Christopher Rufo argues President Biden’s DEI executive order replaces equality with identity-based equity, framing CRT as a Marxist ideology pushing wealth redistribution and institutional dismantling. He exposes its infiltration into schools, universities, and corporations under euphemisms like "social justice," citing Cupertino’s forced racial training for children. With 100+ volunteer attorneys, Rufo’s legal campaign targets CRT programs for violating civil rights, urging resistance through reporting, organizing, and strategic litigation—calling it a "dominating ideology" reshaping America’s foundations. [Automatically generated summary]
So, as you know, in the show, we like to bring on occasionally somebody who is intelligent and articulate just for a change of pace.
Today, we want to talk to Christopher Ruffo because he is dealing with some of the most important things that are coming out of Washington.
He has been dealing a lot with the white privilege, critical race theory training that is being foisted upon people, not just by the government, but also at the corporate level.
He's a filmmaker, writer, policy researcher, a contributing editor, as am I, to City Journal, and a research fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Wealth, Poverty, and Morality.
Chris, are you there?
I'm here.
Good to be with you.
It's good to see you.
How are you doing?
Very well, very well.
All right, I want to begin by just playing this clip of Biden signing one of his endless executive orders, this one on equity.
Look, in the weeks ahead, I'll be reaffirming the federal government's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and accessibility, building on the work we started in the Obama-Biden administration.
That's why I'm rescinded the previous administration's harmful ban on diversity and sensitivity training and abolished the offensive counterfactual 1776 Commission.
Unity and healing must begin with understanding and truth, not ignorance and lies.
So, you hear that, Chris?
What do you think?
What are you imagining he's actually saying?
Yeah, it's really great.
I think he embodies perfectly Machiavelli's idea that you need to kind of perform the virtues while you can execute under the surface devices.
And you look at the language, right?
Where it's diversity, inclusion, and equity.
The acronym that I like is not DEI, but actually DIE.
You know, that's what happens to your institutions once you implement it.
But it's a subtle shift, right?
And I think this is deliberate.
You know, the American value of equality that this country was founded on imperfectly, that Abraham Lincoln sacrificed for, and then the civil rights movement actualized to a degree that we hadn't seen before, is equality.
And that's the rhetoric for the last 250 years of the United States towards which we go.
He's replaced it with equity.
And the idea behind equity and critical race theory is that those old values, individual rights, freedom of speech, private property, the Constitution, give the kind of camouflage or the pretext of equality, but they really hide a kind of subterranean racial domination.
And it should be replaced with equity, which is not the protection of individual rights, but the apportionment of privileges, power, and wealth based on group identity.
So his language is soothing, kind of healing, equity, unity.
But under the surface, the ideology that he is proposing is radical.
It's anti-constitutional, deliberately, and it's quite dangerous.
Equity, I mean, this idea that you can give things to a race is just a racist idea, it seems to me.
But we're being told now that if we believe that there should be, we should try to act without racism, we're being told that that is in fact racism itself.
Is that a fair assessment?
Yeah, I mean, it actually becomes very difficult.
I've seen articles in kind of academic journals and the popular press where now logic is white supremacist, math is white supremacist, objectivity is white supremacist, colorblindness is white supremacist.
I mean, it really is the kind of blanket accusation at anything that people don't like that want to implement, which I think is kind of intellectually at heart a kind of Marxist theory where you look at the critical race theorists and you always ask, well, okay, racism is ever present and just as damaging now as it was 100 years ago, just in a different, more subtle form.
What do you want?
What is a solution?
And at the end of the day, and in the literature dating back to the 1990s, it's large-scale seizure of property and assets, redistribution of land along the African decolonial model, and a kind of restructuring of society so that all of the statistics provide kind of mathematically equal outcomes.
And we've tried that.
That's a political kind of proposal that has been, that was proposed in the 1840s.
Uh attempted in the 20th century and led to nothing but heartbreak.
And I I find it just astonishing that someone like Joe Biden who to me is not a radical, he's a kind of new deal retail politics Democrat would be just allowing this to be his kind of centerpiece of the first few weeks of his administration.
It is amazing to me when I hear people say that logic is white supremacist or math is right is white supremacist.
It's amazing to me that people don't point out how incredibly racist that is, how incredibly denigrating that is to people who are not white to say that they can't do math, that they can't do uh, use logic.
It's just an incredible uh, incredibly racist statement.
You have been, you have been in the forefront of battling critical race theory.
If you could sum up critical race theory in a couple of sentences so we know what we're talking about, what?
What does it even mean?
What is critical race theory?
Yeah, critical race theory is the idea um, that society can be divided neatly into oppressor and oppressed.
So it's taking taking that old Hegelian Marxist dynamic.
But in the 1960s the, they realized that oppressor and oppressed wasn't really bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
So they took the economic categories, they replaced them with racial categories um, in kind of simple terms, white and black, and critical race theory's basic idea is, um that uh, scholars and legal scholars and activists should look explicitly at racial dynamics.
That racism is ever present uh, racism is everywhere, at all times, and that the United States is, and the institutions of the United States that preach liberal Democratic values, um really use those as a pretext uh for oppressing people of color, and that the kind of way forward is not through those liberal democratic values, it's not through the constitution and the law, but actually through dismantling all of those oppressive power systems it's.
It's pretty amazing.
I mean, just in in San Francisco, where the schools are shut down, they're taking George Washington and Abraham Lincoln's name off schools.
That's what the school boards are meeting to do while the schools are shut down so minority kids can't go and get an education it's.
It's pretty amazing to me that they put forward these theories that, as far as I can tell from what i've read, they they have no factual basis.
I mean, I don't see any proof, a that this is, that this is the case, that the that endemic, uh systemic racism is what is keeping people down or, b that these things actually make anybody's life better.
That's what I don't see.
I mean, I suppose that if you are uh saying, if the government is saying to you, Oh, we're going to take these guys' money and give that money to you.
I can see where that would kind of make your mouth water if that's what you thought was a good idea.
But I can't see any proof that A, these theories are based in fact, or B, that they will make people's lives better.
Am I missing something?
No, actually, you know, they, A, well, they reject your kind of white, heteronormative, patriarchal conception of objectivity and facts and evidence.
No, really, they say facts, evidence, and logic are actually kind of white supremacist, a white supremacist epistemology.
And we actually value a narrative and the feelings and impressions of minority individuals above them.
So they make it unfalsifiable in that way.
But you're right.
I mean, the evidence is really clear.
And I think that at heart to me, critical race theory and the kind of aligned ideologies are deeply pessimistic.
I mean, they don't acknowledge any form of progress.
They don't acknowledge that in a society of truly equal opportunities, they don't believe that that is good enough or would actually lead to greater equality.
And I think that the kind of people who are really pushing it, and this is the thing that really incenses me about it, is that it serves to maintain the elite social status of academics and journalists and bureaucrats and policymakers, but it doesn't offer for anything for people who are at the bottom of the social ladder of any racial group.
And, you know, I spent, and we talked about it, I spent five years documenting life in three of America's poorest cities: a white city, a white neighborhood, a black neighborhood, a Latino neighborhood, and three different regions.
And, you know, the things that they said, hey, Chris, these are the problems.
These are the obstacles.
These are the things that we need in order to advance to kind of full dignity and equality of person have nothing to do with what people like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo and other kind of narcissistic peddlers of the new ideology are proposing.
And I think that it really is this kind of cynical academic game that cements their own status, gives them authority in HR programs, the kind of petty tyranny of corporate HR, but actually offers nothing to people at the bottom.
And I'm not convinced that they even care as long as it's serving their own interests.
You know, this is kind of a theme of today's show: that we're really, we're not really dealing with left versus right.
We're really dealing with elites versus the rest of us.
And just as I always say that AOC should ask herself why so many corporations and rich people donate to her cause when she's supposed to be for the little guy, guys like Tanahisi Coates ought to ask themselves, why is it that they get all these prizes from elite white people?
It's because they know that the things he's recommending are not going to make his kids rivals to their kids.
I think that that's part of exactly what they're doing.
They're actually cementing elites.
They'll let some black guys into the elites, but it's not going to help the average Joe, black or white, who wants to get ahead.
If I said to you, well, you know, this is some obscure stuff and obscure theories and there's articles and who cares, where is this going to pop up in my life, in an ordinary person's life?
Yeah, that's the thing.
I mean, I think that in 30 years ago, it's not a lot of time, this was really a kind of obscure sub-discipline of a sub-discipline in academia.
But you're going to find critical race theory everywhere in every institution that you participate in.
And especially if you're in a blue-leaning state like I am in Washington state or you are in California, it's now part of the curriculum for K-12 education.
It's at every university for higher education.
Churches are now starting to adopt critical race theory in many cases.
Your HR department at your technological mega corp has definitely already implemented DEI training.
And you'll get it in your local library.
For example, you know, our local library in King County is now hosting racially segregated programs under the kind of banner of social justice.
And it's, it's, I think it's, I'm not exaggerating when I say it is now the default operating ideology of most of the major institutions in the United States.
And it has a couple different names.
It's diversity, equity, inclusion, cultural competency, empowerment, sensitivity training.
ethnic studies, you know, kind of social justice studies.
But all of those euphemisms and all of those kind of branches of influence within the institutions all trace back to critical race theory, which of course traces back to the kind of radical politics of the 1960s.
So what are you doing?
I mean, you've been really, you were right on top of this.
Part of your work is why Donald Trump got rid of this stuff in reaction to your work.
What are you doing to fight this?
Yeah, well, I think, you know, really three things.
And my strategy, I'll lay it out because I know that no progressives are probably watching.
So it's safe to share with your audience.
But, you know, it's really three strategies.
One is investigative reporting.
I'm reporting on whistleblowers in dozens, now hundreds of institutions, whether in academia, corporations, universities, showing the actual concrete content of these programs, which has drawn a huge audience because it's so outrageous.
Second, there's now in a movement, I hosted a Zoom call recently of 60 different parent groups around the country that are saying critical race theory has now entered our school, entered our curriculum.
It's dividing students.
I reported on a school in Cupertino where they were forcing eight-year-olds to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and then rank themselves according to their power and privilege.
Luckily, these parent groups are taking action, so there's a grassroots effort.
But the thing I'm most excited about is the third plank in the platform is this kind of, we're launched essentially a decentralized and relentless campaign of legal warfare.
I've recruited now, had more than 100 attorneys across the country volunteer to help on this effort.
And we're finding plaintiffs.
We're filing lawsuits.
And we're basically making the argument, you know, making the gambit that critical race theory is not only morally and intellectually bankrupt, but actually if you implement it in institutions, it traffics in racial stereotyping.
It traffics in collective race-based guilt and harassment.
And then also compels speech from government employees when they're employed in the public sector.
And this is not only wrong, but it's actually illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
And it's also unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution.
So we're hoping that over time, you know, in the short term, we're going to win some cases, get some settlements, make waves in the press.
But over the long term, the kind of brass ring is for us to win in the United States Supreme Court and immediately change the risk calculus for every institution in the country that's considering these programs.
That's very cool.
My last question for you then is, what does an ordinary person do when he confronts this stuff?
I have a feature on the show where I answer questions in the mailbag.
And one of the mailbag questions today is from somebody who is attending graduate school in New York City for an MFA in painting.
And the annual show this year is a BIPOC exhibition, meaning a show displaying the talent of Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
And he says the issue with the show for him is that it means that he's basically being locked out of an opportunity.
He feels that this is a violation of civil rights law and of title, I guess it would be Title VI, Title VII.
But he feels, and he wants to know, he says, this is his question.
He says, is this worth fighting over?
Fighting for Inclusion00:01:55
A friend tells me I am up against the dominating ideology of the time and nothing can come from fighting except my own cancellation.
Do you think this is an issue worth fighting over?
The show will give a lot of exposure to emerging artists, just not ones of a particular skin color.
What would your answer to this guy be?
Yeah, it depends.
It depends on your kind of your life and your circumstances and your risk.
But I think one thing is, if you're an artist, drop out of those institutions.
I mean, they have nothing to offer you.
I was a documentary filmmaker primarily for PBS for 10 years, and I realized that this was the direction it's going.
And I could never fulfill my own kind of creativity and my own insight and my own character in that system.
So I dropped out and did something different.
But if you are kind of on your home turf, right?
If this is your school, your church, your workplace, fight back.
And I think it takes courage, which is the thing that we need more than anything.
It also takes a kind of intelligent way of fighting.
Marshall the right language.
Make an alliance among people within the institution that think in a like-minded way.
And then push back gently and then a little more firmly and a little more firmly and make a stand because this stuff is wrong and you shouldn't be afraid or ashamed to push back against it.
And frankly, unless people have the courage to stand up, this will be the society that we live in.
And if you care about your community, you care about this country, now is the time to take a stand.
Chris, it's really good to see you and I appreciate your coming on.
If people want to get on the Christopher Ruffo train, where do they go?
Yeah, you can find me on Twitter at RealChrisRuffo or visit my website, christopherufo.com.
That's christopherrufo.com.
You can sign up for my email list and we'd love to have you.