Mastermind of ‘critical race theory’ uproar lives in Gig Harbor. Who is Christopher Rufo?
Articles in The New Yorker and The Washington Post last week identified a 36-year-old Gig Harbor political activist named Christopher Rufo as the architect of the campaign against “critical race theory” that has kept conservative media boiling at a fever pitch for months, persuading millions that children are being taught to hate their country.
Local reaction was swift.
“A white guy working out of a home studio in Gig Harbor is behind all the scripted talking points and drama you hear about CRT,” wrote Justin Camarata, a former Tacoma city council member and chair of the 27th District Democrats, on his Twitter feed.
“It was certainly surprising,” said Jennifer Butler, a Peninsula School Board candidate. “It was a very fascinating article, and when I got to the part where it said Gig Harbor, I went, ‘Whoa, well there you go. … These conversations are happening all over the country.”
The twin stories painted Rufo, who moved to Gig Harbor from Seattle last year, as a conservative mastermind who has nearly single-handedly convinced millions of alarmed Americans — including former President Donald Trump — that children are being taught their country is irredeemably evil and racist, and that white people should feel guilt and shame about their race.
In fact, “critical race theory” is a legal doctrine, encountered mostly at the graduate level, that teaches nothing of the sort, said Ken Cruz, a professor in the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice at the University of Washington Tacoma who sometimes discusses the theory with his students.
Critical race theory, as advocates define it, seeks to examine the many ways past racism lingers, sometimes unnoticed, in the law and other institutions, and the ineffectiveness of mainstream liberalism in dealing with that. Academic experts say critical race theory is not being taught in K-12 education curriculums, ABC News reported in May 19 article. It is not taught in the Peninsula School District.
“We’re not saying everyone in that system or institution is racist,” Cruz said. “But at the level of policy, at the level of practice, it’s producing racist results.”
‘The perfect villain’
But to Rufo, as told by New Yorker writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells, critical race theory was the perfect foil for all the things conservatives hate about mainstream liberalism.
“We’ve needed new language for these issues,” Wallace-Wells says Rufo told him. “‘Political correctness’ is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore … . The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain.”
In a Twitter post quoted in the Washington Post article, Rufo boasted that in appearances on Fox News and elsewhere, “we have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”
For Derek Young, the Democratic county council member from Gig Harbor, that quote gave away the game.
“It basically says ‘We’re going to put all these scary sounding cultural things into this and make it terrifying to touch it because it’s now all CRT,’” Young said. “This is an effort to demonize diversity, equity and inclusion work. Plain and simple.”
Camarata, the district Democratic leader, agreed.
“When you see that he also regularly tweets things about how good this is electorally for Republicans, it becomes clearly about something other than what he is saying it is, and we think it is important to call that out.
“He’s trying to stop the teaching of American history and anti-racism work more generally, ” Camarata charged.
Gig Harbor’s new neighbor
Who is Christopher Rufo?
A self-described former liberal, Rufo has worked for conservative think tanks such as the Discovery Institute in Seattle and the Heritage Foundation. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Rufo once tried to sue the city of Seattle in 2017 over its high-earner income tax, although he didn’t make enough himself to be impacted by it. In 2018, he ran a brief, blink-and-you’d-miss-it campaign for Seattle City Council.
According to The New Yorker and Washington Post stories, Rufo won his spurs with articles for the Seattle City Journal revealing what he considered the ridiculous excesses of “sensitivity training” for city employees. Those articles brought in more tips, and he expanded his “investigative” stories to include diversity training within the federal government, which he argued showed “Marxist” influences.
Trump was watching
In September 2020, Rufo brought his suspicions to Fox News’ popular Tucker Carlson Show.
“It’s absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every aspect of the federal government,” he told Carlson. “Conservatives need to wake up. This is an existential threat to the United States. And the bureaucracy, even under Trump, is being weaponized against core American values.“
And the president, as it turned out, was watching.
“The next day, Trump demanded action,” reported Laura Meckler and Josh Dawsey in the Washington Post. “Two days later, his budget chief issued a memo laying the groundwork for the federal government to cancel all diversity training. An executive order followed, and Rufo was invited to the White House a few months later for a meeting.”
(The order was rescinded on President Joe Biden’s first day in office.)
According to The New Yorker, Rufo and his wife, Suphatra, a computer programmer, moved to Gig Harbor last year, in part “to get away from the intense political climate” in Seattle. He showed the writer his soundproofed home studio, “with a hookup to send a broadcast-quality signal to Fox News.”
Reached through an associate, Rufo declined to be interviewed for this story.
“Chris is not involved in local politics and would like to keep his privacy,” the aide said. Further emailed questions went unanswered and Rufo later blocked a Gateway reporter on social media. After the story was posted online, the aide said that “Chris is completely maxed out on media at the moment and is unable to make the time to talk.”
However, Rufo has not been silent on Twitter.
He called the Washington Post reporting a “hit piece” and a “fake story.” He has tweeted that “the NYT, WaPo, New Republic, MSNBC, CNN, and The Atlantic have been relentlessly attacking me for months.” In response to what he says was a request for comment for a story in New York magazine, Rufo tweeted that the publication is “preparing another lazy hit piece against our movement.”
School boards in crosshairs
The campaign against critical race theory is already playing out across the country in local school boards.
Two candidates for the Peninsula School Board have latched onto the issue, and just last week the South Kitsap School Board narrowly defeated, 3-2, a resolution that expressed opposition to the supposed teaching that “America is a racist country with white supremacists maintaining power through law, culture and institutional practices.”
Erik Johnson and David Weinberg, the two Peninsula candidates, denied any connection with Rufo, but their messaging echoes his own.
In a video on his website, Johnson decried the “radical curriculum sneaking into our schools,” though he provided no specifics. Weinberg singled out “critical race theory” in an interview with The Gateway when he announced his campaign.
Both men are running against Butler, who called the anti-CRT campaign “misinformation.”
A political strategy
“My approach has been to correct the misinformation,” Butler said. “Critical race theory is this catchall phrase and it’s become really polarizing on a national level, and then you drill it down to a local level.”
During a recent school bond campaign, she said, “we had to do a lot of educating around misinformation around bonds and levies. Once you’re able to explain to people ‘No, this is the reality,’ my experience is they’re very receptive to it.”
Young, the Democratic county council chair, said “it’s clear that this is going to be a concerted political strategy to try to scare people. Whether or not these candidates know who Rufo is, they’re singing from his playbook. This isn’t some organic thing that popped up. Fox News didn’t wake up overnight and have 1,300 mentions of critical race theory out of nowhere.”
Juanita Beard, a Black mental health counselor who is running against Peninsula board president David Olson, said she’d like to sit down with Rufo and talk about diversity.
“There is a lot of room for education, and we need to have some frank discussions. I would welcome a discussion with this local resident about what it means to talk about comprehensive American history being taught in our public schools,” Beard said. “If that individual would like to have a sit down one-on-one with me and have that discussion, that’d be great.”
Beard said parents should not be afraid to have their students learn about America’s troubled racial history.
“I honestly believe in our district and in our neighboring districts that there are amazing, educated, highly intelligent instructors who can have these hard conversations,” Beard said. “As a Black woman in this community, I talk with my kids daily about race and culture and ethnicity and our religious background and how it impacts their life daily. I think that our staff need to be equipped and empowered to have those dialogues as well.”
Teachers worried
Defenders of freedom of speech say those following Rufo’s lead have muddled the term to include almost any factual historical discussions of race, racism or inequality. Teachers say they fear being intimidated or discouraged from teaching historical facts.
Former Lincoln High School teacher Nate Gibbs-Bowling said he was “frankly gobsmacked” when he first heard about how people were talking about CRT being taught in K-12.
“It’s the equivalent of saying because we talk about the structure of atoms in schools, we’re teaching nuclear physics,” said Gibbs-Bowling, who was Washington state’s 2016 Teacher of the Year. “It’s crystal clear that it’s false to anybody with a scintilla of understanding.”
As a teacher, Gibbs-Bowling said he is concerned about the impact that legislation against CRT could have on what teachers are supported in teaching.
“When you amorphously define potentially anything as critical race theory, it can have a chilling effect on teachers’ speech,” Gibbs-Bowling said. “I think it is important to frame these bills as attacks on freedom of speech.”
Cruz, the UWT professor and criminologist, compared the “moral panic” over critical race theory to the Red Scare, a period between the early 1900s and 1950s, when there was widespread paranoia that Marxist thought was infiltrating the country.
“I think it’s dangerous to put handcuffs on the ability of folks to think,” Cruz said.
This story was originally published June 24, 2021 at 9:01 AM.
