I.

The Trump administration has threatened to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from elite universities, including US$2.26 billion intended for Harvard, US$1 billion for Cornell, and US$400 million for Columbia. Donald Trump wants to dismantle DEI programs at these institutions and roll back what he describes as the teaching of “critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.” Christopher Rufo is a conservative activist widely regarded as the architect of Trump’s anti-DEI campaign in higher education. In a recent appearance on the New York Times’ Daily podcast, Rufo said he “could easily imagine ten times, twenty times, fifty times more dramatic action that is within the realm of possibility.” Rufo says he wants universities across the country to feel “existential terror” and to “put the university sector as a whole into a significant recession.” The Trump administration is threatening many more schools with funding cuts, eliminated programs, and interference in their operations.

Rufo’s ambitions extend beyond higher education—he’s launching a “counter-revolution” against what he sees as progressive orthodoxies in American society. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article titled “Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist,” which highlights Rufo’s attraction to the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci. Rufo says Gramsci “provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore.” Gramsci argued that it’s necessary to look beyond politics and economics to understand why people support particular leaders or movements—true influence lies in what he called “cultural hegemony.” Rufo says Gramsci’s focus on the university in particular provides a blueprint for the “fight against critical race theory, against trans ideology, against captured higher education institutions, against DEI.”

While many opponents of wokeness attempt to push back by writing books and op-eds, forming advocacy groups, and attempting to defeat illiberal ideas within their institutions and in the public square, Rufo believes the power of the state is needed to turn the cultural tide. This is why he regards the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on universities as a first step. After the Wall Street Journal article was published, Rufo advertised it on X: “The Right is learning new political tactics,” he declared. “We are not going to indulge the fantasies of the ‘classical liberals’ who forfeited all of the institutions. We’re going to fight tooth and nail to recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere. Get ready.”

Rufo’s contempt for those he variously describes as “classical liberals,” “establishment liberals,” and “centrists” has driven him toward a more radical approach to reshaping society from above. The liberals he disdains are often critical of wokeness, but Rufo thinks they’re unwilling to pursue the sort of institutional overhaul necessary to instantiate a new set of values in educational institutions, government, and across the entire “public sphere.” One reason Rufo is so hostile to liberal critics of wokeness is that they have challenged his own project of fomenting a cultural revolution through control of educational institutions.

In 2023, Rufo joined forces with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to turn the New College of Florida in Sarasota into a laboratory for right-wing higher education. DeSantis appointed six conservatives to the college’s thirteen-member board, all of whom have ideological priors strikingly similar to his own. Rufo was one of the new appointees, and he said he wanted the ideological takeover of the university to be a national model that would encourage “conservative state legislators … to reconquer public institutions all over the United States.” Rufo said the goal was to pursue a “top-down restructuring” at the New College of Florida and create a “new core curriculum from scratch.”

An example of this new curriculum is a course on wokeness taught by Andrew Doyle, the British pundit behind the popular anti-woke parody character Titania McGrath. Doyle assigned Rufo’s book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything to his students. According to Rufo, the remaking of the college was an effort to “provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values.” This makes it sound as if a university exists to reflect the ideological biases of its customers, rather than to help disseminate knowledge and foster understanding. As Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine, DeSantis’s scheme to take control of the college demonstrated that he’s “not seeking to protect or restore free speech, but to impose controls of his own liking.”

Liberal conservative journalist Cathy Young has criticised Rufo at length. “Stoking the culture wars,” she argues, “rallying the Trumpist base, and using the power of the state to defeat bad ideas is not the road back to sanity.” Young quoted New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, a co-founder of Heterodox Academy and no stranger to the problems with left-wing groupthink and illiberalism at American universities, who said he was “horrified that a governor has simply decided, on his own, to radically change a college. Even if this is legal, it is unethical, and it is a very bad precedent and omen for our country.” When the Harvard professor and experimental psychologist Steven Pinker applauded Young’s article about the ideological takeover at the New College of Florida, Rufo responded:

Boomers like Steven Pinker presided over the decades-long collapse of standards in academia. Now they want to lecture sanctimoniously about ‘how not to fix academia.’ Sorry, buddy, we’re not going to listen to people who can’t even open their comments. We’re in charge now.

Liberals like Chait, Young, Haidt, and Pinker are all staunch critics of left-wing authoritarianism and intolerance on campus. Chait has been making the case against left-wing illiberalism for many years. So has Young. Haidt has perhaps done more than any single individual to call attention to many of Rufo’s concerns about American universities—such as the culture of “safetyism,” threats to free speech on many campuses, and the lack of ideological diversity. Pinker’s book The Blank Slate remains controversial on the Left because it complicates the view that oppressive systems, prejudice, and persecution are to blame for inequality, and he has argued that progressive shibboleths and censoriousness open avenues to more dangerous and reactionary beliefs. Pinker was particularly critical of how elite institutions responded to the 7 October massacre in Israel—last year, he wrote that he had been “stunned by the simplistic hatred that has been hurled at [Israel], not least by students at my own institution, Harvard University.”

Young, Haidt, and Pinker all signed “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” in July 2020, which became known as the “Harper’s letter” and attracted a flurry of criticism at a time when the George Floyd protests—and an explosion of identitarian illiberalism—were roiling the country. The Harper’s letter acknowledged that “protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society.” But, it added, the “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” The bitter resistance to the Harper’s letter was illuminating—a basic liberal demand for the restoration of “norms of open debate and toleration” was viewed as a reactionary assault on the cause of racial justice. This was when American society was hitting something like peak woke—editors were being fired for running pieces that would have been perfectly acceptable at any other time, online mobbings and defenestrations were incessant, and a suffocating blanket of ideological conformity was being pressed upon civil society.

The Harper’s letter—signed by classically liberal writers and intellectuals from the Left and Right—was important because it demonstrated just how deep the hostility to fundamental liberal ideas had become. The letter also demonstrated that many prominent public figures were unwilling to accept this atmosphere of suppression and coercion, which encouraged others to speak out. But this kind of statement now seems quaint compared to Trump’s deployment of the might of the United States government as a sort of superweapon in the culture wars. This is a shift Rufo celebrates—the days of mobilising civil society to push the culture toward liberal values are, in his mind, over. What’s needed now is an ideological blitzkrieg backed by raw state power.

Rufo seems to be convinced that the zeitgeist will forever be in his favour. He sees nothing but ideas he doesn’t like being relentlessly bludgeoned into submission. “We’re in charge now,” he told Pinker, a triumphalist sentiment that becomes louder with each new executive order Trump issues. Rufo isn’t the first radical to unleash the power of the state on his ideological foes, and he won’t be the last. But he may want to recall that culture is a tricky and unpredictable thing, and trying to “entrench” one’s own values through intimidation and coercion is a sure way to push it in unexpected directions.

II.

During a recent conversation with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Rufo made a suggestive admission. Douthat observed that “wokeness … peaked in 2021 or 2022” and argued that it was “in retreat far before Trump’s re-election.” Rufo replied: “Yes. I think probably 2021 was the fever pitch.” Douthat credited Rufo with this shift. Rufo credited Rufo, too, and noted that one “political turn was when Ron DeSantis was re-elected as governor in 2022. He was the key political figure in the war on woke.”

In this telling, the loudest anti-woke voices on the Right deserve all the credit for rolling wokeness back and the liberal centre played no meaningful role. “Your activism began to create a backlash,” Douthat remarked, “and public opinion started to turn.” One reason Rufo thinks he now has a mandate to bring the hammer of government policy down on progressivism is that he feels vindicated—he opposed wokeness and wokeness retreated. He supported Trump and Trump won. He believes the American people have spoken, and what they want is a cultural revolution against DEI.

Trump likes to claim that he received an “unprecedented” mandate in the 2024 election. In reality, he won 49.91 percent of the popular vote to Kamala Harris’s 48.43 percent, a narrower margin of victory than Joe Biden received in 2020. George W. Bush also won a larger share of the popular vote in 2004, while Barack Obama received much larger mandates in 2008 and 2012. Yet Trump is governing as if he did, in fact, receive a “historic” mandate, and his scorched-earth culture-war campaign is a prime example.

By using Trump as a vehicle to crush progressivism in every corner of American life, Rufo is making his project a hostage to political fortune. While he often correctly observes that significant majorities of Americans agree with him about issues like trans athletics and affirmative action—which was even rejected by voters in California in a 2020 referendum—this doesn’t mean they will necessarily support Trump’s version of anti-wokeness. For example, while 46 percent of Americans support the executive order ending DEI in the federal government, Trump is a deeply flawed champion of this policy who is liable to undermine its appeal. After a helicopter crashed into an American Airlines jet on 29 January, Trump immediately blamed diversity hiring at the FAA without a shred of evidence. It’s one thing to demand fair hiring and promotion policies, but it’s quite another to exploit a tragedy to land a blow against DEI hours after the news broke.

There are many examples of the Trump administration taking its cultural revolution too far. In an effort to purge DEI content, the Department of Defense deleted thousands of images from online materials for every military branch—including posts about the first women to pass Marine infantry training, a Medal of Honor recipient during World War II, and even an image of Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The word “gay” flagged the image. Hundreds of books were removed from the US Naval Academy’s library for allegedly promoting DEI, including Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The Navy is reviewing hundreds more. Pulling books off the shelves and erasing the memory of war heroes isn’t a winning political strategy. Nor is it a way to build resilience and critical thinking among members of the United States armed forces.

Trump’s assault on American universities faces significant political problems. It’s clear that the administration is sensitive to public perception, which is why it targeted the least sympathetic institutions first—Ivy League schools with large endowments. However, slashing federal funding to these institutions doesn’t just mean defunding DEI training seminars—it also means terminating and interrupting vital research.

Antiscientific Vandalism

Musk and Trump are inflicting catastrophic damage on biomedical research.

The Trump administration’s decision to cut billions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health and universities across the country will have a devastating impact on patients and medical research. In a statement about the funding cuts, Northwestern spokesman Jon Yates said the university uses federal funds to support research breakthroughs such as the development of the world’s smallest pacemaker and advancements in Alzheimer’s treatment. Other impacts across the country include severing access to cutting-edge cancer treatments for rural patients in Utah and halting genetic research that could treat intellectual disabilities. While Americans aren’t fans of DEI, is this a price they’re willing to pay? Has Rufo considered the political implications of parents telling the cameras that a potentially lifesaving program for their child was ended because the president thinks this will somehow defeat wokeness?

One of the stated justifications for Trump’s war on higher education is that it’s a punishment for the response to antisemitic incidents on elite campuses. Millions of Americans witnessed the disastrous Congressional testimony of University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill in December 2023. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik asked Magill if “calling for the genocide of Jews violate[s] Penn’s rules or code of conduct.” Magill replied that it’s a “context-dependent decision.” Harvard President Claudine Gay gave a similar answer, which infuriated many Americans—including faculty and alumni. As Pinker put it: “The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context.”

But Pinker also put this outrage in context: