What the fight against DEI is all about

Whatever happened to Critical Race Theory, also known by its three-letter acronym, CRT? If you'll recall it was the cause celebre of the 2021 Virginia governor's race which had all the DC tongues wagging about the resurgence of the right-wing culture war. Moms for Liberty, which grew out of the anti-mask, anti-vax crusades of the pandemic, quickly adopted CRT as their crusade and was given credit for Glenn Youngkin's win that year. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made it one of the primary targets of his "anti-woke" campaign for re-election in 2022 and rode it hard during his presidential run the next year.

The whole movement against CRT was the brainchild of a right-wing activist by the name of Christopher Rufo, who single-handedly pushed the idea into the mainstream in 2020, during the pandemic. He had been making some waves about it for a while and caught the attention of Tucker Carlson, then Fox News' top talent. Rufo appeared on Fox and made a big splash with this comment:

Conservatives need to wake up. This is an existential threat to the United States. And the bureaucracy, even under Trump, is being weaponized against core American values. And I’d like to make it explicit: The President and the White House—it’s within their authority to immediately issue an executive order to abolish critical-race-theory training from the federal government. And I call on the President to immediately issue this executive order—to stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology.