#christopher rufo

It's not a new idea. Here's Chesterton in 1918:

It may be that all the nations are tired; and it may be that only the boldest and breeziest are not too tired to say that they are tired. It may be that a man like Ibsen in Norway or a man like Gorky in Russia are the only people left who have so much faith that they can really believe in scepticism. It may be that they are the only people left who have so much animal spirits that they can really feast high and drink deep at the ancient banquet of pessimism. This is one of the possible hypotheses or explanations in the matter: that all Europe feels these things and that only have strength to believe them also. Many other explanations might, however, also be offered. It might be suggested that half-barbaric countries, like Russia or Norway, which have always lain, to say the least of it, on the extreme edge of the circle of our European civilization, have a certain primal melancholy which belongs to them through all the ages. It is highly probable that this sadness, which to us is modern, is to them eternal. It is highly probable that what we have solemnly and suddenly discovered in scientific text-books and philosophical magazines they absorbed and experienced thousands of years ago, when they offered human sacrifice in black and cruel forests and cried to their gods in the dark. Their agnosticism is perhaps merely paganism; their paganism, as in old times, is merely devil-worship. Certainly, Schopenhauer could hardly have written his hideous essay on women except in a country which had once been full of slavery and the service of fiends. It may be that these moderns are tricking us altogether, and are hiding in their current scientific jargon things that they knew before science or civilization were.

They say that they are determinists; but the truth is, probably, that they are still worshipping the Norns. They say that they describe scenes which are sickening and dehumanizing in the name of art or in the name of truth; but it may be that they do it in the name of some deity indescribable, whom they propitiated with blood and terror before the beginning of history.

This hypothesis, like the hypothesis mentioned before it, is highly disputable, and is at best a suggestion...

John Knefel at MMFA:

The right-wing media and policy ecosystem appears poised to escalate its attacks on the basic rights of women as a weakened President Donald Trump lurches toward the end of the first year of his second term. The campaign to roll back decades of material gains for women is coming from both the gutter sexists and the would-be high-brow elements of the conservative media world, and it could serve as a rallying point for an increasingly fractured MAGA movement.   

[...]

New Heritage hire pushes birth control restrictions and rollbacks to the Civil Rights Act

Olsen runs through some of Yenor’s lowlights, including pushing for laws that would let businesses “support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage,” and his belief that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.” Yenor has repeatedly attacked the Civil Rights Act — a distressingly common phenomenon in conservative media — telling a Mother Jones reporter that the landmark 1964 law “made it impossible and, in fact, suspect to treat men and women differently.” Yenor’s opposition to the law extends to racist grievances too. A blog he co-wrote argues that “the 1964 Civil Rights act, and especially its administrative and jurisprudential offspring, have warped American law and culture and traded one set of racial preferences for another.”  Heritage’s decision to bring Yenor on has generated significant support from right-wing media, suggesting that he’s more of an opening salvo than a random misfire. 

Fellow Heritage staffer Emma Waters wrote that it was a “huge win for @Heritage to have Scott on board, and I'm glad he's here.” Her colleague Genevieve Wood reacted to The Atlantic article by writing: “The entire premise of this piece is invalid and disingenuous.” Anti-civil rights activist Chris Rufo argued: “Scott's idea that private companies should be able to prioritize hiring married men with families is completely within the bounds of reasonable debate, and, in fact, it's absurd that individuals cannot hire whomever they want in their own companies, with their own money.” (The Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on sex and other characteristics.) The campaign to roll back decades of material gains for women is coming from both the gutter sexists and the would-be high-brow elements of the conservative media world

Given Yenor’s recent output at Heritage — his author page currently hosts two pieces of writing — The Atlantic’s premise doesn’t seem invalid in the least. An October 29 blog headlined “RFK Should Grill the Pill” argues that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should consider imposing restrictions on hormonal contraceptives and that his seeming reluctance to do so is “to the detriment of women across the country.” Yenor and his co-author write that the “proliferation of the birth control pill since the 1960s has fostered a number of grave consequences for our society: hook-up culture, delayed marriage, and the destruction of the nuclear family.”

The blog is hardly the first time Heritage has gone after birth control. Roberts took aim at the pill in his own book, writing: “In the case of contraceptives, we are a society remade according to a research agenda set by the Party of Destruction.” As Media Matters previously reported, Heritage’s sprawling presidential transition effort, Project 2025, “suggests restoring Trump-era ‘religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate’ through the Affordable Care Act that would allow employers to deny coverage.” A separate Media Matters analysis found that at least 34 of Project 2025’s partner organizations “have spread misinformation about contraceptive methods or championed limiting access to contraception, largely on religious grounds.”     

[...]

Right-wing media figures urge women to leave the workforce

Yenor’s other piece at Heritage argues that prohibiting single-sex education at the Virginia Military Institute and beyond has harmed the school and society at large, suggesting that sex segregation in schools can “be wholesome per se, serving the innate differences between men and women and their somewhat different social destinies.” Elsewhere, Yenor’s writing details those “somewhat different social destinies" a bit more clearly; as Olsen noted at The Atlantic, Yenor has argued: “​​The Mrs. Degree, with additional credentialing for work, is all you want by graduation day.”  The position that women should largely, or perhaps entirely, eschew careers has become increasingly normalized in right-wing media. The late Charlie Kirk — who also railed against the Civil Rights Act — told a young woman with ambitions to be a surgeon that between her career and a potential family, “you’re going to have to choose which one matters more.” On the off chance his advice wasn’t clear, he added: “There are a lot of successful, 35-year-old orthopedic surgeons that have cats, and not kids, and they’re very miserable." Not only do many right-wing media figures want women to exit the workforce — they also want to make it much more difficult for them to leave a failing marriage. Conservative pundits have attacked no-fault divorce, seeking to reduce women to a second class status and exposing them to greater risk of violence from their husbands.

Will Sommer at The Bulwark:

Can Right-Wing Media Concoct a New Nick Fuentes?

NICK FUENTES’S EFFORTS to co-opt the MAGA movement continue to roil right-wing media, with Donald Trump Jr. becoming the latest right-wing figure to go soft when asked about the infamous white nationalist podcaster. Given Fuentes’s popularity, it was probably only a matter of time before an outlet asked itself: Rather than tying ourselves into knots about this, what if we instead just got our own Nick Fuentes? That’s the logic at the Blaze, the right-wing media outlet founded by Glenn Beck, which has increasingly tilted towards groyperism in its programming. And given the momentum racist and antisemitic figures like Fuentes have in right-wing media right now, I don’t think this will be the last time we will see established conservative publications trying to synthesize their own Fuentes clones. If you can’t beat ’em, recreate ’em. Beck himself all but retired from the Blaze in October, announcing that he will be devoting himself instead to building an AI version of George Washington to offer guided tours of a digital library containing copies of the contents of several “tornado-proof” historical archives Beck has had constructed across the country. The archives’ purpose, among other things, is to prove that some Native American tribes were “bloodthirsty and slave owners.” Beck’s AI Washington will set America’s families straight on that and show that most of “what you were taught in school was . . . a half-truth, or most likely an out-and-out lie.”

And yet, somehow, the Blaze has gotten nuttier without Beck. Last month, it all but accused a former Capitol Police officer of being the January 6th pipe bomber, with the argument resting on a novel investigative method called “gait analysis.” That story looks even worse now: CBS News reported last week that the officer has video evidence proving her innocence and that the FBI has ruled her out as a suspect. But the Blaze wasn’t done there. The site paid far-right commentator Matt Forney—author of sex tourist guide Do the Philippines—to write about H-1B visas, only to can him two days later over his tweets (the Blaze countered that he’d been only a freelancer). It also launched a talk show featuring anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman (alias: “Lomez”), the publisher of Passage Press, which specializes in pre-World War II fascist literature.

But the most interesting figure in the newly groyperfied Blaze has to be John Doyle, a former Fuentes acolyte who has been reinvented by the site as a slightly more palatable take on the groyper king. Last month, the Blaze launched “The John Doyle Show,” wherein Doyle holds forth on important issues, like how Thanksgiving is a “Holiday of Christ and Conquest,” while sitting in front of a statuette of Donald Trump as Buddha.

If you squint, you might think the Blaze had hired Fuentes himself. Doyle is a self-described “white nationalist” who wears a tie, and he has little Fuentes-like quips. Talking about early American colonists shooting off guns on his most recent show, Doyle said, “God forbid white boys get a little goofy.” All of this has been a bit baffling for the Blaze’s traditional audience. “What the hell is happening at The Blaze?” conservative pundit Dave Reaboi posted on X after Doyle’s show launched. But if the Blaze was hoping Doyle would capture some of the Fuentes’s fans, they’ll be sorely disappointed. That’s because, although they appeared alongside each other at a “Stop the Steal” rally in Michigan in November 2020, Doyle and Fuentes are archenemies.

The Bulwark’s Will Sommer hit a home run with this column on how TheBlaze decided to have their own Nick Fuentes equivalent in John Doyle.

Nathan Cofnas wrote a great piece the other day, Beating Woke with Facts and Logic, which included this part: Beliefs Aren’t Genetically Determined Should we execute murderers? Raise taxes on the rich? Believe in God? How you answer these questions can be predicted with unsettling accuracy based on your genes. Some people draw the conclusion that beliefs are therefore genetically determined and there’s nothing we can do to change them. You can’t argue someone out of being woke any more than you can argue someone out of having blue eyes or sickle cell anemia. But this is a mistake. High hereditability does not mean genetically determined. Heritability is relative to a population and an environment: within a particular environment, the heritability of a trait in a population is the proportion of the variance associated with genetic differences. If you change the environment, the genes “for” X might lead to Y. Genes that “coded for” girls being a tomboy in the 1990s now code for cutting their breasts off and getting hormone therapy. Genes “for” hanging witches in Salem in the 1690s drove social media mobs in the 2010s. In an informational environment where facts about hereditarianism are readily accessible from credible sources, genes that now lead to wokism might have a different effect. The debate is the usual one about how to defeat the current version of egalitarianism (wokeness) for good. Should one use facts and logic, or institutional power? Chris Rufo is quoted as saying (from an X exchange with Cofnas): The crux of Cofnas’s argument is that abstract argument and scientific rationality govern, or, at least, should govern, the world. This is as much of a fantasy as the blank slate thesis. “Win the battle of ideas” is the political equivalent of “show them you have the best Pokémon cards”—while your enemies show up with tanks. Politics is not a debating society; institutions do not survive on facts and logic alone….[T]he implicit logic is something like this: brave truth-tellers will show existing elites a series of race and IQ graphs, and then, poof!, the institutions will suddenly self-dismantle and adopt new ideologies wholesale; departments of critical race theory will acknowledge the extraordinary prowess of their arguments and resign en masse. Both are right in their respective emphasis. In this post I want to dig into the genetics of particular beliefs or aggregate dimensions of belief such as conservatism. We can apply the usual family designs to estimate the heritability of various kinds of beliefs. This can be done for the specific beliefs or broader tendencies among beliefs, which we call latent dimensions, factors (of the mind), or ideologies depending on context. Using twins, we can estimate the heritability of these political dimensions of belief like this:

…

The thing to note here is that the heritability of beliefs seemingly also depends on which twins you study. Those twins low in political knowledge show lower heritabilities and higher unshared environment (‘everything else’ being a better name). Since this latter component includes noise, that is, essentially random responding, the obvious interpretation here is that people who don’t know much about politics fill out opinion questionnaires somewhat at random. This makes the dimensions less clear for such subjects, and the proportion of true variance (non-error) in the scores will be lower. The effect of more random error is always to make findings weaker, and this is also true for heritabilities. Since measurement error is always present, heritabilities are almost always under-estimated. To the above, we should note that beliefs aren’t really genetically encoded. So when we say that political beliefs or dimensions are heritable, the causal chain is rather long from the gene to the belief. 

…

This is how, roughly, many people conceive of the heritability of beliefs beliefs. They are 1) based on lower-level pre-existing tendencies, and 2) they are context dependent, that is, result from interactions in the statistical sense. The first part about the intermediate cause is important too. Children don’t have much in terms of political beliefs (aside from ‘give me what I want-ism’, tendencies towards fairness vs. greed etc.), but they do have obvious personality variation. The study of political psychology can also largely be viewed as the attempt to find these causes of political beliefs, and especially so if they are unfavorable to the Out Group (‘rightists are dumb, leftists are crazy’ is the current battleground in the Western world, both are true to some extent). There is a study that tried to test the personality > politics causal model using a genetically sensitive design: • Verhulst, B., Eaves, L. J., & Hatemi, P. K. (2012). Correlation not causation: The relationship between personality traits and political ideologies. American journal of political science, 56(1), 34-51.

…

The choice of P is also unfortunate since that now overlaps with general psychopathology, also called p/P. Maybe modern psychologists should re-adopt the hard science approach and go back to using Greek letters (e.g. Cronbach’s alpha, McDonald’s omega). Perplexity tells me to use Ψ (psi), which sort of fits since general psychopathology is usually seen as a hierarchical trait based on 3-ish main sub-dimensions (internalizing, externalizing and ‘others’). Language aside, we aren’t too surprised to see that tough-minded people are more right-wing on military and social matters, but curiously also slightly left-wing on economics (maybe they want to be tough on the capitalists too). Note that the political questions were from the Wilson-Patterson (1968) measure, and the data were collected in the 1980s. By modern standards, the questions are thus quite outdated. The authors find that all of their measures show moderate heritability:

…

Next up, they first employ Cholesky decomposition to see to which extent the traits overlap genetically. They find that they do to some substantial extent. However, finding that, say, psychoticism and RW military views overlap genetically doesn’t tell you which causes which, or whether they just have a common genetic cause (perhaps some lower level personality constructs). Thus, they move on to the more powerful, in theory, approach:

…

I think another problem is that the personality constructs they used are too broad. As they themselves noted, psychoticism correlates with multiple Big 5 facets with opposite direction relationships to certain politics views. What then would be the causal effect of the broad construct? It is somewhat nonsensical to even think about. The Verhulst study has 390 citations since 2012, so naturally I looked for any replications. There is one amusing longitudinal survey study supposedly showing that one can prime people into filling out their self-rated personality data a bit differently based on political primes.

…

I want to return to the context sensitive nature of the findings. Much research in political dimensions have showed that the dimensions can change across time and place. The political axes are often partially flipped outside of the West, in particular in former communist East Europe. Insofar as there are some genes that cause preferences for capitalism (through whatever intermediate causes), and different genes that do the same for liberal social values. In, say, Germany, these genes would tend to point in opposite directions on left-right scale, but in East Europe, they would point in the same direction (anti-communist), at least until recently. Or to put it another way. Some of these genes for being tough-minded and anti-authoritarian. They would tend to make you a communist if you lived in Nazi Germany, but a capitalist if you lived in communist DDR Germany, and a human rights advocate if you live in Pakistan. The effect of the personality trait on the political dimension will change depending on who is currently the Bad People in Charge. Any measure of overall heritability of political opinions, then, include the current direction of such personality variations, which may be different 20 years from now due to political realignments. As such, the genetic correlation between a political score for political conservatism in 1980 and one from 2020 should be relatively weak, as some of the sub-causes have changed directions or strength.

…

Thus, you can see that if you were trying to build some causal model of how certain aspects of personality cause political leanings, and you studied the data any time before 2016, you would find that higher IQ appears to lead to Republican party support. If you only looked at data after 2020, you may conclude the opposite. The fact is that the relationship depends on contextual factors.

…