The Anti-Woke Mob On Tour

The paranoid crusade comes for public radio and the world's best encrypted chat app. Who's next?

It’s 1994 and Philip Zimmermann is sitting on a plane, flying from Romania to Hungary. He’s writing the preface to his seminal book, the deceptively-titled PGP Source Code and Internals.

“In Bucharest, I saw the terrible legacy of a system designed by men who craved certainty, not trusting the people with individual freedom,” he wrote. “The people there now are glad to have their freedom, and they understand my concern about the power of Government.”

Zimmermann was a hacker in the oldest sense of the word. In the preceding years, he had grown freaked out by a proposal, put forward by a still-not-young Joe Biden, to force internet companies to give the U.S. government access to their users’ communications.

Zimmermann knew it was do-or-die time. Either the internet would be a free and open thing, or it would be subject to American meddling and surveillance. So Zimmermann dropped a new tool he had developed, a standard to encrypt communications on both ends so that only its sender and intended recipient could read it. He called it PGP: Pretty Good Privacy. He posted it online, and made it freeware.

When he touched down in Washington, he was hauled into an interrogation room. He was accused of arms trafficking for publishing his code. A grand jury was impaneled for five months — it ultimately decided charges were not warranted.

Washington’s worst dreams came true. PGP became the foundation for a safe and secure internet, free from prying eyes. Basically all good privacy-respecting software traces its lineage to that moment.

“One billion Whatsapp users went to bed without encryption,” Zimmermann told me when we spoke in 2019. “In the morning they had it. That’s a billion. With a b! All at once.” (In fact, Whatsapp rolled out full encryption over time, but his point still stands.)

When I first emailed Zimmermann, using an encrypted email client that traces its lineage to PGP, he called me back within an hour: “Do you have Signal?” We moved our conversation to the encrypted app, also a direct descendant of PGP, quickly thereafter.

Zimmermann is a bit of a hero of mine. (I tried to hide my gushing while we spoke.) I’m particularly fond of him because of the broad, complicated, messy coalition he helped usher in to continue advocating for this open internet: Anarchists, libertarians, paranoid weirdos, nerds, activists, journalists, and a lot of people in-between. Despite lots of cross-purposes, this loose-knit coalition has stuck together. Even Elon Musk is — or, was — a Signal stan.

So imagine my surprise when, this week, I came across a thinly-written essay arguing that Signal had “a problem.” It had, the essay argued, been compromised by the American intelligence state. Not from the outside, but from the inside.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, the quest to discredit Signal, a crusade against National Public Radio, and how the anti-woke mob is finding great success in corrupting consensus.

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I have a hard time figuring out whether Christopher Rufo is an idiot or a genius. Maybe he’s both. Maybe he’s neither. Maybe he just thinks his readers are idiots.

If you recognize his name, it’s because he has been particularly responsible for mainstreaming torqued-up fears around Critical Race Theory, Diversity Equity & Inclusion initiatives, and gender theory. His series of hit pieces on Harvard President Claudine Gay likely cost the academic her job.

I wrote about Rufo’s playing of the New York Times early this year (Dispatch #83), as an example of how gullible the old gray lady had become. Their soft spot for right-wing ideological grifters led them into a full-blown moral panic around fears of anti-semitism in higher learning, which has bled into their totally out-of-whack coverage of the pro-Palestinian encampments across university campuses in recent weeks.

I don’t want to pump Rufo’s tires, here, but I want to flip that focus around and talk about him specifically. Because, more than just taking down woke mucketymucks, he threatens to do a lot of institutional damage along the way.

This tick-tock may delve into the weeds a bit — more than usual, I suppose — but there’s a moral at the end of this story, I promise.

Pick a Target, Set a Narrative

Rufo’s has proven himself to be an incredible talent at laundering ideological crusades through seemingly-rational concerns, bringing all the torch-wielding boys to the yard.

His rise came by spinning this fabulous yarn for the anti-woke masses, warning that Queer people and radical anti-white cultural Marxists were infiltrating the school system through indoctrinatory textbooks and a fifth column of nefarious teachers. And your kid could be next. You can read more of his background on Marisa Kabas’ newsletter.

He succeeded in this campaign because he has emulated the shady tactics that, he believes, the left is using to great effect. His writing looks and feels like works of journalism, even if is absolutely not journalism. It’s weaponized information. As he wrote last year, he wants the political right to start stealing tactics that (he believes) the left has weaponized for years. He takes lessons from the reactionary and paranoid backlash that bubbled up against companies celebrating Pride:

The recent boycott campaigns against Disney, Target, and Bud Light demonstrate that aligning social-media activists with mass-market outlets, most importantly Fox News and The Daily Wire, can shape public perceptions and convert a firm’s “egregious act” into significant financial and reputational damage. Moving forward, conservatives need to develop professional activist organizations to formalize, direct, and sustain “protracted siege“ campaigns against recalcitrant corporations. This combination—social media agitation, mass media amplification, and formalized pressure groups—has the potential to be enormously effective.

Pick a target, set a narrative, throw everything at the wall, go viral, do it again.

This hack-and-burn tactic isn’t about winning the argument, but eradicating opposing ideologies. It means bringing universities to heel, or defunding them entirely.

Don’t take it from me. See Rufo explain it himself:

[Rufo, Twitter, October 13, 2023] Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA [Democratic Socialists of America], and academic “decolonization” in the public mind. Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them. Make them political untouchables.

[Rufo, Fox News, November 7, 2023] We’ve now basically imported violent Third World ideologies onto American campuses. American left-wing activists, and even many professors, at prestigious universities have been cheering on the Hamas terror attacks against Israel.

[Rufo, Twitter, November 10, 2023] Seems like we did it. Fox News ran hard with this angle. Conservative journalists substantiated it with reporting. And the BLM, DSA, and academic "decolonization" activists obliged by providing great clips, speeches, and protests. Narrative established. Now to the next step.

House Republicans were happy to help. They hauled the Ivy League bigwigs before Congress and made them squirm. Then Rufo went into siege mode, digging up fallacious claims of plagiarism, broadcast through ideologically-friendly media outlets, and kept whacking.

Neither Rufo, nor his pitchfork-wielding mob, nor the Daily Wire gave a shit about plagiarism in academia. They cared about ridding academia of the cultural Marxists. But The New York Times certainly cares about plagiarism, so it was a real win-win. (For more on this, read Thomas Zimmer.)

Even though this was a transparent crusade, the damage was done. Within weeks, Gay was gone. (I guess you can pray the gay away.)

But Rufo’s reconquista can’t stop at a small liberal arts college outside Boston. He needed a new target.

That opportunity came when ex-NPR editor Uri Berliner penned a righteous takedown of NPR for The Free Press. In it, he rattles off the usual things which he proclaims NPR was incorrectly offside on — Russiagate, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the COVID lab leak theory — but he really boils it down to a complaint about NPR going woke. Too much DEI, too much time spent worrying about race, too often coverage was uncharitable to Republicans.

Whatever the merit of Berliner’s critique of NPR, he ends on a rather encouraging note, wishing incoming CEO Katherine Maher well on her new gig as CEO of NPR. “I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job” he wrote. “Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think.” (NPR subsequently published a response to Berliner, which led him to resign in a huff, lamenting he had been “disparaged.”)

Rufo doesn’t do well-wishes. He has a spot on his wall for Maher’s head, right next to Gay’s.

Now, Katherine Maher is an impressive woman. Scroll through her LinkedIn and you’ll see: Some internships at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Eurasia Group; a communications job at UNICEF; a program officer gig at the National Democratic Institute, a gig at the World Bank; director of advocacy at digital rights group Access Now; a long stint as head of the Wikimedia Foundation; an appointee on the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board; positions with the World Economic Forum, Atlantic Council, and on the Signal Foundation; and finally: National Public Radio.

Apart from her WEF ties, Maher was hardly a target for the grievance merchants. And, as Berliner notes, she had barely even begun the job. But Rufo needed a figurehead with which to go to war, and Maher was a good as target as any.

Throw Everything At the Wall

So Katherine Maher has to go. Too woke. Rufo just needed a trojan horse.

On his Substack, Rufo combed through her tweets and past writing. He feigned outrage that she used phrases like “non-binary people” and “toxic masculinity” — dangerous, radical ideas — and lamented that she liked Elizabeth Warren and disliked Donald Trump. (Maher, it’s worth remembering, has never been a journalist and has had no obligation to be politically neutral.)

But that’s the usual stuff. So Rufo began poking at Maher’s history at the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia. He found a video where she dared to suggest that Wikipedia’s mantra of “free and open” was in need of updating, because it risked duplicating inherent biases in the Western historical lens.

Rather than unpack that, he held it up as evidence of wrongthink. He ran to a guy who agrees with that: Larry Sanger, “co-founder” of Wikipedia, who happily agreed that Maher and Wikipedia “systematically silenced” dissident voices and that Wikipedia had been compromised by “probably governments, probably the CIA.” And, wow, if the co-founder of Wikipedia says so.

Nevermind that Sanger’s status as co-founder has been in dispute for 20 years, nor that he’s been peddling the CIA-runs-Wikipedia thing for ages, without a scintilla of proof. Sanger is an ideological fellow traveller, a brother in the counter-revolution, a useful voice.

Rufo kept plugging away. Next was a piece about Maher’s participation in “color revolutions.” If you’re vaguely familiar with those uprisings, you know they were in response to widespread vote-rigging and electoral chicanery in those nascent democracies. And that the West was pretty supportive of them, at the time.

You may also know that ‘color revolution’ has become shorthand for a whack of conspiracy theories, beloved by Russian and Chinese propagandists, blaming the CIA for being involved in everything, everywhere, all the time. Because ‘color revolution’ sounds scarier than ‘popular, pro-democracy, pro-human rights protests openly supported by Western agencies and NGOs.’

Rufo dives right into the conspiracy theories, proclaiming that “Maher was involved in the wave of Color Revolutions that took place in North Africa in the 2010s, and she supported the post-George Floyd upheavals in the United States in the 2020s.” His evidence is that she spent one year at the National Democratic Institute, a government-funded democracy-promotion vehicle roughly tied to the Democratic Party. (Its counterpart is the International Republican Institute.)

Most of this stuff, Rufo lifts (uncredited, I’d note) from lefty conspiracy outlet The Gray Zone. It comes down, really, to a single tweet from a former Tunisian politician claiming that Maher was “probably a CIA agent.” (While The Gray Zone includes Maher’s reply, Rufo doesn’t bother.)

So, just to recap, Katherine Maher is a woke leftist who weaponized Wikipedia against conservatives, fomented the Arab Spring to help the CIA, and is now coming for NPR. (Women really can have it all!) A lack of proof for these claims don’t matter. Rufo isn’t building a case, he’s building a narrative.

And, finally, we arrive at Signal.

Maher is on the board of the Signal Foundation, which funds and supports the LLC which manages the Signal messenger app. That’s the Signal app that I used to chat with Zimmermann, the one made possible by PGP.¹ Suddenly, the problem isn’t with Maher herself — now it’s “Signal’s Katherine Maher problem.”

Beyond the caricature of Maher that Rufo has built up, he can point to only a single $3 million grant to Signal, from a government-funded body, as evidence that there are “questions about the app’s origins and its relationship with government.”

I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at coming for my favorite encrypted messaging app.

I could write an entire article about why these allegations are bullshit. (If you could see earlier drafts of this newsletter, you’d know that I nearly did.) But suffice it to say: Signal, and the standard which it runs, is (mostly) open source and has been subjected to multiple third-party audits. There are no serious claims that it contains backdoors to American intelligence agencies, or that it is otherwise compromised.

Again, none of this matters. Rufo does not care about Signal’s security protocols, or whether it has ties to the State Department. Rufo cares about doing damage to things that, he thinks, the left cares about. He made that clear when he openly mused, on Twitter (which has completely faulty encryption) that maybe people should use Telegram instead. Telegram is widely believed to actually be compromised by foreign governments, particularly Moscow.

Comparing Signal and Telegram’s security features is like putting an M1 Abrams tank next a Lada 2101 and asking Twitter which will fare better in battle. But Telegram has a great feature, for Rufo’s purpose: It’s full of right-wing propagandists. It has become a remarkably useful broadcast platform for all sorts of far-right activists and influencers. It will be useful for the counter-revolution.

Go Viral, Do it All Again

With his hard work done, Rufo was able to kick his feet up and wait for the reply guys to do their thing.

Ex-Twitter boss Jack Dorsey endorsed the Signal attack, while current Twitter boss Musk gooberily tweeted: “There are known vulnerabilities with Signal that are not being addressed. Seems odd.” (Community Notes, the only good thing about Musk’s Twitter, quickly affixed a scathing correction. Signal replied, too.)

The media has jumped in, too. Attacks on Maher have been picked up in the New York Post, The Daily Wire, Fox News, by Indian clickbait farms and a junk right-wing site targeted at the Hispanic community in the U.S. The CatholicVote PAC giddily sang that Rufo had exposed Maher’s “ties to Middle East radicals.” Crypto blogs fully adopted the notion that Signal is “linked to U.S. intelligence.”

The biggest coverage, of course, came from The New York Times. In a piece perplexingly entitled “NPR C.E.O. Faces Criticism Over Tweets Supporting Progressive Causes,” they cite Rufo for having “called attention to many of Ms. Maher’s posts on X.”

And with all this smoke in the air, the Republicans weren’t far off. They want Maher to testify before a House committee, like Gay did. She, probably wisely, declined. But the crusade will continue. Congressman Jim Banks, chair of the Anti Woke Caucus (yes, a real thing) has introduced legislation to defund NPR, lifting language straight from Rufo about Maher’s supposed threat to free speech.

And so the ball is rolling, and Rufo is keen to keep pushing it. If it achieves the end result of toppling Katherine Maher — a woman who has advocated for an open, free, and accessible internet for her entire career, as Rufo has toiled away in the depths of hyperpartisan meme warfare — he’ll do it. And then he’ll pick his next target.

Can We Just Not?

The lesson we need to take from Rufo’s regular skirmishes is that he will go after anything, and his enablers are happy to help out. And the media is keen to participate. And politicians are eager to get in on the fun. Once he goes back to his home planet, someone else will lift these tactics directly. Someday, perhaps, the left will adopt these tactics to destroy their enemies on Wall Street.

Recent years has seen the culture war come for children’s’ TV (Dispatch #62), libraries (Dispatch #48), urban planning (Dispatch #42), city hall (Dispatch #79), an international capitalist summit (Dispatch #16), climate science (Dispatch #18) and all manner of other issues, big and small.

Like an AI doing iterative generations of an increasingly quirky hot dog, Rufo seems intent on bringing his kind of paranoid politics to bear on as many things as possible as fast as possible. That is how you win the culture war, after all. He explains it in his book, where everyone within our institutions — academia, media, politics, NGOs, the civil service, so on — are cultural revolutionaries. The counter-revolutionaries must start by redpilling the normies:

They must help the common citizen understand what is happening around him and mobilize the vast reservoir of public sentiment against the ideologies, laws, and institutions that seek to make the cultural revolution a permanent feature of American life. The task for the counter-revolutionary is not simply to halt the movement of his adversaries but to resurrect the system of values, symbols, myths, and principles that constituted the essence of the old regime, to reestablish the continuity between past, present, and future, and to make the eternal principles of freedom and equality meaningful again to the common citizen.²

Sometimes appeals to protect our institutions can get a bit too precious. Government institutions need to be criticized — some need to be destroyed. (Looking at you, TSA.) But Rufo wants to destroy anything that bears the hallmark of modern social progress, or which even stands next to it, to be replaced with statues of the old gods. And we keep helping him out.

We could just not.

But the problem is that the eggheads at the Times do not see themselves as a tool in these culture wars, despite the fact that they obviously are. As Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn made clear in a recent interview with Ben Smith, he still sees the paper as a thoughtful, thorough, objective, impartial organization that sits above and between the revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. He’s insisting that the baby needs to be split in half, regardless of who the real mother is.

We can hope that Rufo’s crusade to have electoral politics dictate school curricula and the safety of Queer people ultimately fails. I have to believe it will. But how much wreckage gets left in his wake? Certainly, Harvard is not better off for having lost its top official to an angry and irrational mob. The media certainly won’t be better if NPR gets defunded, but nor will its job be made easy going forward by having a CEO who is now regarded as a CIA stooge.

The open internet, meanwhile, has actually had a good few years. Successive U.S. administrations have grown better than they have been. (This faint praise, I would note, also applies to the first Trump administration.) But there remains a big threat from China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and hybrid regimes around the world. Bloodying up the world’s most accessible highly-secure app doesn’t help us in that regard.

As Zimmerman told me years ago: “The internet is such a hostile place, good encryption is a necessity.”

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That’s it for this week!

My very-detailed feature on the present and future of Ukraine’s drone war is up on WIRED, and worth a read.

I was also in the Globe & Mail last week, insisting that sending police to crack down on pro-Palestinian encampments is a huge mistake. I followed that up with conversations on Canadaland and the Canada Jewish News.

More to come soon. Until next week!

1. Signal, today, operates on the Signal Protocol, which was an improvement on a protocol called TextSecure, which led to the creation of the Off-the-record Messaging encryption system. That, in turn, was created as a way to apply PGP’s principles to instant messaging — it was introduced in a paper entitled: Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP. So we might say that Signal is the great-grandson of PGP. Pedants may argue that Signal is more like the great step-nephew, which is probably more accurate.

2. America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, Chris Rufo.