How The Manhattan Institute Hired a Porn Star to Infiltrate The Conservative Movement and Channel its Energy into Being Pro-Israel
"You spent over a decade whoring yourself out all over the internet, you have no one to blame but yourself. Take some responsibility for your actions, this perpetual victim act is pathetic."
In October 2024, Christopher F. Rufo’s employer, the Manhattan Institute, gave him a budget to hire 2 full-time investigative journalists reporting directly to him.
It was the chance of a lifetime.
Rufo had just spent the past five years positioning himself as the face of the anti-woke movement — a champion for meritocracy, a voice for disillusioned young men frustrated by affirmative action and collapsing institutional standards — now, he had the chance to handpick anyone — literally from a pool of thousands of hyper-competent young geniuses — and for months, he bragged non-stop about using this opportunity to assemble a team of ‘‘dangerous’’ “killers” and “assassins” who would “build institutions” and “advance the conservative movement” with dogged precision and intelligence.
So… who did he hire?
Rufo’s first hire, Hannah Grossman, is a self-described ‘‘Holocaust educator.’’
Hannah’s journalism career began in 2017 as a fellow as Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a Jewish supremacist think-tank, where she ground her teeth by lobbing softballs to Jeffrey Epstein associate Alan Dershowitz, in articles such ‘‘Alan Dershowitz on Trump, Israel, and Antisemitism.’’
She then worked as an associate editor at the Daily Caller, where she wrote such classics as ‘‘95-Year-Old World War II Paratrooper Captured By Nazis Describes His Harrowing Experience’’ and ‘‘150 Rockets Rain Down On Israel As Revenge For Palestinian Leader’s Death.’’ She then wrote for Jewish Press, Jewish Star, The Five Towns Jewish Times, Daily Wire, and Legal Insurrection, where she mostly spent her time complaining about anti-Zionism, e.g.: ‘'Important win for Jewish students against anti-Zionist discrimination at Cal State.’’
She was then given a shot in the A-leagues at Fox News, where her corpus of work doubled down on nakedly shilling for the Israel Lobby.
Here is a sample of her Fox News articles:
Hamas defector tells pro-Palestinian activists they belong in 'a mental asylum' in brutal debate
Black student erupts on anti-Israel 'White libs' for blocking path on campus
Major 'political shift' among Jewish Cornell students as they question ties to progressive groups
Father of American held captive by Hamas says hostages 'are dying,' going through 'hell' in Gaza
Ilhan Omar's daughter suspended from college amid anti-Israel activism
On Rufo’s team, she focused on “the fight against campus anti-semitism”:
Hard hitting stuff.
Look: I have nothing against Hannah Grossman personally, I have never met her. My focus isn’t on her as an individual but on her career, which is as an overt Israeli attack dog singularly dedicated to promoting Zionism with little nuance. She is an Israeli PR agent, not a journalist. Her Twitter feed is dedicated to retweeting Israeli government accounts and “Mossad Commentary”.
The real issue is what her hiring says about Rufo’s priorities. He swore to avenge the injustice done to disillusioned young conservative men, was given a slush fund to do it, and then promptly gave that slush fund to… a midwit Holocaust educator chick, to write about anti-semitism? Huh?
Since hiring Hannah, Rufo’s focus has conspicuously shifted. Instead of targeting woke absurdities or academic malfeasance, he has spent the past couple of years focused on attacking professors who call for financial divestment from Israel, or attacking other pundits for not being sufficiently Zionist.
His second hire, Christina Buttons, is much more scandalous.
For starters, the least of the problems is that it was a nepotism hire.
Christina Buttons is dating Colin Wright, another senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute… meaning after hiring a holocaust scholar, Chris Rufo promptly hired his buddy’s idiot girlfriend. Put bluntly: everyone knows she wouldn’t have gotten the job at the snobbiest intellectual thinktank in New York if she didn’t sleep her way there. So much for meritocracy.
Secondly, ‘‘Christina Buttons’’ is not her real name.
Her real name is “Christina Berry.”
She uses a nom-de-plume “Buttons” to obfuscate her past as a hardcore porn star.
She stared in at least 25 pornos from 2008-2016 under the stage name ‘‘Rita Lovely,’’ sometimes “Cute Courtney” , including such classics as ‘‘Perky Redhead Hippie Slut,’’ ‘‘Cum Stained Casting Couch 14,’’ ‘‘Only Teen Blowjobs 3,’’ and ‘‘Treat Me Like a Slut 3.’’
Here is her partial filmography:
Her career transition from ‘‘Perky Redhead Hippie Slut’’ to conservative gatekeeper was uncovered after an internet sleuth named Basil ran her face through facial recognition software, which showed R-rated stills from her pornos next to her professional headshots.
Basil gave this info to a drama streamer named Ethan Ralph, he tweeted it out, it went viral, and it’s been a recurring meme for 2 years now.
It was then double-confirmed when users on X cross-verified her moles/freckles with Rita Lovely’s moles/freckles:
Rufo pled ignorance, and besides, it didn’t matter, because she was repentant:
Except: she has always been unrepentantly pro-porn & pro-prostitution. In fact, she explicitly maintain that prostitutes and porn stars are making a completely rational choice because they can easily make more than someone earning minimum wage, so, sex work is good. Sex workers are NOT victims with no agency. It’s a rational choice.
Despite being pro-sex work, she has a habit of bullying other strippers, trafficked women, and CSA survivors, telling them without any irony to “take some responsibility” for “whoring yourself out all over the internet”:
Perhaps Rufo should have read her tweets before hiring her, where she explicitly warned him:
Or perhaps he could have looked at her previous employers, the Daily Wire, where she quit in a blaze of glory because Ben Shapiro was mean to trans people.
Another of her former employers was the “Jewish Institute for Liberal Values”:
Her Jewish liberal values include aggressive support for abortion:
She loves abortion so much that her Etsy page, where she posts doodles of softcore loli porn and sells pro-abortion tank tops, donates 20% of all proceeds to The Lillith Fund to pay for abortions:
I particularly like her art of naked Jewish children:
While she loves Judaism, she hates Christianity…
…so much so that she even hates her own name because it has “Christ” in it:
…this hatred for Christianity is despite the fact that as late as 2025, she has “never opened a Bible before”:
Of course, she would never criticize the Talmud — support for Israel is a prerequisite for working at the Manhattan Institute, whose board of Trustees includes names like Barr, Golub, Hertog, Singer, Kristol, Lefkowitz (Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer), Rosenkranz, Kaufman, Lebovitz, and Greenberg.
They fired their biggest star last year for milqueoast hemming and hawing about “well maybe we shouldn’t carpetbomb women and children in refugee camps”:
They publish articles claiming that anyone holding up a banner saying “NO US MILITARY AID TO ISRAEL” is a “civil terrorist”…
…and other articles arguing that free speech is “too sacred” and that more people should be “deported” for “anti-Israel speech”:
Here is the Manhattan Institute’s Director of Constitutional Studies, Ilya Shapiro, spreading the lie that Hamas burns babies alive in ovens, calling Palestinians “subhumans” who “must be eradicated”, and repeatedly calling for explicit “ethnic cleansing”:
But I digress.
Upon going viral for being a porn star who works at the most elite conservative thinktank in the world, she wrote an essay justifying it:
Her reasoning for doing porn is as follows:
I received many diagnoses throughout my life, the most recent being Asperger's syndrom… I eventually agreed to meet with a representative from an agency that had been hounding me, which led to my decision to make adult films to pay off my debt. At the time, and for several months thereafter, I believed I had bipolar disorder. However, I later realized that the instability I felt stemmed from other factors, including heavy drinking
So: BPD, heavy drinking, OCD, autism, and credit card debt.
A tale as old as time.
Then, after years of having “autistic” in her bio and loudly making having autism her entire personality, just last week, she came out and loudly proclaimed that autism is fake, her diagnosis was fake, and launched a whole anti-autism crusade:
As a wise woman once said: You spent over a decade whoring yourself out all over the internet, you have no one to blame but yourself. Take some responsibility for your actions, this perpetual victim act is pathetic.
Now she wants to be a gatekeeper of the conservative movement.
Sorry, but no.
Someone has to be the gatekeeper of the conservative movement.
Today it’s me.
Leave.
You don’t belong.
You are a cancer.
Go back to being who you really are: a mentally ill adventuress bimbo with rainbow hair obsessed with abortion, who’s now only masquerading as a conservative gatekeeper to trick people into advancing the interests of Israel.
She is very explicit in this goal:
How Many Porn Stars Are There in Con Inc.?
Ms. Buttons isn’t the first porn star to infiltrate the conservative movement and rise to become a gatekeeper.
Not by a long shot.
One prominent example is “Jack Murphy”, who spent years pretending to be an Irish alphamale, later revealed as a gay Jewish pornographer whose actual name is John Goldman:
Another good example is conservative freedom warrior Corey DeAngelis, who did his porn under the name “Seth Rose”:
Chris Rufo, of course, defended his friend’s past as a gay porn star and maintained that he should keep his role as a Con Inc. gatekeeper:
Corey DeAngelis / “Seth Rose” headlined CPAC this year.
My favorite example in this genre is Brian Riedl, who joined the Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow in economic policy in 2017.
After working for the Manhattan institute for a decade as their resident tax wonk, in 2025, Brian Reidl, chose to shatter his own family and traumatize his children so that he could put on a skirt, paint his face, and do news hits as a Manhattan Institute expert flaunting his fetish and subverting/destroying the conservative movement:
The Manhattan Institute using female pronouns for “Jessica” Riedl, is, of course, extra funny because Rufo built his entire career on the absurdity of pronouns.
The Real Reason Christina Buttons Was Hired
It turns out that Christina Button’s biggest fan on Twitter is a woman named Suzy Lebovitz-Edelman, who has sycophantically replied to her hundreds of times before Buttons ever worked at the Manhattan Institute:
Suzy Lebovitz-Edelman, Christina’s top reply-guy, is married to hedge-fund manager Joseph Edelman, whose net worth is roughly $2.5–$3 billion. Their interests can be traced by their donations history. This includes the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish World Service, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, The Tikvah Fund, Bari Weiss’s UATX, and Media Matters.
Suzy and Joseph are among Manhattan Institute’s top donors, giving them a $725,000 cash infusion in 2022-2024 for a “gender identity initiative.”
The term “Woke Right” and “Woke Reich” came from Suzy Edelman-Lebovitz and James Lindsay.
Here, Chris Rufo corrects Rod Dreher over his misuse of the term, since he is paid by the Edelman's through their special donation devoted to "transgender issues":
As part of this “Woke Right” psychological operation, Suzy met with Chris Rufo and James Lindsay to coordinate messaging:
Recently, James Lindsay attacked Arby’s as "Woke Right”:
When Chris Rufo stepped out of line and made fun of James Lindsay for this, Suzy put him back into his place. She keeps him on a short leash.
Suzy Edelman-Lebovitz is Christina Button’s biggest fan.
Suzy Edelman-Lebovitz is Chris Rufo’s handler.
She tells him what he is or isn’t allowed to tweet about, and who to hire.
Oh wow! Such hard-hitting googling there! And so many pretty pictures!
I'm confused but trying to keep up with this cast of characters out of a Russian novel.
Chris Brunet said toward the end of today's article...
'As part of this “Woke Right” psychological operation, Suzy met with Chris Rufo and James Lindsay to coordinate messaging:'
But Christopher Rufo's name is listed on the photo of the chart called Every Conservative James Lindsay Called "Woke" under Mainstream MAGA people.
Who made that chart? Who is Kaiser von Loengramm?
If Rufo and Lindsay are coordinating messaging, why does the chart say Lindsay is calling Rufo "woke?"