Rufo calls media denial CRT exists in schools a 'deliberate strategy': 'They have no choice' but to lie
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Chris Rufo discusses how the media has covered critical race theory and attempted to discredit him.
Prominent critical race theory opponent Christopher Rufo spoke candidly about his combative exchanges with the media and the effort by journalists to dismiss the fiery education debate occurring nationwide.
In an interview with Fox News, Rufo said he has become such a high-profile media target among liberals because he's a "man with the goods."
"I developed a database now of more than 5,000 sources [from] every kind of institution in every place of the country," Rufo said on Tuesday. "And once I started breaking these stories, once I started exposing what was happening in the federal government, in K-12 education and fortune 100 companies, people started to then see me as their voice because so many people within American institutions are scared to speak out against this. I can be their voice on the outside, I can be their advocate, really, because they've been bullied into silence."
"And once this started happening, the process simply snowballed where I became the go-to repository of this information, all of these source documents, PDFs, emails, audio, video, everything. And then developed over time a vocabulary, architecture, platform in order to convey this story to the American people," Rufo added.
(Fox News)
When asked what it's like to be such a media target, Rufo grinned, "I love it," saying the past year has been "fun" clashing with liberal journalists but can become "stressful" when feeling like being "under siege." He insisted he will resort to being confrontational only after being first attacked by a news organization.
CHRISTOPHER RUFO SAYS FIERY EDUCATION DEBATE WILL GO FAR BEYOND VIRGINIA
"You have Joy Reid putting my picture on her show every night, you have the Washington Post publishing ten articles directly attacking me, you have multiple New York Times articles, including some from the same author over a period of a few months denouncing me," Rufo said. "But I think what the record has shown is that I outsmarted them, I out hustled them and then I outplayed them all, demonstrating that if you have hard evidence, if you have a supple mind and if you have a sophisticated strategy, one person with very little institutional support can expose the most powerful institutions in the country, can beat the really dishonest press that attempts to silence you and then provide a model for other people who know intuitively that something is wrong in our country but are not sure how to fight back. And to me, that's been the lesson."
He continued, "We shouldn't be afraid of them. These people are resting on borrowed prestige from the past. They're lighting on fire- the credibility of their institutions. And a side benefit of this campaign against critical race theory is accelerating the conflagration of our prestige institutions that I think are losing their credibility on a daily basis."
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Follow him on Twitter at @realchrisrufo and sign up for his newsletter. (Christopher F. Rufo)
Despite Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin's stunning victory in Virginia after heavily campaigning on opposition to CRT, much of the media has continued to push a narrative that such an ideology does not exist in public schools or have claimed the movement is about stripping the teachings of America's racist past from the curriculum or banning books like Toni Morrison's "Beloved."
Rufo, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, insisted that Americans who consume liberal media are being "deliberately misinformed."
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"It's a deliberate strategy of obfuscation and denial because they can't defend critical race theory on the merits," Rufo told Fox News. "They're following the strategy of the partisan politicians, people like Terry McAuliffe, who have no substantive counter-argument against forcing children to confess racial guilt, that they just say 'It doesn't exist. It's Bigfoot, it's the Loch Ness Monster.' And they lie through their teeth because they have no other choice."