Where Did the Anti-CRT Backlash Come From?

A better first draft of history than that proffered by Ben Domenech.

Back in July I wrote a review for Reason of a new book by right-wing education activist Christopher Rufo. The most interesting disagreement I heard was from conservative blogger Ben Domenech. It’s worth engaging with in some detail because our disagreement speaks to something larger than the book review. It’s ultimately a question about the origins of the anti-CRT movement that blossomed from late-2020 until mid-2022 and which helped spark a series of controversial library book bans and public school board protests. In this sense, Domenech and I are arguing over the “first rough draft of history” that future historians will someday revisit and revise as they write the story of the post-George Floyd reaction.

Simply put, Domenech doesn’t believe my claim that Christopher Rufo’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on September 1, 2020 sparked the anti-CRT backlash. His justification is that only 4 million people watched the interview live, which he doesn’t consider viral-worthy numbers. Furthermore, Domenech dismisses the fact that President Trump cited Rufo to justify an executive order later that month banning CRT instruction at federal agencies; Domenech calls it a “feedback loop” that “happened all the time in the Trump administration.”

I would point to the same facts but to the opposite effect. In September 2020, Tucker Carlson’s show was not just the most widely viewed news show in the country, it was the highest rated month in the show’s entire history with a 4.6 million average viewers per night. I repeat: it was the best monthly performance of the highest rated news show on the most watched news network in the country. If at least four million live viewers — including quite possibly the President himself — doesn’t represent meaningful reach, then it’s hard to imagine if anything in the realm of broadcasting can!

The reason why Domenech pooh-poohs such eye-popping numbers is even more apparent in his initial Twitter thread than in his newsletter write-up of our tussle. Domenech believes in what I’ll call the grassroots hypothesis of anti-CRT backlash. The “pushback" to CRT was “driven organically by parents across the country” fighting back against CRT indoctrination “in their local communities.” When did it start? When schools closed because of the pandemic and “parents with school age kids” noticed what their kids were being taught via Zoom class.

By contrast, my implicit hypothesis of the anti-CRT backlash is entrepreneurial. Political activists like Christopher Rufo saw CRT as a wedge issue that they could empty of meaning, redefine on favorable terms, and with which they could then launch a broader ideological project. I know this because Christopher Rufo himself has been remarkably transparent that this was his rhetorical strategy with CRT.

To be fair, fighting over the relative role of political entrepreneurship versus grassroots activism is one of the most frequent historiographical debates in modern political history. I myself am a regular advocate for a grassroots understanding of right-wing movements; I published a book about the origins of modern conservatism with that explicit framing! So I’m not reflexively opposed to a grassroots understanding of the anti-CRT movement, but I think the early, imperfect data that we have highlights the importance of political entrepreneurs in activating the movement.

Thankfully, we have a way to test both hypotheses that’s much better than just gesturing at the number of people who watched Rufo’s appearance on Tucker Carlson. After all, there is a gulf between merely seeing something versus ingesting it. For Rufo’s Carlson appearance to be a key precursor to mass anti-CRT backlash, we need to see some kind of plausible, direct impact on public opinion. It requires Rufo to have sparked something.

Conveniently, we have just such a tool with Google Trends, which allows us to assess relative search interest in news and information over time. If Domenech’s grassroots hypothesis of anti-CRT backlash is more plausible, we should expect to see a surge in searches for “critical race theory” around the time of the pandemic school shutdowns in March 2020 as parents were suddenly able to observe curricula and classes via Zoom.

By contrast, if my entrepreneurial hypothesis is correct, we should expect that spike of searches for CRT to occur later in the year, subsequent to Rufo’s appearance on Tucker Carlson in early September.

Here’s a snapshot of Google Trends for that time period. Judge for yourself which story the data fits best.

In the first full week following Rufo’s appearance on Carlson’s show, searches for critical race theory spiked 50 times higher than baseline interest in the years preceding it. FIFTY TIMES.

It’s also no accident that searches for Christopher Rufo’s name also boomed exponentially in September 2020, which is what you’d expect to happen after millions of highly energized fans of Tucker Carlson Tonight saw Rufo’s appearance and wondered “who is that guy” and “what the heck is this ‘critical race theory’ thing??”

I want to end on a note of conciliation. The question of grassroots vs entrepreneurship is a matter of emphasis. Every successful social movement engages both grassroots activists and elite entrepreneurs in a robust feedback look. I think it’s entirely possible that parents in 2020 had a growing but inchoate sense that something was wrong with what their kids were being taught, especially about topics related to racism. Then, in September 2020, Rufo’s nationally televised splash put a name to that uneasiness and gave those parents a conveniently ambiguous target for their concerns.

Muddying the matter, however, is polling showing that although the general public has grown increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of public school education, that’s only true of non-parents. Parents of public school kids report being as satisfied as they’ve ever been; indeed, their satisfaction rate actually increased from 2020-2022! Such polling is suggestive — albeit certainly not determinative — that the fear of CRT instruction in schools is being driven by political entrepreneurs appealing to a general conservative audience rather than by grassroots outrage generated from actual parents observing remote classroom instruction. Do bear in mind that the median viewer of Fox News is 68, while the median age of a public school parent is likely low-40s, a quarter of a century gap! In other words, Rufo wasn’t primarily speaking to school age parents when he went on Tucker Carlson.

In any case, future historians parsing the matter will have an advantage denied us: documentation. Give it a few decades and they’ll be able to root around in the personal papers of various Moms For Liberty activists and other grassroots leaders to look for evidence of what motivated their activism and when. But until then, the data we have strongly suggests that Christopher Rufo’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show played a major role in activating anti-CRT backlash in the fall of 2020. That’s the best first, rough draft of this history I can come up with now, though I’ll be happy to read the second draft someday.