Voices of Freedom - Interview with Christopher Rufo

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

An Interview with Christopher Rufo, Writer, Filmmaker and Commentator For more than half a century, many of America’s most revered institutions have been infiltrated with ideas that run counter to the country’s founding principles. This ideological capture has been acute within prestigious universities, to the point where the opportunity for viewpoint diversity continues to be under severe threat.  Yet, according to our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom, all is not lost. In fact, he believes that there has been an ideological shift not only within higher education, but in society, politics, culture and in civic institutions. And, he says, it’s only beginning.   Christ Rufo discusses how his unique background, which is rooted in both scholarship and filmmaking, has led him to believe that it’s possible and vital to restore the principles of American exceptionalism.  Topics Discussed on this Episode Why Chris went into documentary filmmaking upon graduation from Georgetown University. What Chris learned directing documentaries and why he focused on urban areas How Chris’ filmmaking experience turned him into an advocate for solutions to the problems he was seeing Reversing the ideological capture of higher universities and how to turn ideas rooted in scholarship into reality. Opportunities to change the culture in institutions that seem permanently captured, such as government, higher education, and entertainment Why the younger generation is gravitating towards values and ideals traditionally tied to free enterprise, liberty and free speech The rise of independent media and how it has contributed to the cultural shift What it means to receive a Bradley Prize About Christopher Rufo  Rufo is a bestselling author, filmmaker and commentator, whose work has significantly influenced contemporary American culture and policies. He’s also a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Rufo is a 2025 Bradley Prize winner.

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. American culture has been described by many as being at an inflection point socially, economically, politically. We're at a time of change that is really highlighting the need for deep reform in government and

in our civic institutions. In our day-to-day lives, we watch once proud towns and cities become plagued by crime, drugs, and homelessness. Yet according to our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom, all is not lost. He believes that it's not only possible to revitalize urban America, but also possible to restore institutions that have been captured by an ideology that is simply antithetical to American principles. Christopher Ruffo is a best-selling author, filmmaker, and commentator whose work has significantly influenced contemporary American culture and policies. He's a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical

Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. And of course he is also a 2025 Bradley Prize winner. Welcome and congratulations, Chris. It is great to have you with us. Thank you. Chris, let's jump right in. And if I may talk a little bit about you at first and your background and how you started out professionally.

You have degrees from Georgetown and Harvard, and after graduation, you went into documentary filmmaking. Why'd you start there? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. After I graduated from Georgetown, the undergraduate degree, I felt restless and I felt the desire to really get out and see the world. And it's very interesting. One of my mentors at Georgetown, a dear professor of mine, you know, took me aside my senior year and he said, Chris, most people are here to get on the escalator. You've gotten in, you're graduating, you can go into finance, law, the diplomatic corps, all these things. But he recognized that I was on a different path. And so I wanted to get out and see the world on my own terms. I wanted to maybe avoid the

kind of escalator or that kind of pre-planned ladder. And working in documentaries first as a freelancer, then as a producer and a director was really a way to escape that process and took me all over the world, seeing things, talking to people, learning new languages. And it was really a great way to see the world on my own terms and flex some of the kind of creative muscles or the kind of go through the creative process, you know, making these films. I took that other path.

I wish I had your courage to do something different. Good for you. Chris, you directed four documentaries for PBS, for Netflix, international television, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities. Why did you think it was important to focus on urban areas? And through that process, what did you learn? Yeah. Well, I always had a fascination with how places are governed. And I had experienced a lot of observation of different places

around the world in my twenties. And then as I, right around the time I turned 30, I wanted to do a domestic film. I wanted to look at some of the forgotten places in the United States. So devised this film that focused on a predominantly white working class community in the Rust Belt, predominantly black, urban, underclass in Memphis, Tennessee, and then a Latino and multiracial kind of post-industrial place, kind of neighborhoods in Stockton, California. The idea that some of these cultural problems that we've seen and that many conservative

scholars have addressed in, you know, social science and other book-length works, I wanted to actually understand it on the ground, talking to people, living with people. And so I spent three years in and out of these places, telling some of these stories, and then at the same time doing all of my homework to understand them politically better, to understand them economically better,

to understand what was driving this great separation. You know, you have very affluent places in the country and then these, you know, forgotten places. And so that was the film for me that kind of took me on this new path and really helped me start thinking about some of these bigger social and political questions. And, you know, without which I don't think I would be, you know, where I am today. Do you really spend months in each of these cities? Probably got to know them pretty well. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. I mean, it was over the course of three years of heavy fieldwork. So spending, you know, weeks and weeks at a time, you know, you know, often on throughout the year. And so you get to know people, right? You become a kind of familiar face in some of these communities. And you're there at the most intimate moments in people's lives. You're there when someone's father is getting out of prison. You're there when they're closing the casket on a murder victim. You're there when someone is, you know, family is giving

birth to a new child. And so we were there in all these big human moments. And the idea was to compare some of these individuals' human stories to these broader social questions. And one thing that I did actually that didn't end up making it in the film, we cut all of it, which was an enormous expenditure of budget. But I interviewed a lot of the scholars from both sides of the partisan aisle that had been talking about some of these issues.

So I saw Robert Putnam at Harvard. I saw Charles Murray down in Berketsville, Maryland. I talked to a whole range of people, Francis Fukuyama at Stanford. And so even though eventually the interview actually had to be cut, because of the kind of narrative flow of the piece, those interviews really, and the accompanying reading, really helped me start thinking in those terms and start weighing the evidence, weighing the arguments about what's happening to America. And I think, I didn't intend it this way.

I started making the film in 2014, but it was also happening right at the time where Donald Trump was making the entry into the political scene. And although it's not about Trump at all, it's not directly partisan political in that sense, I think that this has been a sub theme over the last 10 years, whether it's JD Vance as the avatar of the forgotten places in the Rust Belt or Appalachia, or some of these other social and economic questions. And so I like to think that I had an early window into this and a very substantive window into this, not just writing an op-ed or having a hot opinion, but actually having done the

work and experienced it, not directly through my own life experience, but through observation, through relationship, through direct access. Even though there are three very different cities geographically and demographically, did they have a lot in common? They did. The flavors are different, right? I mean, the local kind of distinctions are real, but they really all did have some of the same problems fundamentally. And the problems were all encompassing

the basic problem of economy. So this is something that has now kind of surged back into the conversation in recent months. These were all kind of blue collar, working class, industrial places. And so the factory economy really held them together and provided a path for upward mobility into the middle class. Those things started to disintegrate for a wide variety of reasons, but started to disintegrate in the post-war period. They have social problems. Most notably, these places have almost total absence of intact families. Somewhere between 60% and 95% of the families in these places are single-parent families.

So that was another critical theme. And then you have, as the social and spiritual problem, you have a kind of disappearance of the old moral structure. And so if you look at a place like Youngstown or Memphis, even Stockton to a lesser extent, you see empty churches as a symbol of this process, right? The old kind of moral institutions that were there, you know, through neglect, through disuse, through destruction, you know, have ceased to being an influence in these places. And what you have in all three cases is the total replacement of those institutions by the state. And so you have the government essentially, you know, serving as the, almost

the sole organizer of social, cultural, and individual life in these places. And one of the things that I learned, especially looking at something like a place like Memphis, is that the federal government was injecting something like $3 billion a year into the city of Memphis through anti-poverty programs, which would break down to about $30,000 a year per household under the poverty line. And you'd think this is kind of an enormous sum of money that has been spent year after year after year, and yet it's grinding down these places and really failing on its own

terms to solve some of the problems that were, that were, these solutions were proposed in the 60s. And so one of the conclusions that I had was that we've been living with this status quo for a very long time. The evidence suggests that it has completely failed. But we find ourselves also in this difficult political moment where people aren't really talking about it. No one is proposing a solution. And there's little hope that these programs can be reformed. And so I'm interested in that. And again, even now, my own political work is not focused on this, partly for those reasons. It's very hard to actually change some of these policies without

a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, essentially. But I still think that they're important and I think it's a good backdrop for all of the other political conversations we're having. Is it fair to say, Chris, that the experience you went through, the process you went through with your time in these cities really in many ways turned you into an advocate for solutions to the problems that you were seeing in those places? Definitely. And I think, you know, and even more pointedly, you know, it changed my politics and turned me into what you would call a conservative. And, you know, and look, it was through observation

and study. And so, you know, I read all of the books on these topics dating back, you know, from the 1960s to the present, all the modern literature. And from the left, right, and center, again, from Charles Murray to Robert Putnam, from Shelby Steele to William Julius Wilson. And over and over and over, the most compelling arguments for me at that time always were weighted heavily towards the conservative arguments. And so it just,

you know, I didn't go into it thinking, you know, I want to, you know, only consider, you know, conservative opinion, but the theories and the arguments that were laid out in the conservative literature about these questions just matched reality much more closely than the alternatives. It just says, this is exactly what I'm seeing after spending years on the ground, It just says, this is exactly what I'm seeing after spending years on the ground studying these things in the field. And so my politics is not first ideological, but my politics is really first an empirical politics to say, well, how can I understand what I'm seeing and which arguments seem to be the best explanations for the problems I'm observing?

Interesting. Let's switch gears a little bit. Many people have tried and frankly, many people have failed to reverse the ideological capture of institutions, especially when it comes to higher education. And it's just not easy. I mean, that's a fact. You have been able to challenge the institutions and in the case of some very well-known Ivy league universities had more than a little role in causing leadership changes to occur. Very highly publicized. What worked for you that

didn't work for others? Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I don't want to jinx it. It's one of those things where you can talk about the techniques, but you don't want to jinx it. But look, I'll tell you a couple things, a couple lessons that I've learned that I think are really relevant to this. In my experience, conservatives have bought into this art a couple things. The conservative argument for a while now has been, you know, facts don't care about your feelings. That's the kind of popular telling of this idea. But there's this kind of myth that if you make the stronger arguments, then you will win politically. If you're more logical, more factual, more rational than your opponents,

you will win. That's not true in my observation and in my experience. I think it's good, all things being considered, to be more factual, more logical, more rational. But actually, politics doesn't move on rational arguments, but politics to me seems to move more on emotional narratives, which can be, of course, expressions of that logical argument, or it could be false, it could be propaganda in that sense. But what I've always tried to do is to what I've figured out how to do rather is to use the stories, use the reporting to try to bring some of these ideas into the political process, not an intellectual process. Because if you if you just keep your arguments and your stories and your advocacy in the realm of the intellectual, you end up kind of meeting hitting a cul-de-sac or a dead end.

Okay, great. You want to debate with somebody on the radio or something. Fine. But I don't orient any of the things that I do towards that outcome. If that's a useful tool to advance the argument, great, you should do it. But ultimately, the goals that I found to be most satisfying are when you change policy, when you change personnel, when you get reforms to institutions, when you get something, you know, a corrupt institution, when you take away their funding, all of these concrete political outcomes. And I remember,

you know, I was giving a speech a number of years ago with governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. And we were unveiling this campaign to shut down the DEI bureaucracy in Florida state universities. And I talked with a colleague, a very nice colleague, and he said, Chris, I don't know why you go on stage with those politicians. The politicians are kind of slimy and it's somehow kind of beneath an intellectual to appear with a partisan politician. And I was very confused by this because I said, well, if we want our ideas to actually win and we live in a constitutional republic, the way to do that is through politicians, through elected representatives. And so if you approach politicians with this kind of attitude, it's going to be very hard for you to actually get your ideas to become reality.

And to me, that's the ultimate goal. I have tremendous respect for the pure scholars. I mean, I think it is so important and we should protect that, you know, that mode. I'm not a pure scholar by any sense of the imagination. But in fact, those of us who are in this more kind of this kind of halfway world between, you know, scholarship and pure politics, pure scholarship and pure politics, this kind of think tank world. It seems to me that the best approach is to try to ground your arguments in the best scholarship and move your arguments into politics as far as you can. And so I think because of those few reasons, some of these campaigns have been successful. Fascinating.

It's tough to know in real time, but it seems like we are at a time right now where the landscape is changing. If you agree with that, if that's your sense too, where do you see opportunities to change the culture and institutions that just a couple years ago seem to be permanently captured? And of course, I'm talking about government, I'm talking about higher education, entertainment. Are we at one of those moments? We are. We've seen a lot of progress. In corporations, for example, you have corporations that are slashing a lot of these ideologies out of their administration. In state governments, I think because of the example of Governor DeSantis in Florida, they're starting to take education reform seriously and related issues more seriously. And then you have this second Trump administration, which limited to the issues that I'm working on at least has taken much more decisive and courageous

action than previous administrations. And I think that we're in this period where the key question is going to be about the proper relationship between the state and the institutions. So for example, if you think about higher education, even public universities make up about three quarters of the universities, those are directly government institutions. But then of the 25%, virtually all of them accept public funds, accept public subsidies, accept public research grants, and are in effect a kind of satellite institution of the federal government. And the president in recent weeks has made what I think is the right and prudent decision to contest the relationship and to say there

are reciprocal obligations. If you're going to take billions of dollars in public funding, you have a minimum requirement of upholding, following standards and conforming with the following laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And so we're getting into an actual political fight. So what I was saying earlier is that you want to move from the purely intellectual into the political arena. That's really what's happening. And obviously, you have to do it wisely. You have to do it intelligently. You have to do it with some tactical sophistication. But this is really the question and the conservative argument that has been built over the generations, which is a true argument. You know, people like Roger Kimball or Mark Bauerlein,

or these great, you know, great, you know great scholars and writers and journalists of the past, James Burnham going further back than that, they've established the argument for us. But the moment was not quite right. The moment was not open. And I think that moment really opened up after 2020. Because if James Burnham or Roger Kimball or Mark Bauerlein, if they could see the corruption of the academic institutions because of these mostly race and gender ideologies, it was still limited. You know, most people couldn't quite grasp it because they weren't specialists. After 2020, I think what happened is that the average American citizen started to understand what a very small minority of scholars and intellectuals had understood in the past. And so that really created the possibility for me and others to take that great, those great arguments, to take that great work that had been done, to kind of put our feet onto it and use it

as a lever to actually, you know, turn these into popular issues. And so whether it's critical race theory, ans ideology, EEI, the corruption of higher education, these have become like headline political issues for the first time in a long time, probably since the 1950s and 60s and early 70s. So they kind of went dormant for about 50 years. They came back. And I'm very happy to see that the people who do what I do, rather the people who do what I can't do, which is administration. There are people who are very good administrators. I'm not one. I learned that. I tried various things. I'm very bad at it. But what's been so just gratifying to me is that some of these ideas and arguments that I've been making for a number of years seem to have penetrated into the thinking of many

brilliant administrators in the new White House. And so it's a very exciting time, very exciting moment. I see Harvard continues to push back and resist. We'll see how that plays out. That's right. I'll tell you, they're going to try, but I think they're on much weaker footing than they would admit for a few reasons. One is because they're just on the wrong side of these issues.

The polling data indicates that we have a three-to-one advantage on these questions of DEI. And so any campaign consultant will tell you, if you have a three-to-one advantage on these questions of DEI. And so in any campaign consultant will tell you, if you have a three to one advantage on an issue, you are in a great position. But second, what is their leverage? You know, Harvard is getting like $2 billion from the federal government, from taxpayers. And so it seems to me that the president and the administration have all of the leverage because they can say, all right, you don't want to come to the table. No money. You have to get into compliance with civil rights law or you don't deserve the public trust.

I think that the Trump administration has the financial leverage and the universities made a very dangerous deal in the past. They sacrificed their independence for federal dollars. Now they're finding their independence for federal dollars. Now they're finding out that those federal dollars have strings attached. And I think it also demonstrates the wisdom of Hillsdale College and its current president, Larry Arnn, who made the more difficult initial decision to refuse federal funds. But now they have their independence intact. And so I think that a lot of these older arguments that might have even appeared strange to people are starting to make a lot of sense.

And I do wonder whether the lawyers and administrators at Harvard are starting to realize that they actually are beholden to the government through their own agreements. And then this creates a large risk for them on the other side. Yes. There have been some pretty solid signs, including electoral signs, that the younger generation is gravitating towards values and ideals traditionally tied to free enterprise, to liberty, to free speech. You think that's right? Are you seeing the same thing? Yeah, I am. You see it in the polling data. And then I see it even with my own oldest son as a teenager. I see it kind of with his friends, you know, kind of peering, kind of easing in on the conversation. Yeah. I mean, look, a lot of

these ideas that have been circulated on the left are, they're stifling, they're unjust, they're often absurd. I mean, just kind of falsification of reality. And young people have a natural inclination to question these ideas. I think that's healthy. And also, but what I think is happening as well is that there's been this myth, I mean, largely because it's been true for the last half century,

but there's this myth that people in the arts and then people under the age of 30 are always liberal or left-wing. And that's, again, that's been true for a while in the United States, but that hasn't always been true over time and across geographical borders. And so there's nothing inevitable about that. So I think that, I think that this is perhaps the beginning, and again, we'll see where it goes, of a bigger realignment.

And so I'm excited about that. I think that's good. And I hope that, and even in my background in the arts, the arts have grown tremendously stale as well. And so I think that while I'm directly involved on the political side, trying to notch political victories, I think that there will also be corresponding cultural victories. And one of those cultural victories, paradoxically, coming from the conservative side, is opening up a greater range of artistic expression.

And I think real artists are chafing at a lot of the artistic institutions, the gatekeepers, the funders, the prize committees, of course not the Bradley Prize committee, but lesser prizes like the Pulitzer and the MacArthur Genius Award. But look, these awards, I mean, they've been chiefened, they've been ideologized, and they don't have the kind of sway that they used to in the past. And I think that's good. And I think new expression, new hierarchies, new institutions, you know, are sorely needed. Do you think the rise of independent media has contributed to the cultural shift we're

seeing? People just have so many more and different options to get their information and they're going to those more and different options. Definitely. I think that's right. There's of course, it's a double-edged sword. There's good and bad to that. Yeah, I think that what's been interesting to watch, and I've watched it from my film career to the present, The internet has really changed the arts and also changed politics and changed journalism. And so you used to have a limited number of institutions that were debating, kind

of debating each other, gatekeepers. And, and now it's really opened up so that even individuals can enter into the conversation in a way that they couldn't have previously without the approval of, you know, the National Review or the Weekly Standard or the Atlantic or the New York Times. And so look, sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad. You have less quality control, which is a problem that we can solve. But you also have a bit more freedom, a bit more latitude to bring new ideas and new people into the conversation. a bit more latitude to bring new ideas and new people into the conversation. And so on the whole, I think it is good,

even if it requires some of those institutions to change how they operate. I think it's good. And I think that a lot of the reason that in recent years we've had some of these successes is because we have direct access to the public, you know, those of us who are reformers. We have direct access to the public and then also a feeder system into the media, right? And so an idea that circulates on Twitter can then go on to Fox News, can then end up

in a policy on the governor's desk. That's exciting to me. And although I'm a huge admirer of the institutions, appreciate the institutions, work with the institutions as well, it seems that the best way for conservative institutions to move forward is to come up with like a hybrid model where they can serve as a gatekeeper,

a point of reference, a trusted kind of filtering mechanism, but they can also harness some of this energy that is circulating on the internet and refine it and fact check it and turn it into the actual material that is required to become real politics. Last question, Chris. You've taken a somewhat unconventional path to becoming a cultural reformer, given that path that you've taken. What's it mean to you to win a Bradley Prize?

Yeah, it's great. It's a huge honor. I've thought about this a lot since we first chatted and you broke the news. Many of the people that I admire from the older generation, I looked up to as maybe mentors or at least inspiration by reading their work have won the Bradley Prize. And so this was always on my radar. It was always something that I thought

this would be a high honor. But I also recognize that I'm not the typical recipient, a little bit different. And I think one of the things that I've reflected on even since the beginning is that I sometimes find it still kind of amusing and maybe a little bit strange that I ended up here in the first place. I'm not a temperamental conservative. I'm not a cradle conservative. I didn't come up in the kind of conservative institutional world, the kind of ladder of the conservative world, but I found myself here later in life, let's say after 30, so kind of later than the beginning career,

because I think the ideas are right. That's how I first got into it. I got into it because I did the reading and I said, these are the right ideas. And I really then dug into the whole tradition. I mean, as deep as I could, you know, back to the founding, you know, reading Jefferson and Adams and Payne and Samuel Adams, my favorite founder. And so I see this continuity and I see this participation in the tradition. And the Bradley Prize to me is part of that tradition. And the people who have been awarded the prize in the past are really upholding that tradition. And so, you know, while I came into it from purely intellectual grounds, what I've

discovered in my, you know, five, six years really, you know, kind of working within the institutions is I always, I've also made great friends, good people, substantive thinkers, you know, exciting, you know, publishers and researchers and writers and journalists and media figures. And so it's been, you know, that's been maybe a surprise to me. But probably, you know, really the gratifying part about it is I found a great community of people with not only the right ideas, but have become, you know, actually good friends. And so I hope that at the awards dinner, I've invited many of these friends. I think a lot of them will come. And so it's just a very special opportunity. It's a

great honor. And I really appreciate just being acknowledged as part of this tradition. And I think that there's something special about that. We look forward to celebrating with you and all your friends and family in just a few short weeks. Chris Ruffold, thanks so much for spending time with us and thank you for your courage. Cultural change is not easy and you've experienced that firsthand. People will resist, people have already resisted, but thanks so much for helping to turn our country into what is hopefully a better direction for all of us.

Thanks so much. Thank you. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this edition of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast. you