Christopher Rufo's Cancel Culture

"Christopher Rufo took six months to contradict his own advice. In February, the conservative activist wrote that social-media posts "should no longer be grounds for automatic social and professional annihilation." This view won't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Rufo's long crusade against left-wing cancel culture. By August, however, he had emulated his enemies, arousing outrage over a journalist's old tweets. The episode demonstrates not just his own hypocrisy but also why campaigns against unwelcome speech should always be resisted."

""The Right's longstanding proposal-to 'cancel cancel culture'-might make for a good slogan," he wrote in the same essay from February. Now, with Donald Trump back in the White House, he says that conservatives have to be more proactive. "We should acknowledge that culture is a way for society to establish a particular hierarchy of values and to provide a way to police the boundaries," Rufo wrote. "And then we should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward.""

Christopher Rufo opposed automatic social and professional annihilation for social-media posts in February. By August he targeted a journalist's old tweets, provoking outrage and replicating the tactics he had criticized. The reversal exposes personal hypocrisy and signals a broader conservative shift toward proactively policing cultural boundaries. The campaign followed reactions to Sydney Sweeney's ad and commentary by Doreen St. Félix about racialized desire. Rufo characterizes culture as a means to establish hierarchies of values and police boundaries, and he calls for promoting a new set of values to expand acceptable discourse rightward while limiting left-leaning expression.

Read at The Atlantic