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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.
Rufo’s about-face reveals something else too: The rules of the culture war are changing. Take it from Rufo himself. “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.”
Judging by his recent campaign, however, Rufo seems to be less concerned with expanding discourse on the right than with limiting its range on the left. Instead of canceling cancel culture, he seems to want to reverse engineer it for his own priorities. “All cultures cancel,” he has concluded. “The question is, for what, and by whom.”
The story of Rufo’s inversion begins with Sydney Sweeney. The actress’s American Eagle ad campaign—an extended, breathy play on the words genes and jeans—elicited an array of overreactions from the left. One of the most notable came from Doreen St. Félix, a Black staff writer at The New Yorker, who used the occasion to argue that “breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass.” She followed this with a contention that some of Sweeney’s fans want to recruit her as “a kind of Aryan princess.”
[Read: The discourse is broken]
Readers may have simply raised an eyebrow at these race-baiting assertions. But Rufo seized on them to instigate the kind of online outrage mob that he once decried. As with his successful campaign to topple Claudine Gay, the erstwhile president of Harvard, his tactics recalled those used by extremely online progressives in the 2010s and early 2020s, the era that spawned the term cancel culture.
It’s a nebulous and contested phrase, but cancel culture nonetheless denotes something real. First, activists whet the appetites of onlookers by highlighting an initial violation. Then they scour the offender’s past for further evidence of guilt. Cancel culture needs numbers like a fire needs oxygen, so the outraged scrounge whatever they can to grow the mob. Once critical mass is reached, they threaten—explicitly or implicitly—the livelihood of the accused.
As I see the phenomenon, though, cancel culture goes beyond punishing people for doing something deemed inappropriate. It’s not just an internet pile-on. Cancel culture is more fundamentally about solidifying norms that haven’t yet been established. To lose your job for calling someone the N-word or saying that women are inferior to men is not true cancel culture, I would argue. Such a definition obscures too much of what the 2010s wrought.
Back then, a broad range of norms was up for grabs. Could one insist on making a distinction between trans women and biological females? No matter what most of the country believed, a cohort of progressives decided that the answer was no, signaling to any future offenders that they, too, could suffer the mob’s wrath. At the peak of the early-2020s moral panic, a museum curator was pressured to resign after saying that he would continue purchasing works produced by white artists. All at once, every curator in the country understood the potential stakes of following suit. Such campaigns became potent ways to prevent “wrongspeak” before it could happen.
Right-wing outrage mobs are nothing new, of course. Colin Kaepernick was hounded out of the NFL after kneeling during the national anthem, and Anheuser-Busch suffered serious backlash for its ill-conceived ad campaign featuring the transgender TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney. But during this early period, conservatives, perhaps hypocritically, still denounced the cancel-culture phenomenon in the abstract. Today, Rufo is overtly embracing it—a reflection of the right’s ascendant cultural might under Trump and a warning that much more canceling could be on the way.
After St. Félix’s article was published last month, Rufo surfaced dozens of ludicrous tweets that she had posted a decade ago, during the onset of an era when many writers of color were spouting racist nonsense without consequence. In 2014 and 2015, St. Félix mused on Twitter: “Tbh whiteness fills me with a lot of hate,” and “We lived in perfect harmony w/ the earth pre whiteness.” And “Of course white people don’t bathe. It’s in their blood. Their lack of hygiene literally started the bubonic plague, lice, syphilis etc.” And, not least, “The holocaust is the worst thing to happen to black people.”
Anti-Semitism proved a fertile subject for St. Félix, who proposed that the Holocaust, like 9/11, allowed white people the opportunity “to affect a fake racial psychic burden.” In 2016, on Facebook, she espoused a lightweight kind of Black supremacy. “If black lives matter to you,” she wrote, “you must upend your comfortable white life and live it in deference, in prostrated honor, of our existence.”
This racist litany reminded me of the case of Sarah Jeong, a Korean American writer whom The New York Times hired to its editorial board in 2018. At the time, critics dug up tweets of hers from 2014—about the “joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” and how white people’s skin makes them “only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.” Jeong epitomized this emerging sensibility by tweeting, “#CancelWhitePeople.”
Jeong wasn’t fired for her tweets. Neither was St. Félix, who went on to be included in Forbes’s “30 Under 30” list and Brooklyn Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture.” Rufo’s campaign hasn’t prompted The New Yorker to do or say anything in response, other than block him on X. For his part, Rufo has said that he hopes the publication continues its silence, which he is choosing to interpret as an admission that “the entire premise of the BLM era was never about ‘antiracism.’ It was always a fraud.” This is, among other things, a savvy way for him to claim victory, no matter the outcome. (The New Yorker declined to comment for this article.)
Even though Rufo is not calling for St. Félix’s termination, he is evidently trying to reshape institutional culture, just like his progressive forebears were. Rather than simply reinforce the already-established norms against the naked prejudice and racism on display in St. Félix’s posts, Rufo seems to want to overturn the conventional wisdom in many elite spaces that only white people can be racist. That cosmopolitan view begins with the premise that racism per se involves not only prejudice but also structural power. No matter the personal privileges or credentials of St. Félix, Jeong, and other people of color, the thinking goes, white supremacy has stripped them of the systemic advantages afforded to white people. Therefore, nonwhites, no matter the bigotry or bias they espouse, are exempt from being racist.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is this what cancel culture achieved?]
This assumption has begun to falter in the post-“woke” era that was ushered in with Trump’s reelection, and Rufo might have just accelerated its demise. St. Félix may not have lost a job, but her reputation has been complicated by a surge of negative coverage, and she has retreated from social media, deleting her once-prominent account on X. She is now a warning for anyone else who has thought that trafficking in anti-white tirades wouldn’t come with a cost.
Rufo is blatantly unprincipled. But his moral purpose here seems clear enough: to establish the cynical norm that white people aren’t the only ones who can be tarred by opportunists seeking to narrow the range of acceptable discourse. That is a terrible equality that must be disavowed no matter whose scalp is on offer.