Christopher F. Rufo  ⚔️

A quick thing everyone in the Critical Race Theory debates should keep in mind to avoid misunderstandings: there are (at least) three different versions of CRT. 1) there is CRT, a decades long body of scholarly books, articles and lectures, with many internal disagreements. (1/)

2) There is CRT2, which is what has filtered down to Tumblr posts and social justice book clubs and Medium essayists and K through 12 educators, which is different and often internally inconsistent and far less rigorous than the best CRT scholarship

3) And there is CRT as portrayed by its opponents, which sometimes accurately conveys one or two but in many instances is an exaggerated or distorted Fox newsified version that is different than both.

Critical race theory in our institutions should be measured concretely, not abstractly. How does it manifest in real life? On those terms, the "Fox newsified" version is accurate and valuable for the public to understand. Otherwise, it's "real communism has never been tried."

Our disagreement here is about the quality of Fox News rather than what the public should know. I agree that the public should know exactly what's going on concretely in institutions, which is why I love it when you unearth primary source documents showing that.