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Sept. 3, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

55:42

Can We Save Our Society? | Chris Rufo

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	I just started looking at the people around me, and these kind of left-wing, radical student groups and political movements, and what I found is that these were people who were the sons and daughters of the most elite people from around the globe.
	These are people who are using this vocabulary cynically to establish their own status, to establish their own power, and then after a couple years of wearing the keffiyeh, are going to go on and take over their father's company.
	And that was really the question.
	If these people are utterly amoral frauds, maybe there's something wrong with these ideas.
	Christopher F. Ruffo is a writer, filmmaker, and senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute, as well as a contributing editor of City Journal, where his writings explore many issues such as gender ideology, identity politics, addiction, crime, and the decline of American cities.
	Rufo gained attention as an outspoken critic of progressive ideologies and policies, fighting against CRT and DEI, and even inspiring a presidential order and legislation in 15 states where he's worked closely with lawmakers to craft successful public policy.
	As a filmmaker, Rufo has directed four documentaries for PBS, Netflix, and international television, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities.
	Chris has a popular substack where you can follow all of his work on critical race theory, gender ideology, institutional capture, and social decay.
	His new book, America's Cultural Revolution, covers the period between the 1960s and the summer of George Floyd.
	In this episode, we discuss how to create a free society through duty and responsibility, and how leftist ideology has evolved and planted itself into all of our social institutions.
	Plus, we delve into how Chris transitioned from a young leftist to a force for good in
	the conservative movement.
	Welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
	Just a reminder, some of our conversation at the end will be exclusively for our Daily Wire Plus members.
	If you're not a member yet, click the link at the top of this episode's description to get the full conversation with Chris Ruffo and with all of our awesome guests.
	Let's get started.
	This show is sponsored by Genusell.
	Chris, thanks so much for joining the show.
	Really appreciate it.
	It's good to be with you.
	So why don't we start with the biggest question on everybody's mind.
	Are we winning?
	I mean, it seems like in some areas yes, in some areas no.
	Politically speaking, Republicans have been underperforming the last several election cycles running.
	But at the same time, in a lot of states we're seeing some success.
	So what's your impression?
	Are we winning?
	We meaning, you know, the rational people in America who don't believe that boys are girls and such.
	Well, I think first it's that in politics there's no ultimate victories and there are no ultimate failures.
	And so you have to figure out what the combination is amongst the two opposites.
	And so I think that we are demonstrating effective models for winning, both on the media side, the activism side, the political side, the policy side.
	But that hasn't translated into a broad-scale reversal of some of these cultural phenomena that we are fighting against.
	But look, I think we're in an experimental phase, and the experiments that we've been running, I think, have been successful, whether it's critical race theory or gender or some of these corporate boycotts.
	And these are the models that we'll need, and we'll need to replicate and to deploy across different domains in order to be successful.
	So, Chris, one of the critiques that we hear from you a lot from the left-wing media is that they're not sure exactly what you are.
	Are you a journalist?
	Are you an activist?
	So what do you consider yourself?
	In which box do you put yourself?
	Because you're pretty obviously not hiding the ball when it comes to your own political persuasion and the things that you're hoping to do, but you're also uncovering a lot of news and breaking a lot of news and making a lot of news.
	Yeah, I like to maintain a posture of strategic ambiguity.
	But, you know, I think that what I've come to a conclusion about is I try to work of what excites me, what interests me, what I think is effective.
	And so I pick and choose from the variety of different backgrounds and disciplines and genres of work to put it together to do something quite simple.
	I'm a politically engaged writer, journalist, policy analyst.
	I want to put big victories up on the scoreboard.
	And I use journalistic techniques to achieve some of these things.
	And so it's a hybrid role that I've kind of created through my own experiments, drawing on my background as a documentary filmmaker, drawing on journalistic techniques, and then really by accident at first, translating it into the domain of activism and leadership and public policy.
	And so I've created this, I think, somewhat unique system, this somewhat unique approach that confounds my critics.
	And that just makes it all the more delicious.
	It makes it all the sweeter that they can't quite put me in a box and they don't know what to make of it.
	Now, Chris, one of the things that you've uncovered that really is fascinating is that you'll pick a story and people will immediately leap to the conclusion that the story is an outlier.
	And then you'll hit them with a bunch of other stories along the same lines.
	And they'll say, well, you know, it's not really happening, but it's good that it is.
	Or eventually they end up at the position that the thing that you've been saying all along they've been trying to do is the thing they've actually been doing.
	How do you know when what you're covering is an individual story and when it's actually an important trend that needs to be explicated and brought into public view?
	Well, I think, look, a lot of us know that some of these things, whether it's critical race theory or gender in schools or any other kind of issue, they are widespread.
	We know that intuitively.
	We know that through our experience.
	But what I found as a general rule of thumb, Is that you need to do somewhere along the lines of 10 to 12 reported stories to establish a trend, to establish a body of evidence, to establish a kind of irrefutable pattern that then forces the left to engage in debate.
	And so whenever I'm designing a campaign or reporting campaign or a policy campaign, that's pretty much the rule of thumb.
	I really try to do 10 to 12 stories over the course of 10 to 12 weeks.
	And I found that if you can be hitting these stories, exploding them into the media, establishing them as a
	narrative pattern.
	And you can do that for a three-month period, more or less, every week, getting on TV, getting
	on the radio, getting on podcasts, getting on social media.
	What you do is that you force the left to finally engage, because you start doing damage
	to their narratives, to damage to their own institutional power.
	You start activating conservative or Republican politicians on these issues.
	And only when you put them in a position of forced engagement Will they actually engage?
	Because they'll play the game, you know, critical race theory doesn't exist.
	This is an outlier.
	It's just equity.
	What do you have against equity?
	All of these word games.
	And what I found is that you have to have shocking, salacious, incontrovertible evidence.
	And you have to do it in a repeated manner at a large scale.
	And that's really how you force the debate.
	And that's really how I think you change public opinion and ultimately deliver political victories.
	So, Chris, let's talk a little bit about sort of the history that you've been uncovering.
	You do so in your book, but also that you've been uncovering in a lot of your journalism.
	And the first question I want to start with there is, what do you think was sort of the tipping point for the United States?
	Was it back in the 1960s?
	Was it that it was kind of hiding under the surface and then broke out into the open in the 2010s?
	Or was there a simultaneous shift?
	In terms of policy and publicity that happened in the 2010s.
	In other words, was there sort of a lurking monster for 50 years that was gradually eating ground and then finally we saw it in the 2010s?
	Or did it all sort of happen all at once?
	Yeah, I think the lurking monster theory is probably the most accurate and, you know, what I found in researching this book that traces the radical left's long march through the institutions from 1968 to 2020, those are the great bookends, the kind of historical frame, you know, what I found is that intellectually The left's ideology was fully formed in 1968-1969.
	They had the ideas, they had the theories, they had the basic coalitional patterns, they had even the very language that we see used today was already in use in the far left, radical journals, publications, and pamphlets by 1968-1969.
	And so, in some sense, there are no new ideas on the left.
	since that time. But what has changed is the placement of these ideas within institutions.
	And so from that period of 1968 to 2020, with the death of George Floyd, everyone taking the knee,
	everyone posting the black square for BLM, what you had is this long march process. And what I've
	tried to do is trace not just the ideas as abstractions or as a kind of empty vessels,
	but actually the flesh and blood march of these ideas through institutions.
	And so you see it in universities, you see it in K-12 schools, you see it in government bureaucracies, and then you see it even in Fortune 100 companies.
	And so it took that basic pattern over a very long period of time.
	And what I think the left has done very brilliantly since 1968, when their intellectual development It's essentially ceased is that they've understood how to identify weak points within institutions, identify choke points where ideologies can take hold, and then distribution mechanisms where they can have a minority of individuals within, say, a Fortune 100 company that are exerting power with great leverage from the middle register all the way to the CEO suite.
	And so that, to me, is really fascinating.
	And I think the right has done a poor job historically.
	We want to have a debate as if politics is an Oxford style exchange of ideas and the best ideas win.
	That's not actually how it works.
	That's not how politics plays out in the real world.
	And so that's what I really hope to do is show conservatives how politics really works, how institutions really function.
	And then given that knowledge, we can start to turn things around.
	We'll get to more with Chris in just one second first.
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	So, why don't we go through some of those institutions?
	I wrote a book in the early 2000s talking about left-wing bias on college campuses.
	And I remember, even then, I was hit with a bunch of people on the right saying, what do we care what's happening on the college campuses?
	People will get off college campuses and then they'll go into the workforce and then they'll be converted back to sanity.
	when that happens.
	I remember arguing, I was still at UCLA at the time I was in college,
	and I remember arguing, well, I'm not sure that that's the case
	because this is where bad ideas start and then they are sort of infused throughout the culture.
	But obviously the takeover of the college has started, as you're pointing out, in the late 60s, early 70s.
	Were colleges and universities sort of the first flowering of these ideas,
	the first seed beds for these ideas?
	And why were they, and if so, why were they such easy pickings for the left?
	Well, they absolutely were.
	And you don't have to take my word for it.
	Some of those folks who were leading this movement, notably the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse and his student, the black communist radical Angela Davis, you know, they gave a speech at UCLA in the late 1960s outlining their strategy.
	And they thought very clearly at the time that the universities were their initial revolutionary institutions.
	That's the kind of phrasing that they were using.
	And of course, universities have always been open, have been friendly to radical ideas, have been a home for left-wing political radicals for a very long time.
	But what they deposited for the first time, really, was to say, we don't want to go towards the production of knowledge.
	That's no longer the goal of our politics within the university.
	We want to transform it, the university, into a revolutionary institution, into an activist institution.
	And so they changed the telos, or the ends, or the purpose of the university.
	That's what they were preaching at the time.
	It wasn't necessarily the case.
	There was resistance within the University of California system, believe it or not.
	Ronald Reagan was the governor.
	The trustees of those universities tried to tamp down some of the radicalism, tamp down some of the academic takeovers.
	But they lost institution after institution, department after department.
	And, you know, conservatives, as you said, made a grave error by condescending to campus life and to say, oh, these are, you know, blue-haired radicals studying queer theory.
	They'll never get a job.
	You know, look at these losers.
	In fact, that's not true.
	They didn't get the jobs that existed at the time, but they created jobs like DEI administrator Microaggression investigator.
	All of these fake ideological jobs, these commissariat-style jobs that have really mushroomed and exploded not just in campuses but in really all of our institutions.
	And so, you know, look, In 1968, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Information, in that period, Eldridge Cleaver, really truly said, we want to seize the factories.
	We want to seize the means of material production in the United States and start making, you know, school buses instead of, you know, Ford trucks.
	They still had that orthodox Marxist idea that the means of production were the source of wealth, the source of power.
	Nobody believes that on the radical left anymore.
	They don't want to build cars.
	They don't want to manage agricultural facilities.
	They don't want to do any of the hard physical work that it takes to run a modern physical economy.
	They just want to have those prestige cultural institutions.
	They've seized the means of knowledge production, of ideological production, and that's the situation we find ourselves in today.
	We find ourselves in this Paradoxical and very contradictory moment where the means of capitalist production are still very much oriented towards the private market, towards capitalist production.
	But our cultural institutions, our knowledge production institutions are very much in the hands of the radical left.
	And so we are in this, I think, precarious spot where we have to take a hard look at the status quo and figure out what our next move is.
	So, to go back to the universities for a second, because I want to move into corporate America momentarily.
	When we look at the universities, what do you think was sort of the immune failure of the universities that allowed them to be taken over so easily?
	Because this movement really breaks out in the late 60s, and by the early 70s, they're basically completely taken over.
	I mean, the switch happens incredibly fast.
	And it does lend some credence to theories that have been heard from some corners of I'd say an integralist crowd that classical liberalism is a failure, that classical liberalism, the idea that everybody's voice should be heard, that free speech carries the seeds of its own destruction because it turns out that if people walk through the front door and they say, well, my version of free speech is that you shouldn't get free speech and you're a victimizer and actually the entire superstructure of free speech is actually a reflection of power structures.
	You have no systemic immunity to that because you've allowed that view in the door.
	There actually has to be a rule to classical liberalism that is not universal, and that is that if you attack classical liberalism, then you are outside the realm of classical liberalism.
	But many of the people at universities were not capable of actually implementing that.
	The basic idea was, if this is a place for free speech, then free speech also includes people coming in and saying free speech is incredibly bad, you're a victimizer, and you should hand power to us to demonstrate that you're not actually a victimizer.
	I think that is absolutely part of it.
	And I think that if you say, well, why did the universities fall?
	There really are two primary causes.
	One is the intellectual cause, let's say, that you've outlined.
	And basically what happened is that conservatives or even kind of old line liberals adopted what I think of as a proceduralist approach.
	to campus life. They said, we want free speech, academic freedom, and those are the great rules.
	And we'll have a marketplace of ideas. We'll have a debate.
	We'll have a peer review in journals, and the best ideas will emerge triumphant. But what they
	did is they removed the ultimate purpose of education. And so they had a lowering of
	ambition.
	They had no final point, no final reference, no highest ideal by which you could measure all of these other things.
	And so the free marketplace of ideas turned into nothing of the sort.
	You had no competition.
	You had an ideological sorting rather than a sorting on a hierarchy of real values towards transcendent values like truth, goodness, and beauty.
	And once we abandoned that highest point, You had a totally lateral system and in that kind of system, a horizontal arrangement of power without a highest point, the strongest wins.
	You have a Nietzschean kind of battle of wills.
	And so that brings me to the second point.
	And the second point is one of character.
	And you had old line liberals running these institutions as they had been run for many decades.
	And they were simply, did not have the fortitude, did not have the strength, did not have the character.
	to resist the left-wing radicals. And so you can see this, you know, you said they walk in the
	front door, but actually they don't walk in the front door.
	Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis at University of California, San Diego, they had a famous
	incident where they, they knocked down and broke down the front door to the registrar's office,
	occupied it, and then, you know, the rest is history. And so you had old line liberals managing these
	institutions that, that, that professed these values of propriety and civil discourse.
	But when they were confronted with violent left-wing radicals that wanted to take over their
	institutions by intellectual and physical force, they did not have the ability to resist
	just as a matter of temperament, as a matter of character, as a matter of will. And so, and,
	and, and, In a sense, what you had were people that were trained in the streets, people that were trained in revolutionary violence, people that were, you know, hitting police officers in the back of the head with batons.
	They entered the faculty lounge and they find a bunch of middle-aged, predominantly men, with tweed suits, and they said, these people are no match.
	We're going to eat them alive.
	And that's exactly what happened.
	The antibodies, or the defenses of the universities, We're so weak intellectually and temperamentally that it was only a matter of time before there was a demographic turnover until what we see today, which is a wholesale recomposition of academic life that signals that at least in this limited domain, the left has won.
	That seems like the next move for the left after taking over the heads of universities was to then filter that out into the entire education system because ed schools become sort of the vanguard of the revolution.
	And now the idea is we're going to see these ideas in kids, an entire generation of kids all across the United States using the teachers unions, making sure that every public school classroom is reflective of these values.
	And that also requires a nationalization of the education apparatus.
	And so when people look at why do young people think the way they do, the answer is because
	they've been taught for two generations to think the way that they do.
	So how did that bleed over happen?
	How did the bleed over happen from the faculty lounges to the ed departments to public schools?
	This is the great transmission that I tackle in the third section of the book.
	I really show how these ideas went from originally the kind of philosophical core to the street activist revolution and then into these great organs of values transmission in the K-12 schools.
	And so, absolutely, it starts with graduate schools of education.
	This was a kind of soft conquest.
	And so you have someone like Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist pedagogist, bringing
	the pedagogy of the oppressed, which is a kind of Marxist, Leninist theory of education
	that says that the function of education is not to establish basic literacy skills.
	It's not to create good citizens, as Aristotle would have said, to educate the child into
	the political regime, which in this case would mean the American constitutional system.
	But he said the function of education is to open a child's eyes to his or her own oppression,
	to turn the revolutionary consciousness switch on in that child, and then guide that child
	towards an activist politics where he can overturn all of the social entities around
	him.
	And so that became the focus of education.
	And that book that outlined that theory that most people have never heard of is actually
	the number one most cited book in all graduate schools of education in the United States
	and the third most cited book in all of the social sciences and in American academic journals.
	It's immensely influential.
	And I think that conservatives again failed because they were not able to do that.
	They had an implicit trust in public institutions like K-12 public schools to a great degree.
	They bought into this idea that they were neutral entities that taught children in as neutral a manner as possible, that sought to show both sides and let students learn how to think, not what to think.
	Which is, of course, one of the most awful ideas in practice that you could have.
	And I think conservatives also didn't contest those school board elections, didn't try to take control over the curriculum.
	And then consequently, you have an open playing field that over the years allowed these left-wing pedagogists
	and activist teachers to take over the entire transmission chain so that now,
	and I think that this is the most remarkable piece of research that I found doing the work for the book,
	was you could read the radical pamphlets of the Black Liberation Army.
	These were violent revolutionaries that were assassinating police officers, robbing banks,
	bombing police stations.
	And then you see the K through 12 public school curriculum in a school district like Buffalo, New York.
	And the ideas, while the vocabulary has changed, while the connotations have changed, it's softened a bit,
	it's passed through a therapeutic language, the core ideas are identical.
	And so the radical ideas have gone from the revolutionary fringes
	to your child's kindergarten classroom.
	And to me, that is a shocking conquest that cannot be underestimated.
	It's more on that in a second.
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	You can see pretty easily, as you talk about the book, how this infuses the government bureaucracy.
	You're talking about a group of people who are not answerable to electoral politics.
	They're not answerable to a market.
	So failure and success look exactly the same.
	The only sort of success that actually exists is an ideological success, and failure just looks like getting fired, and you're not getting fired because you have a government contract.
	So you can see pretty easily how this takes over the bureaucracy, but most Americans,
	because we don't tend to think of the unelected fourth branch
	of government, the bureaucracy that actually runs all of us as being very important, we ignore all that.
	We keep focusing on elections.
	Who are we going to vote for for president?
	Who are we going to vote for in terms of Congress next time?
	But as you point out in the book, that's really not how the government is run.
	And so it's a pretty smooth transition between a useless ed degree and a slot in the bureaucracy making regulations
	that govern hundreds of millions of people.
	Yeah.
	And then choosing the people who actually enter the classroom and teach the curriculum.
	And so we have, and this is a conservative critique that is spot on.
	I mean, we have a vast bureaucratic state or administrative state that is really in charge of how our institutions function in practice.
	And, you know, I found this to be true even in my conversations with folks that are in the U.S.
	Congress, in the United States Senate, and you talk to their offices, you talk to even
	the principals themselves, and you learn very quickly that their influence is actually rather
	limited compared to their counterparts in the bureaucracy who are there permanently.
	They're not accountable to voters.
	They're almost impossible to fire, and therefore they're almost impossible to influence.
	And so you have to, the political powers who are in theory under our Constitution the ultimate
	authority over our republic are actually almost supplicants to the bureaucracy.
	They have to engage in a kind of begging, a kind of persuasion just to get the bureaucracy
	to do what the law says.
	And so this is untenable, and I think the conservatives need to develop a strategy.
	.
	to deal with this and there really are two possible avenues and I think that we need to experiment
	with both. You know, the one possible avenue that will not work and does not work and has not worked
	despite conservatives best intentions is, you know, reducing the size of the government small
	enough so you could drown it in a bathtub and Grover Norquist's famous phrase. Conservatives
	have been promising to do that for many, many decades, really for about a hundred years.
	That's never happened.
	It's unlikely that it will happen in the medium term.
	And so we're left with, I think, two options.
	One is you recapture the bureaucracy.
	You use administrative and executive power to try to remove the top layer of policy decision makers in the bureaucracy.
	And you find and train and credential conservatives that can go in and actually replace those folks to to run the bureaucracy at that top level,
	or you can try to decentralize the functions and create in a sense of patronage network
	from the government to smaller groups according to subsidiarity.
	And so this is the model for state level school choice programs
	that have been remarkably successful in recent years because of the failure of these centralized teachers unions,
	the rise of critical race theory and radical gender ideology in schools.
	And then of course the COVID lockdowns.
	And so the idea here is to say, we're gonna give parents the chance
	to take their seven, $8,000 a year per child to any institution of their choice.
	This is from the public budget, but it's going into the hands of parents and individual families, and they can create a side market that bypasses the great centralized K-12 public education system.
	These two almost paradoxical approaches An approach of ideological centralization of the bureaucracy and an approach of financial and administrative decentralization providing the funding to smaller units in society.
	I think some combination of these two is the way forward and we have to get really smart and really aggressive in how we execute them.
	So let's move on to the part that I think conservatives have found the most troubling.
	I think it's become a truism for conservatives for a long time.
	Universities are run by the left wing.
	Educational institutions are run by the left wing.
	Bureaucracy is run by the left wing.
	The one that I think took conservatives completely by surprise over the course of the last decade is the takeover of corporate America.
	This is a place we had always thought would be safe, not because we assumed that every executive was going to be a conservative or Republican, Because the market was supposed to be the deciding factor in how decisions got made.
	the idea that you were going to pile a bunch of ESG or DEI on top of the fundamental market mechanism
	and in so doing, weigh down your profit margins and destroy your efficiencies,
	that seems completely unthinkable to a huge number of Americans,
	especially considering the fact that if you were gonna do all that,
	the assumption was that there wasn't going to be giant scale collusion,
	that there'd be another firm that would come along and out-compete you by not participating
	in any of that garbage.
	And yet over the course of the last 10, 15 years, we've seen now an open usurpation
	of the mechanisms of economic power at corporations by either the woke or people who are woke-adjacent
	or people who surrender to the woke.
	So what exactly happened inside the halls of corporate America where if you look at actually the individual donations by corporate heads, they still, I believe, majority go to Republicans, but corporate donations go by far to Democrats.
	What exactly happened here?
	So yeah, and I tackle this a bit in the book, but what I've done is I've tried to talk to a lot of C-suite executives and board members of Fortune 500 companies off the record to try to get a sense of what's happening.
	And the basic picture that I could paint for you is something like this.
	Um, you have to think of corporations and especially C-suite executives as amoral operators that are merely putting their antennas up and then responding to incentives, responding to pressure, responding to economic and cultural and political forces for their immediate short term safety and protection and security.
	And so that's kind of how the entity operates.
	And what executives have learned in the last 20 years, and especially the last 10 years, is that they've secured their economic interests from the political right.
	Since the Reagan administration, the political right has lowered corporate taxes, has created more favorable regulations, and has opened up free trade agreements, including with communist regimes like the Chinese, that allow American companies to make a lot of money, to maximize profits in a really spectacular fashion.
	All things being equal, I think you and I would agree.
	That's, you know, good with some, maybe some caveats.
	But what happened is that when corporations felt like they had secured everything that they needed from the political right, they felt like they could also pander to the political left on culture.
	So they're trying to have it both ways.
	They're trying to have their economic fortunes taken care of by the right and their cultural status taken care of by the political left.
	And so you see the creation of DEI bureaucracies, you see these kind of corporate marketing campaigns, you see their corporate donations and funding and philanthropic contributions that are really going all towards the cultural left.
	Because they were getting a lot of pressure from the cultural left.
	The left has very effective kind of elite mechanisms for putting pressure on companies to do these very things.
	And so what you've also had then is the situation where a CEO is facing this kind of situation.
	They're facing activist employees within the corporate hierarchy in their identity-based activist groups that were sanctioned by the CEOs.
	The Black Employees Union, the LGBTQ Plus Employees Union, the Latino or Latinx Employee Resource Group.
	So they're feeling pressure from below and within.
	They're feeling pressure from these very effective left-wing activists laterally.
	And then sometimes they're also feeling pressure from above, from their corporate board members, who are, after all, rich.
	They have plenty of cash.
	So what they want is they want status.
	They want fame.
	They want recognition.
	They want a pat on the back from elite institutions.
	They want to go to the kind of corporate dinner and then get the kudos.
	And so they say, hey, we need to put trans characters in our movies.
	For example, that's kind of what happened with Disney.
	This is corporate board level pressure.
	And so Corporate executives are facing a situation in which they're getting three-dimensional pressure, and as amoral incentive responders, they make the obvious choice was to kowtow to these left-wing cultural policies, and really without any countervailing pressure from the right.
	So I think that it's been a simple calculus, so it shouldn't surprise any of us that corporations, especially those big corporations, that kind of brand entities, have really buckled to the left over and over and over in recent years.
	We'll get to more on that in just one second.
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	One other element that was pointed out first, I think, by Christopher Caldwell in his book Age of Entitlement was the idea that these massive legal structures have also been created that essentially create massive liability for a lot of companies if they don't kowtow to the left.
	So the way that you Prevent some sort of mass lawsuit on your hands over racial discrimination is you force everybody to take some sort of diversity training.
	The way that you make sure that you don't get sued for some form of racism is you make sure that you have a DEI policy to make sure that it's crammed down on everybody.
	Now in the normal market mechanism, one of the things that probably would happen here is that Counterintuitively, what would happen if you try to force diverse crowds into a business and create additional liability for the business is people just don't hire them.
	If you suggest that there's an additional liability risk for every, for example, LGBTQ plus person that you hire, then people will stop hiring those people because they're afraid of the liability risk.
	So then a legal system comes up where if you don't have enough of those people in your company, then NASDAQ will delist you.
	Or you will have a situation in which you will be sued for discrimination for not hiring, and then once people are hired, then you have a massive risk of those people actually suing you for having hired them, and now you're mistreating them, or you fired them.
	And it makes people unhireable and unfireable simultaneously, so the best thing to do is you just create these broad-based policies, and this somehow is supposed to be a legal cure-all for all of this, which would mean, as per the usual arrangement, that the only way to fight that would actually be via legislation.
	I mean, despite all of the talk about libertarianism, it just doesn't work in a world
	where the laws are written the wrong way.
	Yeah, that's right.
	And I'd like to dig into that because it's an important point that you're making.
	And the reason that the kind of classical, liberal economic idea of firms seek to compete
	and they seek to kind of lower the cost of goods and increase quality,
	and that if they don't get there in a system of perfect competition,
	another firm will come in and replace them.
	That's, I mean, beautiful.
	And in some goods, I would say that there is a lot of truth to that, right?
	It's not totally wrong.
	But it doesn't apply in this case for a number of reasons.
	The first is that many of these companies are not in systems of perfect competition.
	If you look at a company like Microsoft, Microsoft essentially has a monopoly, a loose monopoly,
	or an oligopoly-style position on operating systems, on government contracts.
	If you look at Amazon, they have a kind of monopoly position
	in certain verticals with limited numbers of competitors that take up a small share of the market.
	And so firm after firm after firm, there's not a system of perfect competition.
	And there are massive barriers for a new firm to come in and out-compete them.
	But second, and I think even more importantly, and this applies to almost all of the largest firms,
	there's an enormous amount of waste in these companies.
	They aren't in a system of perfect competition and perfect efficiency.
	They're very far from that system.
	And so if you know anybody in, let's say, a corporate marketing department, I know a lot of people in corporate marketing department for tech firms here in the Seattle region, and they'll say very easily, yeah, you know, I'd say maybe 50% or more of our marketing budget is totally wasted.
	And it's totally inefficient.
	It's based on doing something that somebody likes for reasons unrelated to maximizing competitive pressure, etc., etc.
	We have entire departments that are not profitable.
	We have entire product lines that are a waste of time.
	I mean, there is an enormous amount of waste, even in the most profitable companies, kind of paradoxically.
	And so what I think that people are thinking in the C-suite is that these DEI programs, these ideological programs, are a form of insurance.
	They don't add to the bottom line.
	They don't add to productivity.
	They don't create products and services that customers want.
	But it's a form of political insurance and legal insurance that's simply deducted as a cost of doing business.
	It's like paying a tax or in the past, it's like paying the mafia for protection, which I actually think is an even better analogy.
	And so, you know, these companies stumble on.
	And Adam Smith, of course, said there's a great deal of rot in a nation.
	The same thing, you know, God bless him, can be said.
	There's a great deal of rot in any of one of these firms.
	Well, that raises sort of the broader question that's come up with regard to some of your work, which is, what should conservatives seek to do with government?
	So this has been a broad-scale debate inside conservative circles.
	You know, how far is too far with regard to government interventionism?
	In a perfect world, obviously, you have free competition.
	You don't have monopolistic situations.
	Really, monopoly is created by government regimes.
	I mean, really what you have is not even market power monopoly.
	What you have is essentially A monopoly of ideas that's been created by forced government collusion.
	If the government sets a standard, everybody has to hop to that standard.
	There's no ability to out-compete that because the government set the standard.
	That's true for DEI, ESG, lawsuits, and all the rest of it.
	But this has raised questions for a lot of conservatives about, you know, let's say that you are the governor of a state, a state like Florida, and now you have the ability to take over a college or university that is state-funded What should you do?
	Is the thing that you should try to do to reestablish a sort of classically liberal idea of a thousand flowers bloom?
	Or what other standard should you utilize in order to pursue an educational institution that actually does good?
	So what the left will do is now, after having lost the election, they will then attempt to revert back to classical liberal principles and argue through that Trojan horse.
	After having destroyed classical liberalism, By basically arguing for critical race theory, which argues that, for example, classical liberalism is itself a power structure that must be destroyed.
	Now that they've lost the argument, they'll start arguing, well, but we need our argument back because classical liberalism allows us to be there.
	And so you can't actually bar us because that's a violation of freedom of speech.
	Sure, we're arguing against freedom of speech.
	Sure, we're arguing for Herbert Marcuse's repressive tolerance.
	But you have to allow us to do that and to redestroy the system.
	And if you don't allow us to do that, it's a violation of your classical liberal principles.
	So what can government do here?
	What should government be doing?
	Well, I think there are really two important points, and the first is this.
	I mean, I find it astonishing that some of our libertarian and maybe kind of libertarian conservative friends are appalled that states are restricting critical race theory in the classroom, that states are passing legislation saying that teachers are not allowed to racially scapegoat students or to categorize, shame, humiliate, and segregate them on
	the basis of their ancestry.
	And there are some libertarian conservatives saying, no, that's a step too far,
	that's government interfering with the great transmission of ideas.
	And so there's a number of problems with this, obviously.
	One is that these are public schools, and then these are public universities, so they are the government.
	The principles of the free marketplace of ideas do not apply.
	This is a government-run monopoly.
	In the case of K-12, over 90% of the market.
	And in the case of higher education, colleges and universities, 75% of the market.
	And so even under the most stringent libertarian philosophy, in a condition of a government monopoly, those rules, kind of non-intervention rules, do not apply.
	And then of course, you know, it's absolutely absurd to say that a kindergarten classroom should be a freewheeling open debate where all opinions are welcomed.
	No, you have to shape the values, you have to shape the character, you have to even shape the souls of kids that are that young, and you have to teach them principles that reflect the values of their parents and the society and the political regime that they live in.
	And so I think government is, of course, well within its right.
	to regulate within these schools.
	And the libertarian argument, in fact, ends up in practice being a really catastrophic reversal.
	What libertarians are arguing, in essence, is that the people, through their elected legislators,
	have no right to regulate their own government.
	And that's not liberty.
	That's tyranny.
	And so we have this really absurd pretzel-twisting on behalf of libertarian conservatives that seem to not even understand their own principles.
	I think they're deranged by Trump, deranged by DeSantis, deranged by the so-called new right that is seeking to replace limits on these institutions.
	And then second, briefly, and I'd love to talk about this more, is we've mistaken what classical liberal arts education means.
	We've reduced it to a procedural value of freedom of speech and academic freedom and the free marketplace of ideas.
	But that actually has, you know, has nothing to do with the ultimate aim or the ultimate purpose of education.
	And of course, classical comes from the Latin classicus and liberal comes from the classic liber.
	These are hierarchical words.
	You know, it is the kind of upper class or the free.
	And the idea of a liberal or an elite versus a base or a vulgar education.
	And so embedded in the very terms, classical liberal, is this idea of a highest point
	towards which we should all be aspiring that creates limits on this notion of unfettered access.
	And so it requires us to make judgments.
	It requires us to say racial scapegoating of children is either good or bad.
	And if we determine as a society that it's bad, it should be restricted from, let's say, the elementary school classroom.
	And so classical liberal arts education at heart means the education of a free man or woman In a free society.
	And it's not just liberties which can become licensed, but actually has corresponding duties and responsibilities and limits that we should seek to reimpose in the interest of teaching students the great trinity of the true, the good and the beautiful, and being unapologetic about orienting our education system towards them.
	Well, this is one of the areas where I think that, for a lot of libertarians, they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of liberty itself.
	Is liberty an instrumental value, or is it an inherent value, is really the question for them.
	And there are several different types of liberty.
	If you were to say that liberty is an inherent value, then that leads directly to moral relativism.
	I mean, because at that point, you're basically just saying whatever free choice anybody makes, those are all of equal value.
	It's liberty to make the choice that is the thing that is of value.
	But the reality is that nobody actually thinks like that.
	Nobody actually believes, there's an Israeli philosopher named Joseph Raz, nobody actually believes that if you have the free decision to murder the person next to you, that that is more morally praiseworthy because you have utilized choice than the person who is forced to murder the person next to him.
	The bad thing is still bad.
	In fact, it becomes worse because you chose to do it.
	The real question as to limits on what the public can do in the name of the good are more utilitarian than they are values-laden.
	Meaning, you can make the case pretty easily, I think, that the free speech principles, the sort of libertarian full free speech principles, should be applied at the federal level as opposed to at the very, very local level.
	Which, by the way, the founders understood, which is why the First Amendment is about Congress not abridging freedom of speech.
	It is not about you and your local HOA abridging freedom of speech.
	Because the reality is that when there's a great level of unanimity among people that you live around, your ability to actually, as a community, legislate, to maintain a certain social lifestyle for your community, is a core element of freedom and also decency.
	But as you abstract up the chain, as you go to the federal government, for example, and it's governing 300 million people, it's a lot harder to say, well, here's the singular standard that should govern for everybody because it's a very diverse country with a lot of different ideas in it.
	And so on a fundamental level, I think it's a lot easier to make the case for the kind of government involvement except for basic principles like Non, you know, non violation of the 14th Amendment.
	But if you're talking about what should be taught in schools, this is something that shouldn't be mandated by the federal government.
	This is something that should essentially be done in a place where you and your fellow parents have a pretty good idea of what it is that you want taught to kids.
	It's the left that's arguing that the federal government should be able to cram down from the top down the notion that, for example, boys are girls and girls are boys.
	It's why the libertarian argument seems to kind of drown the government in the bathtub idea.
	There's an argument for it at the federal level.
	There's significantly less of an argument for it at the state or at the local level.
	That's right.
	And I think that ultimately, we have to understand what the subject is and what the object is.
	We have to go back to the very basics.
	And we have to ask, what is the purpose of freedom of speech?
	What is free speech for?
	And of course, it's a question of something quite simple.
	I agree with you.
	I think that the curriculum should be decided at the local school district level.
	That would be the ultimate kind of locus of authority in my ideal society.
	Right now, it's actually at the state level.
	In almost all states, the state mandates the basic curricular standard and then delegates the implementation to local school districts.
	But what we're talking about is parents saying, and voters saying, Hey, we do not want you teaching our kids how to be a non-binary, pansexual gender theorist in fifth grade.
	And we want to restrict the ability of the government, the public school, to promote those values and ideologies to our children.
	And so we have to remember that individuals have free speech.
	The idea of free speech was that the government should not infringe on the free speech right of the citizen.
	But in this case, the citizen has every right to limit the speech and conduct of the government.
	That's the entire purpose of having representative government.
	The government does not have unlimited power.
	The government can be limited and restrained by the people through the process of passing legislation, through the process of governing these institutions.
	The left, though, sees the government as a citizen, as actually the primary citizen in the republic.
	And it wants to endow the government with all of the rights that were initially intended to be secured for the citizens.
	And so we have this really, the Leviathan is a beautiful metaphor because the Leviathan has now been endowed with rights of the individual.
	It is the most powerful individual in society and it can impose its will with no restrictions on the average person.
	And so I think we are in this very precarious space where even conservatives and libertarian
	conservatives have bought into the great myths and superstitions of the left to the point
	where they're functionally, they're theoretically defending individual liberties, but they're
	functionally defending the Leviathan that seeks to override and destroy the actual liberties
	of the people.
	So in your book, America's Cultural Revolution, one of the things that you talk about is obviously
	corporate America and and the relationship between government
	legislation and corporate America.
	This is where you get into the really fundamental debate with a lot of libertarians.
	There are a lot of libertarians who will argue Or we'll acquiesce to the argument that local governments have the ability to restrict what's taught in third grade.
	Because obviously you're talking about parents delegating a particular agency to the government.
	The scope of agency is limited.
	It is not unlimited.
	And the idea that you've delegated complete power over your kids to this group of government bureaucrats is really silly.
	When it comes to corporate America, however, They say that, you know, the government really shouldn't step in and do anything that is viewpoint discrimination if the government steps in and, for example, does what Governor DeSantis did with the special tax district for Reedy Creek and Disney.
	That Disney decided to get itself involved in a deeply political conversation about what kids ought to be taught in public school and their special tax district went away.
	And the argument is that this is a violation of free speech principles because this is a private actor now that's being acted upon by the state government.
	Well, what is the countervailing argument on that one?
	So there's there's an easier one and there's a more difficult one.
	So the easy one with Disney is, well, wait a minute.
	Why does Disney have special tax status that no other corporation in the state of Florida has?
	Why did they have the ability to?
	I think they had the ability to create a nuclear reactor on the Disneyland campus in Orlando.
	And so in a sense, what Ron DeSantis did is said, hey, The state of Florida had negotiated in previous years a sweetheart deal, a kind of crony capitalist deal, with the Walt Disney Company because there was a general and mutual interest that this would benefit the people of the state and the society as a whole.
	By participating in the political process, by seeking to overturn the will of the people of the state of Florida, we are simply revoking your special status and putting you on an equal free market and fair competitive playing field as your other competitors.
	So you can make a free market defense of Disney.
	The harder argument is to say, well, what if that wasn't the case?
	Let's have a hypothetical.
	What if, let's say, that the government was saying, you know, we're going to actually create a special standard for this one company.
	I think that's a much more difficult case.
	And I think that conservatives and free market conservatives are right that that can go too far, that that can run amok, that that can be problematic.
	But what I think is the best approach is to say, that you can actually create general regulations and
	general laws governing how corporations behave that don't provide special rewards or punishments to any
	one firm, but say that, hey, these are the standards of conduct.
	For example, on ESG, you know, ESG, I think, is a perversion of the purpose of the free market,
	which is to create a high standard of living, is to create goods and services,
	is to create a kind of mass prosperity for our society.
	ESG is a hijacking of that purpose, a reorientation of that purpose.
	And I think a general law saying that ESG standards are illegitimate, they're not in the best interest of shareholders, and they're not in the chartered purpose of the corporation, because of course corporations are chartered by the state.
	I think we're on firmer grounds for something like that, and so I would like to see general legislation in that effect that seeks to counteract the special levers like the kind of abuse of the civil rights bureaucracy outlined in the Caldwell book, but I think also some more activist measures to say we do not consent to this Anti-democratic, activist-led injection of ideology such as ESG into the structures of our corporations.
	I think that's, you know, it's well within the legitimate purview of legislatures to enact legislation to that effect.
	It is going to take some aggressive action on this front because the game that the left has realized is that they can basically, through corporatist means, mobilize business on their own behalf to do the work the government isn't allowed to do.
	We're obviously seeing this with regard to social media.
	There's now an injunction on the FBI and the DOJ from talking with social media in the upcoming election because during the last election we obviously saw the FBI and the DOJ going to social media and basically dictating to them what they think they ought to do.
	And in so doing, essentially curb the free speech rights of Americans.
	As that boundary between private corporations and the government has blurred, it's very easy for private corporations to seek the immunities that private corporations ought to have while at the same time acting as tools of a government that shouldn't have that immunity in the first place.
	Yeah, that's right.
	And I think there's a simple test here also, even on libertarian grounds, why this is justified.
	Because, again, on libertarian grounds, in conditions of monopoly and in conditions of limited competition, there is some government intervention that is justified.
	And so what I'm seeing as I'm looking at the landscape is companies like YouTube that are an effective monopoly over video services.
	You know, they have the lion's share of the market.
	They've been entrenched for a number of years.
	And then you have obvious collusion.
	Look, someone like Andrew Tate, I'm not a fan.
	I think he's awful.
	I think he's an abominable human being that has values that are not aligned with mine in any sense.
	But I remember what happened to him was quite remarkable.
	He was banned from one of the social media services.
	And then within 24 hours, he was banned from nearly the entire Internet.
	And so this suggests to me either a kind of collusion that is direct at the staff level or a cascading collusion in a de facto sense, where if you are if you are deemed a kind of persona non grata, according to the kind of left liberal hierarchy, you can be wiped away from wiped off the Internet from basically all of the firms who, in theory, are competing against one another.
	And so that to me, even on libertarian grounds, and I'm not a libertarian, thank God, but even on libertarian grounds, justifies some intervention to say, look, in a conditions of a dominant firm position, we could have basic rules, like let's say common carrier standards, to say that you can't be purged from the entire internet simply because you have a naughty opinion or even an abominable opinion.
	Obviously, there are exceptions.
	You can't be making actionable death threats against people.
	I think that there are kind of prudent limits on these that can be negotiated between social actors and between courts and government and companies.
	But certainly, we can push those boundaries outward to protect a wider range of speech.
	And I think that's a totally legitimate use of government power.
	Folks, our conversation will continue with Chris's personal story, how he became what he is.
	Apparently he grew up as like a communist.
	We'll talk about that, but that's only for our Daily Wire Plus members.

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