The conservative writer taking aim at Newsom’s green agenda

SACRAMENTO, California — Utility contracting rules do not usually light up the internet. Then Christopher Rufo got involved.

A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning public policy think tank, Rufo’s writing on California’s energy and environment policies has turned a series of wonky Newsom administration programs into viral conservative media fodder, and now, in one case, a federal civil rights issue.

The latest: Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said late last week that the Justice Department would scrutinize the California Public Utilities Commission’s supplier diversity program after Rufo and co-writer Austen Hufford criticized it in a Tuesday piece for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

The two called the commission’s inclusion of LGBT-owned businesses in utility procurement goals a “gay certification program.” The article went viral on X, and was shared by Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Andreessen. It also appeared in The California Post with an opinion label.

Dhillon warned the CPUC in a letter a few days later that “aggrieved private parties” and the Justice Department “may” challenge the program under civil rights law. On Newsmax, she called the program unconstitutional and later told Glenn Beck: “It’s nonsense, it needs to stop, and it’s illegal.”

In an email to POLITICO, CPUC spokesperson Terrie Prosper described it as a voluntary 40-year old program created by state law, and pointed to a new page on the CPUC’s website pushing back on “inflammatory rhetoric and selective facts” regarding the program.

It’s the latest in a string of online flare-ups between Rufo and California agencies as Gov. Gavin Newsom winds down his governorship ahead of a likely 2028 presidential bid. Officials from state agencies and Newsom’s press office have characterized Rufo’s stories as bad-faith outrage campaigns, but they’ve also been forced into a defensive crouch, including responding in unusually lengthy public detail in posts on X.

Rufo, who grew up in Sacramento and built a national profile attacking critical race theory and diversity programs, turned his attention to California earlier this year as part of a larger Manhattan Institute effort to focus on the state, he told POLITICO in an email. The effort includes a new ten-person team dedicated to California, he said.

“My own personal goal is to do to Gavin Newsom what we did to Tim Walz in Minnesota,” he told Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles and Andrew Klavan in a March podcast.

He and his team kicked off their efforts in March with a City Journal piece taking aim at the $100 million-plus Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Los Angeles, which got Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso to criticize the project. They’ve followed this with a steady drumbeat of pieces spotlighting issues like tribal wildfire resilience grants and Newsom’s forest management projects.

In an email to POLITICO, he touted “hundreds of millions of views” for the stories, most of which have taken aim at the Newsom administration’s energy and environmental policies.

“The state has used “climate change” as a mask for wasting billions of dollars in taxpayer funds,” Rufo wrote in the email. “We’re showing how deep the rot goes.”

The online traction the stories have received, and the reaction from Trump allies, have California officials scrambling to defend their record.

Daniel Villaseñor, deputy secretary for communications for the California Natural Resources Agency, detailed his strategy in a LinkedIn post in March, calling the wildlife crossing story a “coordinated outrage cycle.”

“We do want to make sure that our response, even if it's not fully included in the story, is out in the public space," he said in an interview, "so that people can see what they're trying to sell you in these stories is, most of the time, garbage."

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