Mr Rufo’s Renegades and the Hermeneutics of Evil

Planting the Seeds of American Fascism

Percolating through the popular imagination, unmooring the sanity of the far-right, and paving the way for a wild acceptance of dark web conspiracies and outlandish QAnon-type warnings about reptilian Satanist politicians drinking the blood of children and computer chips in COVID-19 vaccinations are the blistering seeds of a permanent fascism in America. Anxiously waiting in the wings for Trump’s re-election are his loyal cadres, knitted together by a shared psychosis, ready to ‘stand back and stand by’ and risk life and limb for their supreme leader. The list includes neo-Nazis, armed militia members, white supremacists, ethno-nationalists, right-wing fanboys, QAnon conspiracy theorists, angry incels (misogynistic male supremacists who claim that women who deny them sex are committing ‘reverse rape’), preppers in high-end bushcraft attire, spiffily groomed alt-right recruits and root cellar survivalists – all of whom are preparing for a blistering revenge against the deep state. Also making the list would be the Proud Boys, Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, all of whom have ties to ‘Stop the Steal’ Republican Congressmen and Congresswomen, many of whom support the Capitol insurrectionists of January 6.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo is one of the most dangerous men in America, partly because he is a stupid man’s smart person, an intellectual who succeeds in articulating what stupid people know but can’t say in the very pseudo-intellectual language that they would otherwise criticise as elitist. Recently, Rufo has gone through another revelation in political judgement with respect to dealing with a conundrum facing many fascists in the past: How to deal with the ‘far-left’ (and what others might describe simply as ‘socialist’)? Rufo seems to be at peace with the idea of having the US leadership steered by a far-right white supremacist dictator whose wheelhouse is torturing and murdering his leftist enemies. Known for serving dutifully as the wind-up pit bull that Governor Ron DeSantis sets loose on his ‘woke’ adversaries, Rufo recently hosted a social media debate that will go down in infamy in the annals of America’s rise of fascism. Historians, get your pens ready.

Rufo hosted the debate on X, formerly known as Twitter. Charles Haywood, one of the participants in the social media debate, known for his tumid oratory and firebrand hate of the left, maintained, hypothetically, and apparently with a straight face, that conservatives should cooperate with a white nationalist dictator ‘in order to destroy the power of the left.’ And not just any steely-eyed dictator, but one in the order of a Franco, a Pinochet and a Salazar. Salazar would be bad enough for America, but an Augusto Pinochet and a Francisco Franco? The latter two went well beyond brutal repression and a censored press but were mass murderers. And what was Rufo’s response? He commended all the speakers, Haywood included, for their ‘thoughtful points’ and described the discussion in a positive light as a model for engagement with ‘the dissident right.’

By commending his fellow far-right extremist, Haywood, for making thoughtful points about supporting the idea of a white nationalist fascist dictator rising up in America, we can see in Rufo’s comments the clear trajectory of today’s far-right, which is all about power, control, hate, retribution and death, and not necessarily in that order.

An American Pinochet? Is this what Rufo considers a worthwhile consideration? Apparently so. I will let the Guardian’s reporter, Jason Wilson, set the stage:

Participating in the debate was Charles Haywood, a former shampoo magnate … a would-be ‘warlord’ who founded a secretive, men-only fraternal society, the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR).

The debate concerned Haywood’s promotion of a strategy he calls ‘no enemies to the right,’ which urges people on the right to avoid any public criticism of others in their camp, including extremists….

Early in the Rufo-hosted discussion last Tuesday, Haywood raised the hypothetical possibility early in the discussion: ‘Let’s say a real white nationalist arose who had real political power … and therefore [could] be of assistance against the left.’

Responding to the hypothetical, Haywood said: ‘I think that the answer is that you should cooperate with that person in order to destroy the power of the left.’

Later in the broadcast, Haywood responded to concerns about right-wing authoritarianism by saying: ‘When we’re talking about people like Franco or Pinochet or even Salazar … they did kill people. They killed people justly, they killed people unjustly, and that’s just a historical fact.’

‘But,’ Haywood added, ‘they saved a lot more people than they killed.’

But that was not the end of the event. Wilson writes:

In closing the discussion, Rufo credited speakers with raising ‘some provocative points on all sides, some thoughtful points on all sides,’ and told listeners: ‘I think there is room for engaging the dissident right and the establishment right. I think we need to have a bridge between the two and engage in thoughtful dialogue.’

Here we have Pinochet and Franco, praised as the model for America’s far-right, should that be necessary in order to cast out the political filth of the far-left from America’s golden shores. Killing unjustly is allowed as long as it is for a good cause – in this case, for destroying the power of the left. Yes, we’ve heard this before from the right all through history, from Machiavelli to Hitler. We’ve heard a similar sentiment from Thomas Jefferson that the far-right loves to quote to justify their violence: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.’ But it doesn’t make sense when it’s the tyrants refreshing themselves in the blood of patriots, especially critical patriots – which is the case with Haywood and Rufo (see my essay on critical patriotism). Haywood’s Machiavellian wet dream fantasy – that people must occasionally be cruel, even evil, to accomplish their means – is not surprising coming from the right. But Haywood makes it seem like it’s just another political talking point. He is, of course, saying out loud what others on the right are thinking. I am surprised Haywood didn’t offer Hitler as another example, but it’s likely that he was thinking of it. Perhaps he needs to read the holocaust testimonies by Élie Wiesel or Primo Levi to remind him of what happens when you allow yourself to be seduced into the thrall of fascist demagoguery – it poisons the mind, which accounts for the iniquitous, nefarious, and degenerate ideas overpopulating the brainpans of the far-right in these apocalyptic times.

I can hear the whataboutism rising up about now.

Yes, there were far-left demagogues responsible for millions of deaths through murder, orchestrated famines, and other horrific means – Stalin is the first that comes to mind, and there were others. Marxist humanists and Christian socialists have always been staunch critics of Stalin and the Eastern Bloc police states. But setting up torture centres in stadiums where thousands could be ‘disappeared’ with impunity is anathema to today’s critical theorists, critical race theorists, and critical pedagogues, who have become the targets of Haywood and Rufo’s psychotic ire, apparently in stark contrast to the obvious appeal of such a scenario to Rufo and Haywood themselves, whose thinking clings to the fascist imaginary like gum to the sole of a jackboot goose-stepping to ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied.’

Francoist repression was responsible for the deaths of between 30,000 and 50,000 people. Chile’s infamous fascist dictator, whom Haywood and Rufo also champion as a model of American leadership, tortured and murdered thousands of men and women of the left. The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture revealed that the Pinochet regime detained 1,132 minors under the age of 18. Of these, 88 were under 13 and 102 were arrested along with their parents – or were born in prison. Some 307 children under the age of 18 were brutally murdered during that period, according to human rights groups’ reviews of documentation from the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So, this is the type of leadership style approved by Rufo and Haywood, a style that just might embody the kind of ‘necessary evil’ to obtain victory in the quest to purify the country of woke-ism.

Evil in the service of destroying the left has always been considered throughout history to be a practical tool of purification, one to be exercised with relish by far-right extremists like Rufo and Haywood, who apparently would not flinch when it comes to torture and murder. It is interesting to read the comments about Haywood made by Glenn Beck, no stranger himself to conservative circles. Jason Wilson reports:

The right-wing broadcaster Glenn Beck has attacked Charles Haywood, a shampoo magnate and would-be ‘warlord,’ as a ‘false prophet’ on his radio broadcast after the Guardian exposed Haywood’s sponsorship of a secretive, far-right men-only fraternal society.

Last week, Beck devoted five minutes of airtime on the Blaze – in which he read the Guardian’s article aloud and interspersed his own commentary – to criticising Haywood and Haywood’s Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR).

Beck told his listeners that the Guardian’s revelations about the shadowy group were ‘extraordinarily disturbing,’ adding: ‘All of the people that are involved in this, I will make it a personal mission to expose them and what they are doing to this country.’

Beck went on to compare Haywood to the far-right Russian political theorist Alexander Dugin and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt before saying Haywood’s ideology was ‘infiltrating everything. And I am aware of many of the places that it has infiltrated.’

Coming from someone with Beck’s long pedigree in far-right circles, that should tell you something. Well done, Glenn.

In 1937, Franco seized possession of the severed hand of the Doctor of the Catholic Faith, Saint Teresa of Avila, and kept it beside his bed until his death in 1975, the same hand that is thankfully now back in the safe keeping of the nuns of the Nuestra Señora de la Merced in Ronda, Spain, housed in a darkened, locked room, set inside a silver glove festooned in precious stones. I think this act of stark hypocrisy and purposeful sacrilege by Franco, more than anything else, symbolises the inhumanity of right-wing demagogues throughout history, including both Rufo and Haywood. Right-wing demagoguery is not just an insult to Catholics but to all decent human beings. Rufo’s mission is an affront to those killed by dictatorships not just in Portugal, or Spain or Chile, but the world over. Rufo’s congratulatory remarks on Haywood’s ‘thoughtful points’ about bloody dictatorships trigger the anguished echoes of what happened in El Salvador during the 1980s: Archbishop Oscar Romero, a fierce critic of El Salvador’s fascist regime, was gunned down while saying Mass and canonised October 14, 2018; Jesuit fathers Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Segundo Montes, Amando López, Juan Ramón Moreno, Joaquín López y López, were brutally murdered by the Atlácatl Battalion, an elite unit of the Salvadoran military created in 1980 at the US Army’s School of the Americas, located in Panama. The priests were sympathetic to liberation theology and its ‘preferential option for the poor.’

Perhaps Rufo is planning to resurrect this infamous death squad to take care of teachers who might have the temerity to teach about the horrors of slavery – teachers who refuse to tell their students that slavery was merely a means to acquire life skills for the day in which they will eventually be freed. Rufo remains among the shrillest of voices in the GOP, relishing his role as the Republic’s Master Censor, bowdlerising America’s history of oppression, sanitising the acts of racists, and now commending the idea of installing a mass-murdering fascist to the highest office of the nation. Rufo is only the latest among a long list of right-wing propagandists who enjoy being feted by the power elite. But if he doesn’t get a hold of his senses, his story could turn glaringly gothic, his memory risking entombment and abandonment in a charnel house of history’s schemers and plotters, a place, ‘O’ercovered quite with dead men’s rattling bones, / With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls’ (Romeo and Juliet, act 4, scene 1).

Rufo’s ‘highbrow brand of scaremongering’ during his criticisms of social justice advocates can be best explained by the hermeneutics of evil, which was an abiding concern of philosopher Paul Ricœur. Can you imagine a feverish and dying Rufo, who spent his entire life fighting drag queen hour, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory, furiously waving the withered hand of the great Saint at those demons who, frothing at the mouth, were fighting over who would get the chance to accompany his soul to his final destination? But it is never too late for redemption. Remember Dr. Faustus? Christopher Marlowe is always a good read.

Rufo’s avowal of evil by condoning the modelling of American leadership after Pinochet and Franco, betrays something eerily unsettling about his ontological vocation as much as his shadowy ethical symptomology, something that defies the transparency of consciousness, but can be seen in his tragic failure of human agency, in his paranoid projection and sacrificial scapegoating, in his brute, anthropological condition of willed action to do evil, in his contempt of freedom and democracy which makes witting culprits of all fascists. Rufo inhabits a world where those committed to inclusion, diversity, interculturalism, critical multiculturalism, equality, anti-racism, and human rights for marginalised communities – including 2SLGBTQ+ constituencies – must be demonised as retribution for the sin of being committed to moral-political action for justice for all. Rufo cannot stand the test of human decency demanded by democracy. His scatological consciousness and sullen discontent will not admit of a politics that does not conform to his own misanthropy and philosophical pessimism.

The following comments by Rufo could only have been written by a man at peace with the dispossession of his own humanity, a man devoid of moral honesty and integrity, an empty soul ensepulchred in a prison house of ontological disablement and moral decay:

We have successfully frozen their brand – ‘critical race theory’ – into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category…. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

That Franco stole the severed hand of Teresa of Avila, a Saint known for transforming self-centredness into other-centredness, only to accord him supernatural power, highlights the scabrous hypocrisy of a monster. His torture and executions of leftists make him no better than Pinochet. Pinochet’s wide-ranging torture itineracy included the institution of 17 torture centres, where his well-trained torturers used the ‘grill’ to send jolts of electricity to electrodes attached to various parts of a prisoner’s naked body stretched across a metal bedframe. Sometimes, a prisoner was tortured on the lower level of a metal bunk bed, while a friend or relative was simultaneously tortured on the top bunk. Women were raped with trained dogs and live rats placed inside their vaginas and forced to engage in sex acts with their fathers, brothers, or other relatives, all for the crime of being labelled a leftist. Thousands were ‘disappeared.’ Immediately after he seized power, Pinochet had his military Gestapo round up 10,000 students and political activists into Santiago’s National Stadium on September 18, 1973, where many were tortured, shot and buried in secret mass graves. The storied singer-songwriter, Victor Jara, was arrested by the Chilean military, tortured in the bowels of Santiago’s Estadio Chile, and killed. His body was found on the street of a shantytown in Santiago, riddled with 40 machine gun bullets. His songs were about love, peace, and social justice. He was a staunch supporter of socialist Salvador Allende. While imprisoned with thousands of innocent Chileans in Estadio Chile, Jara tried to strengthen the moral revolve of his fellow prisoners by singing Andean and Chilean folk songs. After singing a ‘manifesto’ composed during his second night in the stadium, his captors recognised him and removed him from the crowd, after which time they tore off his nails, smashed his hands, and ordered him to play the guitar. Here are the lines of Jara’s ‘manifesto’:

I don’t sing for love of singing
or to show off my voice
but for the statements
made by my honest guitar
for its heart is of the earth
and like the dove it goes flying …
endlessly as holy water
blessing the brave and the dying
So, my song has found a purpose
As Violet Parra would say.

Yes, my guitar is a worker
shining and smelling of spring
my guitar is not for killers
greedy for money and power
but for the people who labour
so that the future may flower.
For a song takes on a meaning
when its own heartbeat is strong
sung by a man who will die singing
truthfully singing his song.

I don’t care for adulation
or so that strangers may weep.
I sing for a far strip of country
narrow but endlessly deep.

I urge readers to listen to a recording of Jara singing this song.

Jara’s final poem, written just before his death, reads:

How hard it is to sing
when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the moment.

In Resisting Alienation, Christopher Michael Travis wrote that Jara’s poem ‘poignantly understates the effect of “Auschwitz” on artistic expression.’ In The Meaning of Human Suffering, Dr Joel Gajardo-Velasquez compares the final line of Jara’s poem to the message of the cross: that Jara was able to envision ‘the new that will be born in spite of, and probably especially because of, his personal tragedy,’ as ‘suffering without hope is death without resurrection.’

Gajardo-Velasquez clearly echoes the idea of the positive nested within the negative, found in Hegel’s negation of the negation. In this case, we are referring to the negation of oppression, of exploitation by capitalist overlords who bring unfreedom in the name of free markets, who propagate the lie that free markets translate into personal freedom, that an unregulated market economy liberates working people from the despotism of bureaucracies. We take a stand in which the idea – I am NOT wage labour – hears itself speak: When we recognise that our labour power is our human potential for the creative alteration of the natural world. Reflecting upon Raya Dunayevskaya’s comments on Hegel’s negation of the negation, process philosopher Anne Fairchild Pomeroy writes, in an article in the journal Cultural Logic (2004), that the first negation, ‘I am NOT wage labour’ (note the emphasis on the ‘not’) is a self-determination that is not yet fully self-conscious in the individual and is consequently directionless. But when the revolutionary ‘truly hears herself denying her status as capitalist labour and, for the first time, understands its meaning’, she has ‘a recognition of the positive content of the original negation. By hearing her own self-determination in the ‘no’ to capitalism, the revolutionary recognises herself as the subject of revolution: the one who can say no – the mediator, the free subject of the movement itself.’ The first negation, ‘I am NOT wage labour, therefore, is followed by the self-reflexive ‘I AM not wage labour’ (with the emphasis on the ‘am.’

So, did Pinochet save people from recognising their own self-determination, their ‘I AM not wage labour’ moment, setting themselves on a path to freedom from capitalist exploitation? From seeking a socialist alternative to capital’s law of value? I suppose his savage coup saved right-wing Chileans from a government led by a respected socialist who is remembered today as a national hero, Salvador Allende. Because the right is intrepidly ignorant when it comes to socialism.

On September 11, 1973, the democratically elected government led by President Salvador Allende in Chile was overthrown in a military coup d’état engineered by the CIA. Military jets bombed La Moneda presidential palace. Just before the capture of La Moneda by Pinochet’s soldiers, amidst the sound of gunfire and explosions, Allende gave his famous farewell speech to Chileans on live radio, describing his deep love for Chile and his faith that the country would prevail in spite of the impending fascist tyranny. To prevent himself from being used as a propaganda tool by the traitorous coup plotters, he took his own life. Fortunately, the US military did not join the MAGA (Make America Great Again) insurrectionists of Jan 6, much to the dismay of America’s far-right. Many find the idea that a full fascist takeover of the US is impossible. But we never imagined a Donald Trump could be elected president, did we?

Allende came to power by the peaceful means of a democratic election. Pinochet was not content in lying that the election was stolen, unlike some presidents we know. He decided to go the full monty. And that is exactly what Haywood and Rufo are calling for. Allende’s victory was the first example in history of a socialist/Marxist movement winning a democratic election against strong right-wing opposition. The possibility of a democratic path to socialism threw the anti-communist establishment in the US into a fit of panic because Chile became a potential (and non-violent) example for other countries to follow in order to achieve a democratic socialist state. This would make socialism more viable in the eyes of the world. Allende was militant but not by any means an extremist. He was committed to a democratic, constitutional process and the rule of law. Nevertheless, he was a threat that had to be eliminated.

Today, Allende’s heroism is a source of pride for the Chilean population – a man who died for his beliefs while Pinochet is a name that will forever be held in the greatest contempt (that Margaret Thatcher sent Pinochet the finest scotch during the former dictator’s UK house arrest tells you something about Thatcher that we probably already know. (It’s hard to forget the images of Londoners’ joyous celebrations on the day that Thatcher died.) I recall the evening, some decades ago, when I was seated beside economist Arnold Harberger, one of the ‘Chicago Boys,’ at a banquet at the Argentine Consulate in Los Angeles. Luckily, I wasn’t removed for a lack of decorum after the genial Professor Harberger made a comment that stuck in my craw. Harberger and Milton Friedman, as we know, helped restructure the Chilean economy, which resulted in the growth of conglomerates, generated runaway inflation, reduced real wages and created a program of agrarian counter-reform that exploited the peasantry and rural labourers ‘even more brutally than the urban population’ (see Andre Gunder Frank). As for conservative economists, I much prefer those who at least will agree to an earnest dialogue about issues, especially those who are willing to venture beyond the limits of their own profession into areas such as theology. (For those who are interested, see my debate with Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith.) Yes, we can learn to dialogue with and respect those with whom we disagree.

Rufo’s scruple-ridden attempt to achieve notoriety on the right by adhering to proscriptions and precepts on the strength of a brawny irreverence and pretence to intellectual astuteness doomed him to misrecognise the gaping limitations of his moral vista. Hence, his academic acumen is tragically reflected in his byzantine attempts to bring Florida’s New College in line with Governor DeSantis’s anti-woke delirium. Rufo appears to want to return to the romanticised roots of the North American College, before woke-a-mania took over, perhaps even as far back as the 1920s, when North American universities fuelled the rise of eugenics, and allowed eugenics to continue to be taught in more subtle or covert ways well after the Holocaust. Rufo seeks to ‘rebalance’ the ratio of male and female students. Too many female students caused ‘cultural problems.’ Oh, yes, the gender studies department has been dissolved, and a third of the faculty have left the school. To counteract ‘the feminisation of higher education,’ males now occupy 54% of the incoming class, thanks to the massive recruitment of student-athletes. Why? Because the more males, the more conservatives, according to Rufo. These moves apparently coincide seamlessly with Rufo’s expressed desire to bring back ‘classical liberal ideals’ to educational institutions. How Rufo’s alleged commitment to classical liberal ideals squares with his seeming acceptance of an American fascist dictator along the lines of Franco, Pinochet and Salazar is quite a feat of academic legerdemain.

Rufo’s role in New College seems fitting. One of the prime sites for the reproduction of eugenicist logic was, and is, the North American university, where today such institutions can be found to ‘work to suspend opportunities for disabled people or use forms of disablement to suspend opportunities and privileges for marginalised groups.’ Timothy Dolmage writes:

These eugenic practices, and, in fact, eugenics itself, can be seen as the invention of the North American university, which in turn was also built upon the exploitation of people with disabilities. Colleges and universities were colonial projects – places for settlers to continue the work of forcibly changing their landscapes and these landscapes’ inhabitants, but also as sites of a sort of internalised imperialism, because universities were mainly where North Americans went to Europeanise. Eugenics was not just implicated in these moves but was, in many ways, the perfect ideological vehicle for the settler colonialism of higher education. More simply, academia became the place where North Americans could most efficiently destroy what and who came before European settlement. Eugenics – the idea that certain bodies were biologically inferior – was rhetorical fuel for this very efficient destruction.

It is clear which kinds of bodies Rufo wants to inhabit his university – and I am not talking only about gender, but political ideology. That is why decent, caring professors and students are leaving New College in droves and heading for the hills in order to escape the ideological tentacles of pure, ripe fascism. And if Rufo doesn’t have a change of heart (for it is as much a matter of the heart as it is of ideology), those tentacles could very easily become enjoined with Scylla and her 12 feet and six heads on long slithering necks, with each head mounted by a triple row of sharklike teeth, and her loins girdled by howling, savage dogs. That is what happens when the sulfuric seeds of fascism are watered by the boiling tears of far-right rage. And no theft of a relic from the body of St. Teresa of Avila will send those demons set loose by fascist demagogues back to hell. That remains our earthly burden.

I remember sitting a few seats away from the great revolutionary priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua in 2004. Father Cardenal was a liberation theologian (who was admonished by Pope John Paul II in 1983 on a Managua airport tarmac for refusing to resign as Minister of Culture: ‘Usted tiene que arreglar sus asuntos con la Iglesia’ In 1984, Pope John Paul II suspended Cardenal a divinis because of Cardenal’s refusal to leave his political office, but thankfully it was lifted by Pope Francis in 2019). Father Cardenal was the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands. He is considered one of the great Latin American poets. Father Cardenal and I had been invited to be part of the audience for President Hugo Chavez’s Sunday television show, ‘Aló, Presidente.’ The location for the show was always kept secret until the last moment to deter assassination attempts on President Chavez. The Bolivarian revolution was a powerful advancement for socialism in a country that had been ravaged by capitalist corruption and violence. It was flawed, as it depended too much on petrocurrency. But it nevertheless was a beacon of light for socialism, cut short by Chavez’s untimely death, and it has never been the same since. Father Cardenal wrote in El Nuevo Diario:

Pero para mí, su revolución Bolivariana es como que Bolívar hubiera vuelto a Venezuela, de donde lo expulsó la oligarquía. Para mí se vive una auténtica revolución, y no es solamente un líder carismático, sino son millones de Venezolanos que hay detrás. Es una revolución distinta de todas las otras, como son distintas todas las revoluciones.

Tal vez lo más popular que tiene Chávez es su programa ‘Aló, Presidente’ de los domingos en la televisión, en el que está recibiendo llamadas telefónicas de todo Venezuela y departiendo con su pueblo por 5, 6 y 7 horas. Durante esas horas se paraliza casi todo Venezuela.

Chavez spoke a lot about Christ and was inspired by the Bible. I remember when, as part of his Mission Sucre social program, he threw out the oil oligarchs from a magnificent building, and transformed it into the Bolivarian University, where I was privileged to lecture on occasion. The university is open to all, regardless of academic qualifications or even nationality. In some of my classes, the caretakers would join in. There are hundreds of satellite classrooms throughout Venezuela. Perhaps Mr Rufo will learn something about colleges from the history of UBV.

Peter McLaren and Ernesto Cardenal

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Full Citation Information:
McLaren, P. (2023). Mr Rufo’s Renegades and the Hermeneutics of Evil: Planting the Seeds of American Fascism. PESA Agora. https://pesaagora.com/columns/mr-rufos-renegades-and-the-hermeneutics-of-evil/

Peter McLaren

Peter McLaren is Emeritus Professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. From 2013-2023 he served as Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, Co-Director and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice, The Paulo Freire Democratic Project, Attallah College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, USA.