An Interview With Christopher Rufo

Plus Trump's Hollywood tariffs, School Shutdowns, and Amy Wax

May 06, 2025

The latest edition of The Spectator is on “Reviving the American mind” — you can read it here, and as always, I encourage you to subscribe to the print edition:

My contribution is an interview with Christopher Rufo, the counter-revolutionary newly empowered in his quest to change American education:

As fire-breathing counter-revolutionaries go, Christopher Rufo seems notably mild-mannered. Perhaps it’s his northern California roots and Pacific Northwest home that keep him from embracing the based lifestyle pursued by so many conservatives in the Trumpian era. He doesn’t like sports. He doesn’t enjoy UFC. He allows his four kids to watch Disney movies and admits he was once a vegetarian. Yet it’s also possible that the Georgetown-educated PBS documentarian turned right-wing iconoclast is effective precisely for that reason: he knows the people he is criticizing.

No individual activist has come to prominence in recent years as much as Rufo, who went from doing relatively low-level work within the sphere of conservative think tanks to being a fierce critic who leads the charge, across multiple media platforms, against the institutions and figureheads of the world of higher education. He is a recipient of the Bradley Prize, one of the most significant awards in the world of conservative non-profits, in recognition of his work. Rufo weaponizes his audience, informs them and updates them on his targets – and is often surprisingly open about his plans.

His work has upended a consensus among classical liberals and conservatives that has endured since the 1960s – that the answer to the left’s long march through these institutions was to retake them or push them to admit more right-of-center voices as professors and campus speakers, not engage in a campaign to tear them down. Rufo’s approach casts this aside for something more akin to Bane’s solution for Gotham: a reckoning.

Rufo recalls a student protest on behalf of cafeteria workers during his time at Georgetown in the early 2000s, which he attended with the intention to go into international politics for the next Democratic administration. “I remember going to this hunger strike and thinking: ‘This is a noble cause,’” Rufo says. “But then I was talking with some of the actual cafeteria workers, which no one else seemed to have done. And I realized that they were just embarrassed by the whole theater show. They didn’t want anything to do with these hyper-privileged kids dressed up in revolutionary outfits. And they were really actually scared that not only would this hunger strike fail – which of course it did – but that it would actually put their jobs at risk. It was like a reenactment of the civil rights movement [led by] all of these kids who are going to go into banking and consulting, white-shoe law firms and high finance.”

The experience caused in him “a cultural and personal revulsion from what you would think of now as the left’s professional managerial elite. I had this extremely strong feeling that the entire enterprise was preaching high-minded ideals but, in reality, was just a kind of ruthless and empty status-seeking.”

While filming a documentary about hardscrabble life in America for PBS, which looked at the struggles of life in the cities of Youngstown, Memphis and Stockton, Rufo became more interested in questions surrounding the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. He turned to conservative literature, reading Charles Murray’s Coming Apart along with Robert Nisbet, Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, and finding in their descriptions of American life a greater understanding of the failure of the same professional managerial elite he knew from his college years – and not just on the left.

“I maintain a good relationship with most of the institutions [of the right],” Rufo says. “I think almost all of them are well-intentioned. And many of them have contributed greatly to the movement in general, and on the particular challenge of education. But what I would say is lacking, as a general matter, is not the mind, but the hand. Conservatives have imagined that politics is predominantly about intellect – developing the right philosophies or making the stronger argument with facts and logic. But what I’ve learned in practice and also in the study of history is that the good ideas don’t always win. Bad ideas often win. So you have to ask yourself not just ‘Have I adopted the right principles?’ You have to ask yourself, ‘What can I do to advance or maintain those principles?’ And I think the answer to that question is you have to do politics, and that requires courage, strength, bravery, action, conflict, controversy – all things that many conservative intellectuals are just temperamentally unequipped for.”

This aggressive stance toward pursuing dramatic change has gotten results. Rufo’s campaign against former Harvard president Claudine Gay, spurred on by her stunningly tin-eared performance in a House hearing on anti-Semitism on campus, led to the exposure of nearly 50 instances of plagiarism and citation flaws in her work across multiple papers and her dissertation – and ultimately to her resignation. When Rufo identifies a target, he doesn’t hold back – even if that target is sometimes seen as being on his side of the ideological fray.

“I’ve gotten calls and texts from various people who are all well-intentioned, saying, ‘Hey, you should really lay off.’ I’ve challenged a number of highly respected conservative or classical liberal figures in academia, people like Jeffrey Flier at Harvard Medical School, Alex Tabarrok at George Mason University, Robert George at Princeton University. All these individuals, in theory, have mostly aligned principles with me. But all of them have offered criticism of the work that I’m doing.

“What I have really tried to raise in reply is, it’s very easy to say ‘I’m a principled conservative and I have all of the right ideas, and this is how it should be.’ But the actual test is, well, did you get those ideas into power at your own institution? The answer in all three of those cases is no.”

Read the rest here.

Trump’s Hollywood Tariffs Aim at a Real Problem

Puck’s Matt Belloni on how they’re not the right answer:

The proper response to the past 24 hours in Hollywood has, for sure, been holy shit. But maybe not for the reason you might think. Amid the sea of questions about Donald Trump’s Sunday evening promise to levy a 100 percent tariff on movies “that are produced in Foreign Lands,” three things are almost certainly true:
Yes, a significant tariff scheme for film and TV would raise costs, lower production volume, violate World Trade Organization rules, and spark retaliation from other countries—all of which would be disastrous for a U.S. entertainment industry that dominates global competitors and produced a $15.3 billion trade surplus as recently as 2022, per an MPA report. Forget the Sinners copyright deal hysteria; a prolonged trade war over Hollywood product could be the actual “extinction-level event” those whiny studio execs have been warning about.
No, the president didn’t consider and/or care that his specifics-free post would cause a collective, industry-wide spit take that immediately injected more fear and anger into a community that is already pretty fearful and angry. That was kinda the point. A quick glance at my text messages from this morning: “WTF dude kill me now”; “My show is written and posted in L.A. but shot in Vancouver???”; “Post-production is a SERVICE right”; “Animation apply here? Any idea??” There are no answers.
Trump is right about one thing: The U.S. movie industry is “dying a very fast death,” at least the movie and TV production business, for the reasons we’re all very familiar with at this point. Movies aren’t goods, like cars or iPhones, but it’s usually less expensive to make them elsewhere, and other countries are happy to offer taxpayer-funded give-backs. It is predatory. And it has worked for decades now. From 2022-24, there were 241 American movies released with budgets of $30 million or more, and only a third of those were shot in the U.S., per Luminate data. Look no further than Trump’s “special ambassadors” Mel Gibson, who is about to shoot his new Jesus movie in Italy, and Sylvester Stallone, whose Expendables production log read like a Lonely Planet guide. Atlanta, which stole the Marvel movies from Los Angeles, just lost the next two Avengers pics to the U.K., which has become the soundstage location of record for studio tentpoles, just as Vancouver and Toronto largely replaced Sunset Gower and Television City for TV shoots in the 2000s. Disney’s Bob Iger might talk publicly about loving L.A., but he’d happily ship 100-year-old Dick Van Dyke to Bulgaria for a Mary Poppins reunion special if it saved a little money. Everyone in Hollywood just accepts this now.
As with most Trump proclamations, this one is likely just noise—another attention-seeking missile launched into the news cycle after spending the weekend in a Mar-a-Lago conga line with “special ambassador” Jon Voight and his manager, Steven Paul. Trump is using tariff talk to try to extract concessions from former allies, and there’s no reason to believe the Hollywood tariffs aren’t part of a broader war of words with countries like Canada. After all, the media spent Monday mostly talking about Trump “fixing Hollywood” (and possibly reopening Alcatraz??) instead of the cratering economy. Mission accomplished.
But… if this whole tariff blowup isn’t just noise, what if it’s actually an opportunity for Hollywood rather than a potential death sentence? Multiple times already, Trump and his people have walked back the tariff talk. This morning, the White House issued a statement with “no final decisions” and “exploring all options” language. Then Trump himself clarified: “I’m not looking to hurt the industry, I want to help the industry,” he said, promising that his team would meet with Hollywood leaders to make sure “they’re happy.”

Who’s To Blame For School Closure Disaster?

Alexander Zanaryan in NYMag:

I didn’t know who journalist David Zweig was until the fall of 2020, when he began to write about the suddenly urgent issue of COVID and schools. My daughter was at home, “learning” remotely. His kids were too. Though he had never focused on kids, schools, or medical writing in his previous journalism, he threw himself into a topic that was reshaping his life, producing a series of articles (published here and elsewhere) that together made a forceful case in favor of reopening schools for full-time, in-person instruction.
Though it began as a sometimes unpopular argument, by mid-2021 it would become the default view of all but the most skittish policymakers and public-health officials. Zweig’s important new book, An Abundance of Caution, published by MIT Press, is a declaration of victory of sorts — but mostly he wants to understand the colossal mistake and how it happened so that it never happens again.
“Everything related to kids strongly pointed in one direction,” he writes, revisiting the period with the spirit of a historian, trying to fathom why public-health officials and the media were so frequently suggesting otherwise, and why so many educational systems opted to stay closed for so long.
“I want people to be able to look behind the curtain and gain an understanding of what was happening,” Zweig told me, “versus what most of us were observing as regular citizens.”
The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You wrote about this issue a lot at the time. Why, years later, did you feel compelled to write a book?
I very early observed my kids just withering away in the gray light of their Chromebooks alone in their bedrooms. And while it seemed reasonable initially to have schools closed, particularly because I’m close to New York City, soon it dawned on me that there was no long-term plan and this was not going to work.
Childhood is achingly brief, and for a little boy or girl who’s 8 years old to miss a year, or even more than a year, of the experience of putting an arm around a friend, of chatting with other kids at lunchtime, of running around in a playground with friends … the idea that that wasn’t a tremendous harm is absurd.
People are still missing the larger point here about what was lost.
The conventional wisdom was that we needed to keep schools closed until it was safe to reopen them, and even then, it could be done only in communities where the spread of the virus had abated and educators took certain concrete steps to keep teachers and kids safe. You’re saying all of that was wrong?
I recognize that intuitively many of these interventions seem like they would be beneficial. School closures in particular and then, more broadly, mask mandates and barriers on desks and six feet of distancing — but the evidence shows none of this did anything.
Europeans had announced in the spring that there was no observable negative impact to reopening schools, yet for some reason this information was ignored.
People like Randi Weingarten, the teachers-union leader, and Dr. Anthony Fauci and others continually said, We really want schools open. This is so important, but we have to do it when it’s safe. And then fake benchmarks were contrived that made it nearly impossible to open them. And fake interventions were contrived that needed to happen even if they opened. At that point, do you really want schools open?
One of your slightly counterintuitive arguments is that part of the reason many schools stayed closed is because Trump was pushing to open them.
Trump was so reviled by the left that when he announced schools should reopen, he basically ensured they would remain closed. I give a lot of examples in the book of how institutions, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, were very strongly in favor of getting kids into schools, but as soon as Trump came out in favor of reopening, they completely reversed their position. I have lots of other examples of this happening; this was clearly in opposition to Trump.

The Spectator: Amy Wax on wokeism stifling American universities

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“Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.”

— Joan Didion

The Transom

An Interview With Christopher Rufo

Plus Trump's Hollywood tariffs, School Shutdowns, and Amy Wax

Trump’s Hollywood Tariffs Aim at a Real Problem

Who’s To Blame For School Closure Disaster?

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