Never heard of him before this incident. The Politico article I provided links to an interview with him, and he credits billionaire Democrat Harvard donor Bill Ackman for leading the financial pressure and suggests that they're all allies who had a shared goal of toppling the president of Harvard University.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/03/christopher-rufo-claudine-gay-harvard-resignation-00133618I’ve learned that it never hurts to take the credit because sometimes people don’t give it to you. But this really was a team effort that involved three primary points of leverage. First was the narrative leverage, and this was done primarily by me, Christopher Brunet and Aaron Sibarium. Second was the financial leverage, which was led by Bill Ackman and other Harvard donors. And finally, there was the political leverage which was really led by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s masterful performance with Claudine Gay at her hearings.
When you put those three elements together — narrative, financial and political pressure — and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the resignation of America’s most powerful academic leader. I think that this result speaks for itself.
How closely have you been coordinating with the other people in those three camps?
I know all the players, I have varying degrees of coordination and communication, but —
What does that mean, “various degrees of communication and coordination?” Have you been actively working together?
Some people I speak to a little more frequently, some people a little less frequently. But my job as a journalist and even more so as an activist is to know the political conditions, to understand and develop relationships with all of the political actors, and then to work as hard as I can so that they’re successful in achieving their individual goals — but also to accomplish the shared goal, which was to topple the president of Harvard University.
MSNBC credited Bill Ackman for leading Gay's ouster, and the Guardian credits him as well -
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/jan/03/bill-ackman-billionaire-attacks-claudine-gay-harvard-twitter-xChief among the campaigners celebrating the resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University was a man who arguably did the most to push Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, out the door: Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager and Harvard alumnus.
From the
earlier MSNBC video posted it said after the five minute mark that Bill Ackman "called on the university to release the names of students who signed a pro-Palestinian statement in order to get them blacklisted from future jobs, stating none of the companies which he controls will hire a student who had signed the statement and nor should others."
Should Harvard be releasing the names of students who signed a pro-Palestinian statement?