I will never understand how someone could emerge from the dismal bowels of the Discovery Institute and be taken seriously, and not laughed off as a clown. But that’s the Chris Rufo story. He just moved off to an even more ludicrous organization, the Republican party of Florida.

A journalist and activist, Rufo is largely responsible for the rise of “critical race theory” as a major concern for the GOP. He has played a crucial role in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attempt to transform Florida’s universities, spearheading the takeover and transformation of the New College of Florida, a small liberal arts school, as proof of concept for a new right-wing model for higher education.

Rufo has managed all of this before his 40th birthday. And he wants to go bigger: In recent essays, Rufo has argued for conservatives to treat authoritarian Hungary and Richard Nixon as models for a “counterrevolution” against the left.

Great. And here I thought creationism was as low as they could get. But then, this is a familiar story, or conspiracy theory.

Rufo claims that the American system as we know it has been overthrown, subtly and quietly replaced by “a new ideological regime that is inspired by … critical theories and administered through the capture of the bureaucracy.” Rufo’s “counterrevolution” is aimed at reversing this process; taking America back, starting with Florida’s universities.

That’s what John Birchers claimed in the 1960s! The American system then had been taken over by Commies…and now it’s all about the hippies and far-left radicals undermining the American way of life. It’s a great recipe for capturing the minds of paranoid idiots.

Except…Rufo has to make shit up to make that argument at all. And he admits it!

But many of his assertions, like the claim of secret regime change in America, are far less defensible. When pressed in an interview to defend some of his most extreme positions, Rufo ultimately claimed to be writing in “a kind of artful and kind of narrative manner” that does not always admit of literal interpretation. The retreat was necessary given the glaring lack of real-world policy evidence for what he had written and said.

The seemingly credible evidence Rufo presents of radical influence — the mainstreaming of once-radical concepts like “structural racism,” for example — thus ends up undermining his case. When radical language goes mainstream without accompanying radical shifts in policy, that’s not actually evidence of a radical takeover. If anything, it looks like a win for the liberal mainstream, which seemingly has coopted radical ideas and redirected them toward more moderate ends.

Radicals haven’t taken over mainstream America; they’ve been taken over by it.

Now that’s an interesting and defensible thesis: that maybe the ideals of those old-time radicals are popular and persuasive, but they’ve been effectively translated into milder, more pragmatic forms. That I can believe. I can also believe that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, while also seeing that in many ways it neuters the radical agenda.

But the notion that American arms manufacturers have been taken over by radicals is ridiculous. Lockheed Martin builds weapons to maintain the American war machine. It is not owned or controlled in any way by sincere believers in the Third Worldist anti-imperialism of the 1960s radicals; it is using the now-popular terms those radicals once embraced to burnish its own image.

Rufo is getting the direction of influence backward. Radicals are not taking over Lockheed Martin; Lockheed Martin is co-opting radicalism.

That’s how a liberal system works, not by overthrowing everything everywhere all at once, but by pushing progressively for slightly better systems, one step at a time. We need the revolutionaries shouting at the margins to push everyone in the right direction, but face it, it’s the bureaucrats who will implement it. And it’s always been that way!

Historically, liberalism has proven quite capable of assimilating leftist critiques into its own politics. In the 19th and 20th centuries, liberal governments faced significant challenges from socialists who argued that capitalism and private property led to inequality and mass suffering. In response, liberals embraced the welfare state and social democracy: progressive income taxation, redistribution, antitrust regulations, and social services.

Reformist liberals worked to address the concerns raised by socialists within the system. Their goal was to offer the immiserated proletariat alternative hope for a better life within the confines of the liberal democratic capitalist order — simultaneously improving their lives and staving off revolution. The New Deal, which was explicitly pitched as a means of defanging radical passions, is an especially clear American example of this pattern at work.

I mentioned the John Birchers — they hated the New Deal and Roosevelt. Even the slightest tinge of “socialism” would set them off. It’s the same with Rufo and his repellent ilk — they hate things with any hint of progressivism, it doesn’t matter if it empirically improves the lives of citizens, they’re agin’ it.

I do find it odd, though, that everyone writing about him ignores his personal history of anti-science, loony creationism. I also wonder if he ever really believed that nonsense. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just an opportunistic front.

This time of year, what’s at the forefront of my memory is my wife’s birthday, and my kids’ birthdays, which are mostly around this time of year. The thing that most people bring up around now is the ugly memory of 11 September 2001. I shy away from it, because while it was definitely a tragedy with significant loss of life, it was also an excuse, a justification, a starting point for excesses of evil on this country’s part. Also, a trigger for kitsch.

These days it’s perhaps more often utilized in memory of a great tragedy that happened 22 years ago this Monday, back at the dawn of the 21st century, the attacks on 9/11, when our own infrastructure was turned against us in an act of modern horror. So around this time of year, when we hear Never Forget, it’s most likely the attacks of that day being referenced. It’s on posters, and t-shirts, to help you remember. There’s a lawn decoration, I see, in the shape of the Twin Towers, which you can buy at Walmart, in case you think your neighbors might be in danger of forgetting to Never Forget. You can put it on your lawn, and maybe you’ll all remember who your enemies outside your borders are, and if you actually sometimes like to talk as if New York City is an unlivable hellscape full of your enemies inside your borders, maybe you’ll be so busy Never Forget-ing that you’ll forget to remember that you do that, at least until it is time for Halloween lawn decorations.

Oh god. $79.95. And the ugly upper-middle class house is a perfect background for it.

OK, AR Moxon mentions all the things we should never forget.

I’ll Never Forget the way the liars who had the steering wheel on that day bragged that they would create their own reality, and then proved it. I’ll Never Forget how proud they were of making us a country that tortures. I’ll Never Forget how lie led to lie led to lie, but never to consequences.

And I’ll Never Forget how the liars who came after—even less scrupulous, even more flagrant—noticed there would be no crime that an authoritarian-facing Presidential power couldn’t survive, no outrage that would not be normalized, no meat too raw for voters who craved bigotry, and pressed that advantage far past our breaking point, so that today we have an openly criminal party speaking and acting against any elections they do not win, and arguing in public and even in court that it isn’t illegal if a president does it, provided the president is an authoritarian.

I think we’d do well to Never Forget that the failure to prevent those attacks did not represent insufficiently aggressive national security, or insufficiently guarded borders, or insufficient domestic policing, or insufficient cruelty in our foreign policy, but rather insufficient attention paid to available information—an intelligence failure, in other words: a failure of awareness, of imagination, of competence. So it strikes me that those who still today insist on ignoring available information risk similarly catastrophic failures of our national intelligence.

Those are the things I already remember when the pretense of martyrdom rolls around every year.