Chris Rufo and His Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Afghanistan Take
Since all he has is a hammer, everything looks like a culture-war nail.
There has been no shortage of bad takes on the crisis in Afghanistan, from both sides of the political aisle. But one that stood out last Thursday, even as reports came in of a deadly attack in Kabul on U.S. troops and Afghan civilians, was this contribution from Manhattan Institute fellow and anti-wokeness crusader Christopher Rufo blaming the collapse of the American mission on too much woke ideology:
One neednāt be a fan of Robin DiAngelo, the diversity guru and White Fragility author whom even progressives mock these days, or of other āwokeā efforts to be skeptical of Rufoās glib explanation. For one thing, while the Biden administration certainly bears major responsibility for the Afghanistan debacle, it was the unwoke Trump administration that set the withdrawal of American troops in motion and entered peace talks with the Taliban. (Of course, one could always argue that the withdrawal would have been handled much better if Donald Trump were still Presidentāa āperfectā and ābeautifulā exit, no doubt.) For another, there is absolutely no evidence that āwokenessā in the military had anything to do with the American failure in Afghanistan. And, finally, the āgender programsā on which the United States spent close to $800 million between 2002 and 2019 had very little to do with āwokeā feminism or gender studies.
But Rufoās entry in the Worst Tweets on Afghanistan sweepstakes was par for the course for the documentary filmmaker-turned-activist, who gave a candid explanation of his strategy against the woke left a few months ago:
To Rufoās detractors, this is a self-incriminating admission of dishonesty and bad faithāthe Twitter equivalent of the movie scene in which the villain explains his dastardly plan. Rufo himself has defended these comments to the Washington Post as a description of normal political tactics. Either way, the comments provide useful context for the tweets about our āwokeā defeat in Afghanistan: This is Rufo trying to āannexā an Afghanistan exit widely seen as a fiasco into the general category of āpostmodernā progressive racial and gender politics.
Unlike many critics, I think Rufo makes some perfectly valid points about āwokenessā and even ācritical race theory.ā (He vastly overuses āCRTā as a catch-all term for various progressive ideasāapparently as a deliberate ābrandingā tacticābut critical race theory and its offshoots actually do have more linkage to these ideas than many of Rufoās detractors admit.) He first caught my attention last year with genuinely alarming and fairly well-documented reports about the excesses of āanti-racismā training in schools and workplaces, including organizations funded with taxpayer money. One such find was a Seattle city government program where white staffers were herded into race-segregated struggle sessions requiring them not only to examine how they and their families benefit from āthe system of white supremacyā but to recall and reflect on a recent incident in which they may have ācaused harm to a person/people of color at work.ā Another was a school exercise in San Cupertino, California in which third graders had to āmapā their identities and state which aspects were āprivilegedā and which oppressed. (The program was tried in the classroom only once and was suspended due to parental outcry.)
Unfortunately for those of us who believe these ācultural insanitiesā do need to be exposed, Rufo is an extremely flawed messenger. He has done impressive work getting internal documents from whistleblowers, but his reporting is often compromised by exaggeration and cherry-picking. Thus, he has claimed that white male employees in a 2019 seminar at Sandia Labs (a government-funded nuclear-technology research center in New Mexico) had to write āletters of apology to women and people of color.ā Yet of the ten worksheets photographed by Rufoās source and posted on his site, only one had an explicit āIām sorry,ā while a couple of others had vaguely apologetic statements about āwhite privilege.ā (Other messages included āWe should have mutual agreement that it is OK if we disagree with each other.ā) More recently, Rufo announced in a Twitter āscoopā that one author of Californiaās proposed āethnic studiesā curriculum had called for a āācountergenocideā against white Christiansā in a book the curriculum repeatedly cites. Yet a look at the sources, including Rufoās own City Journal article on the story, makes it obvious that the book used ācountergenocideā to mean resistance to the āgenocideā of native populations by white Christians, not genocide in response to genocide. There are plenty of good reasons to criticize the curriculum, but Rufo turns valid complaints into breathless hyperbole and āwhite genocideā innuendo.
There is also the fact that in the fall of 2020, when he first gained visibility, Rufo overtly and aggressively hitched his activist wagon to Donald Trump. After Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlsonās Fox News show in September 2020 to discuss ācritical race theoryā in government-funded diversity training and urged Trump to ban the practice, Trump promptly issued an executive order doing just that. āHe delivered,ā Rufo exulted on Twitter, praising Trumpās order as āthe first successful counterattack against critical race theory in American history.ā Rufo also brushed aside critics who were sympathetic to the goal but skeptical of the strategy (such as myself) as snobs who would rather āwrite another thinkpiece explaining why wokism is badā than āwield actual power.ā After Trumpās defeat, Rufo channeled his quest for āpowerā into advocacy of āanti-CRTā state laws. Yet a number of strong critics of āwokeā ideologyāincluding the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a leader in the fight against āprogressiveā censorship in academiaāhave decried these laws as likely to infringe on free expression and the exchange of ideas.
If Rufoās crusading against wokeism and critical race theory at least has valid concerns behind the hyperbole, his typically grandiose Critical Afghanistan Theory tweets donāt even have that distinction. Yes, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, angered conservative activists in June by defending anti-racist teaching in the U.S. military, including a seminar on āwhite rageā (with voluntary attendance) at West Pointāand particularly by linking āwhite rageā to Trump supportersā attack on Congress on January 6. This hardly means that U.S. military brass focused on āwhite rageā and wokeness while ignoring the looming crisis of Afghanistan. In March, Milley was somehow able to take time out of his busy schedule of Robin DiAngelo book clubs to make an impassioned plea for keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan at a National Security Council meeting.
Even more absurd is Rufoās claimāalso made by others on the right, including Carlsonāthat the United States tried to āexportā woke postmodernism to Afghanistan. For instance, the idea that now-former Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani is āwokeā because he taught at Johns Hopkins University thirty years ago and ādid a TED talkā (actually two TED talks: āHow to Rebuild a Broken Stateā in 2005 and āA Vision for the Future of Afghanistanā in 2020) is simply bizarre.
But Rufoās identification of U.S.-sponsored āgender programsā in Afghanistan with extreme and nonsensical āwokeā ideology is especially insidiousāas well as factually wrong. It is worth noting that the bulk of the money the United States spent on gender-focused projects in Afghanistanā$627 million, out of a total $787.4 millionāwas spent on programs addressing the needs of women and girls in 2003-2010, that is, mostly under the notoriously radical feminist Bush administration. Many of these programs had to do with such issues as maternal mortality, health care, and access to education for girls and young women. They certain didnāt, as Carlson suggested in his segment, traffic in such flights of gender theory as āthe idea that men can become pregnantā (that is, that biologically female transgender persons who identify as male should be regarded as pregnant men). While there were some educational programs intended to change attitudes toward male and female roles, such projects hardly amount to inane wokeism in a society where wife-beating and child marriage have been traditionally viewed as normal. Carlson has sneeringly (and approvingly) remarked that the people of Afghanistan donāt think of masculinity as ātoxic,ā but itās hard to think of a more toxic version of āmasculinityā than the Taliban.
One can discuss whether American āgender programsā in Afghanistan alienated parts of the population by trying to do too much, too soon. (The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction suggested in a report that these programs could have been more attuned to the Afghan cultural context, but it does not mention any significant popular backlash.) But the notion that they had something to do with āwokeā feminism or postmodernism is laughable. For what itās worth, the Women, Peace, and Security Act codifying American gender-related programs in Afghanistan was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Trump in 2017.
It wasnāt long ago that right-wing outlets such as Breitbart decried left-wing failure to condemn radical Islamist misogyny as a stark example of political correctness gone mad. Now, we have right-wing culture warriors like Carlson and Rufo scoring political points by suggesting that basic human rights for women in Afghanistan are a pernicious attempt to export woke postmodernist ideology.
The other day, after seeing a couple of Rufo exposĆ©s on what sounds like genuinely awful (even discounting for the usual hyperbole) social justice training at Verizon and Bank of America, I wondered if I was being too uncharitable to the guy. Then, he posted those ghoulish Afghanistan tweets exploiting a tragedy and attacking womenās rights to promote his crusade. The question answered itself.
