Chris Rufo Thinks the Right Can Control This. I Don’t.

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

News, Government, Society & Culture

4.3 • 14.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2026

⏱️ 125 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Christopher Rufo is arguably the most successful activist of the MAGA era. He rose to prominence fighting D.E.I. initiatives and critical race theory. In President Trump’s second term, he’s had a huge influence on policy, from Trump’s executive orders against D.E.I. and the attacks on the Department of Education to the ICE and C.B.P. deployments to Minneapolis. Rufo, helpfully, calls his shots. He has published a guide, “The New Right Activism: A Manifesto for the Counterrevolution,” in which he argued for the value of “agitprop” and counseled that “political life moves on narrative, emotion, scandal, anger, hope, and faith — on irrational, or at least subrational, feelings.” But more recently, in his writing and on the podcast he co-hosts, “Rufo & Lomez,” he seems worried about the new right he has helped build: its attraction to conspiracy theories, its racialist thinking, its internal fissures. So I wanted to have him on the show to talk about the problems he sees on his side, but also to interrogate whether he may have scored short-term victories while seeding profound long-term problems. Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute. He’s a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.” This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “The New Right Activism” by Christopher Rufo “The Number” by David D. Kirkpatrick “The unraveling of a cat tale” by Jacqueline Sweet Book recommendations Unmasking the Administrative State by John Marini The Revolutionary by Stacy Schiff The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Mixing by Pat McCusker, Efim Shapiro, and Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Kate Wilkinson and Marlaine Glicksman.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The You could really make a case that Chris Rufo is the most successful activist, certainly on the right of this era.
0:33.9	He initially rose in prominence as the central strategist in the rights counterattack on DEI initiatives.
0:41.3	He's very much behind a lot of the demonization of critical race theory.
0:45.3	Critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy
0:50.3	and is now being weaponized against the American people.
0:53.3	He claims CRT is actually a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the
0:58.9	declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.
1:03.0	And he built that into a series of campaigns. They've actually changed policy.
1:06.6	It's very influential in Ronda Santis's governorship and kind of running Claudine Gay out of Harvard.
1:12.6	Pushing out Claudine Gay, toppling the president of Harvard for a journalist like me is a big win.
1:18.6	Then in Donald Trump's second term, quite a lot has come out of Rufo's work for better and from my perspective for Morris, from a lot of Trump's early executive orders.
1:28.6	We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion policies all across
1:35.5	the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military.
1:42.1	To some of the work that led to the ICE and CBP deployments to Minnesota.
1:47.4	This week I published an exclusive story exposing the Somali fraud rings in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
1:53.8	which are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers.
1:58.0	Whatever else you want to say about him, Rufo has quite significantly affected
2:01.1	the world we live in. He's also, if you listen to him, and he's a very, very smart and often
2:07.3	quite honest analyst of his own side. One thing I appreciate about Rufo is he always says what
2:12.2	he is doing clearly and in public. He seems uneasy. Gone are the days when Tucker Carlson's nightly monologue set the
2:19.9	agenda for the entire right. You can feel a sort of disquiet, a sense that maybe the right,
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