Christopher Ferguson Rufo (born August 26, 1984) is an American far-right activist,[1][2][3][4][5] New College of Florida board member, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

[7][8][9] Rufo has been involved in Republican efforts to restrict critical race theory instruction or seminars,[8][10] which he says "has pervaded every aspect of the federal government" and poses "an existential threat to the United States".

[18][7] Later, he was a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Christian think tank known for its opposition to the theory of evolution and advocacy for intelligent design to be taught in public schools.

[7][19][20] He was a documentary filmmaker in his twenties and early thirties, with overseas projects such as Roughing It: Mongolia, and a film about baseball in Xinjiang called Diamond in the Dunes.

In discussion, Haywood expressed a desire to form strategic alliances with white nationalists and authoritarian dictators in order to "destroy the left", citing Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco as examples of the latter.

"[30] 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".

[19] 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.

[32] 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] 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.

[36][37][38] 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.

"[10] New York magazine has also alleged that Rufo misrepresented the contents of internal documents from the Tigard-Tualatin School District in Oregon, which referenced Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

In Rufo's view, the documents incited revolutionary sentiments and assumed that white people were born racist, which he called "textbook cult indoctrination".

[12] Citing a study by Charol Shakeshaft, Rufo has claimed that public school teachers are responsible for 100 times more child sexual abuse than Catholic priests.

[12] According to New York Times writer Trip Gabriel, "critics of Mr. Rufo, and of the broader right-wing push on LGBTQ issues, say the attacks represent a new era of moral panic, one with echoes of slanders from decades ago that gay teachers were a threat to children.

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.