He Fuels the Right’s Cultural Fires (and Spreads Them to Florida)

GIG HARBOR, Wash. — Christopher Rufo appears on Fox News so often that he converted a room in his Pacific Northwest house to a television studio, complete with professional lighting, an uplink to Fox in New York and an “On Air” light in the hall so his wife and two children don’t barge in during broadcasts.

“I’ll do ‘Tucker’ and then pop out and have dinner,” Mr. Rufo said recently at his home in Gig Harbor, Wash., thousands of miles from the nation’s media and political capitals.

Mr. Rufo is the conservative activist who probably more than any other person made critical race theory a rallying cry on the right — and who has become, to some on the left, an agitator of intolerance. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, he has emerged at the front of another explosive cultural clash, one that he sees as even more politically potent and that the left views as just as dangerous: the battle over L.G.B.T.Q. restrictions in schools.

Mr. Rufo has taken aim at opponents of a new Florida law that prohibits teachers in some grades from discussing L.G.B.T.Q. issues and that critics call “Don’t Say Gay.” He declared “moral war” against the statute’s most prominent adversary, the Walt Disney Company. And he has used the same playbook that proved effective in his crusade on racial issues: a leak of insider documents.

On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Mr. Rufo shared video last month of an internal Disney meeting where a producer spoke of adding “queerness” to an animated series and mentioned, tongue in cheek, her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda.”

To conservatives, the video was proof that Disney was sexualizing children.

“We’ve caught them on tape and the evidence is damning,” Mr. Rufo declared. The story ricocheted through the conservative media ecosystem. Fox News alone ran dozens of segments critical of Disney.