity for self-correction, not evidence that it is in retreat. (I’m not sure what role Rufo thinks “anti-woke” reporting had in any of this, but it makes no difference either way.) The right would never have a Kendi scandal because a right-wing Kendi would never be held accountable. Can you think of a single example in recent history where a right-wing leader was marginalized for stupidity or grifting? If the right held its leaders accountable for these things, almost everyone would be gone (including Rufo).

BLM Lives On

After gaining steam from several hoaxes such as the Michael Brown “hands up, don’t shoot” incident, BLM reached its high point after the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. The movement was unofficially led by the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF), which, in 2020, received more than $90 million in donations.

BLMGNF was run like Zimbabwe. Its leaders paid themselves lavish salaries. They funneled large sums of money to their friends and family. Director Patrisse Cullors’s baby daddy was paid $970,000 for “creative services.” Cullors resigned her position at BLMGNF when her private purchase of more than $3 million in real estate attracted scrutiny. The left-wing New York Magazine broke the story that BLMGNF secretly bought a house for $6 million, apparently for private use by senior members of the organization. Local BLM chapters faced similar scandals.

Rufo can gloat about how embarrassing this was for the left. But the left exposed corruption on its own side and took measures to fix the problem without retreating from its ideological goals.

BLM attracted a flurry of support, then started going off the rails due to corruption and purity spirals. The left-wing establishment responded by quietly switching its focus to institutional capture so it can wield real power instead of just burning down police stations.

CRT Didn’t Go Anywhere

“Critical Race Theory” is a fancy name for the idea that racial disparities favoring whites are caused by past or present racism. It is simply the philosophy that follows from taking the equality thesis (all races have the same innate distribution of socially relevant traits) seriously.

Rufo played a role in passing legislation in some Republican-controlled states to prohibit educators from teaching CRT. Having anti-CRT laws on the books makes it marginally easier to push back against the most noxious expressions of anti-whitism. But elites remain committed to CRT, whether they call it CRT or something else like “American history.” Children spend seven hours a day, five days a week at school. As long as educators remain overwhelmingly left and woke, they are going to find a way to impart their beliefs to students.

Elite Consensus

Nothing happening at the New York Times indicates that “elite consensus [has] shifted very favorably in our direction.” Some mainstream left-wing outlets have recently expressed cautious skepticism about mutilating “trans” children. But gender theory is philosophically and historically separate from wokism. I always said there could be a backlash against it. The Times has not backed one inch away from the idea that all groups of people are on average the same and we need to strive for equality of outcome.

How the Left Actually Won

Howard Zinn was the author of A People’s History of the United States, which sold more than two million copies and played a major role in radicalizing American education. In 1967, the political science department at Boston University voted to award him tenure. However, its recommendation had to be approved by the trustees, who were scheduled to meet for the annual Founders Day banquet. Zinn then accepted some students’ invitation to speak at an anti-war rally, not knowing that the purpose of the rally was to protest Secretary of State Dean Rusk...who had been invited to speak at the Founders Day banquet! But he did not pull out. On the same day the trustees were voting on his tenure case, Zinn gave a 45-minute speech railing against their honored guest, the government, and America’s founders. He went home assuming he would be fired. Unbeknownst to him, the trustees had already voted to approve his tenure before the banquet.

Bill Ayers spent time in jail.

Noam Chomsky’s wife went to college so she would be able to support the family when her husband got what they expected would be a long prison sentence.

For 70 years, the woke project has inspired commitment from a large proportion of intelligent and idealistic people. That’s why the ideology prevailed. There was no conspiratorial “long march through the institutions.” As long as they believe that all groups are on average innately the same, intelligent, morally sensitive people will recognize that there is a moral emergency to correct the environment and bring about equality of outcome. Insofar as society is a meritocracy, institutions staffed by qualified individuals will spontaneously wokify.

In a revealing moment, Chris Rufo mocked me for being fired from Cambridge for talking about hereditarianism. (In fact I wasn’t fired from Cambridge, but leave that aside.) For Rufo the nihilist, the idea of sacrificing your immediate self-interest on behalf of a worthy cause is incomprehensible. He and his fellow trolls only know how to kick their opponents when they are down—a strategy that, besides being dishonorable, is generally ineffective in the long run, when eventually your enemy (perhaps Gavin Newsom?) gets up and starts kicking you.

The right may have the political power to defund cancer research, but it is currently not a position to retake the institutions and run them effectively. Note that, even with virtually unlimited funding, the right-wing University of Austin (UATX) is teaching college students middle-school-level algebra and appears to be on the verge of shutting down. To defeat race communism, it will be necessary to persuade a critical mass of liberal elites to join the right. Holding up people like Rufo as representatives of anti-wokism is pushing these potential allies—and therefore real victory—further and further away.