Christopher Rufo

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".[26][5] From 2016 through 2019, Rufo's investigation into poverty in cities that had declined dramatically following periods of prosperity—Youngstown, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee, and Stockton, California—left him with the view that poverty stemmed from "social, familial, even psychological [dynamics]" and could not be solved by public policy.[5][27] Rufo said that the 2016 United States presidential election challenged ineffective establishment responses to poverty and drew attention to these cities.[27] 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,[28][29] with the "compassion brigade" calling for social justice using terms such as "compassion, empathy, bias, inequality, root causes, systemic racism."[29]

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".[8][30] Rufo contended in 2020 that "critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government".[17]

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.[31] 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.[8] 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'."[32] 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".[8] 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".[5]

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.[5][2][33] The administration described such programs as "divisive, anti-American propaganda".[33] The ban was revoked by President Joe Biden on his first day in office.[2][33] Divisions continued at the state level, with Republican legislators putting forward bans on critical race theory.[34] Rufo has appeared multiple times on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle.[35][36][37] According to New Yorker writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Rufo's story on racially divided bias-training sessions in Seattle was a "phenomenon" that "helped to generate more leaks from across the country" about the contents of courses and diversity training programs.[5]

According to The Washington Post, Snopes and New York, Rufo has misrepresented contents of diversity training programs and course curricula.[8][38][6] For example, he falsely claimed that a diversity consultant hired by the U.S. Treasury Department had "told employees essentially that America was a fundamentally white supremacist country", and urged them to "accept their white racial superiority"; however, the diversity consultant had said no such thing.[8][6] Rufo denies the Washington Post's characterizations, saying, "This is an absurd position that only an ideologue could believe."[39] Rufo has also falsely claimed that a course curriculum in California called on students to honor the Aztec gods of human sacrifice and to commit "countergenocide" against white Christians, which the curriculum did not do; however, the State of California later paid $100,000 and agreed to delete from school curriculums the Aztec and Mayan god chants Rufo had cited.[40][41][38][6] He also falsely claimed that a document by an Oregon school district "calls for adopting the educational theories of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire" and advocates turning students against the Marxist "revolution's enemies" and into the "liberated masses". However, the document had no reference to revolution, its enemies, or the liberated masses. It only referenced Freire's call to treat education as an act of liberation and mutual humanization.[6] Rufo claimed that staff resources at the school district "assumes" that whites are born racist; however, the document only urged teachers to move beyond the "belief that you aren't racist if you don't purposely or consciously act in racist ways".[6]

Salon, in a critical March 2022 article, compared Rufo's favored education policy to that of Viktor Orbán's during his second premiership.[42]

Rufo has been a prominent advocate for bans on teachers discussing LGBTQ issues in classrooms. He supported Florida House Bill 1557 (The Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, sometimes referred to as the "Don’t Say Gay" bill),[10] which prohibits teachers from discussing such matters in kindergarten through the third grade. Rufo appeared alongside Florida Governor Ron DeSantis when he signed a bill retaliating against Disney after the company criticized the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act.[10]

Rufo linked LGBTQ discussions at schools to grooming, the act of connecting with children for the purpose of sexually abusing them.[10] He said that schools were "hunting grounds" for teachers and that parents had "good reason" to worry about grooming.[10] However, the data that Rufo used to come to this conclusion "is completely invalid", according to the original studies' authors.[9] Some critics maintain that Rufo's rhetoric has "echoes of slanders from decades ago that gay teachers were a threat to children."[10] After Disney criticized the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, Rufo suggested that Disney was involved in sexualizing children and that the company was rife with child sexual abuse.[10]

Writing for Salon, education journalist and political science lecturer Kathryn Joyce has argued that Rufo's claims about public school teachers and pedophilia are part of his goal to "generally foster so much anger against public schools that it drives a nationwide popular movement to privatize education".[42] Similarly, president of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten has claimed that Rufo and others who wish to privatize "public education are using Big Lies to undermine public schools."[11] Rufo has said that "To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust."[43]

Rufo opposes "socio-emotional learning", saying that it "serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogies such as critical race theory and gender deconstructionism." Socio-emotional learning, which promotes self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, social awareness and relationship building, was a fairly uncontroversial pedagogical technique before it received criticism from Republicans and Rufo.[44]