We Need to Talk About Christopher Rufo

For all the theatrical vandalism that Elon Musk and his groyper cohorts are wreaking throughout the US government it’s worth mentioning one of the less bombastic clowns in this carnival. Every few months the mainstream media goes into a raptured feeding frenzy over some alleged hive of far left blood-drinking communist antifa operating inside one of America’s treasured institutions, and when you dig into the origins of the story the same worm always pokes out like you’re blowing softly on Robert Kennedy’s ear.

 The latest Christopher Rufo™ Presents: Moral Panic involves transgender federal agents allegedly talking about transgender stuff amongst themselves. As we all know, transgender stuff means only two things: Weird sex stuff and a blistering hatred of Italians. 

 Christopher claims to have been handed these chat logs by some whistleblower, and I believe him, because if they were forgeries then he would have seen fit to manufacture some truly vile evidence worthy of the five alarm fire he’s raising hell about. As it stands, although he begs us to trust him that these logs contain the vilest, most reprehensible, sexually violent, anti-Italian(?) filth that you can possibly imagine, the worst examples that he’s able to present to the public are relatively mild discussions about pronouns. 

Of course, he’s a good honest Catholic so he likely believes showing the actual evidence of the stuff he promises exists would cause devils and imps to enter your body via the open Hell-computer screen-eyeball portal, and probably force you to become transgender yourself. So he instead kept the real evidence safely stowed away in the replica Ark of the Covenant he constructed in preparation for the Great Unveiling.

Nevertheless, Trump’s new National Intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard (that’s never going to sound like a sane thing to say) cited Rufo’s … reporting? complaining? … as her justification for immediately firing any and all agency employees who are transgender or gender nonconforming or maybe just manicure their beards too carefully and wear skinny jeans. 

 Some may ask “who the hell is Christopher Rufo and why does the media treat him like he’s the fucking Oracle of Delphi on all matters of anti-wokeness?” There’s no satisfying answer to that question. 

Rufo really is, at the end of the day, just a Random Dipshit. Just another smug, contemptuous Pollux who gamed his way into the high echelon of conservative politics due to the fishnet-stocking-porous barrier of entry to right-wing think tanks. If anything, he does dispel the illusion that there’s anything resembling meritocracy involved in rising to the most prominent circle of American right-wing influencers. This is an illusion that should already be dispelled by the mere existence of single-digit IQ master race ambassadors Dave Rubin, Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, and fucking brain donation survivor James Lindsay.

Rufo has almost no formal education to beef up his credentials as a high profile member of the right’s top intellectual brass. He likes to pass himself off as a Harvard Graduate, and when you think Harvard Graduate you think Oppenheimer, Kennedy, and you might be surprised to learn, Conan O’Brien. All of Rufo’s biographies state Harvard Graduate as his golden academic achievement.

 However, when folks started caring enough to look into this they found that Rufo’s degree (in Liberal Arts, no less) is actually from the Harvard Extension School. Unlike actual Harvard, the entry requirement to Harvard Extension School is getting either a B average in high school or having your Dad write a really nice letter.

 When the difference was pointed out publicly by Real Harvard professor Jennifer Hochschild, she was sadly forced to apologise and rescind her criticism after a bunch of other Harvard Jr mini-academics got a case of the sads over it. It turns out lots of these graduates really enjoy the prestige of technically being Harvard Graduates. Hochschild needing to walk back her criticism to avoid offending a bunch of other thin-skinned future podcasters was a significant win for Rufo, so as someone who isn’t playing politics in search of tenure let me step in and say, no, I don't think you can say Mini Harvard is the same as Harvard.

 But this little sleight of hand comes to characterise Rufo’s whole general thing. The word “Harvard” has awarded Rufo the public credential to do what he’s basically famous for doing—disingenuously “explaining” academia to outsiders, pretending to be a kind of whistleblower from within and doing for universities what QAnon did for pizza shops.

 What lends more weight to the perception of Rufo as some sort of intellectual is his fellowship with an impressive number of very prominent think tanks like the Danube Institute and the Heritage Foundation. But is it impressive, really? I’m not entirely convinced that conservative think tanks are much of a thing to begin with or that impressive academic chops are as important to obtaining fellowship as just being very conservative. Certainly you’ll have a hard time convincing me that there’s a lot of thinking going on in any room that has Jack Posobiec in it.

 I’m not calling Rufo an imbecile. He knows just enough about the language of academia to know how to misrepresent it. And we know that he’s deliberately misrepresenting it rather than misunderstanding it, because he says that’s what he’s doing.

Rufo’s original claim to fame was inventing the blowback against “critical race theory,” and “inventing” is the correct word because he had to lie about what that phrase means in order to weaponize it. He doesn’t even think that actual critical race theory is without merit or necessarily bad. He is, however, willing to sacrifice that valid research to burn it in effigy for what he sees as the greater good.

 His strategy is instead to make up a lie that first grade teachers are accusing their pupils to their faces of being oppressors, and further lying that this activity is what’s called “critical race theory,” and run crying to the media about it like a narc.

 Don’t just believe me, believe Rufo:  

 That’s the most infuriating thing about Christopher Rufo. He narrates his own social engineering project from start to finish, presumably to educate his followers about how to distort or manufacture reality to achieve a preferred outcome. Before any one of his schemes he will outline what he’s going to do, discuss it as he’s doing it, and then recap what happened afterward, often to the same media who fell for it. 

And the media will still take his fucking bait every single time, because in a way he is correct about how it operates. The truth of the matter is largely irrelevant in the case of a big enough story, and the media by and large doesn’t care about the consequences of its reporting. There is some validity to the last part—I think it’s mostly not the media’s job to decide what people should be allowed to know—but in conjunction with the first part you’ve just got a garbage in, garbage out situation that reduces the media to a dangerous irrelevancy at best. 

Here he is openly discussing a plan (this one thankfully didn’t catch on) to in common use replace the term “drag queen” with “trans stripper.”

 He knows that transgender is a distinct concept from drag, most drag queens are not transgender or identify as women outside of performance, and most drag isn’t stripping. The truth is not consequential to the desired outcome, which is to ban or outlaw drag, which he desires because of his thoughts on cultural rot or degeneracy or RETVRN or whatever.

He knows most people don’t care about his preferences enough to try to ban a harmless form of artistic expression but he also feels his preferences are superior and that overrules what most people think. If society at large doesn’t choose his preferences willingly, it must be engineered into it by lying repeatedly and consistently about terms like ‘transgender’ and ‘drag’ and hoping the volume of outrage will drown out the corrections. 

He says it outright: He figures people on average are more upset about transgender people than they are about men performing in dresses, so conservatives should lie and insist the concepts are interchangeable, and once that’s done, drive it home by manufacturing an inseparable connection between all these things and child sexual abuse. 

There are two very simple rules that govern the right’s attitude toward anything and anyone that is queer, non-straight, trans, or anything else you hang on that rainbow: It’s the ultimate argument-terminating mantra and the bulldozer they use to justify the elimination and removal of LGBTQ+ from public or even private life. It is this: 

1.      Anything weird is sexual.

2.      Anything weird and sexual is pedophilia. 

As Rufo here admits, he doesn’t want to invite a debate. What’s to debate when he’s already decided? He wants action taken on this ideal and he doesn’t have any loyalty to truth that supersedes or even approaches his loyalty to this ideal. 

As I said, his decision to air his entire process publicly in real time is, I believe, a gambit that showing enough equally insidious shitstains like himself how it’s done will pay off better in the long run than the risk that too many people in the media will wake up to it. This gambit is based on the unfortunately correct assumption that, when he waves his bullshit in front of them, the media will react in the same way as Chip ‘n Dale’s Monterey Jack when he sees a lump of cheese, no matter how many times this has gotten him injured or captured or put other people in mortal danger. 

In his published work Rufo keeps insisting that he’s not a racist and he hates Nazis so he hopes you’ll keep that in mind the next time you want to say something about the approximately 100% of the time that he goes specifically after black people in his projects, and the fact that he’s closely connected to the creepy-as-hell neo-phrenology and skull measurer cult of Steve Sailer and Aporia. In his published work he wants you to believe he fully rejects the idea that he fully rejects the philosophy of “no enemies to the right” so he hopes you’ll ignore his social media where he’s calling for “right unity” and accepting Nazis and groypers as one of the “five families” of the right. 

 The direct role he played in popularizing and demonizing the phrase “critical race theory” is probably his greatest success to date, taken as a whole, and he will, again, readily explain what he did there. Basically, to undercut and undermine racial diversity projects, he needed a phrase that meant something similar to “political correctness” but that sounded more sinister and more academic—much the same process that brought the phrase “cultural Marxism” into mainstream conservative lexicon. He dug deep into race studies literature and found a real phrase, “critical race theory,” that he thought had the right sound to it.

It doesn’t matter that this isn’t what that phrase meant! That’s irrelevant! Anyone who wants to fact check him only needs to go so far as to look at some race studies literature themselves and see that the phrase does in fact exist. 

It’s basically the same concept as pointing to a synagogue and saying “I bet that’s full of Jews plotting to take over the world,” and if someone doubts you, then you need only invite them to look through the window and confirm that it is, in fact, full of Jews. 

It’s absurd, and it works. 

After flaunting his ludicrously easy win, those of us who had any faith left in the media hoped they would take this one on the chin and not fall for it a second time, but just a couple of years later he comes running back to the media with a brand new scoop, and good fucking grief did they ever treat him like an abusive ex they couldn’t wait to embrace again. 

This time, the project was to force universities to censor protests for pro-Palestinian causes. He knew that nobody was going to buy that on free speech grounds but he could use his mastery of the media as a weapon of blackmail. The message was clear to academic higher education managers who failed to shut down protests he didn’t approve of: He would come for them with something. 

And that’s exactly what he did, at Harvard, his old stomping ground that he never stomped, when he randomly started fine-tooth-combing through Harvard President Claudine Gay’s academic history for traces of plagiarism—a subject that he had never been interested in before (and still, let’s face it, wasn’t). 

The process of ratfucking Gay via an eager media apparatus was, again, openly broadcast by Rufo via his Twitter account. He just described it in real time. 

 The gambit worked. A public and a media who weren’t very familiar with academia’s minutiae were shocked to learn that Gay had slipped a few unattributed phrases into some of her past academic work, something that most people don’t realise is almost impossible to completely avoid, but was still technically plagiarism. The media barrage in conjunction with the onslaught of threats forced Gay to resign. 

Rufo knew that this fake scandal would hit the right buttons because Claudine Gay is a black woman. The first, in fact, black woman president of Harvard. The public was eager to find any reason to believe that she was a DEI hire. The moment they were given a tiny sniff of that, just the littlest teensy tiny whiff, those torches were lit and those pitchforks came out and literally nobody could explain what they were mad about. 

The message was loud and clear, but for those university presidents in the back who might not have heard it, he made it explicit. 

 “Plagiarism” is in scare quotes in the first sentence because what he’s really hunting is clarified in the second sentence: Black people, specifically those in positions of power and especially if they don’t follow his rules on acceptable campus speech. 

Before I go on, I want to really hammer this home: Christopher Rufo bragged very loudly and very clearly about what he had done. He bragged to the same media that he had tricked a second time about how, precisely, he had tricked them. He told them very explicitly that this was not actually about plagiarism, it was about the campus protests. The media covered the story of their own humiliation as eagerly as they had covered the initial story, like the masochists that they are.  

So we’re good, now, right? In the immortal words of George W. Bush, “Fool me once, shame on, shame on you, fool me you can’t get fooled again.” There’s not a chance in hell that anyone in the media is going to take this guy seriously anymore. 

 In 2024 during the most heated phase of the presidential election the notorious “Haitian immigrants hunting and eating cats and dogs” conspiracy theory idiotically managed to find its way to the presidential debate stage. This one wasn’t originated by Rufo, it bubbled out of Facebook rumours that turned out not to have been true in the first place and were amplified by a white supremacist called Captive Dreamer who also admitted he pulled it out of his ass because he hated black people. 

I wrote a whole piece on the Haitians hoax and Rufo’s role in it, which was late to the game but he was still eager to bring his hoaxing expertise to the game to show the noobs how it’s done. 

To briefly recap: Rufo offered a $5000 reward for anyone who could give him evidence that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating cats and/or dogs in the town of Springfield. Ohio. He still couldn’t find any. In the end, he settled for a video so grainy that it looked like it was somehow filmed on a phone that pre-dated phone cameras, of a backyard barbecue with a skinned animal that looks nothing like a cat sitting on the grill, which he later confirmed belonged to a Congolese family in Dayton. 

Credit where it’s due, the media didn’t heavily bite on this one. JD Vance tried as hard as he could to push Rufo’s weak-as-camel-piss evidence, but this story was a little too weird and obviously fake for the mainstream media. Rufo has hits and misses, but man the MAGA brass really went to bat for him on this one. 

But now he’s back for Round 4 under Acting President Musk, who has deputized him and granted him some official role, I guess, in reforming the Department of Education. 

 I suppose it is fitting that an administration that would put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of health would put Christopher Rufo in charge of education. In both cases it is an example of giving a job to somebody whose experience and mission regarding that job is the opposite and inverse of what that job requires. 

It can’t be overstated how insane it is to take this guy’s word on anything when he is constantly telling you to your face that he lies professionally as a political strategy… 

 …and that one of his goals in doing so is to roll back civil rights. 

 Really the only strategy I can think of in dealing with this stupidity is to utterly and mercilessly shame any media outlet who reports on what Christopher Rufo says with anything short of skepticism or ridicule. 

Stop letting a guy who looks like an actually less fit Ryan Gosling wail on you. It's getting a bit embarrassing.