Chris Rufo, far-right provocateur, proclaimed his pride in toppling the President of Harvard. Is he happier with this victory than with his success in turning “critical race theory” into a national scare? Hard to say. This was a big one for Chris, not least because he found a way to incite the liberal media and to walk away with Dr. Gay’s scalp.

He boasted to Politico about his latest triumph.

In recent weeks, Rufo has been at the forefront of a sprawling campaign to force Gay to resign, which began after she delivered controversial testimony before Congress in early December about Harvard’s handling of alleged instances of antisemitism stemming from the war in Gaza. On Dec. 10, Rufo and the conservative journalist Christopher Brunet publicized accusations that Gay — the first Black woman to serve as Harvard’s president and a political scientist held in high regard by her peers — had plagiarized other scholars’ work. Together with pressure from donors about Gay’s response to the war in Gaza, those accusations ultimately led to Gay losing her job this week.

None of that happened by accident. As Rufo acknowledged to me, Gay’s resignation was the result of a coordinated and highly organized conservative campaign. “It shows a successful strategy for the political right,” he told me. “How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful.”

While the extent of Gay’s alleged plagiarism is being disputed in the academic community, Rufo’s campaign worked because instances in which Gay apparently borrowed language from other scholars were frequent and credible enough that the allegations stuck.

For an operative who works mostly behind the scenes of Republican politics, Rufo isn’t shy about revealing the true motives behind his influence operations. Last month, he told me that his efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s legacy are part of broader ploy to exonerate former President Donald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon, he was equally frank about what motivated his efforts to get Gay fired.

As Rufo makes clear, his real target was diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he successfully painted Dr. Gay as the embodiment of DEI, meaning that she was a diversity hire and didn’t deserve her position.

He explained his strategy:

It’s really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Brunet and I broke the story of Claudine’s plagiarism on December 10. It drove more than 100 million impressions on Twitter, and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into the left-wing media. But the left-wing uniformly ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of a thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption scandal in Harvard’s history.

Finally, the narrative broke through within 24 hours of my announcement about smuggling the narrative into the left-wing media. You see this domino effect: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing Gay’s plagiarism, and then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all of those publications calling on Gay to resign. Once my position — which began on the right — became the dominant position across the center-left, I knew that it was just a matter of time before we were going to be successful.

Why is it so important to get the story into the center-left media?

It gives permission for center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then to editorialize on it. Once we crossed that threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign.

He makes clear that the issues are not important: what matters is winning and shaming the left.

I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful….

What is your broader objective here, beyond forcing the president of Harvard to resign?

My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.

Peter Greene goes into Rufo’s strategy of announcing his goal, then turning the media coverage into a horse race.

Christopher Rufo is on the dead bird app bragging that he took down the president of Harvard and announcing that he’s going to start “plagiarism hunting,” which sounds so much better than “going after liberal Black academics.”

It is just the most recent demonstration of the Rufo technique, which is to announce the bad faith argument he’s about to launch and how he plans to use it to pwn his chosen liberal target. And then various main stream media and other well-intentioned folks proceed to amplify and engage with that bad faith argument. Even now, social media features a bunch of folks arguing about the plagiarism piece of the Harvard take down (“Well, you know the president of Rufo’s New College won’t get caught plagiarizing because he’s never published anything! Ha! Gotcha!!”) as if the plagiarism is actually the point. And media outlets keep publishing their “Harvard president taken down by plagiarism” takes as if that’s the real story here.

The New Republic took pleasure in revealing that Rufo claimed a master’s degree from Harvard, but he fudged by not admitting that the degree was not from the highly selective Harvard programs but from the Harvard Extension School, which I confess I never heard of.

It’s very hard to gain admission to Harvard College or graduate schools. But Harvard Extension School says this in its website:

Simply Enroll—No Application Required

To get started, simply follow these steps:

Readers may recall that I supported Dr. Gay and urged the Harvard Corporation to resist the pressure from Rufo. I did so because I knew that the campaign to force her out was not conducted in good faith. Rufo doesn’t care about anti-Semitism, nor does Elise Stefanik. I don’t recall either of them expressing outrage when anti-Semites chanted “The Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville nor did they speak out when Trump said that there were “good people” on both sides. Neither of them appears to care about anti-Semitism when it’s right in front of them.

As for “truth” and “beauty,” Rufo is blowing smoke. To him, they are just buzzwords. Faculty at the University of Texas called his bluff when he appeared there. Rufo spoke at a center at UT sponsored by Republican donors, and the attendees roasted him.

Ten minutes later, Polly Strong, an anthropology professor and the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Rufo that she believed in intellectual diversity but that a commitment to the concept wasn’t what she heard from him. She said her personal hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom, due process, and neutrality in higher learning and asked if Rufo supported those values.

Rufo thanked Strong for her question but his words came faster and more insistent than before. He derided Dewey, saying it would have been better if he’d never been born, and dismissed his values. “Academic freedom, due process, neutrality – those are means, not ends,” Rufo said. “If you have an erasure of ends, what you get is sheer power politics, you get everything reducible to will and domination, and then you get an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” Rufo concluded by saying that academics who continue to adhere to Dewey’s principles, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”

Strong was completely unawed by the implied threat. “The ‘ends’ of academic freedom, due process, and shared governance is education for a democratic society,” she said simply. “That is the basis of John Dewey’s vision and many, many university professors believe that today.”

The audience was silent after Strong’s remark. It had become clear that Rufo wasn’t dominating his opponents. It got worse for him when Samuel Baker, a UT English professor, came to the mic. Baker reiterated that Rufo’s veneration of beauty and truth was meaningless if he provided no idea of what the concepts mean to him, and he criticized Rufo’s use of violent imagery like “laying siege” and deserving “what’s coming.”

“I just want to be honest with you,” Baker said, “your rhetoric in relation to barbarism and the way you smugly say that the university is not going to like what’s coming – I think that in the context of the world right now, where there is a lot of really tragic violence, that we ought to be careful to remove ourselves from that and from groups with white supremacist associations. I really think you should rethink the glibness.”

Rufo was exposed as a phony and called out for his connections to white supremacists. He beat a hasty retreat.

Freedom of expression and academic freedom are wonderful in action.

If you have never seen Rufo explain “laying siege to the institutions, watch his Hillsdale College speech.