This Right-Wing Culture Warrior Wants Trump to 'Snatch' Activists Off the Streets
Chris Rufo's extreme ideas have been a source of inspiration for Donald Trump and his allies. Experts say his latest suggestion reminds them of the Pinochet era.
There are countless influencers and propagandists within the MAGA movement, but one of the most well-known and influential figures within it is Christopher Rufo. The conservative activist was an integral part of the smear campaign against critical race theory, DEI, elite universities, and more. Earlier this week, in the Free Press, Rufo published a new plan for the Trump administration to further interfere with higher education.
Rufo's comments on higher education get a lot of attention, but that's not all he writes about. While the nation has been navigating the chaos Donald Trump has been creating on a daily basis with military in the streets and people being sent to foreign gulags, Rufo recently suggested that Trump take his immigration actions to a whole new level.
Immigration agencies like ICE should “dispatch unmarked vans to follow key agitators and snatch them from the streets while the media are not looking,” Rufo suggested in a Substack post last month. He compares this to when federal agents were sent into Portland, Oregon, in 2020, also under Trump, during the anti-police brutality protests following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
“The most effective riot control is to take movement leaders off the field, infiltrate their networks, disrupt the flow of funding, and roll them up in federal investigations,” Rufo wrote. “Denying the Left trained protest leaders now will create a strong precedent for the rest of the president’s term.”
Obviously, this would be a horrendous, authoritarian move from the Trump administration, but Rufo’s suggestion shouldn’t be disregarded as one extremist’s random musings.