To deepen our understanding of the psychology of the xenophobe, we can turn to a fascinating document published recently. It is a commentary in City Journal by Christopher F. Rufo called “The Hollow Kingdom: A dispatch from London on the brink of chaos.” Rufo is the architect of the right-wing moral panic over “Critical Race Theory,” and I have previously interviewed him and co-written a review of his book America's Cultural Revolution. In that review, Matt McManus and I noted that Rufo’s book was uncommonly well-researched for a right-wing screed, although it lacked an argument. 

Rufo’s new article is not well-researched, containing zero sources. Nevertheless it has much to teach us. “The Hollow Kingdom,” based on a trip Rufo made to London, is a short argument that “mass immigration” is threatening to destroy British civilization, and has already made Britain a hollow shell of its former self. Rufo takes up the usual right-wing posture that those who refuse to acknowledge this are simply in wilful denial of obvious facts, preferring politically correct wishful thinking to a hard-headed acknowledgment of the incompatibility of nonwhite, especially Muslim, migrant populations with British civilization. 

Let’s take a look at a portion of Rufo’s argument: 

The city’s transformation, which I had followed only abstractly in the newspapers, has prompted a visceral shock… Everyone knows what the hell happened—mass immigration—but no one is allowed to speak about it…The Muslim population of London has nearly doubled, and migrants from South Asia and Africa have entrenched themselves throughout the city… What I’ve observed in the city this week has amazed me. Women’s eyes peering through the slit of black niqabs. A procession of sub-Saharan Africans traversing Westminster Bridge, waving the flags of their homelands and demanding reparations. Street corners that could be confused for Peshawar or Islamabad. Districts in which one could pass an entire day with barely a glimpse of an Englishman…These are facts. There is nothing inherently racist or antiracist about them. The question is one of perspective. England’s progressives would have one believe that these snapshots represent the triumph of diversity. But this position appears increasingly untenable. For good reason. England, unlike the United States, does not have a long history of assimilating others. And many of the country’s migrants—in particular, the large Muslim population—are among the most difficult populations to integrate… The history of mass migration in Britain is a history of civil tension, punctuated by violence: riots, terrorism, murder, rape…The truth is that, even if we believe in the principle that all men are created equal, this does not mean that all cultures are equal or interchangeable—far from it. The structure of a civilization is a delicate thing. Changing its citizens will, over time, change its form… This process is underway in London. The buildings, avenues, and palaces look the same as before; there is still a parliament, a king, and the pound. But the central city feels hollowed out. The old connection between citizen and nation has been altered. The old bonds of culture have been frayed… England without the Englishman would no longer be England. The form—parliamentary democracy, economic growth, liberal culture—might hold for a time, but eventually, it would give way, too…. To engage in violence is not the answer. But neither is the answer to pretend that this conflict, or this re-composition, does not exist. Sooner or later, Britain will have to answer some hard questions. Reality has a way of breaking through. 

Let’s make a few observations. First, note the words I have bolded. Rufo “feels” that London has been hollowed out, that while its buildings may look the same, something is wrong in a “viscerally” shocking way. What is so shocking to Rufo? He doesn’t disguise it. It’s the presence of non-white people. That there are now “districts in which one could pass an entire day with barely a glimpse of an Englishman,” Rufo’s assumption apparently being that you can tell who is English by looking, because non-white people aren’t English. (Incidentally, the English themselves overwhelmingly disagree with this, with only 10 percent saying that “ethnicity is an important determining factor in being English” in a recent survey.) There are women in niqabs. There are “sub-Saharan Africans” who even have the gall to demand reparations for crimes committed against their people by Britain. There are “Street corners that could be confused for Peshawar or Islamabad.” In other words, there are Pakistanis (or people Rufo assumes to be Pakistanis, many of whom might well have been living in Britain for several generations). What they are doing that makes the streetcorner more like Islamabad or Peshawar (selling Pakistani food?) goes unspecified. 

What is the actual evidence that the people Rufo is talking about are “difficult to integrate”? He doesn’t provide any. The fact that there are women in niqabs appears to be evidence ipso facto that there is a problem. As is common, Rufo makes statements about Muslims that would never be made publicly about Jews. If someone pointed to the presence of yarmulkes and sidelocks in New York City as proof the local culture was being “hollowed out,” the bigotry of the claim would be obvious. Rufo says that progressives believe that all cultures are interchangeable, that it doesn’t matter whether Britain is populated in large part by Christians or Muslims. But what is the evidence against this proposition? What is the evidence that London going from majority-white to majority-nonwhite has “hollowed out” London as a city? What is the cultural incompatibility specifically? The fact that many of these new Britons don’t eat beans on toast and mushy peas? Why does it matter that London’s mayor is Sadiq Khan rather than Boris Johnson? Rufo’s evidence appears to be circular and racist: the proof is that the city feels different, and it feels different because of all the nonwhite people. But how are they actually undermining British institutions and civilization? Rufo doesn’t say, because for people like him, the proof that nonwhite immigrants are a problem is the reaction of white people to their presence. 

Recently, there were far-right riots in Britain after a Welsh teenager born to Rwandan parents fatally stabbed three little girls at a Taylor Swift themed dance class. For Rufo, “riots” are part of the evidence that multiculturalism isn’t working, meaning that if racists react badly to the presence of immigrants, that is proof that immigrants aren’t being “assimilated,” even if the immigrants themselves have done nothing wrong. Rufo wisely doesn’t argue that the gruesome stabbing incident represents some typical behavior of the children of immigrants, since we know this is false, and plenty of Britain’s most horrific crimes have been committed by those Rufo would regard as quintessentially “English,” from Jack the Ripper to Fred and Rose West. But instead of pointing out that fear of immigrants has no rational basis, Rufo reveals that he, too, is fundamentally a xenophobe, someone who thinks the presence of foreigners is, in and of itself, something terrible and damaging, regardless of whether there is any actual evidence it is doing harm. 

A famous philosopher once said: “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Right-wingers love to repeat this mantra, since it feels good to be Logic Guy cutting through naive progressive dogmas. But we can see in Rufo’s text the extent to which reactionary politics are themselves based on pure emotion and totally fallacious reasoning. What, precisely, is the problem nonwhite people in Britain are causing? How are they eroding “parliamentary democracy, economic growth, liberal culture”? (We could add “How is it that ‘no one is allowed to speak about it’ given that plenty of people seem to be speaking about it both in Britain and the U.S.?” As usual, reactionaries are pretty loud for being so “silenced.”) No answers are offered. I am reminded here of another entry in the “dystopian multiracial Britain” genre of conservative travel-writing, Andy Ngo’s 2018 visit to “Islamic Britain,” in which he, like Rufo, failed to speak to the people he was writing about and ended up mistakenly concluding that “no alcohol” zones were an example of creeping Sharia law rather than an effort to curtail British yobs.

Rufo has nothing. We see here just how pitiful the logical case against immigration is. He barely attempts to make one. Instead, he hopes the reader will share his vibes. This is how right-wing panics are generated. You do not interview or engage with the people you’re discussing. (Just as Abigail Shrier avoided interviewing trans kids for her book on them.) You conjure a bogeyman, tell stories about imminent civilizational collapse, and excuse yourself from the responsibility of providing any evidence that this collapse is in fact occurring, beyond subjective sensations. We should study Rufo’s short article, which provides a useful lesson in how bigoted propaganda is constructed.