“Scalped,” Christopher Rufo gloated. Using this single word posted on the social media network X on January 2, the American conservative activist claimed a trophy. Claudine Gay, president of the prestigious Harvard University in Massachusetts, had just announced her resignation, triggered by a plagiarism case involving her doctoral thesis. Rufo had been the first to reveal her ethical failings.
Gay’s position had already been weakened by anti-Semitic incidents on her campus and an appearance before Congress, where she proved incapable of explicitly condemning calls for Jewish genocide. At Harvard, and at several of the country’s other elite universities, a wave of anti-Semitism has spread after the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023.
Rufo has been engaged in a fierce battle against the left since 2020 and has put universities, which he deems responsible for the moral collapse of the United States, at the heart of his fight. In his bestseller America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023), he argued that the radical left has a complete stranglehold on higher education.
According to him, it is committed to disseminating Marxist-inspired theories and reducing US history to white supremacism. Progressive hegemony permeates the whole of society, with “unity” now existing between “the university, the media, the state, the corporation.”
Contacted by Le Monde in Washington state, where he lives, Rufo affirmed his belief that anti-Semitism is a manifestation of the harmful influence exerted by “post-colonial and neo-Marxist ideologies.” “The radical left in the United States wants to see the full decolonization of Israel and the West more broadly. And it’s not merely intellectual, it’s physical,” he said. “They want to see the physical annihilation of anyone who is deemed an oppressor.”
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