This grifter comes as a grifter

There are many, many signs that the recent moral panic over Critical Race Theory is a wilful product of cynical bad faith and nothing else, just the latest CARAVANS or EMAILS! But really most of this evidence is redundant, since the people responsible for the grift will explicitly tell you this:

He continues to appear regularly on Fox News to discuss the issue and often offers strategic advice over how to win the political fight. In March, he wrote on Twitter that his goal was to conflate any number of topics into a new bucket called critical race theory.

“We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” Rufo wrote. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Of course, in a rational universe this would be a dispositive reason for political reporters to stop pretending to take Republican claims about CRITICAL RACE THEORY OOOGA-BOOGA seriously, but I’m afraid that’s just not how things are done.