Far-right troll triggered by his gender studies rival

A tantrum unbecoming of classic liberal education

Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.

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He may be humiliating himself in Iowa right now, but back home in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s plan to destroy higher education is moving swiftly toward profitability.

On Thursday, the zombified version of New College of Florida announced that it was doing away with its rigorous four-year degree program and launching a quack online studies program sponsored by the infamously racist billionaire and GOP donor Joe Ricketts. The program, known as Ricketts’ Great Books, currently exists as a low-rent home schooling and online K-12 curriculum in the same ideological vein as far-right Hillsdale College.

Ricketts, a GOP megadonor, gave $1 million to DeSantis’s presidential campaign PAC. Now he’s in line to make far more for licensing his historically inaccurate online courses to the school. The deal was brokered by Christopher Rufo, the right wing troll DeSantis appointed to New College’s Board of Trustees in early 2023, and came as a surprise to several board members when it was announced during a board meeting in December.

The board is now split between longtime academics and DeSantis’s conservative appointees, a dynamic that has fostered a growing tension and distrust. After Rufo — he’s also the guy who campaigned to take down Harvard president Claudia Gay — called Ricketts a friend and took a swipe at the student member of the board, Dr. Amy Reid, a tenured staffer who has locked horns with Rufo before, raised the issue of potential conflicts of interest.

Rufo quickly grew apoplectic and told Reid to “shut up.”

Reid didn’t accuse Rufo of violating the law during the exchange, but the outburst marked the second time he’d alleged that she had done so. The first time came in August, when Rufo sought to fast-track the dismantling of the Gender Studies program that Reid has overseen since 2006.

Reid said that Rufo had circumvented the state’s open government laws to begin the program’s elimination. Sunshine Law violations had been alleged since DeSantis’s nominees joined the board in January 2023, and at the very least, Rufo was seeking an expedited abolishment of the program; his motion wasn’t listed on the minutes of the meeting and Reid and another trustee were not made aware of it ahead of time. Even Corcoran, the president of New College, seemed to agree that they needed to go through the proper process.

The conservative political-education industrial complex

As for Reid’s allusions to conflicts of interest, those are often subjective, with definitions dependent on the standards of a particular institution. I won’t allege official wrongdoing, but it does not take long to find a morass of financial and instituonal connections among the conservatives currently dismantling education in Florida.

Rufo, for one, has seen his income rise dramatically thanks to a burst of funding to his dark money organizations beginning in 2021, when his war cry against Critical Race Theory made him a celebrity on the right.

Among his earliest champions was Pete Ricketts, the son of Joe Rickets and the then-governor of Nebraska. Ricketts sought to ban CRT in the state’s schools, had Rufo as a guest on his podcast, and frequently cited Rufo’s CRT briefing book, distributed by his employers at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

Corcoran was Florida’s Education Commissioner when he pushed to give control of the schools in rural Jefferson County to a for-profit charter company called Academica; bid-rigging and the involvement of current education commissioner and then-Academica employee Manny Diaz have put Corcoran at the center of an FBI investigation, which seems to be a baseline for Florida Republicans.

Based in Miami, Academica runs more than 200 charter schools across the country, including several in Florida that are part of a partnership with a conservative education organization called Education Opportunity — an organization that was founded by Joe Ricketts.

As a billionaire seeking to impose his merciless agenda on the American people, Ricketts has founded or been a central financier of a number of right-wing dark money groups that are intertwined in the larger web of conservative influence organizations.

Here’s another yarn: Citizens for Free Enterprise has received at least $8 million from Hugo LLC, a Nebraska-based holding company that controls Ricketts’ various education and political projects. The president of the Citizens for Free Enterprise is former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, an ardent champion of school vouchers who received Rufo’s support as he pushed the policy down the throats of voters who had explicitly rejected it several years earlier.

DeSantis and other far-right institutions play a significant role, as well.

The governor’s makeover of New College included six other appointments to the board of trustees, including Matthew Spalding, the dean of the political program at Hillsdale College, the deeply conservative school that DeSantis has held up as a model for his New College. In October, Rufo accepted a position as a distinguished fellow at Hillsdale.

Another Hillsdale alum served as the executive director of the Nebraska GOP after serving as Pete Ricketts’ communications director. The younger Ricketts is closely tied to Hillsdale, having frequented the campus and given talks at luncheons there.

The Michigan-based school has also overseen curriculum and training reviews for the Florida Department of Education at DeSantis’s behest, while a Hillsdale alum with a shady consulting firm and little experience won a controversial and highly unusual contract with the Sarasota school board to review its curriculum. The consultant was recommended by Bridget Ziegler, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty and close DeSantis ally whose husband, Christian Ziegler, was just ousted as head of the Florida GOP for allegedly raping the woman that had been the couple’s regular threesome partner.

The new board at New College also includes several scholars from the Claremont Institute, the psycho-right think tank that once awarded Rufo a fellowship and now provides a fellowship for the chief of staff of American Studio, the tax-exempt vehicle that Rufo uses to house his various media projects.

The Bigger Picture

The hijacking of New College has led to a mass exodus of students previously enrolled in the school and created a culture of chauvinism, hatred, and fear for many that remain. On a broader scale, it’s also given the far-right a living template for the national dismantling of public education that has been long one of the movement’s most ambitious goals.

Rufo is a critical part in that larger plan. He is a bigot, polemicist, and creep, but he’s now a bigot, polemicist, and creep with an outsized amount of power thanks to crank billionaire pals like Joe Ricketts, loyal politicians, and the mainstream media’s dangerous promotion and legitimization of his fringe ideas and bad-faith campaigns.

His bombastic attacks on Critical Race Theory and screeds against the LGBTQ+ community fueled the “parents’ rights” movement, which birthed book bans and ignited the explosion of school voucher programs that are already starting to bankrupt states, enriching wealthy families and corporations, and failing children. The religious extremists aim to use the Federalist Society-built judiciary to force government to subsidize their evangelism and impose it on the public, while the ultra-wealthy conservatives plan to reengineer society into a white nationalist feudal state.

It’s frightening stuff, but seeing Rufo throw a tantrum over a vague allusion to criticism by a woman whose life’s work he’s attacked so many times is a reminder that these people are exceptionally fragile and must always be challenged head-on.

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