A couple of weeks ago, a Republican friend informed me that Vice President Kamala Harris, now the likely Democratic Party presidential candidate, had taken to quoting Karl Marx. Needless to say, I was both confused and pretty excited about this. But my heart sank as soon as I discovered his source:
Kamala Harris proposes a regime of « equity » based on a simple principle: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. This should sound familiar.pic.twitter.com/PO6vUSrJ5m
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 25, 2024
I barely needed to watch the video to know that the infamous liar Christopher Rufo was lying once again. There’s no need to take my word for it — just watch the video for yourself. Harris talks a lot about equity in these clips, but she never even comes close to saying, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” That Rufo added the line that this “should sound familiar” makes it hard not to read it as a deliberate attempt to sucker his audience into thinking those sounds actually came out of her mouth.
Rufo, to be fair, earnestly believes that when Democrats say “equity” they really do have something like Marxism in mind. Here’s how he put it a few years ago:
Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds nonthreatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality.
Can we stop for a moment and just appreciate how kooky this conspiracy theory really is? It would be one thing to say that equity is a Marxist idea or that it was inspired by Marxism, but that’s not what Rufo is doing here. Rufo is claiming that critical race theorists actually want to do Marxism, but that they consciously decided that they won’t be able to talk anyone into it and that they needed to use their powers as “masters of language construction” (whatever…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Carl Beijer
