Charles M. Blow: America, right-wing censors, and the ‘battle for the next century’

Chris Rufo, the man who orchestrated the attack on critical race theory, underscored a new focus earlier this month.

“Conservatives must move the fight from ideology to bureaucracy,” he tweeted. “We’ve won the debate against CRT; now it’s time to dismantle DEI.”

DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, a concept that goes far beyond just the racial prism of critical race theory, and moves into the worlds of ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age and class.

What Rufo is proposing is the distorting and demonizing of legitimate practices and areas of academic inquiry. He admitted as much in a 2021 tweet, back when he was still focused primarily on critical race theory: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’ ” he wrote. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Republican elected officials are quick to “amen” Rufo’s talking points. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, for instance, amplified Rufo’s tweet this month about moving on from fighting “ideology” to taking on the entire bureaucracy. Rufo, Roy said, was “speaking my language.”

This is the same Roy who voted against the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, one of only 14 members of the House to do so, on the grounds that it created “a separate Independence Day based on the color of one’s skin.”

This is the same Roy who, during a congressional hearing a few years ago, referenced an “old saying” that seemed to be celebrating lynching: “Find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree.”

This is the same Roy who was one of only three representatives to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, saying that the legislation “simply raises the punishment” for offenses that are already federal crimes “in an effort to advance a woke agenda under the guise of correcting racial injustice.”

Meanwhile, Roy has been pushing his “Restoring Military Focus Act,” a bill he first introduced two years ago that would, if passed, eliminate the Department of Defense’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.

In 2022, Sen. Marco Rubio introduced companion legislation in the Senate, and together, the two men released a report on political influences in the military titled “Woke Warfighters.”

The report, which featured on its cover six cartridges strapped to the back of a helmet, each one carrying a rainbow-colored bullet, repeatedly invoked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as it railed against the Pentagon’s attempts to deal with racism within its ranks.

The report also focused on trans people serving in the military and receiving gender-affirming care as well as what it called the military’s promotion of “individual identity and self-actualization in recruitment and retention efforts, particularly for the LGBTQ+ community.”

This year, just a week before Roy responded to Rufo’s tweet, he reintroduced the bill, this time to a House that Republicans controlled.

This fight against DEI isn’t confined to public institutions and bureaucracies. As the leader of this movement, Rufo has set his sights on corporate America as well. In July, he published what he called a survey of the “programming” of every Fortune 100 company and found they had all adopted DEI programs, including those that “promote the most virulent strands of critical race theory and gender ideology.”

When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law limiting DEI in the workplace last April, Rufo likened him to Teddy Roosevelt and praised his “muscular” strategy for combating “corporate malfeasance.” “Conservatives,” he wrote, “need to build on these efforts by developing a comprehensive agenda for pushing back against left-wing ideology in corporate America.”

In fact, Rufo sees Florida as the seeding ground for his censorship, where it can take root and spread, and Texas has already followed suit. Earlier this month, just a few days after DeSantis announced plans to block state colleges from having programs on DEI, the office of the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, issued a memo warning state agency and public university leaders that the use of DEI in hiring was illegal.

This was precisely the worry of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA and Columbia, who played a leading role in developing critical race theory into a discipline, when I spoke with her recently:

“They started with CRT. They moved to ‘Don’t Say Gay.’ Now, they’re moving to all of Black studies. It’s not going to be long before they include all ethnic studies. We’ve already seen they’re attacking diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education. And, the real thing, Charles, is going to be when they come for diversity, equity and inclusion in corporations.”

This is the New Right’s strategic plan: a relentless push to reestablish and strengthen the straight, cis, patriarchal, white supremacist power structure. And as Crenshaw put it: “This thing will not be satisfied by one victory. This is just one skirmish, in a wider, broader battle to make racism unspeakable, and basically to contain the power of Black folks, queer folks, women, and pretty much everybody else who doesn’t agree to the agenda of reclaiming this country that the MAGA group claims.”

In fact, every perceived win will only embolden the extremists. The objective is to win the war against progress and to freeze America in a yesteryear image of itself. This is a swing-for-the-fences play. They are seeking to widen the conservative aperture in their quest to suppress and reverse, to promote a universal vision on oppression, to apply uniform pressure.

As Crenshaw put it, “I believe that this is the battle for the next century.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.