Editor’s note: The Washington Examiner is honored to publish the unedited remarks of this year’s Bradley Prize honorees. The below speech was given by Christopher Rufo.
It’s great to be with all of you tonight. I’d like to thank the Bradley Foundation, the members of the selection committee, and my family — my wife and four children, who are here with us tonight.
In many ways, I am an unlikely conservative, and being here on this stage tonight comes to me as something of a surprise. I grew up with very left-wing politics. My first political memories were with my aunts and uncles in Italy, looking through their bookshelves, which included Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and other communist theorists.
As a teenager, my family gifted me a flag of Che Guevara bearing his black-and-white portrait and the slogan “Always Until Victory” beneath it. I entered Georgetown University with an aspiration to be involved in left-wing politics here in America, but that early idealism did not survive contact with reality.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Examiner (paywall)
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Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He is the author of America's Cultural Revolution.
Photo by LumiNola/Getty Images
