Free Republic

On Friday night at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the conservative educational foundation ISI awarded Christopher Rufo with their 2024 Conservative Book of the Year Award for his America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Rufo’s book is certainly deserving of the honor because it gives the reader a cogent history of the main players and mechanisms by which America’s left conquered almost all our institutions. More importantly, in its closing chapters, it outlines the weaknesses of the “Revolution of 1968” and outlines some ways by which those who favor the “Revolution of 1776” can fight...

Chris Rufo, the man who orchestrated the attack on critical race theory, underscored a new focus earlier this month. “Conservatives must move the fight from ideology to bureaucracy,” he tweeted. “We’ve won the debate against CRT; now it’s time to dismantle DEI.” ***What Rufo is proposing is the distorting and demonizing of legitimate practices and areas of academic inquiry. He admitted as much in a 2021 tweet, back when he was still focused primarily on critical race theory: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’ ” he wrote....

Harvard University covered up a high-level investigation into whether its controversial president was a plagiarist — and used an expensive law firm to threaten The Post over our own probe. ... Harvard did not disclose that it had conducted a plagiarism investigation into its president Claudine Gay when she appeared before Congress last week. ... Anne Williamson, of Miami University, Ohio, said she was “shocked” by the parallels to her work and one of Gay’s papers and said: “It does look like plagiarism to me.” ... The 27 instances were in two academic papers published in two peer-reviewed journals between...

A surgeon dubbed Dr Frankenstein has candidly revealed the downsides of performing genital re-shaping surgeries on transgender children and adults, in a video which has since been deleted. In the video, Dr Blair Peters, a self-described 'queer surgeon' with 'he/they' pronouns, pink hair and a 'passion' for genital surgeries, says patients face fertility, sexual pleasure and other lifelong post-op complications. Perhaps more concerning is how Dr Peters - who works at one of America's most progressive hospitals - presents his procedures, some of which involve robotics, as experimental. He says he's 'figuring out what works' and that his team will...

I have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with a physician who works in a major children’s hospital in a blue city. This physician has witnessed firsthand how transgender ideology has captured the medical profession and jeopardized the first commandment of the healing sciences: do no harm. He has now chosen to speak out, on condition of anonymity, because he is alarmed by the sudden corruption of the medical community. His colleagues, many of whom oppose transgender interventions, have so far chosen to stay silent. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Christopher Rufo: Please begin by setting...

Conservatives expressed outrage online after a leaked video of an episode of “Baymax!”, the new kids’ show streaming on Disney+, features a transgender man who buys tampons at a supermarket. Christopher Rufo, the conservative academic from the right-leaning think tank the Manhattan Institute, said he had “obtained leaked video” on Tuesday from an upcoming episode of “Baymax!”, which is a six-episode spinoff of the popular hit film “Big Hero 6.” In the scene, the protagonist, the Marvel Comics superhero nurse robot Baymax, is in the aisle of a supermarket in the fictional town of San Fransokyo browsing women’s hygiene products....

Now that Claudine Gay is out as Harvard's president on evidence that she plagiarized research and failed to counter antisemitism on campus, Harvard's elites are steaming with fury. They had, after all, signed a letter urging that the university keep her and her wokester policies on board. But that wasn't the worst of it. The biggest indignity was in the knowledge of who took her down: Not a top Harvard scholar but a lowly Harvard night school student with the equivalent of a master's degree named Christopher Rufo, writing on his humble Substack. He was the one who found the...

In the wake of the resignation of Claudine Gay as the president of Harvard, leftists have found themselves in an embarrassing frenzy of rage-addled excuse-making for the prolific plagiarist and attacks against those who called her out. Chris Rufo was one of Gay's biggest critics and also of DEI and other progressive ideologies infiltrating American academia. Graduates of the illustrious David Hogg University, also known as 'Havard', wasted no time making a mockery of their alma mater in an attempt to belittle Rufo. Christoper Rufo claims his master's is from Harvard U. It's actually from Harvard *Extension.* Harvard U. doesn't...

Harvard’s embattled president, Claudine Gay, has quietly built a “diversity” empire over the course of her career, which has “influenced every facet of university life,” says conservative activist and CRT expert Christopher Rufo. Gay oversaw the Harvard’s racially discriminatory admissions program — which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional — as dean of the largest faculty on the Ivy League university’s campus between 2018 and the summer of 2023, Rufo said in an article for City Journal.

This presents evidence that the president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, plagiarized her dissertation! Even more amazingly, her PhD is from Harvard, and she won a “best dissertation” prize there for it! And they hired her on the faculty and even made her president. And since she plagiarized from her advisor, it says there, someone at Harvard knew she did it, and they still graduated her, hired her and promoted her.

Catholic Bishop Robert Barron and commentator Chris Rufo share a hope that the "extremism of a lot of the woke ideology" is prompting a promising backlash despite dominating conservative fears. … Barron said the U.S. will be "on dangerous ground politically" as culture moves away from the Declaration of Independence's sense of inalienable rights. "Real equality is that we're all children of God together our rights are going to even us because they're dependent upon the Creator's will," Barron said.While many Republican politicians have joined the crusade against "wokeness," others have softened on the term. "I don’t like the term...

Progressive ideology permeates American education. Such is the “rapid growth” of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in higher education and the demand for assent to their core tenets that, according to The New York Times, “[n]early half the large universities in America require that job applicants write” statements that affirm belief in and demonstrate devotion to race-conscious measures that ensure equality of outcome based on skin color and ethnic heritage. To bolster its hegemony, universities punish dissent from progressive orthodoxy. To question on campus whether America really is divided into an oppressor and an oppressed class; to doubt that discrimination...

A Ron Desantis-backed conservative activist was named in a civil rights complaint against a Florida college — after he misgendered an educator who used ze/zir pronouns. The Biden administration’s Department of Education opened an investigation into the New College of Florida after it received a complaint last month alleging that the school’s board has created a “hostile” environment for transgender and disabled students and staff.

It was only six days ago, on January 26, when I wrote a post containing a list of proposals for Christopher Rufo and the other new trustees of New College of Florida to take back control of the institution from the insane left. In an uncanny development, as if they having been reading the Manhattan Contrarian blog, Rufo and his fellow trustees, along with Governor Ron DeSantis, have already implemented the first proposal, and are well along on implementing the second. How about all you other red states? Why can’t you do the same things? My first proposal was: “Replace...

Over the past several years, Republicans have very gradually acquired some backbone in pushing back against progressive idiocy. But a glaring example of failure to push back remains in the state university systems, very much including those of the red states. In essentially all of those states, Republican governors and legislatures have allowed the very worst of Marxist and racist monoculture to fester and metastasize not only without opposition, but with ever-increasing taxpayer funding. Well, count on Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida to be the one to finally step up and do something about it. On January 6, DeSantis announced...

There is so much information coming out of Disney since the company decided to go full woketard in response to the passage of Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill. Last week, leaked videos of a meeting between executives and high-level employees within the company gave people an inside look at the push to drown children in LGBTQ+ content. Well, Christopher Rufo, who was responsible for dropping the leaked Disney meeting videos on Twitter, chose this morning to blast Disney in a fashion that can only be accurately described as legendary. If there’s one thing a company that is actively trying...

hristopher Rufo, the conservative activist who shined a spotlight on Critical Race Theory in schools, resulting in multiple states banning the toxic curricula, has set his sights on the Walt Disney Company after Disney publicly opposed the Parental Rights in Education bill, which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed into law. The sensible anti-grooming law prohibits Florida educators from teaching or discussing sexual orientation and gender identity issues to school children in kindergarten through third grade. In response to the legislation, Disney said in a statement: “Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the...

As Twitchy reported, Disney CEO Bob Chapek got himself into really hot water with Disney employees by not vocally opposing Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill. He did eventually call Gov. Ron DeSantis to express his “disappointment” and “concern” and sent an apology email to staff for not speaking up sooner, but that didn’t stop employees from staging a walkout. Now the bill is law and Disney says it “remains committed” to seeing the law repealed.To soothe the hysterical employees, Disney held an all-hands video conference, and Christopher Rufo has obtained footage. Disney really is dedicated to promoting queerness —...

American Big Tech companies apparently aren’t the only ones pushing woke ideologies. American Express (AmEx) was allegedly exposed for instituting a vehemently anti-American Critical Race Theory training program for its employees. Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Rufo reportedly exposed how “AmEx executives created an internal ‘Anti-Racism Initiative’ that subjects employees to an extensive training program based on the core tenets of critical race theory.” The tenets included “‘systemic racism,’ ‘white privilege,’ and ‘intersectionality,’” according to alleged whistleblower documents obtained by Rufo. He reported in a tweet that the company has been using an outside firm to teach employees to “deconstruct...

The creators and defenders of Critical Race Theory, or CRT is it’s often known, describe it as a legal and academic movement aimed at critically examining the many ways in which racism manifests, with a view toward pushing beyond traditionally liberal color-blind laws and solutions. It has been around since the 1970s, but in the wake of Black Lives Matter, CRT has suddenly become a lot more prominent in progressive activism and academia. And while many conservatives have pushed back on CRT throughout the years, basically accusing its champions of using postmodern language to justify reverse racism, no one has...