High Stakes

 

On September 12, 2023 I received an email, a publication from Chris Rufo that I subscribe to. The title of his publication is: High Stakes In Florida: The Biden Administration comes after New College and its conservative reforms, alleging specious civil rights violations”

 

I will quote what interests me from the article and then comment on it.

 

Rufo: “Last week, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into New College of Florida, where I serve as a trustee, regarding alleged ‘disability discrimination.’

 

The investigation was prompted by a complaint by ACLU attorney Jennifer Granick, alleging that the college’s trustees and administrators violated civil rights law by removing ‘gender neutral’ signage from bathrooms, defunding DEI and gender studies programs, and ‘misgendering’ the former DEI director and a former student who use ‘ze/zir’ and ‘they/them’ pseudo-pronouns respectively. According to the complaint, these actions constitute discrimination ‘based on perceived disability and gender prejudice.’

 

As a tactical matter, the complaint is a clear attempt to disrupt the conservative reforms at New College, which represent a threat to the Left’s hegemony over higher education. Since January, when the new board of trustees was announced, New College has secured record funding from the state legislature, begun a campus-wide renovation, launched a new core curriculum, and recruited the largest incoming class in the college’s history. For left-wing activists, who had previously considered New College as an outpost for social-justice activism—conservative leaders implementing conservative reforms—was intolerable. They might chant for ‘democracy’ in theory, but, in practice, they are more willing to use anti-democratic tools to restrict an democratic action that might undermine their cultural power.”

 

My response: The Feds and Leftists (one and the same) use threats of federal investigations and lawsuits to undermine popular, legal reforms popular with Florida voters and their elected officials. Once again the Administrative State overrules popular will and the outcome of state and local elections.

 

Rufo: “As a strategic matter, a more dangerous element is in play: the manipulation of civil rights law. The Civil Rights Act, many have come to believe, was a noble response to Jim Crow segregation and other serious abuses that, over the years, has been distorted by left-wing activists, who have used it to force public and private institutions to conform to unrelated ideological demands. In the case of New College, the implication is clear: despite the fact that the trustees, the state legislators, state education officials, and the governor support ongoing reforms, left-wing activists, in cooperation with the Biden administration, would use civil rights law to compel the college to surrender to left-wing ‘diversity and inclusion’ orthodoxy and to mandate the use of falsified ideological terms, such as ‘ze/zir’ and ‘they/them.’ Dissenters, the activists hope, will be denounced, investigated, and punished by the full force of the federal government.

 

The stakes are immense. The complainants would like nothing more than to set the precedent that DEI bureaucracies, gender study programs, and specified political speech are required by civil rights law. If they are able to make the link between ‘perceived disability and gender prejudice and win such a judgment, it would the ultimate vindication of Christopher Caldwell’s thesis that the Civil Rights Act, in its present configuration and usage, represents a mortal threat to the constitutional principles of free speech, democratic representation and equal treatment under the law.”

 

My response: this illegal and unconstitutional attack by the Feds upon the trustees and elected officials of Florida must be stopped, for this authoritarian precedence cannot be stomached. It needs challenging by citizens, to be outlawed by Congress and to be taken by the conservative to court.

 

Rufo: “If the Department of Education forces New College to reinstate terminated left-wing programs and requires trustees to address women as ‘ze/’zir’ and ‘they/them’, it would mean, in a real sense, the replacement of the system of self-governance with a system of ideological rule.

 

How will the investigation proceed? If evaluated on the merits, it would be dismissed immediately. But the Biden administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it is willing to misuse the federal justice system against its political opponents. The administration mobilized the FBI counterterrorism division against conservative school-board protesters and colluded with social-media companies to censor conservative opinion. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to sees that the administration sees the New College complaint as an opportunity to cut down a political foe.

 

For me, the Department of Education investigation is personal. I’m the person in question who supposedly ‘mocked and misgendered” the former employee and former student and whose reporting on radical gender theory has supposedly created a ‘hostile environment’ on campus. But I will affirm my basic principles: I will not falsify reality. I will never address another human being as a ‘ze/zir’ or a ‘they/them.’ And, however the Department of Education rules, I will not back down from the mission of New College of Florida: revising classical liberal arts and restoring the true, the good, and the beautiful, as the ultimate end of higher education.”

 

My response: Rufo is honorable, smart, informed, and well-intentioned, and he is making sure the tax dollars of the citizens of Florida are wisely spent on campus.

 

Rufo: “The law, rightly interpreted, is on our side. The former employee and former student have a First Amendment right, of course, to call themselves ‘ze/zir,’ ‘they/them,’ or any other nonsense that they fancy. But I, too, have a First Amendment right to tell the truth: left-wing ‘neo-pronouns’ are ideological constructions that deny human nature and are designed to manipulate otherwise well-meaning people into affirming a cult-like belief system. The New College Administration has ‘brushed off’ the allegations and promised to defend itself.”

 

My response: Chris is right. Biologically, there are only two genders. He should tell this truth no matter how the Feds demand and compel him, or try to, to use their fake, socially constructed pronouns, whether he wants to or not, or be punished by the government and that is really authoritarian and unjust.

 

Rufo: “This investigation is bigger that New College, If the state can force you to lie about basic reality—man and woman—then it can force you to lie about anything. If this effort succeeds, it will not only destroy reforms at New College but will also effectively outlaw the core of conservatism, which as Russell Kirk explained long ago, is the ‘negation of ideology’ and the adherence to unchanging norms. 

 

We can’t let that happen.”

 

My response: There is much at stake her, and Rufo is just the man to articulate what is at stake and how to fight back.