Conservative network to bring US far-right provocateur Chris Rufo to Alberta

The Canada Strong and Free Network intends to bring far-right American provocateur and writer Chris Rufo to Red Deer in September to share his views about the future of the conservative movement.

Rufo is a prominent figure in American right-wing circles focused on attacking progressive race and gender policies. He refers to critical race theory, an interdisciplinary scholarly field focused on examining systemic racism, as “race Marxism.” Last year he was tapped by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to sit on the board of trustees for the New College of Florida, which since his appointment has dismantled its gender studies program, a field Rufo has called “pseudoscience.”

Rufo takes credit for all that and more. In an interview with Politico about his effort to topple Harvard president Claudine Gay, the Ivy League university’s first black president, he bragged he was able to “smuggle” his far-right views into the mainstream media by “shaming and bullying” colleagues in journalism.

In what Rufo calls a “manifesto for the counterrevolution,” published earlier this year in IM1776, (a far-right magazine that has praised dictators including El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele and Russian President Vladimir Putin) he outlines his views for how the right wing can seize power.

The theory goes, once the right can force its framing of issues to the mainstream it can steadily build political support. A practical example is Rufo’s focus on “parental rights” – a relatively innocuous phrase in itself that has gained wide traction in recent years to give cover for anti-trans policies in schools.

“A movement gains legitimacy by taking territory in discourse, the adoption of its discourse by society’s elite, and eventually, through elevation of its discourse into law,” he explains. “Win the argument, win the elite, and win the regime — that is the formula, which traces the path from the pamphlet to power.”

Rufo warns his fellow right-wing activists that if the goal is to build institutional power, in other words taking control of institutions to push an agenda, as he successfully did with the New College of Florida, they must sometimes hide their true agenda and beliefs.

“The activist must not forget that he is doing politics, not literature, and balance his desire for intellectual purity with institutional reality,” according to Rufo.

“At times, he must conceal his radicalism in the mask of respectability.”

Divide and conquer

The Canada Strong and Free Network, formerly the Manning Centre, is an influential hub for conservatives across the country. At its conferences it brings together youth, journalists, and prominent politicians like Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith for networking purposes. Its former president, Jamil Jivani who is friends with former President Donald Trump’s vice-president pick J.D. Vance, successfully won a byelection this year to claim the seat of former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole.

The Canada Strong and Free Network hosting Rufo tells James Rowe, an associate professor at the University of Victoria, the conservative movement is interested in learning how to identify issues to build support.

In an interview, Rowe told Canada’s National Observer Rufo is skilled at dividing the public. Rufo’s particular skill rests in “finding wedge issues that help to make the left look like lunatics, and make the right feel like persecuted victims that are on the right side of history. That's his jam,” he said.

Rufo makes no attempt to hide his strategy. He publicly admits his goal is to strip the intended meaning of a term, and “recodify” it to change its public meaning.

“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,” he tweeted in 2021.

Shane Gunster, a professor at Simon Fraser’s school of communication, said in an interview that Rufo’s skill at framing universities and other institutions as “purveyors of cultural Marxism that need to be deprogrammed” could inform the actions of the Conservative Party of Canada under Poilievre.

Given one of Poilievre’s rallying calls is to defund the CBC, Gunster says it can be expected that to make the argument more compelling, “you really need to push the narrative that the CBC has been infiltrated by the forces of the far left, and is an effective institution in disseminating far left [views].”

A key part of right-wing organizing is about pushing a narrative that authoritarian elites are trying to control the public, Gunster says. It’s this cultural narrative that drives relatively small issues into the mainstream, he added. For example, drag queens reading books in a library to children is “very benign,” he says, but can be framed as the state forcing “a particular kind of sexual identity on children,” which then is understood by some as a “very nefarious conspiracy by the powerful to impose themselves on you.”

This template can be used on race issues, where policies aimed at curbing systemic racism are recast as a state-led effort to enforce equitable outcomes, or on climate issues where heat pumps and electric vehicles are understood by some on the right-wing as a state led effort to control what you drive and how you heat your home. At the fringes, pandemics become international conspiracies to gain power, city planning becomes a plot to cordon off “15-minute cities,” and wildfires become distractions from secret UN military operations.

“That's how a lot of right organizing works. That's how a lot of right recruitment works. It works through those kinds of narratives,” Gunster said.

Rufo, the Canada Strong and Free Network, and the Conservative Party did not return requests to comment.

Petro-nationalism and extractive populism

On climate change and energy issues, Rufo is not on the record saying much. But Gunster says Rufo would have insight into how the Conservatives can revive the “foreign-funded radicals” smear used by former Prime Minister Harper and his Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, which cast environmentalists as traitorous to Canada. That line of attack was similarly used by former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who launched an inquiry into foreign funding of NGOs, and created the Canadian Energy Centre – frequently called the War Room – to target climate activists opposed to the province’s expanding oil and gas sector.

That tactic is part of what Gunster calls “extractive populism” – a political strategy that rests on three claims: First, extractive industries like oil and gas production, are said to be a national public good that everybody benefits from; second, the industry is under attack from a powerful, elite minority; third, “the people” must unite to defend this public good from “nefarious interests” who are trying to destroy it.

“Clearly there seems to be a pretty good fit between that basic extractive populist [framework]... and Rufo's skill at spinning stories about enemies of the public good,” Gunster said, warning that this strategy gets “really, really ugly, really, really fast.”

Gunster pointed to Calgary-based entrepreneur Brett Wilson, a Poilievre ally, who called environmentalists “slimy bastards” who should be hanged for treason in 2018 as an example.

As the climate crisis and the need to respond to it became increasingly apparent, the Canadian oil and gas industry needed a strategy to build support outside of Alberta, Gunster said. In the 2000s and 2010s, Canadian conservatives talked about the oil and gas industry as if it were operated in the interests of everybody, he said, describing it as an emergence of “petro-nationalism.”

Petro-nationalism reframes the story of Canada with resource extraction at the centre, he explained.

“Conservatives in the 1990s saw Canadian nationalism as a bad thing…They saw it as something that was used to defend multiculturalism, and peacekeeping, and all of these kinds of things,” Gunster said. “So [the Conservative movement] had this concerted project to assert, to position, more muscular forms of our history.”

Petro-nationalism is part of that story, Gunster said. It’s about baking Conservative values “right into the heart of the story of what it is to be Canadian.”

With enough people buying what Conservatives are selling, the argument that “the eco-authoritarians, the radical activists, the cultural marxists… have wormed their way into the institutions of political and civil society,” and therefore the public needs to fight back gains traction, he said.

Gunster said convincing conservatives to engage politically, whether it be through taking over school boards or constituency associations, is one of the strategies Rufo has effectively used to fight progressive policies.

Because Rufo is a culture warrior, Rowe says Canadian conservatives learning from him is a hint that Poilievre’s Conservative Party doesn’t believe it will be able to seriously deliver on its promises.

“As much as [Poilievre’s] talking about affordability as his leading concern, I haven't seen any policy proposal besides ‘axe the tax,’ and that's not going to have any genuine impact on affordability,” Rowe said. “When you're not able to seriously deliver the economic message, I think you lean into culture wars to fire up your base and to try to divide the other side.”