Mastermind

 

I subscribe to email publication from Chris Rufo, and I received one on 1/4/24, entitled ‘The Conservative Mastermind Behind Claudine Gay’s Ouster”. I will quote from it and then respond to what I quoted.

 

Chris (C after this) wrote this: “I tell Politico how we ran the campaign to unseat Harvard’s president. The resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay has sent shockwaves through America’s elite institutions. Commentators across the political spectrum, habituated to years f submission to DEI orthodoxy, have been asking how it happened.

 

Yesterday, report Ian Ward of Politico reached out to ask me precisely this question. As one of the journalists and activists who worked on this campaign and watched it develop from the inside, I was happy to oblige.”

 

My response: Chris has been telling we conservatives that we must fight to take back the institutions, our culture, and our country. He is an intellectual, a journalist, and shrewd, effective activist, so he is demonstrating here how to conduct a counterrevolutionary event to take back Harvard and send signals to Progressives everywhere, and they are getting the message, or should if they know what is good for them.

 

Here is the interview with Politico (P after this): “How much credit do you think you deserve for Gay’s resignation?”

 

C: “I have learned that it never hurts to take the credit because sometimes people don’t give it to you. But this really was a team effort that involved three primary points of leverage. First, was the narrative leverage, and this was done primarily by me Christopher Burnet and Aaron Sibarium. Second was the financial leverage, which was led by Bill Ackman and other Harvard donors. And finally, there was political leverage which was really led by Congresswoman Elsie Stefanik’s masterful performance with Claudine Gay at her hearings.

 

When you put those three elements together—narrative, financial and political pressure—and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the resignation of America’s most powerful academic leader. I think that this result speaks for itself.”

 

My response: Chris is wicked smart; he knows how to use power and run pressure plays to fight and beat the Progressive at their own games. I wish he would consult with and organize the chaotic, incompetent, feckless, RINO Republican Party of Minnesota that got us Red Flag gun laws in 2023 by losing both houses to the Democrats.

 

Note that he is assertive, taking credit for what he did, but not for what others accomplished.

 

P: “How closely have you been coordinating with the other people in those three camps?”

 

C: “I know all the players, I have varying degrees of coordination and communication, but—"

 

P: “What does that mean, ‘various degrees of communication and coordination’? Have you been actively working together.”

 

C: “Some people I speak to a little more frequently, some people a little less frequently. My job as a journalist and even more so as an activist is to know the political conditions, to understand and develop relationships with all the political actors, and then to work as hard as I can so they’re successful in achieving their individual goals—but also to accomplish the shared goal, which was to topple the president of Harvard University.”

 

P: “On December 19, you tweeted that it was your plan to ‘smuggle the (the plagiarism story) into the media apparatus from the left, which legitimizes the narrative to the center-left actors who have the power to topple (Gay).’ Can you explain that strategy in more detail?”

 

C: “It’s really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Burnet and I broke the story of Claudine’s plagiarism on December 10. It drove more than 100 million impressions of Twitter, and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into the left-wing media. But the left-wing media ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption story in Harvard’s history.”

 

My response: Chris is a sharp thinker and a very clever practical activist, knowing just how to go for the jugular vein, so to speak. I am glad he is a good man and on our side.

 

C: “Finally the narrative broke through within 24 hours of my announcement about smuggling the media into left-wing media. You see the domino effect: CNN, BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing Gay’s plagiarism, and then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all of those publications calling on Gay to resign. Once my position—which began on the right—became the dominant position of the center-left, I knew it was just a matter of time before we wwere going to be successful.”

 

P: “Why is it so important to get the story into the center-left media?”

 

C: “It gives permission to the center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then to editorialize on it. Once we crossed the threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign.”

C: “Do you think that playbook works on any issue, or do you think that the Israel-Palestine issue is unique, insofar as it’s dividing elite liberal organizations?”

 

C: “I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful.”

 

My response: Just think what Rufo could do if he was in charge of training and giving  conservatives’ agenda target items for an army of millions of politically astute activists from the center and the right, to follow and implement, locally, on the state level and the national level, an army of savvy, united supercitizens out to take America back.

 

P: “Why do you think you can be so open about your strategy and still have it work? Why don’t you feel like you need to be covert about it?”

 

C: “First, and most simply, because I’m telling the truth—and the truth has an inherent and innate power. I believe that if it’s propagated correctly, it has the power to defeat lies.”

 

My response: Yes, we always want to speak the truth as well as we know it or can identify the truth. We even want to give the opposition credit for what they do right. We want to be trusted by the general public; in the long run, if activists tell the people the truth, and give them as much information and a sensible agenda for going forward, that is how we restore America. We need the people on board with us, and, as Chris reminds us, the truth has an inherent and innate power of its own. We want the people to feel that we are square with them, do not seek to deceive, manipulate, brainwash, gaslight or steer them.

 

C: “The reason I announced my strategy in advance is both to demoralize my opponents—and it certainly does a good job at that—but also to teach my potential friends and allies how the game works, but to teach people who need to know—and in reality, the people who need to know about how politics works are American conservatives. So I tried to publicly narrate what I’m doing in order to teach my friends how to do it themselves. I think this is a big service—with the added benefit that it demoralizes and deranges my enemies.”

 

P: “Do you think you understand how the left-wing influence ecosystem works better than the people inside it do?”

 

My response: Yes, I think Chris is that savvy, and they know it and are scared. If conservative activists get involved as concerned citizens and supercitizens, running the political show from the bottom up, they can become as savvy as Chris for he is providing them with a roadmap for wielding cultural and political influence.

 

C: “Well, I spent 10 years directing documentaries for PBS, lived in large, left-wing American cities, and I’ve studied how the media, NGOs and universities circulate and legitimize information regimes. I’ve just applied that knowledge—and in some senses, I’ve stolen some of the earlier tactics from earlier generations from the American left and weaponize them against the current regime.”

 

My response: The Right is learning to out-Saul Alinksy by employing his manipulative and pressure-creating tools against his political and cultural heirs.

 

C: “What I’m doing is teaching conservatives how to hack that system and to use our asymmetrical disadvantages to our strategic advantage. We need to be very lightweight and very aggressive, and we need to be faster and smarter and rhetorically more sophisticated than our opponents—who, unfortunately for them, have grown complacent, lazy, entitled and ripe for disruption.”

 

P:  “What is your broader objective here, beyond forcing the president of Harvard to resign?”

 

C: “My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.”

 

My response: Chris is a very, very sharp strategist and a deep-thinking idealist, who knows how to gain and wield power. He is a little scary, if he should get power-hungry.

 

P: “In her letter of resignation, Gay said she was troubled by ‘threats fueled by racial animus.’ How do you respond to that?”

 

C: “It was absolutely not fueled by racial animus. It was fueled by Claudine Gay’s minimization of antisemitism, her serial plagiarism, her intimidation of the free press and her botched attempts to cover it all up. It had nothing to do with her race or sex and everything to do with her merit, her competence and her failure to lead.”

 

P: How significant of a victory do you consider this campaign for the conservative movement?”

 

C: “I worked on critical race theory for a very long time but it yielded fruit, but this Claudine Gay story has shown that we can drive major, paradigm-shifting victories over a compressed timeframe. I’d like to engage in more experimentation on how we can cycle up some of these campaigns very quickly.”

 

My response: Chris is showing and inspiring conservative activists, idealists, and traditionalists, out to take back America and make it great again, that there is a practical but principled way to fight and win going forward.