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.

Christopher Rufo in 2022

Quotes

• Academics want to be free to push their ideology at all times, but they also want to be free of democratic oversight. I hope to reverse that. I hope that the opposite becomes true over time.
  • "Why Diversity Programs Need to Be ELIMINATED" (at 12m43s), Triggernometry, 17 September 2023.

• I have a bit more of a subtle take on the question of indoctrination: A lot of conservatives say 'Universities are indoctrinating kids to be blue-haired gender communists.' That's kind of a meme that you see everywhere, and I could understand why at first glance you might think that, but I don't think that's exactly how it works. I don't think that most professors are consciously in a cult-like manner indoctrinating their students, pushing their ideology, converting them to the cause in that kind of recruiting sense. I actually think it's something more subtle and more insidious. I think that it's just that they're not exposing students to any alternative sets of ideas.
  • "Why Diversity Programs Need to Be ELIMINATED" (at 16m4s), Triggernometry, 17 September 2023.

America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (2023)

Broadside Books. ISBN-10: 0063227533 and ISBN-13: 978-0063227538

• He understands intuitively that appeals to a new system of governance based on 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' are a pretense for establishing a political order that is hostile to his values, even if he does not yet possess the vocabulary to pierce through the shell of euphemism and describe its essence.
  • p. 27

• Learn how to 'challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs' and critique 'white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.' Teachers are then encouraged to drive their pupils to participate in 'social movements that struggle for social justice' and 'build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.' R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original co-chair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, cited in the state's official reference guide, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on a 'Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.
  • p. 28

• In pursuit of this goal, the state curriculum encouraged teachers to lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the 'In Lak Ech Affirmation,' which appealed directly to the Aztec gods. Students clapped and chanted to the deity Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to become 'warriors' for 'social justice.' As the chant came to a climax, students performed a supplication for 'liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,' after which they asked the gods for the power of 'critical consciousness.'
  • p. 30

• As Cuauhtin tells it, white Christians committed 'theocide' against indigenous spirituality. Those deities must be resurrected and restored to their rightful place in the social justice cosmology. It is, in a philosophical sense, a revenge of the gods.
  • p. 32

• "[D]iversity, equity, and inclusion" represents a new mode of institutional governance. Diversity is the new system of racial standing, equity is the new method of power transfer, inclusion is the new method of enforcement. All of this could be presented to institutional leadership in a language that appears to be soft, benign, tolerant, and open-minded — something that, combined with the threat of accusation, elite administrators were culturally incapable of resisting.

• The critical race theorists and their allies have turned resentment into a governing principle. But this also a trap: resentment is a tool for obtaining power, not of wielding it successfully.

• The revolution, which seeks to connect ideology to bureaucratic power and to manipulate behavior through the guise of expertise, is ultimately not democratic.

• The only solution, he believed, was the Great Refusal: the complete disintegration of the existing society, beginning with a revolt in the universities and the ghettos, then dissolving 'the system’s hypocritical morality and ‘values’' through the relentless application of his 'critical theory of society,' a philosophy described by Marcuse scholar Douglas Kellner as 'Western Marxism,' 'neo-Marxism,' or 'critical Marxism.'