Photo: Holly Andres for New York Magazine
Personally, I’m not particularly offended by cat-eating,” says Christopher Rufo. “I was a vegetarian most of my life, but have traveled enough to see people eat many things: crickets, monkeys, serpents, mice, scorpions.” Last month, the presidential campaign had unexpectedly come to revolve around a Facebook rumor, supersized by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, that Haitian migrants were stealing and consuming household pets in Springfield, Ohio. Whatever their aversion to “childless cat ladies,” conservatives had now appointed themselves chivalric defenders of feline welfare. Rufo leapt into the discourse in typically provocative fashion, offering a $5,000 prize to anyone who sent him hard evidence of these crimes. The potential imagery stemming from the search was so surreal and gothic, it wasn’t obvious the right would benefit from an unearthing. But where others might have turned away queasily, Rufo, with his bottomless appetite for partisan combat, sensed opportunity. “Let’s settle it,” he wrote in his post announcing the bounty.
Rufo, 40, is the most pugnacious, and probably effective, conservative activist of the Joe Biden era. When I visited him last month at his studio in Gig Harbor, Washington, outside Seattle, he ran down a half-dozen projects he was noodling on, including the latest iteration of his rolling investigation into diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. “So I’ve commissioned a researcher in a graduate department of one of our esteemed universities, to say, ‘Look, what is the Kamala Harris record on DEI?’” The researcher’s job: comb the Biden-Harris administration for “sensational, scandalous, and shocking illustrations,” which Rufo could then tie to the vice-president.
In his role as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, he is famous for leading a scorched-earth campaign against critical race theory, elevating a once-obscure academic concept to an all-encompassing bête noire and exposing the forms it had taken on in anti-racist government trainings and public schools. In December of last year, he published passages revealing Claudine Gay plagiarized parts of her Ph.D. dissertation, helping precipitate her ouster as Harvard’s president. He co-piloted Governor Ron DeSantis’s coup at New College of Florida, a quirky left-leaning institution the state is de-wokeing. He published an investigation into gender treatments at a Texas children’s hospital weeks before the state banned gender-affirming care for minors. On Monday, his prolific stretch continued when he came out with a story documenting plagiarized sections of Harris’s 2009 book Smart on Crime, which Harris authored with the help of a co-writer prior to her election as California’s attorney general.
The story came about after Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber sent Rufo a file last week detailing more than two dozen lifted passages. Rufo and a colleague sifted through the document, setting aside what they felt were trivial accusations and initially publishing the five most damning. “You really want to highlight the most egregious examples, because my opponents, what they’ll do is cherry-pick the weakest example,” he tells me. “I’m hoping for this sort of steady drumbeat of ‘there’s more’ coming from a variety of angles, while I maintain the strict, straight, 100 percent cocaine at the top.”
Rufo highlighted language the book copied verbatim from sources such as Wikipedia, the Urban Institute, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the Associated Press. Conservatives pounced, while mainstream outlets did not seem to regard it as a full-blown scandal. The New York Times noted that the book had copied “descriptions of programs or statistical information” rather than “the ideas or thoughts of another writer.” The Washington Post quoted a plagiarism expert: “It’s sloppy. It’s bad. But I don’t think it’s evidence of deliberate and malicious plagiarism.”
Whatever unfolds next, it’s worth noting that even Rufo’s failures have a way of shaping public perception. Earlier this year, he scrutinized the 29,000-tweet archive of new NPR CEO Katherine Maher. When he came up for air, he had surfaced an almost perfect avatar of C-suite progressivism. “On every topic, Maher adopts the fashionable language of left-wing academic theory and uses it as social currency,” Rufo wrote in City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s publication. He provided a sampling: “structural privilege,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” “folx.” Maher is still at NPR, though not for Rufo’s lack of effort. “I tried, I tried,” Rufo told me in Gig Harbor, a little disconsolate. “The financial pressure is difficult because unlike Harvard, NPR donors are ecstatic when they hear that their CEO is a left-wing ideologue.”
If Steve Bannon is a strategist brawler, lobbing provocations from his Capitol Hill “War Room,” Rufo seeks to use the energy of the left against itself. He is trim with boyish features; you could see him, in Renaissance-painting form, as an impish prince. Rufo’s critics regard him as both a fearsome operator and an object of scorn. His reputation in the former category is based on him openly empowering conservatives with sharp rhetorical weapons to do culture war. As he puts it, “I make the manipulation visible and then telegraph in advance how it’s going to work.” But many liberals also see him as a race-baiting huckster, in the style of James O’Keefe in his Project Veritas era, and welcome any chance to embarrass him in kind. In September, an activist circulated an apparently fictitious claim that Rufo was at some point surfing the affair-seeker site Ashley Madison; after he waded into the cat controversy, critics discovered that his wife, Suphatra, who used to work at Microsoft and Amazon, had come from Thailand as an undocumented immigrant (she has since gained citizenship), and they branded Rufo a hypocrite.
Rufo employs the martial, often grandiose language of a tactician. “The man who can discover, shape, and distribute information has an enormous amount of power,” he has written, in one typical koan that partially explains his fixation on higher education and the media. And it is power he wants. “My intention is obvious, I’m open about it. I want to abolish DEI, I want the FBI to dismantle violent, left-wing networks, and I want to rein in illegal immigration,” he says, laying out his current top priorities. He hopes to do this by building up a “conservative counter-elite” to fill the ranks of universities and federal bureaucracies currently populated by the left.
But Rufo isn’t a wizard of the political dark arts, despite many a profile that has painted him in that sinister light. Mostly what he’s doing, as with his Harris scoop or any number of humiliating gotchas, is reporting. Only he’s reporting on maximally explosive topics that liberal-leaning outlets are either not interested in or uncomfortable covering, which makes it easier for him to dominate headlines in national media. Just as Vance is a slicker, nimbler vehicle for Trumpism than Trump, Rufo is an upgrade on the prank-activism of O’Keefe and the freewheeling incitements of Bannon — himself a manifestation of the conservative counter-elite that he is trying to bring into being.
Gig Harbor, a town of 12,000 on the Puget Sound, was built up by Scandinavian and Croatian immigrants in the 19th century into a fishing and boatbuilding outpost. Rufo works out of a stylish studio equipped for TV hits, in an office building by the hills north of town. A Fox News–ready blazer hangs on a rack, but when I visit, he’s dressed casually, in black jeans and brown suede boots. He’s got a vintage New York Post newspaper box in one corner, a Nixon poster on the wall, and a more high-minded selection in his bookshelves, including several works by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Rufo’s operation is lean: He works with a chief of staff, a researcher, and a cohort of Manhattan Institute reporting fellows, who are overseen remotely from the D.C. area by Antonin Scalia, the grandson of the late Supreme Court justice.
Before I visit, Rufo has been gleefully exhuming Harris and Tim Walz’s past left-wing incantations in a bid to remind voters they’re not the centrists they play on the campaign trail. After Harris selected Walz as her running mate, Rufo seemed enthralled, taking several hours out of a family vacation in Bruges to keyword-search for mushy progressive stuff Walz had said on X, then auto-scheduling reposts of them along with sardonic commentary: “He might look like your proverbial racist uncle. But he’s learning. He’s listening to BIPOC voices. He flies the Pride flag at his home. He’ll remember your pronouns …” (One of Rufo’s professional advantages is his seemingly endless stamina for such exercises.)
Because Rufo technically works for a nonprofit, his writing for the Manhattan Institute can’t veer too close to election advocacy. That doesn’t prevent politicians from using his work for partisan gain. Amid reports of Venezuelan gang activity in Aurora, Colorado apartment complexes, Rufo and a colleague began investigating two publicly-funded NGOs that had settled migrants there. Rufo published the article hours before the September presidential debate, during which Trump made reference to the gang “taking over” said complexes. (Many in the national media, correctly assuming Trump was using the story to fear-monger about immigrants, scrutinized his “takeover” claim while ignoring or unaware of the fact that Aurora police had recently arrested nine reputed Tren de Aragua gang members for violent crimes.) Trump staged a campaign rally in Aurora last week.
Repeatedly, Rufo has sought to exploit Democratic blind spots, which popped up most glaringly this year in the case of Biden’s age-related decline. He charts a kind of Kübler-Ross progression to explain the phenomenon. “Look, they did it with critical race theory. Critical race theory doesn’t exist. Oh, actually, it’s only in law schools. And, actually, oh, yeah, it’s everywhere. And, actually, it’s good. And then, actually, oof, this is really embarrassing. We’re gonna run away from it.” In fairness, any backtracking from CRT was partly a testament to Rufo’s success at using it to describe all manner of left-wing overreach. As he tweeted in 2021: “We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”
Rufo has unusual editorial freedom, given his self-imposed mandate to chase stories that weaken his political enemies. After Gay’s resignation, Rufo says, he paid someone $10,000 to help build a plagiarism-detection program. In August, Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon — one of Rufo’s reporting fellows at the Manhattan Institute — broke a story that White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo had also copied parts of her Ph.D. dissertation. When Nate Silver noted on X that major outlets never seemed to break these big plagiarism stories, Rufo supplied an explanation: “The ‘big news brands’ see themselves as ideological allies with left-wing academia, and so, ignore, rationalize, and run interference for academia’s multiplying scandals.”
I ask Rufo if attaching his name to stories is arguably counterproductive, given his polarizing reputation. Can’t his opponents just write off his work as a biased Chris Rufo production? “It creates a dialectic, a method of engagement,” he says. “You’re right that they can just say, ‘Oh, this is a Rufo propaganda campaign,’ and ‘He’s such a naughty boy,’ and ‘Haven’t you checked his Wikipedia, which is just a sewer?’ But they can only maintain that for so long.”
“Part of the role I’ve stumbled into is I’m saying the things that respectable center-left journalists whisper in private, and I’m saying them out loud in a very provocative and polemical style, which provides my counterparts two related possibilities. They can simultaneously point their finger and say, ‘Look at this bad person.’ But then I also create the space for them to agree with me on the principle.”
And unlike conservatives who privately covet the approval of the respectable center-left, Rufo doesn’t seem to mind having a sewer for a Wikipedia page. “Look, you can be either liked or respected in this kind of dynamic,” Rufo says. “I have no interest or desire to be liked.”
I eat like a libtard,” Rufo tells me. At a brewery on Gig Harbor’s main drag, he orders a kombucha; then at a dockside restaurant, he orders a poke bowl. In fact, Rufo used to be a liberal. He was raised in Sacramento by an Italian immigrant father and a mother from Michigan and says he marched against the Iraq war as a Georgetown undergraduate. He has described himself as “kind of a bohemian” and spent time living in Berkeley and Topanga Canyon, California. After college, he made documentaries for public television, including one about extremely old competitive athletes, and another following a Uyghur-Han Chinese baseball team in the country’s northwest. He became radicalized directing a later film, America Lost, about poverty in three struggling American cities, which he says exposed him to the failures of the modern welfare state.
In 2018, then living in Seattle’s tech-boho Fremont neighborhood (distillery, coffee roaster, statue of Vladimir Lenin), he ran for City Council as a critic of the city’s permissive approach to homelessness and drug use, while also standing “with the pro-choice, immigrant, POC, and LGBTQ+ communities.” He dropped out, citing threats to his family from activists, an experience that radicalized him further. (“I have seen the hideous face of revolution,” he wrote in the preface of a book he published last year about the genealogy of modern leftism.)
Working for the Discovery Institute, a right-wing think tank in Seattle, he began documenting urban disorder. In the summer of 2020, he received a tip that the city of Seattle was holding “whites-only” sensitivity trainings, then FOIA’d documents that identified attributes such as “silence” and “intellectualization” as examples of “internalized racial superiority.” “Under the banner of ‘antiracism,’ Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights is now explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism,” Rufo wrote. That piece, and subsequent scoops, landed him on Tucker Carlson’s show, prompting an executive order from the White House seeking to bar federal agencies and contractors from “race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating.”
He began to seek out and receive tips about stories left-leaning media was squeamish about covering or, alternately, didn’t see as scandals at all. This is what he tried to do with the cat story. After he put out his call, “a friend in politics” sent him a 16-second video of a skinned animal on a blue grill, while a black cat walks around nearby. “His ass better get missing, man, look like his homie’s on the grill!” narrates the guy taking the video. Rufo dispatched three reporters in his network to nail down the details. The author of the video, which was shot in 2023, reiterated to Rufo in an interview that “this African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill!” Rufo’s on-the-ground reporter, Benjamin Roberts, then visited the Dayton, Ohio, apartment where the video was shot and interviewed tenants from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Various translation apps were deployed. The tenants told him the alleged cat griller and his family had since moved, leaving behind the blue grill. Roberts observed “at least ten cats” on the grounds. Rufo published two stories on the matter, supplying anatomical analysis from an anonymous chicken farmer and an anonymous surgeon.
The left greeted Rufo’s story as an own goal: The video wasn’t in Springfield, it was a year old, it had nothing to do with Haitians, and, anyways, were those even cats? The woman who spread the original rumor in Springfield, meanwhile, had retracted her claim and apologized. Still, the right felt vindicated. “Kamala Harris and her media apparatchiks should be ashamed of themselves,” wrote J.D. Vance, reposting Rufo’s video. “Another ‘debunked’ story that turned out to have merit.”
Like Vance, Rufo saw his effort as a meta-critique of the press. “What offended me was the Establishment media’s insistence that this had never happened and that it was racist to even raise questions about it,” he says. As Vance did when he told a TV anchor he had to “create” — that is, sensationalize — stories about the migrant crisis to draw attention to the challenges of assimilation, Rufo felt he was providing a service. “The media, in this case, is the villain; not the migrants, who are pursuing a better life and making rational decisions, within their own cultural tradition and the American legal system, which, of course, can be submitted to reasonable critique, as I have done.”
I ask Rufo if he thinks his story may have further stirred up animus against Haitians in Ohio. “I don’t think there’s any evidence it did,” he says. Either way, that wasn’t his concern. For better or worse, Rufo was following a journalistic instinct: He thought it might make a bombshell story. “The cats are a symbol that condenses the entire migration debate into a single, spectacular image.”
Rufo entered conservative politics, in concept, via a defense of classical liberal principles, and vestiges of his moderation remain. Certain topics, he says, aren’t strategically useful. “I’ve never talked about abortion, and I’m not about to start now, because whatever I believe, it’s not my issue. I don’t have any influence over it, and I’m not going to alienate people within my own coalition.” By the low bar set by the MAGA-era GOP, he also passes the test of not being an election denier. “You’ll notice, it’s like, again, another issue … like, what were the votes? You know? I mean, look, Trump lost.”
A DeSantis diehard turned Trump supporter, Rufo’s partisan loyalties are clear. Yet he’s feuded with fellow anti-wokes, such as Jordan Peterson, who argue his public-sector interventions into academia or school curricula are mirror images of the left-wing censoriousness he says he deplores. Rufo, in turn, suggests Peterson and his ilk are “enablers” of the status quo. (“David French is not respected by anyone.”) In his 2023 book, America’s Cultural Revolution, Rufo argued that where postwar radicals such as Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis failed at utopian political revolution, they cannily succeeded at colonizing academia and other cultural intuitions. Through this lens, Rufo’s interest in the university comes into sharper focus: He sees it as the spiritual home of the present-day Democratic Party and the incubator of ideas he combats in other arenas. Rufo respects the tactics of his book’s subjects and now seeks to mirror their “long march” to retake those institutions — an update of a goal that’s framed conservatism since the publication of William F. Buckley’s 1951 campus critique God and Man at Yale.
Surveying the GOP firmament, Rufo laments that few of the key figures — including himself — emanated from the right. “Conservative institutions have not figured out how to produce organic elites, and so you see this phenomenon playing out even now in the presidential race. Donald Trump is not a native conservative. It’s RFK, it’s Tulsi Gabbard, it’s J.D. Vance, it’s Vivek, right?”
Rufo is keen to build his “counter-elite,” and in a way, it is already forming. Elon Musk bought Twitter. Companies from John Deere to Microsoft are axing their DEI departments. Mark Zuckerberg, in chains, thinks Trump is badass. Rufo’s own work, in turn, has shored up a right-wing media ecosystem that has for decades been heavier on punditry and sensationalism than hard scoops. In a zero-sum game for attention, his victory is the media Establishment’s loss.
The Harris campaign hasn’t disputed the plagiarism claims per se, noting, “This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the vice-president clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout.” I was on the phone with Rufo when the Times posted its story about the affair. “They’re running cover for Harris,” he said, reciting the headline it chose: “Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages from Harris Book.” I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed the paper wasn’t taking the claims seriously or delighted it was proving his point about media bias.
For Rufo, the scoop was delicious, given his belief that Harris is a substanceless candidate running a “vaporware campaign” built on manufactured excitement. “Is it fundamentally an empty aesthetic?” he asked. “Yes, obviously. But as a tactician, I can respect it.” When I met with him in September, Rufo told me he couldn’t envision conducting an investigation of the vice-president splashy enough to move the needle. “An October surprise has to be a scandal that is directly tied to the character and the stakes of the individual candidate,” he said. Now, he’s starting to believe he can.
