Michelle Goldberg, NYT: “Christopher Rufo, a clever propagandist who has done more than anyone else to whip up the national uproar over critical race theory, tweeted out in March an explanation of how he was redefining it. ‘The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans,’ he wrote.”

“Credit where due: Rufo has pretty much succeeded. The debate about critical race theory has become circular and maddening because the phrase itself has been unmoored from any fixed meaning. Progressives argue, correctly, that teachers aren’t instructing young kids in law school scholarship about structural racism. But even some people who oppose bans on critical race theory insist that this misses the point… It’s nearly impossible to have a straightforward discussion of the educational content that’s being labeled critical race theory precisely because people like Rufo have succeeded in turning critical race theory into a catchall term for discussions of race that conservatives don’t like… I’m highly skeptical that many public schools are teaching that ‘every white child and family today is invariably complicit’ in white supremacy. Rather, the campaign against critical race theory is doing exactly what Rufo wanted it to: taking inchoate anger about what’s often derided as wokeness and directing it onto public education. In some ways, it’s like the campaign against sex education, where conservative activists would either cherry-pick or invent lurid anecdotes to try to discredit the whole project.”