Christopher Rufo
Documentary filmmaker; conservative activist; Georgetown SFS 2006; Claremont Lincoln Fellow 2017; Tucker Carlson appearance September 1, 2020 that triggered EO 13950; architect of anti-CRT culture war; Manhattan Institute senior fellow; Florida education policy operative
Who He Is
Christopher Rufo is the central architect of the conservative “anti-CRT” culture war campaign — a deliberately constructed political strategy to take academic concepts about race and systemic racism, repackage them as a catchall bogeyman, and use the panic to roll back diversity programs across government, corporations, and schools. Field presents him as a case study in how the New Right translates intellectual grievance into executive action at remarkable speed.
Background
Rufo graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in 2006. Before his political emergence, he worked as a documentary filmmaker, producing films on urban poverty and homelessness that were relatively apolitical. He had affiliations with the Discovery Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Manhattan Institute, and in 2017 was named a Claremont Lincoln Fellow.
The Tucker Carlson Moment (September 1, 2020)
On September 1, 2020, Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. He told Carlson that critical race theory had become “the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy” and called on Trump to issue an executive order banning it from federal agencies.
The day after the broadcast, Rufo received a phone call from Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff. He was invited to Washington to help draft the order.
Executive Order 13950
On September 22, 2020, Trump signed Executive Order 13950: “Executive Order Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” Rufo was the primary author.
The order banned from federal agencies, contractors, and grant recipients any training involving “divisive concepts” — including, specifically, any teaching that members of a racial group are “inherently racist or oppressive” by virtue of that membership.
Field’s critique is pointed: the order banned something that was not happening. Federal diversity training was not telling employees they were inherently racist. The effect was purely chilling — creating a hotline for employees to report colleagues and supervisors, and discouraging any honest discussion of race in workplace contexts. “Instead of finding and naming an authentic problem, Rufo invented a problem and then launched a fresh attack on free speech in the name of solving it.”
EO 13950 was revoked by Biden on his first day in office. But it was a template for what would come.
The Clubhouse Meeting (March 19, 2021)
On March 19, 2021, historian David Sessions stumbled into a Clubhouse room called “Building a New Right: Red States vs. Wokeness” and took notes on what he heard. The panelists were Matthew J. Peterson, Kyle Shideler, James Poulos, David Reaboi, Christopher Rufo, Nate Fischer, and Ryan Williams — a Claremonter gathering.
Rufo’s presentation laid out the strategy openly: turn “critical race theory” into a toxic catch-all term — so toxic that it would lead to new laws in red states. The goal was to “annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans” under the CRT brand. He told listeners not to worry about backlash because claims of white supremacy and racism had “lost all meaning.” He called for “a propaganda war against public institutions.”
The other participants elaborated:
- David Reaboi: “call CRT racism, and an attack on the American founding… They have to hate it and have to have the backs of politicians who will take this stuff on… from a comms perspective, go full bore against the educational establishment.”
- Kyle Shideler: Honest discussion of equality vs. equity doesn’t motivate “the average middle American” — “this is going to be trench warfare, this is going to be a knife fight.”
Sessions’s notes document, in Field’s words, a plan to launch “a destructive and dishonest campaign against mainstream public institutions.”
The CRT Rollout
The Clubhouse strategy was executed with remarkable speed. Between January and June 2021, Republicans introduced anti-CRT bills in almost every state, passing them in over a dozen — across the South (excepting only North Carolina and Louisiana), as well as Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas, and New Hampshire. The laws were written vaguely enough to create chilling effects for teachers while leaving it clearly acceptable to teach that America was not racist.
Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast (May 2021): “The path to save the nation is very simple — it’s going to go through the school boards.”
By the July 2021 CPAC in Dallas, Trump mentioned critical race theory twice in his speech, noting: “Whoever thought [we] would be even using that term?” In summer 2021, parents’ anti-CRT frustrations merged with COVID masking and gender identity grievances, and school boards became a major political flashpoint.
The tactical choice: Rufo’s coalition deliberately focused on the 1619 Project and obscure academic abstractions rather than the actual drivers of racial discourse: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010), Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” (2014), the Black Lives Matter movement (which began in Ferguson after Michael Brown’s killing), and the birther movement Trump himself had led. Field: “It’s easier to lie about critical race theory than mass incarceration, birtherism, redlining, and excess police violence.”
America’s Cultural Revolution (2023) and Longmarcherism
Rufo’s book developed the broader ideological justification for the anti-CRT campaign into a full historical theory — Longmarcherism: the claim that radical leftists had executed a deliberate “long march through the institutions” (borrowing Herbert Marcuse’s phrase) and conquered the commanding heights of American culture. Field: “a yarn, a tall tale, a story.”
At Hillsdale in 2022, Rufo concluded: “even those of us who are temperamentally predisposed to defense must recognize that offense — laying siege to the institutions — is what is now demanded.” The goal was not to assume control of the bureaucracy, “but to smash it.”
The CRT Strategy
Rufo was explicit about his strategy — unusually candid for a political operative. He acknowledged in a 2021 tweet (widely circulated) that “critical race theory” as a political attack term was deliberately constructed: “We have successfully rebranded it… to tie it to the existing political threat. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”
Field: “If Larry Arnn is the New Right face of the baby boomers in Washington, DC, Christopher Rufo is the public face of New Right activism writ large, and a capable conduit to the Hard Right, too.”
Post-2020 Career
After EO 13950, Rufo became a leading figure in the Manhattan Institute’s culture-war project and was involved in shaping Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s education policy — including the “Stop WOKE Act” and curriculum restrictions in Florida’s public schools and universities. He also became a trustee of New College of Florida when DeSantis moved to take over that institution.
The Claudine Gay Campaign (2023–2024)
In the fall of 2023, the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel triggered campus turmoil. University presidents — Harvard’s Claudine Gay, Penn’s Liz Magill, and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth — were called before Congress by Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and questioned about antisemitism and student safety. The questioning was clearly a setup, and the three presidents walked right into it, failing to articulate university principles on free speech and student safety in a way that was not obviously rehearsed for disaster. Within weeks, Liz Magill had resigned.
Claudine Gay became the primary target. Rufo was very open about his campaign against Gay, which involved the discovery of plagiarism in her published scholarship. He posted about the allegations in coordination with others at the Washington Free Beacon, and additional evidence soon materialized. Gay resigned from the Harvard presidency on January 2, 2024.
Rufo took his victory laps. Field notes the strange reversals: conservatives who had ridiculed “woke liberal snowflakes” and campus safe spaces were suddenly deeply concerned about “student safety”; people on the left who had supported safetyism around Black students’ safety concerns reacted to Jewish students’ concerns by dismissing them. The situation exposed the hypocrisy on all sides. “It was also excruciating to watch liberal and progressive academics make excuses for Claudine Gay just because the accusations against her were made in bad faith.”
The IM-1776 Manifesto (January 4, 2024)
Two days after Gay’s resignation, on January 4, 2024, Rufo published “The New Right Activism: A Manifesto for the Counterrevolution” in IM-1776 — a Hard Right magazine. Field: the manifesto reads as “a blend of Eliade’s fascism, Vermeule and Deneen’s ‘integration from within,’ and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.”
Key claims:
- The “regime” is “an opaque and coercive set of psychological, cultural, and institutional patterns that has largely replaced the old constitutional way of life”
- Today’s status quo “requires not conservation, but reform, and even revolt”
- “Political life moves on narrative, emotion, scandal, anger, hope, and faith — on irrational, or at least subrational feelings that can be channeled, but never destroyed by reason”
- “He must conceal his radicalism in the mask of respectability”
- “Institutions are where the word becomes flesh” — a Christ-coded framing of agitprop
- “We must recruit, recapture, and replace existing leadership”
- “The chief vectors for the transmission of values — the public school, the public university, and the state — are not marketplaces at all. They are government-run monopolies… the hand that moves culture is not an ‘invisible hand,’ but an iron clad in velvet — that is, political force”
- The Right’s advantage: “the language of ends — the language of God, or, in its more contemporary form, ‘Nature and Nature’s God.’”
Field’s partial concession: Rufo is right that liberalism’s vulnerability is its discomfort with the “language of ends” — the anxiety about questions of purpose, meaning, and the good life. But Rufo and the New Right are wrong about why. “The basic theoretical confusion is as follows: The New Right mistakes academic liberalism for the real thing.” Liberalism is not neutral all the way down; it cares about happiness, liberty, and truth. It is morally pluralistic — it makes room for divergent accounts of what is good. The New Right exploits liberalism’s vulnerabilities “ruthlessly. Just like fascism does.”
Significance
Rufo’s career illustrates the New Right’s speed-to-power pipeline: a television appearance leads within 24 hours to a White House phone call, which leads within three weeks to an executive order. The entire arc — from obscure filmmaker to executive branch operator — required, in Field’s analysis, not intellectual seriousness but political entrepreneurship: the ability to name and frame a cultural grievance in terms that an executive with sweeping power could act on quickly.
Field: “If Larry Arnn is the New Right face of the baby boomers in Washington, DC, Christopher Rufo is the public face of New Right activism writ large, and a capable conduit to the Hard Right, too.” The conduit role — bridging the mainstream Claremont/NatCon world and the Hard Right — is central. Rufo congratulated Costin Alamariu (BAP) on Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy on X; he published his manifesto in the Hard Right magazine IM-1776.
Cross-References
- Claremont Institute — Lincoln Fellow 2017; Rufo’s ideological home base
- Hillsdale College — institutional ally; New College of Florida overlap
- Tucker Carlson — the television platform that launched the anti-CRT episode
- Hard Right — the broader network Rufo operates within; conduit role
- Ron DeSantis — Florida education operative; Stop WOKE Act; New College takeover
- IM-1776 — published his January 2024 manifesto
- Costin Alamariu — congratulated on Selective Breeding; Hard Right crossover
- Longmarcherism — the ideological framework of America’s Cultural Revolution
- Heritage Foundation — Project 2025; administrative state seizure dovetails with Rufo