Christopher Rufo

Former Director, Center on Wealth & Poverty
Christopher Rufo is former director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. He has directed four documentaries for PBS, Netflix, and international television, including his latest film, America Lost, that tells the story of three "forgotten American cities.” Christopher is currently a contributing editor of City Journal, where he covers poverty, homelessness, addiction, crime, and other afflictions.

Christopher is a magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University, Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow, and has appeared on NPR, CNN, ABC, CBS, HLN, and FOX News.

Archives

The Invisible Asylum

Christopher Rufo
March 26, 2021
The story of American deinstitutionalization has become familiar. In a long arc—from President Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963 to the present—federal and state governments dismantled mental asylums and released the psychiatrically disturbed into the world.

Senator Cotton’s Stand

The Arkansas lawmaker is introducing a bill to protect the military from critical race theory indoctrination.
Christopher Rufo
March 25, 2021
Today, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton introduced legislation to ban critical race theory trainings in the United States military. The bill is concise, and desperately needed.

Subversive Education

North Carolina’s largest school district launches a campaign against “whiteness in educational spaces.”
Christopher Rufo
March 19, 2021
Last year, the Wake County Public School System, which serves the greater Raleigh, North Carolina area, held an equity-themed teachers’ conference with sessions on “whiteness,” “microaggressions,” “racial mapping,” and “disrupting texts,” encouraging educators to form “equity teams” in schools and push the new party line: “antiracism.”

Revenge of the Gods

California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum urges students to chant to the Aztec deity of human sacrifice.
Christopher Rufo
March 11, 2021
Next week, the California Department of Education will vote on a new statewide ethnic studies curriculum that advocates for the “decolonization” of American society and elevates Aztec religious symbolism—all in the service of a left-wing political ideology.

Critical Race Fragility

The Left has denounced the “war on woke,” but it is afraid to defend the principles of critical race theory in public debate.
Christopher Rufo
March 4, 2021
The Left has denounced the “war on woke,” but it is afraid to defend the principles of critical race theory in public debate.

Failure Factory

Buffalo’s school district tells students that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”—while presiding over miserable student outcomes.
Christopher Rufo
February 24, 2021
Buffalo school administrators have adopted fashionable new pedagogies: “culturally responsive teaching,” “pedagogy of liberation,” “equity-based instructional strategies,” and an “emancipatory curriculum.”

Gone Crazy

A New York City public school principal calls on white parents to “subvert white authority.”
Christopher Rufo
February 19, 2021
New York’s East Side Community School recently sent a letter encouraging white parents to become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition.”

Bad Education

In a Philadelphia elementary school, teachers are putting a premium on radicalism, not reading.
Christopher Rufo
February 12, 2021
A Philadelphia elementary school recently forced fifth-grade students to celebrate “black communism” and simulate a Black Power rally in honor of political radical Angela Davis.

Spoiled Rotten

Students at the United Nations International School launch an anonymous social media campaign denouncing their teachers as “racists” and “oppressors.”
Christopher Rufo
January 28, 2021
The United Nations International School has succumbed to the new racial hysteria.