Christopher Rufo

Christopher Ferguson Rufo (born August 26, 1984) is an American conservative activist, New College of Florida board member, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

He is an opponent of critical race theory, which he says "has pervaded every aspect of the federal government" and poses "an existential threat to the United States".

He is a former documentary filmmaker and former fellow at the Discovery Institute, the Claremont Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.

Rufo has been involved in Republican efforts to restrict critical race theory instruction or seminars.

Rufo was born on August 26, 1984.

He was raised in Sacramento, California.

His father was born in San Donato Val di Comino, Italy, and his mother is of Scottish ancestry.

He graduated from the local Rio Americano High School in 2002.

Rufo received a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 2006.

In 2022, he earned a Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies in the field of Government from Harvard Extension School.

Rufo was a visiting fellow for domestic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation and a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute.

Later, he was a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Christian think tank known for its opposition to the theory of evolution and advocacy for intelligent design to be taught in public schools.

He was a documentary filmmaker in his twenties and early thirties, with overseas projects such as Roughing It: Mongolia, and a film about baseball in Xinjiang called Diamond in the Dunes.

From 2016 through 2019, Rufo's investigation into poverty in cities that had declined dramatically following periods of prosperityYoungstown, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; and Stockton, Californialeft him with the view that poverty stemmed from "social, familial, even psychological [dynamics]" and could not be solved by public policy.

Rufo said that the 2016 United States presidential election challenged ineffective establishment responses to poverty and drew attention to these cities.

In 2017, Rufo was one of 30 plaintiffs in a lawsuit that successfully prevented Seattle from imposing a 2.25% income tax on sums above $250,000 a year for individuals and over $500,000 for couples.

In 2018, he briefly attempted a run for the city council.

In 2021, Rufo spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando.

In April 2022, Rufo was reported to have 2,500 paid subscribers to his newsletter.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described Rufo as a "far-right propagandist".

Rufo was one of several conservative education activists appointed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to the board of trustees of New College of Florida in January 2023.

Rufo hosted a social media discussion in which he expressed an interest in the ideas of far-right businessman Charles Haywood.

In discussion, Haywood expressed a desire to form strategic alliances with white nationalists and authoritarian dictators in order to "destroy the left", citing Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco as examples of the latter.

In his 2018 Discovery Institute-funded policy paper "Seattle Under Siege: How Seattle's Homelessness Policy Perpetuates the Crisis and How We Can Fix It," Rufo wrote that four groups"socialist intellectuals", "compassion brigades", the "homeless-industrial complex", and the "addiction evangelists" had successfully framed the debate on homelessness and diverted funding to their projects, with the "compassion brigade" calling for social justice using terms such as "compassion, empathy, bias, inequality, root causes, systemic racism."

Rufo has opposed what he calls critical race theory in governmental and other publicly-funded institutions, and has characterized it as a kind of "cult indoctrination".

Rufo's views on race and poverty became more conservative while directing America Lost, a 2019 documentary coproduced by PBS and WNET for the series "Chasing the Dream: Poverty and Opportunity in America".

He described his strategy to oppose critical race theory as using the term to "put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category" and "to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory. Rufo's appearances with Tucker Carlson on Fox News reportedly influenced President Donald Trump to issue an executive order in 2020 banning some topics from diversity training for the government and contractors; the order was rescinded by President Joe Biden in 2021.

Rufo opposes teachers discussing LGBTQ issues in schools.

He has contended that public schools are often "hunting grounds for sexual predators."

He has said that "to get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust."

Rufo contended in 2020 that "critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government".

Critical race theory considers the idea that racism is systemic, in that laws, policies, regulations, and even court decisions create and continue historical racial prejudices in the United States.

Rufo described his strategy to oppose critical race theory as intentionally using the term to conflate various race-related ideas in order to create a negative association.

Rufo said that "[w]e will eventually turn [critical race theory] 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'."

Rufo has described intersectionality as "a hard left academic theory that reduces people to a network of racial, gender and sexual orientation identities and intersect in complex ways and determine whether you are an oppressor or oppressed".

Kimberlé Crenshaw, an influential figure in critical race theory, has said that what Rufo and Republicans "are calling critical race theory is a whole range of things, most of which no one would sign on to, and many of the things in it are simply about racism".

Through interviews with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Rufo reportedly influenced the Trump administration to issue an executive order in 2020 to prohibit federal agencies from having diversity training that addressed topics such as systemic racism, white privilege and critical race theory.

The administration described such programs as "divisive, anti-American propaganda".

The ban was revoked by President Joe Biden on his first day in office.

Divisions continued at the state level, with Republican legislators putting forward bans on critical race theory.