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July 24, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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FBIs FAVORITE CROOKS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep627
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walzer, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
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Coming up, new evidence from Senator Grassley and also from the New York Post detailing the Biden bribery scheme and the FBI's attempt to cover it up.
I'll show how Judge Eileen Cannon refuses to put up with any nonsense from the Biden DOJ.
I'll ask what Robert F. Kennedy's skepticism about climate change suggests about his evolving politics.
And Chris Rufo joins me.
We're going to talk about the future of critical race theory in the wake of recent setbacks.
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We continue to get new information on the Biden family bribery scandal.
And the information is coming from a lot of different quarters, but all of it corroborates each other.
In other words, the sources turn out to be consistent, and this is a clear sign that what they are pointing to is true.
So we have an FBI informant, an FBI source, a confidential source that has been collecting information, writing it down.
And then we have the IRS whistleblowers.
These are coming, obviously, from the tax agency.
Then we have Hunter Biden's own business partners, one of whom is expected to testify shortly before the House Oversight Committee.
I'll talk about that in the next segment.
segment. We have one of the business partners, Tony Bobulinski, who's also spoken out. So look at all these different people and what's the chance that all of them are lying? The IRS whistleblowers are Democrats, they're not conservatives. The FBI confidential source, I don't know.
Tony Bobulinski was obviously a partner of the Bidens, so he's someone who was very comfortable in Democratic circles.
Obviously, the same is true of Devin Archer, Hunter Biden's business partner.
Hunter talked about this guy as his best friend.
So, this is all very interesting.
And while the information is coming out kind of slowly...
Nevertheless, it's like a python.
It's a slow stranglehold of information, and I think ultimately it's going to be irresistible.
The media, which has been resisting covering the story, is slowly being pulled into being compelled to cover it.
Now, I want to focus in this segment on the FD-1023.
This is the document prepared by the FBI source that the FBI has been trying to block.
They tried to prevent this document from getting in the hands of Congress.
Finally, they had to turn it over, but they tried to prevent it from being released to the public.
Then they tried to redact a whole bunch of it.
They were forced to remove the redactions that were not required by demands of classified information or confidentiality.
And now Senator Grassley of Iowa has released this FD-1023 so we can all read it for ourselves.
It's kind of, look, transparency.
The American people can take a look directly.
And it's a fascinating document.
Why? Because it gives you an A kind of inside window into how all this corruption works.
And it gives you the window, not really from the Biden side, but from the Burisma side.
So Burisma is the Ukrainian energy company that is paying big money bribes Not just to Hunter Biden, but also to Joe Biden.
So a $10 million bribe is what we're talking about here.
And for a very concrete, specific purpose.
And that purpose is to get a prosecutor named Shokin fired, a prosecutor that was looking into Burisma's business dealings.
So here's the background.
Burisma wants to expand its operations in the United States.
In fact, it wants to acquire some U.S. energy companies.
And they feel that this is going to give them better access to the U.S. market, but they can't do it because their reputation is stained by corruption.
And you've got this prosecutor looking into the corruption.
So it's like, how can we get the corruption scandal in Ukraine to go away?
Answer. Let's get the Bidens to help us do this.
Joe Biden has the power as vice president to get the prosecutor removed.
That will end the corruption inquiry.
That will open the door to Burisma.
So Burisma is willing to pay a lot of money for this to happen.
And so, what you have here, as you begin to read this FD 1023, is you see that the Burisma guys, this is the top officials of Burisma, conversing with each other.
And one of them says that he wants to bring Hunter Biden on the board, quote, to protect us through his dad from all kinds of problems, end quote.
So you see the motive here of the bribe payers.
Now, The Burisma CEO goes on to say, quote, Don't worry, Hunter will take care of all those issues through his dad.
So they have to pay both, Hunter and the dad, but they're confident that this will make their problems go away.
Right. Now, one of the other Burisma guys is a little skeptical.
He's like, well, what are we really getting for the money?
Hunter Biden is an idiot.
In fact, at one point he says, my dog is smarter than Hunter Biden, which is not far from the truth.
But at the same time, their point is, we kind of feel compelled to pay.
This is the only way.
That we are going to be able to achieve our goals and essentially the Bidens are shaking us down.
They know that they have the power to intervene on our behalf and so they're charging a hefty price tag.
And all of this is described in detail in this document.
You can see why This document is so powerful at the same time it exposes the corruption at the highest levels of the FBI because the FBI has known about this for a long time and yet they've been hiding it, they've been suppressing it, they didn't want Congress to see it, they don't want you or I to see it.
And now that we have it, we can turn a very skeptical gaze to the FBI and go, listen, for some reason you guys have decided that the Bidens are your favorite crooks.
You're going to protect those crooks.
And so this is a case of police corruption, right?
Because the corrupt police are protecting the corrupt criminals.
And that really means that the criminals are in the FBI also, right?
Because the FBI is supposed to be a straight-up, honest police agency of the government.
But it turns out that it too is full of crooks.
So, corruption at the highest levels of government, with the President of the United States and his family at the heart of the matter.
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I talked in the last segment about the FBI confidential informant collecting information on the corruption of the Bidens.
Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, the whole Biden family.
And now I want to talk about the same story, but from a completely different angle.
There's an explosive story by Miranda Devine.
It's in today's New York Post.
I'm going to read the headline.
Hunter Biden put then-VP dad Joe on the phone with business associates at least two dozen times, ex-partner Devin Archer, to testify.
So this is actually terrific news, terrific from our point of view.
What's the terrific news?
That Devin Archer, Hunter Biden's main business partner, let's remember when Burisma was paying $83,000 a month, $83,000 a month to Hunter Biden, then distributed among the Biden family.
The other $83,000 a month to this guy, Devin Archer.
And this guy is now singing.
In other words, he is fessing up.
He is coming up in front of the House Oversight Committee.
We're all going to get a chance to see him.
And Miranda Devine apparently has the inside scoop on what he's going to say.
So the question here has always been, remember Joe Biden, I've never talked to my son or any other family members about their business dealings.
The question is, what is Joe Biden's direct involvement?
Is Joe Biden himself involved with all this?
And the answer is yes.
So, here we're going to have Devin Archer coming before the House GOP and the Congress, and he's going to testify about things that he directly saw and has direct knowledge of.
And what's he talking about?
He's talking about the fact that when Hunter Biden is with his business partners, he is able to pull in Joe Biden either in person or more often on the phone.
So the business partners will say, hey, get your father on the phone. And Hunter Biden puts him on speakerphone, and Joe Biden weighs in. And this is a way of saying, listen, it's not just me, Hunter Biden, bragging that I'm selling influence from the Biden family because I could just be talking through my hat. No, my dad isn't on it.
My dad is here to confirm that he's part of the game, he's part of the crime family, he's part of the mafia, if you will, and you can count on him no less than you can count on me.
In other words, I am a true representative of the family.
One such meeting, says Miranda Devine, was in Dubai.
This is Friday, December 4th, 2015.
There's a board meeting happening in Ukraine of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and Devin Archer said that after dinner with the Burisma board at the Burj Al Arab Hotel, He, Devin Archer, and Hunter travel six miles north of the Four Seasons Resort in Dubai.
This is at Jumeirah Beach.
And while they were sitting at the bar, Vadim Pozarski, a senior Burisma executive, phoned to say, where are they?
Because Burisma's owner, Mikola Shlokeski, needs to speak with Hunter urgently.
And so, pretty soon, the two Ukrainians joined Hunter, and they joined Devin Archer at the Four Seasons, and Pozarski asked Hunter, can you ring your dad?
In other words, get your dad on the phone.
And at this time, it was early afternoon Friday in Washington, D.C. Hunter then called his father, put him on speaker, placed the phone on the table, and basically introduced his business partners by their first names, Nikolai and Vadim, and he said, in effect, that the Burisma guys, quote, need our support.
So think of what a business dealing is.
Money changes hands, but something has to be given in exchange for it, right?
In legal parlance, it's called consideration.
You're doing something for me, but what am I doing for you?
So here Hunter is saying, this is what they need.
They're paying us.
This is what they need from us.
They need our support. And Joe Biden, in a sense, kind of weighs in in general terms, essentially saying, I'm here for you.
And this is not the only occasion.
This is on multiple occasions.
And the follow-up, by the way, on the Burisma, most people already know this, but that shortly after this exchange, Shokin, the prosecutor who was looking into the corruption of Burisma, is fired.
Joe Biden is on tape.
This is all over social media.
He's boasting that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid to the Ukraine.
If this guy wasn't fired, sure enough, they obliged and Burisma got its wish.
In other words, the product was delivered.
And yeah, remember Joe Biden, I looked at them and I said, I'm leaving in six hours.
If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money.
Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.
End quote. This is Joe Biden talking.
Archer is also expected, this is Miranda Devine now writing, to detail other speakerphone meetings, including a dinner at a restaurant in Paris.
Where Hunter whipped out his phone, put his father on speaker to impress prospective investors.
And this same trick, let's get my dad on the phone, let me show my partners, let me show the people I'm dealing with that I can deliver political influence, apparently occurred as many as two dozen times in Archer's presence.
I mean, you can be confident it occurred more often than that.
These are all the times that one man, Devin Archer, was there and actually saw it.
So all of this is going before the House Oversight Committee.
And as I say, the noose is beginning to tighten around Joe Biden.
It seems slow for many of us.
We'd like to see all this happening immediately.
We want to see the impeachment proceedings already underway.
I don't think they're all that far off at this point, because none of this can really be denied.
Even the media, by not covering it, is in a sense confirming, yeah, we kind of know it's true.
We don't really have a rebuttal to any of it.
We're just going to try to ignore it and try to prevent you from finding out about it.
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I wanna talk about an update to the Trump classified documents case.
I'm actually looking on my phone at a bunch of headlines.
Bloomberg, Trump records case takeaways include 1,545 pages of classified materials.
And we find this repeated CBS News, CNBC, NPR, The Daily Beast.
The whole idea here is that there are more than 1500 classified documents.
Well, as it turns out, as you begin to look a little more closely, you realize this is actually nonsense.
There aren't in fact that many documents.
This is an intentionally inflated number.
Included in the 1,500 documents are 625 interview-related pages which were produced by the DOJ. This is the DOJ's own summaries, their own interview transcripts.
So, these aren't the actual documents.
Not to mention the fact that when the NARA, the National Records, the archives, contacted Trump about turning in documents, Trump turned in a bunch of documents.
Those documents obviously were turned over to the archives.
They're not part of this case, but they're counted in the 1,500 documents.
So what we have here is that the...
The Biden DOJ is leaking information to the media, trying to make this look like a much bigger deal than it is.
We will find out as we get closer to the case.
What documents are we talking about?
And are they even classified?
The DOJ is already using a kind of euphemistic or disguised terminology.
They're not even talking about classified materials.
They're talking about documents with, quote, classified markings.
So a document can have a classified marking, but it could be that Trump has declassified it.
It's not actually classified.
It may have a classified marking.
It's kind of like saying, I'm looking at a check with Dinesh's signature.
Well, the check may have been voided.
It may have been cashed.
It's not actually a check that you can take to the bank.
I'm looking at a check with Dinesh's signature.
Yes, but that's not an actually valid check.
Similarly, when we're talking about these classified documents, the question is, is this in fact classified?
Now, quite separate from all this, there's a battle going on, just resolved, between the Trump people and the DOJ over when is this trial going to occur.
And the government wanted the trial to occur this fall.
In fact, let's see, in August 2020.
So next month, an immediate trial, kind of like, let's just go for it.
Let's just get this matter squared away.
The Trump people said, let's have the trial after the election because, and their reasoning is not unreasonable, they're basically saying, listen, quote, proceeding to trial during the pendency of a presidential election cycle where an opposing candidates are effectively, if not literally,
directly adverse to one another in this action will create extraordinary challenges in the jury selection process, We're good to go.
And the judge, Eileen Cannon, has kind of gone in the middle.
But I think in going in the middle, she is sort of, in a sense, siding with the Trump side.
Because first of all, what she's decided is that this trial is going to occur, but it's going to occur on May 20th, 2024.
So let's think about that. At this point, it is very likely that Trump will be the GOP nominee going into the election.
And also, setting a trial date doesn't mean the trial will, in fact, occur on that date.
Why? Because there are often a lot of pretrial motions, a motion for this, and then the opposing party files its motion, the judges, to rule on these motions.
So, in effect, the trial gets kicked further and further back, and there's an excellent chance the trial itself will occur after the 2024 election.
The judge here is very importantly pushing back on the Biden DOJ. She's in no way intimidated by the government claiming all kinds of prerogatives.
The government, in fact, had the arrogance to say, in effect, that these classified documents that the government gets to say, we decide that these are classified, cannot even be seen by Trump.
What? The defendant cannot view the documents in his own case where he's facing serious charges?
I mean, let's think about the charges.
We're dealing with conspiracy, obstruction, perjury charges, and you can't even look at the evidence?
Well, the judge is having none of it.
In fact, the judge goes to Jay Bratt, who is the head of counterintelligence.
He's part of the prosecution team, and the judge goes, Now, when I was reading the Section 3 protective orders proposed by the government, is it the government's intention to withhold certain portions of classified discovery from the defendants themselves?
Defendants, because it's Trump and this other guy named Nauta.
And Brat goes, not at this point, Your Honor.
Now, first of all, this is the exact opposite of what his documents say.
His documents say, yes, you may have to withhold documents from Trump himself, but here he backs off.
And when Judge Cannon goes, I thought there was a provision in the proposed Section 3 that did contemplate potentially withholding certain documents from defendants themselves.
And Brad goes, yes, sorry, Your Honor.
Yes, I'm sorry. I misunderstood.
So there's a lot of backpedaling going on here.
And what this shows is that the Biden DOJ is arrogantly trying to intimidate the judge, get the judge to just go along, because after all, it is the government.
We are talking about classified materials.
And a little bit of whoop-dee-doo is justified here, because quite frankly, this whole nonsense that we are the government, you're not the government.
You're just a prosecuting arm of the DOJ, and in this case, a highly ideological DOJ. And second of all, the question is not, you can't just say classified.
Materials don't become classified because you say so.
There has to be an adjudication ultimately about whether or not this is classified and whether or not Trump had the absolute right to hold on to it.
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Feel the difference. It's fascinating to watch the ideological and intellectual evolution of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In some ways, to me, it mirrors the evolution of Tulsi Gabbard.
Let's remember Tulsi Gabbard.
She's a She pretty much died in the wool, Democrat, echoing Democratic talking points and pretty much everything.
And then she started to dissent.
Dissent initially on Kamala Harris.
Remember, she kind of took on Kamala Harris in the primary debate.
Then she began to dissent on some of the COVID restrictions.
Then she came out for free speech.
And then Tulsi Gabbard was like, I'm out of here.
I'm out of the Democratic Party.
And Tulsi Gabbard is now pretty much, well, pretty close to, I would call it, a MAGA Trump Republican.
In fact, some people have even mentioned her as a possibility for a vice presidential candidate for Trump.
With RFK Jr., kind of the same thing.
Initially, it seemed that RFK Jr.
was just a solid Democrat, maybe a Democrat of the older stripe, but not somebody, and this is the key point, willing to speak out against the mainstream and the far left-wing domination of the leadership of the Democratic Party.
But slowly and surely, RFK Jr.
is moving in that direction.
Now, there are some forward and backward steps.
There was kind of a backward step recently after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action.
Robert F. Kennedy again echoing the old Democratic Party, hey, don't you want to give poor black kids a chance?
And this is such a misunderstanding and misstatement of what's going on now.
We're not talking about giving people a chance.
First of all, that chance occurs in the schooling system, and the Democrats have wrecked the schools.
So this is one reason why Blacks are starting out so much further behind and are so uncompetitive with other groups when it comes to college admissions.
But leaving aside that kind of backstep, you had R.F. Kennedy Jr.
initially dissenting on COVID. And it seemed like, okay, you got a Democrat.
He doesn't go along with COVID. Now, COVID's really important to the Democratic Party because it's a pretext for totalitarian control.
And then RFK Jr.
goes there. He attacks the totalitarian control.
In fact, Debbie and I were just listening to a clip where he's talking about the fact that even in Hitler's time, you had totalitarian regimes that didn't have this kind of control.
First of all, people could physically leave, go across the Alps.
Second of all, the technology didn't exist for this level of surveillance and monitoring.
You're being able to track things that you say.
You'd have to rely on family informants or a neighbor.
This guy said that, and you could say, well, I didn't say it.
But now, hey, listen, we're following your social media.
We're following your texts.
We're reading your private messages and so on.
So RFK Jr.
is on that topic. And then most recently, and this is very telling, he's now starting to attack The ideology of climate change, this climate hysteria, this so-called climate emergency.
In fact, I've been really chuckling these days because, you know, I'm in Texas.
And guess what? It's really hot in Texas in the summer.
And so you have all these newspaper headlines.
Extreme heat is pointing to the effects of climate change.
And again, we've got to apply Occam's razor here.
If this extreme heat was occurring in February, then you could say, well, maybe.
But the other point about it is not only is it summer, which is a perfect explanation of why it's so hot, but the heat goes up and down.
So Debbie and I were in Dallas.
The last few days because of our grandchild.
And this is Marigold.
This is Marigold Margaret Gill, age three days old.
In any event, we were four days old, says Debbie.
And she's right. Well, born on Thursday, the 20th.
So the point being this, that we get to Dallas and it is hot.
In fact, it's a dry heat that we're not really quite used to.
And we're like, wow, it's hot even for us.
We grew up in tropical countries.
But then on Saturday and Sunday, it's markedly milder.
The heat subsides.
So guess what? If the increase in the heat is attributable to climate change and is evidence in favor of climate change, what about the depletion of the heat?
What about it getting cooler?
Is that sure that climate change is not occurring?
Is that evidence against climate change?
You need to have some sort of standard that illuminates the point you're trying to make.
Well, RFK Jr.
is on to all this.
And so what he's saying is that...
He's now connecting the lies of climate change with the lies of COVID. He goes, quote, And he says that the so-called climate change crisis has been co-opted By Bill Gates,
the World Economic Forum, the Billionaire Boys Club in Davos, the same way that the COVID crisis was appropriated by them to make themselves richer, to impose totalitarian controls, and to stratify our society with very powerful and wealthy people at the top, and the vast majority of human beings with very little power and very little sovereignty over their own lives.
So stop right there and consider that last phrase, sovereignty over their own lives.
Now, Democrats today, anyway, don't talk like this.
They don't want people to have sovereignty over their own lives because sovereignty over my own life means I have these unalienable or inalienable rights The right to speak, the right to assemble, the right to travel.
I make my own medical decisions.
I also get to keep the lion's share of what I earn.
It's my effort, it's my work, and therefore it's my property.
Having control over your own life is a way of saying that the government has a more limited sphere.
And so here is RFK Jr.
again, leapfrogging from one topic to the other, but the way I look at it, he's increasingly breaking with fundamental core tenets of the Democratic Party.
This isn't just on the margins.
They love COVID. They love climate change.
These are the basic pretexts for them to create this rearrangement of the whole economy and control over people's lives.
And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is saying, I am off the Democratic plantation as far as these things are concerned.
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Make sure to use the discount code which is AMERICA. Hey guys, I'm thrilled to welcome to the podcast Chris Ruffo.
He's a writer, filmmaker, an activist, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, also a contributing editor to the public policy magazine called City Journal.
We're going to be talking about his book, America's Cultural Revolution.
You can follow him on Twitter, at RealChrisRuffo, R-U-F-O. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
Really appreciate you joining me.
This topic of diversity, equity, inclusion, critical race theory, a really important issue.
And of course, in its own way, the Supreme Court recently weighed in, striking down affirmative action now.
Not striking down affirmative action as far as I can see in all of American society, which would have been an even better thing, but nevertheless an important start by striking it down in university admissions.
Can you talk about the importance of that ruling?
There are some people who also say, well, the The court left a little bit of a loophole for colleges to be able to sort of dodge their way through.
Do you think that that is right?
What is your take on the significance of the recent court decision on racial preferences?
Well, I mean, overall, it's good news.
It's moving in the right direction towards a system of colorblind equality rather than a racial spoil system, which is what our universities have been doing.
But we should also be very cautious because in California, they have a statutory ban on affirmative action.
But the universities have figured out all of these different workarounds and all of these more kind of subtle methods to have de facto affirmative action and admission.
So I don't think that this is a case where you snap your fingers and the problem is solved.
I think this is the beginning of a very long and hard fight, but a long and hard fight that has the side of the American people with us.
People want colorblind equality.
They want people to be treated equally as individuals, regardless of their ancestry.
We do not have that in so many facets of our society.
But I still think that this is a significant goal because it's for the first time at the Supreme Court level, turning the corner.
So it's creating new opportunities that we should pursue legislatively.
And of course, we should be bringing more cases to the courts to overturn, for example, disparate impact theory and other pillars of the affirmative action regime.
It's part of what you're saying that even if the Supreme Court makes a good decision, that's just the court.
As long as the institutions of our society remain under sort of leftist control, they're going to try to find...
So they might say, well, listen, we're not going to be asking whether you're black, but we're going to ask whether or not you're poor.
And the idea here is that socioeconomic status becomes a kind of surrogate And they still want to get a diverse result, but they get it this way by disguising the strategic approach to it.
Is that what you're getting at? Yeah, and I think it's actually even worse than that because they're not even just saying let's substitute socioeconomic status.
In many cases, they're saying, we're not going to have a checkbox where you check your racial background, but we want in your personal statement to address in as detailed a way as possible what diversity and inclusion means to you.
Which is kind of a wink-wink, you know, give us the information we want in a narrative form and we can get around the affirmative action ban.
But I mean, it's also even more broadly the point that you make is correct that, you know, I reported on racial scapegoating in schools for about a year, looking at CRT, looking how schools were shaming, scapegoating, punishing people on the basis of race.
And because it was from the left, because it was against the kind of European-American majority in some of these school districts, it was totally permitted.
They didn't stop doing it.
They didn't feel any pressure.
Whereas if you had it against, coming from the right, let's say, and it was against a group that was favored, which doesn't happen to that same degree, of course, in classes, it would be a civil rights violation, a case, it would be a whole brouhaha.
And so the point is not to say, hey, let's pit one group against another.
I think, you know, not suggesting that at all.
The point is to say, if we want to have a truly equal standard for everyone, we actually have to have more balance within our institutions, how they're governed, how policies are implemented, and then how we work together in the culture to say, hey, wait a minute.
If we want true equality, it has to be equality for everyone.
And we're going to draw a line. We're going to actually enforce that.
Because without enforcement, You get very nice legislation in the law books, but very poor implementation out in the real world.
Chris, why do you think it is that the progressive white liberal is often at the forefront of bashing whiteness, calling for the elimination of whiteness?
I mean, isn't it paradoxical?
You might have thought that you'd have radical black activists who are pushing for this and reluctant white administrators going, well, okay, we'll concede on this point, but not on that point.
But in fact, very often it's the white guys who are leading the charge.
Yeah, it's a really interesting psychological study, and I think that something that I tried to do in the book was create these profiles of these folks and create a bit of a psychological analysis and to try to understand the utopian impulse that they have, the idealistic impulse that they have originally, starts to go through a process of disillusionment as those ideas fail, starts to go through a process of resentment as these folks see others succeed.
And then they also are in a way, introjecting some of these revolutionary ideas, knowing that they are kind of good white progressives.
And then their own self-hatred becomes a marker of their own worth, their own spiritual enlightenment.
And so you can never quite get there.
So you see these folks that are really spinning.
And to them, the self-loathing, the self-hatred, the guilt feelings that they're managing becomes, in essence, a kind of ascetic ideal or a spirituality.
And I think it's obviously tremendously destructive.
But nonetheless, it's something that is very powerful.
As many of these folks have abandoned older spiritual traditions, these seem to come in and replace them.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with Chris Ruffo, author of America's Cultural Revolution.
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I'm back with Chris Ruffo.
We're talking about his book, America's Cultural Revolution.
By the way, you can follow him on Twitter, at RealChrisRuffo.
Chris, here's a question.
We were talking in the last segment about the sort of psychological root of this diversity business.
In the book, you devote a fair amount of space to the genealogy, to the historical evolution of these ideas.
And you talk about some interesting figures, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, Derek Bell.
Now, Marcuse is maybe a little more familiar to people, a kind of a 60s activist who taught in California.
Let's talk for a moment about this Paulo Freire guy, because probably people haven't heard of him.
He was a South American theologian.
Tell us a little bit about what his contribution is to this racial ideology.
Paulo Freire is really one of the invisible masters of American politics in the sense that he's, you know, a Brazilian.
He's a kind of Marxist revolutionary figure from the 60s and 70s.
He traveled all over the Third World working with Marxist-Leninist governments in West Africa and Latin America.
He only spent a matter of months as a visiting fellow at Harvard.
But if you fast forward now 50 years...
Paulo Freire is the number one most assigned text in graduate schools of education that train America's K-12 teachers.
And he's actually the third most cited author in all of the social sciences in the United States.
And so most people haven't heard about Paulo Freire.
But Paulo Freire's ideas are having an influence on your kids in their schools and perhaps on your kids in their university studies, depending on the discipline.
And so what he's done Take the Marxist-Leninist principles of the 1960s, translated it into a pedagogical approach, and then informed so many teachers how they can start reshaping the consciousness of children and leading their minds away from the status quo as they see it and towards revolution.
It's a method of what he calls conscientization.
or critical consciousness, meaning that it is educating kids into the hatred of their own oppression and then guiding them towards revolutionary action.
I mean, I remember reading his book several years ago, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but I read about it in a little different context.
It was in the context of this emerging liberation theology in South America, in which a lot of Christians were taking on this idea that Christ was a revolutionary, Christ represented the oppressed, and apparently Paulo Freire must have some kind of a theological spin, I'm guessing, because that's why these left-wing Christians were glomming on to it, As a way of trying to create, obviously, a crazy merger between Marxism and Christianity.
Yeah, that's right. And that's another thing that's quite interesting because, you know, many of the revolutionaries in the advanced countries of the West, in Europe and then certainly in the United States, were atheists.
I mean, they were really hardcore, at first, Orthodox Marxists and then Marxist-Leninists.
And for them, the church was something that also had to be overcome.
But in South America, someone like Paulo Freire believed in Christ and believed in Marx.
That's how he talked about his own spiritual and political evolution and the merging of these two belief systems.
And, of course, I think that Marx would say, first and foremost, that they're incompatible.
But they tried to create this synthesis in Latin America.
I don't think that it has as much purchase today, but certainly you have the rise of woke Christians, woke Christian churches in the United States.
Some of that, depending on how you read it, could be traced back to these ideas emerging with figures like Paulo Ferreira.
Let's talk briefly about another figure you mentioned, Derrick Bell, who taught at Harvard before he was denied tenure, was apparently fairly close to when Barack Obama wrote a book, the one I'm most familiar with, Faces at the Bottom of the Well.
Who was Derrick Bell and what was the key element of his thought that is preserved in critical race theory?
Well, you know, as I talk in the book, the great economist Thomas Sowell described Derrick Bell as someone who entered the professorship at Harvard under a policy of very explicit affirmative action, becoming the first kind of full-time black law professor there.
But that he was then kind of racked by a sense of inferiority and a sense of resentment, which became his whole philosophy.
And I think that Derrick Bell's scholarly work is not nearly as important as his practical political work.
Derrick Bell assembled around him through his preacher-like, magnetic personality, a group of young law scholars, young law students who then went on to other professorships around the country, who became the originators of critical race theory.
And so Derrick Bell was there at the inception of critical race theory.
His students were the inventors of critical race theory.
And he brought that very pessimistic, very cynical, very revenge-oriented temperament and philosophy into the ideology of CRT.
And so he is a really pivotal figure that turned away from even the civil rights movement, promising equality under the law.
He was a skeptic of Brown versus Board.
He was a skeptic of the Civil Rights Act.
He was a skeptic of Abraham Lincoln and the 14th Amendment.
He really turned against the country in all facets, even the process of politics.
I think he is, in some ways, the culmination of this revolution.
The revolution begins with utopia and ends in cynicism.
That was really the story that I tell in the book.
You see that process happening over and over.
I mean, it's a very interesting phenomenon because, in a way, Derek Bell reminds me of someone like William F. Buckley, who is not known today, I would say, for a particular—he's known a little bit for his book God and Man at Yale, but really Buckley's influence was on all the other conservatives—I mean, he included, by the way—who were part of the Buckley sort of group— And ultimately went on to do various different things.
So sometimes people's influence can be felt personally rather than necessarily through a particular book.
When we come back, I want to talk to Chris Rufo about the best tactic for pushing back against this diversity mania.
I'm back with author and scholar and writer and filmmaker, activist Chris Ruffo.
We're talking about his book, America's Cultural Revolution.
Chris, I saw a little snippet on social media.
it was actually someone referring to you.
So I'm not sure if this is entirely accurate, but the person commenting was saying that Chris Rufo has been asked about whether or not we should frame our arguments about diversity, about affirmative action, about critical race theory in a vocabulary to convince the other side.
And the guy was quoting you saying, no, we don't have to do that.
The other side doesn't wanna listen.
They are not interested.
They try to ignore everything that you've been doing.
And it's only when various states began to pass laws restricting or outlawing DEI, or it's only when the Supreme Court makes a decision you can't use racial preferences, then suddenly these guys jump up and down.
They realize they can't ignore it.
They're forced to engage.
So the point being here, I think, and this is attributed to you, Don't worry too much about trying to sort of find the middle ground and sort of find common ground with the other side.
Go ahead and flay them.
Pass laws that repudiate them, and then they'll pay attention.
Yeah, I think that's a good summary.
And there's another wrinkle in this that I think is really important.
It's that a lot of conservatives say, well, we need to play to the middle.
We need to convince people on the left.
We need to make sure that our ideas are palatable to this kind of magical center-left community that holds, even for many conservatives, kind of the position of moral authority.
I think that's totally wrong.
You need to say, this is our position.
We're anchoring it in our own vision.
We have the moral high ground and we set the vocabulary.
Because if you operate with the vocabulary of your opponent, your opponent will win every time.
It's like if you go to play poker at a casino and you expect to beat the casino.
Well, you're playing with their chips, you're playing with their cards, you're drinking their drinks.
And so the same is true in politics.
And in fact, you're much better off starting from the beginning, starting from those first principles.
Developing your own language and then imposing that language into the center, reinforcing that language through legislation and victories in practical politics, and then forcing your opponents to engage in your frame, your vocabulary, and then engage with you with your position on the moral high ground.
And in my experience and my observation, that's always more effective than, in effect, asking the permission of the left to Excuse me, sir, can you please accept my ideas?
That's never going to work.
Politics is not a debating society.
The best ideas don't always win.
Politics is about politics.
It's about the competition of ideas, but it's also about the competition of practical power.
I think conservatives need to do both, and they need to be unapologetic in how they frame and argue for their points of view.
I mean, let's take a practical example of what you're talking about, because I think it's actually a critical point.
The left will justify diversity by saying something like, we want to have a something.
It can be a cabinet, it can be a university that looks like America.
And so the assumption here is that it's not just that America should be diverse, but that every institution within America needs to somehow mirror the racial diversity or the ethnic diversity of the country as a whole.
And the question, of course, becomes, why?
I mean, the NBA doesn't look like America.
There are lots of things that function perfectly well without, quote, looking like America.
And so I think what you're saying is, once you grant the other side's premise and now try to argue within it, you're trapped in the framework that they have set up.
Instead, reject the framework, ignore the framework, produce your own framework, and let them react to that.
That's right. And so in this case, the counterargument is not, well, we shouldn't discriminate, but we should make sure that we have, you know, equal representation across institutions in this conservative alternative.
I mean, that's going to go nowhere, because if you're arguing on, you know, who is more pro-diversity, you've already conceded the frame to your opponent.
What I would say as the antidote to that is to say, America is not about racial quotas.
America is not about forcing groups into positions using the state.
America is about giving people their freedom, letting people pursue their talents, and acknowledging that people have a diversity of interests and passions and faculties.
And so if dry cleaners are predominantly owned by Korean Americans, good for them.
They've done so freely, fairly.
They've done so voluntarily.
This is the spirit.
Not every institution has to look like a Benetton ad with very carefully composed racial balances.
As long as people are treating everyone equally as an individual, as long as there's no animus and discrimination coming from our state institutions, the outcomes are up to people's individual capacities.
And good for people who succeed in the NBA and business and academia, whatever that looks like.
This is the genius of America.
And then you have a debate where you're putting them on their heels and you're saying, actually, liberty, freedom, genius, and people's pursuit of happiness.
Are more important than, you know, state-managed diversity.
And so that's how I think we have to start arguing these things.
We can never be on the defensive, and we can never accept the frame that our opponents are trying to box us into.
Excellent. Chris Ruffo, thank you so much for joining me.
Very interesting ideas.
The book is America's Cultural Revolution.
And he also has a substack, ruffo.substack.com.
And Chris Ruffo, thank you very much for joining me.
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