Christopher Rufo

Rufo in 2022 from a video interview with Reason TV

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“”"If conservatives want to protect the American way of life, they must be willing to lay siege to the institutions, and reorient them according to their own values. Whatever the odds, it’s never too late for counterrevolution in our time."

—Christopher Rufo

Christopher Ferguson Rufo (1984–) is an American far-right activist. Rufo is an anti-LGBTQ culture warrior, a racist anti-"woke" and anti-DEI crusader, a professional bullshit artist, and senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute. He is also an intelligent design advocate and former director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. He has falsely claimed to have a degree from Harvard University, when he has only a degree from the open-enrollment Harvard Extension School.

Early activity

Rufo (left) and Ochwat (right) on location in 2014.

Documentary career

Christopher Ferguson Rufo was born to Italian immigrants on August 26, 1984 in Sacramento, California, where he was raised. He received a degree in foreign service from Georgetown University in 2006. For the next decade he travelled and worked as a documentary filmmaker. In 2008, he and his childhood friend, Keith Ochwat, released Roughing It: Mongolia, a half-hour travelogue about the pair's time in Mongolia. This was followed by Diamond in the Dunes in 2009, a documentary focused on a mixed Uyghur-Han Chinese baseball team in Xinjiang, China.

Rightward shift and think thinks

Rufo and Ochwat began work on a PBS documentary about poverty and urban decay called America Lost in late 2014. One of the film's interviewees remembered Ochwat as "a little libertarian, but well-intentioned," while Rufo was reportedly "affable and not overtly political." However, it was during this period that Rufo's beliefs took a hard right turn. He became convinced that poverty is caused by "social, familial, even psychological" factors and cannot be solved by public policy.

Rufo quickly forged connections with conservative think tanks. He was made a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute alongside James O'Keefe in 2017. By 2018, he had joined the pro-creationist Discovery Institute as a research fellow, writing a "flurry of essays" on Seattle's homelessness crisis. He continued to focus on poverty and homelessness as a fellow of the Heritage Foundation.

Rufo and Ochwat co-founded the Documentary Foundation in 2015 with the aim of making "character-driven social commentary films." While this organization is registered as a non-profit, the pair have boasted about making $1.5 million on their third doc, 2011's Age of Champions, which focused on elderly athletes. This lucrative scheme included selling DVDs to universities for $250USD a pop. A report by The Intercept in 2021 revealed that the Documentary Foundation "received millions of dollars" in donations following Rufo's rise to fame (including "hundreds of thousands" from dark money sources). According to the article, "Rufo's salary and donations to the National Progress Alliance comprised the overwhelming majority of the Documentary Foundation's $1.3 million in spending in 2021." The National Progress Alliance is another right-wing lobby group with the stated goal of fighting "far-left ideological takeover" while supporting "free speech and open inquiry." Rufo told The Intercept that he "wound down operations for the Documentary Foundation" in 2021. The organization was "administratively dissolved" in February 2023.

Seattle City Council and family

In November 2018, Rufo announced he was dropping out of a bid for Seattle's City Council, citing an alleged campaign of "ongoing harassment against his family." Rufo told The Stranger's Katie Herzog that "activists" had made "vile racist attacks against [his] wife, attempted to get her fired from Microsoft, and threatened sexual violence." Rufo posted a statement addressing the "rumors," in which his Thai-born wife, Suphatra, revealed she "came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant in the late 1980s." She explained that her mother brought her to the U.S. to "escape abuse and human trafficking" and recounted several experiences with racism in elementary school and college. When pressed for evidence of harassment, Rufo pointed to "several dozen posts" on social media, including one calling him an "absolute fascist". Another post – seemingly the basis for the "sexual violence" threat claim – told his wife to "get f*cking bent" (asterisk included). Herzog concluded that the "hostile posts" had come from "a small number of local residents" concerned over Rufo's right-wing views and "stance on homelessness." Fellow Stranger reporter Rich Smith got Rufo to admit that the campaign amounted to "10-20 people."

In September 2024, journalists Lauren Windsor and Steven Monacelli linked the e-mail Rufo used to register for the 2018 Seattle election to an Ashley Madison account. The company – a dating site for people seeking extramarital affairs – suffered a massive data breach in 2015. Rufo called the claim "complete bullshit" and stated he has "never used" Ashley Madison. He posted screenshots of negative results on two data breach check websites as evidence. However, one of the sites, Have I Been Pwned?, excludes the Ashley Madison breach from searches due to privacy concerns. A software developer examined the code of the second site and found it intentionally returns negative results for everyone except Josh Duggar. Rufo seemingly only had a problem with Windsor airing his dirty laundary. After implying an obviously fake OnlyFans account might belong to her, he threatened her with legal action for "false and defamatory posts," prompting her to delete the tweets in question. Monacelli pointed out that the Ashley Madison account's location was listed as Topanga, California, where Rufo has indicated he lived in 2014. In simple terms, Rufo lived in Topanga, California one year before the 2015 Ashley Madison breach exposed an account registered with his e-mail by someone in Topanga, California. Through his attorney, Rufo stated that he "was single and in his twenties in 2014, met his wife in 2015, married her in 2016, and legally adopted [her] son." The adoption disclosure was prompted by confusion over a 2018 statement by Rufo that he had an "8-year-old son." As of 2024, the couple have had two more children, and are expecting a fourth.

Anti-public education activities

See the main article on this topic: public education

Rufo is obsessed with the idea that colleges have been taken over by the radical left, and in particular is ticked by university diversity efforts. Rufo's obsession is so strong, he believes that universities must be forcefully changed by a "counterrevolution". In an article for City Journal, he pleaded for the next conservative federal government to punish universities that "enforce left-wing orthodoxy", and admitted that such a plan could be described as "right-wing Leninism".

Rufo has expressed admiration for Viktor Orbán's authoritarian government in Hungary. In particular, Rufo seems to desire a similar path that Orbán took in transforming the country's university system into political propaganda mills. Rufo's authoritarian leanings also extend to historical American politics. The same article City Journal article that talked about a "counterrevolution" also featured open admiration, and calls for the return of, the thuggery of Richard Nixon. (Rufo particularly seemed impressed with Nixon's thuggery against Black New Left organizations like the Black Panthers.) In addition, Rufo hand-waved away the illegalities and civil rights violations committed by J. Edgar Hoover.

Destroying New College of Florida

In early 2023, Ron DeSantis appointed Rufo to the board of New College of Florida as part of an effort by DeSantis to replace the board of the small college with conservative firebrands and DeSantis-aligned stooges, remaking it in the model of the private conservative Christian Hillsdale College. Under Rufo's direction, professors have been terminated merely for having left-wing political views and being publicly critical of the DeSantis board takeover, what basically amounts to thoughtcrime.

Before Rufo and DeSantis took over, roughly two-thirds of New College's students were women, a situation that seemed to trouble Rufo. ("This is a wildly out-of-balance student population, and it caused all sorts of cultural problems.") Rufo claimed that having so many more women then men at New College turned it into "what many have called a social justice ghetto." True to this misogynistic outlook, Rufo boasted about the college "rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory" under the DeSantis administration.

The result was a predictable brain drain from New College: in August 18 2023, it was reported that 38 of the 90 full time faculty members resigned. Similarly, 88 of the 697 students took advantage of one transfer deal alone, offered by Hampshire College. New College tried to compensate for the brain drain by heavily focusing on recruiting student-athletes, at the cost of its previous highly-ranked academic reputation. This shift in focus was reflected by one of the new degrees offered by New College by the DeSantis administration: sports psychology.

Battling Harvard University

In December 2023, Rufo continued his theme of attacking education institutions by focusing on ousting the president of Harvard University.

Beginning in October 2023, Harvard (along with several other universities) was battling with the hedge fund billionaire investor and college donor Bill Ackman. Ackman was very concerned (freedom of speech be damned) with possible antisemitism within campus protests of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, and directed ire at school boards that supposedly weren't combating his perceived antisemitism enough. Such was the fervor of his crusade, at one point, he demanded that schools reveal the names of any student blaming Israel for the Hamas attacks. With Harvard in particular, Ackman was also personally ticked that the university had not heeded his advice on a variety of topics. Due to these grievances, Ackman publically called for the university president at the time, Claudine Gay, to resign.

When that effort failed, Ackman teamed up with Rufo to push another way to oust Gay: accusations of plagiarism. On December 10 2023, in his Substack, Rufo published an article accusing Gay of plagiarizing in sections of her Ph.D. thesis. Rufo then worked diligently to promote the story in order for it to eventually appear in mainstream media. Like the critical race theory manufactroversy, the campaign against Gay was well coordinated and highly organized.

While what Rufo pointed out was indeed plagiarism, many in academia found the allegations to be relatively trivial. Even one of the plagiarized authors, the political science professor David Canon, declared that he wasn't concerned at all about the passages Gay had plagiarized from him. ("This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.") Of those people whom Gay plagiariazed, there appeared to be only one person who found it a serious offense, PragerU's Carol M. Swain, who was plagiarized at time when she was an early career academic; other plagiarized academics were either mid-to-late career or did not find the misappropriation particularly serious. Nonetheless, Rufo and Ackman's efforts to oust Gay was successful; Gay resigned as Harvard president on January 2 2024.

Gay was the first Black president of Harvard. Therefore, many civil rights organizations and leaders (ranging from Al Sharpton to the NAACP) detected strong whiffs of racism in the controversy. Rufo certainly helped fuel this impression when he penned a long screed in City Journal that essentially accused Gay's career of completely being a product of reverse racism.

Ironically, the news website Business Insider found on January 4 2024 that Ackman's wife (Neri Oxman) had also committed similar acts of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation. While Oxman admitted to the plagiarism and apologized for the problematic passages, Ackman naturally got extremely pissed and threatened to sue Business Insider.

Views and activism related to race

Critical race theory panic

The manufactroversy of critical race theory was spearheaded by Rufo. Over the course of 2020, the former documentary filmmaker turned conservative activist gathered curricula and documents from anti-bias training sessions in the city of Seattle. From these, he postulated (using cherry picking, according to critics) that the anti-racism seminars did not just merely represent a progressive view on race, but that they were purportedly expressions of a distinct ideology — critical race theory — with purported radical Marxist roots.ny This despite Rufo not completely understanding (or even caring to understand) the actual intellectual underpinnings behind critical race theory. Rufo initially reported his findings on both his Substack and the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Rufo's "theory" later gained huge amounts of currency in conservative politics after Rufo was featured on Tucker Carlson's show.

Promoting racialist pseudoscience

In order to hype up the Claudine Gay controversy at Harvard, Rufo gave an interview in City Journal to an "outsider" academic named Jonatan Pallesen. Pallesen accused Gay of committing supposed data errors in her Ph.D. thesis. Pallesen also whined that in academia, "woke claims tend to find easier acceptance", whereas "non-woke white male researchers, such as Bo Winegard, do meticulous research and are fired."

Unmentioned in the interview was Pallesen's own pseudo-academic work, which included some racialism bullshit. Pallesen is one of four authors (together with other racialism advocates like Curtis S. Dunkel, Emil Kirkegaard and Michael A. Woodley of Menie) of a 2019 paper called, "Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutheran". This paper attempted to prove that "the high average cognitive ability of Jews may have been shaped, in part, by polygenic selection acting on this population over the course of several millennia." To accomplish this, the paper frequently cited Kevin MacDonald, a retired psychology academic well known for pushing antisemitic racialism.

Actual academics found the paper ridiculous, with obvious correlation does not imply causation logical fallacies. Actual academics also noted that the Jewish "high intelligence" stereotype fit into conspiracy theories often pushed by white supremacists.

In previous City Journal articles, Rufo had been critical of white racialists, including websites such as VDARE. It is unknown whether Rufo was sloppy in interviewing Pallesen or whether his previous criticisms of white racialists were not genuine.

Perhaps more strongly demonstrating the later, on 31 January 2024 The Guardian reported that Rufo (on his Substack) recommended a Substack publication called Aporia. Aporia self-styled itself as "the world's only sociobiology magazine", which masked its actual purpose: promoting racialists and their scientific racism viewpoints. Aporia was a re-brand of a previous personal newsletter by a hereditarian named Matthew Archer. At the time of the Guardian report, Bo Winegard was executive editor; other editors include racialists like Noah Carl. To underscore the degree that this "sociobiology magazine" should not be taken seriously at all, one article advanced arguments in part by using discredited data from the early 20th century eugenics promoter Charles Davenport.

Aporia also produced a podcast, which Rufo had appeared in on August 2023. The podcast was likewise known for promoting racialists. For instance, in January 2024, the podcast hosted a debate between The Bell Curve author Charles Murray and the hereditarian Helmuth Nyborg. In the episode published immediately after the Rufo podcast, Winegard interviewed the white supremacist "human biodiversity" advocate Steve Sailer.

Promoting racist conspiracy theories

In September 2024, Rufo offered a "$5,000 bounty" for evidence supporting the cat-eating Haitians hoax after Donald Trump's referenced it during his debate with Kamala Harris.

Also in September 2024, Rufo himself posted (in the best tradition of conspiracy theorists) a very low quality video, originally posted to social media in August 2023, of animal carcasses on a grill. The man in the video, as well as Rufo himself, alleged that the animal carcasses looked like cats; in addition, Rufo claimed to have interviewed neighbors who alleged that the grill belonged to African-American immigrants. To much of social media not caught up in the conspiracy theory however, the animal carcasses clearly did not look like cats, and looked far more like chickens.