If your mother-in-law is involved in Florida politics then it’s quite a surprise that she doesn’t know who he is.
He’s clearly been quite successful at pushing his religious conservative agenda.
He openly argues for other activists to essentially create moral panics around things like critical race theory and to blur the lines between what it actually is and, say, teaching that there used to be slavery in the United States and by the way, that was bad.
I listened to him having a debate about “woke-ism” with Yascha Mounk, who has a more cerebral and less febrile opposition to identity politics, and Rufo was running through a bunch of talking points about how the US was a republic, not a democracy and that Mounk was wrong about what can and can’t be taught in schools and universities and clearly Mounk hadn’t properly read the legislation that Rufo had had a hand in writing. Ruff’s view is that legislation is the way to suppress “woke ideology” whereas Mounk is more of the idea that debate is the best way to combat it.
(That said Mounk has now been accused of rape and been let go by the Atlantic and being investigated by his university. This is a big shame because Mounk is actually pretty interesting. I certainly hope the accusations turn out to be untrue, but it seems there is little chance for that to happen as the purported victim has not gone to the police and it is unclear how he is supposed to clear his name.)
Anyway, one thing that is not so well-known about Rufo is that he was a fellow at the Discovery Institute which, as we all know, is an organization that has been using similar propaganda techniques to get “Intelligent Design” taught in schools. It seems that he and the Discovery Institute know full well that they are engaged in hyperbole, moral panic and dishonest framing of issues in order to gain power and popularity. Rufo is quite often flagrant about it.
https://www.discovery.org/p/rufo/
