Christopher Ruffo’s America’s Cultural Revolution exposes how 1960s radicals—Black Panthers, Weather Underground—exploited conservatives’ distrust of government to infiltrate universities and K-12 schools via education programs, reshaping culture under Herbert Marcuse’s Frankfurt School doctrine. While the left bans overt hate speech, it enforces systemic racism through policies like lowered math standards, while conservatives cede institutions to activists. Ruffo links BLM and CRT to Marcuse’s "dictatorship of intellectuals," ignoring historical failures like Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and urges conservatives to reclaim governance through legislation, not despair—highlighting Florida’s DeSantis-led reforms as a rare counteroffensive. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, it's Andrew Claven with this week's interview, which was with my friend Christopher Ruffo, who has a new book, excellent new book, called America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
You know, I was talking this week to some young people at what's called the Patriot Academy.
Jeremy Boring is friends with them, and so he asked me to give a little speech to them, and I was talking about the power of being polite, which I know sounds like a minor thing, but I recently read this article in American Mind about artificial intelligence, where the author said, people think artificial intelligence is woke.
It's programmed to be woke.
So, for instance, they've asked ChatGPT to write a poem in praise of Joe Biden, and it will, but they ask it to write a poem in praise of Donald Trump, and it doesn't.
And he says, no, it's not woke.
It's just trained to reject hate speech.
And when it goes online and gathers up all this information, it finds more hate speech on the right than on the left.
And I think this is true.
The left will do incredibly racist things, like they will lower the standards of math teaching because they don't think black people can learn math.
So they think that'll make them more equal, which is incredibly racist.
But they don't use racial slurs.
Where on the right, we are more willing to tolerate rudeness and genuine bad manners and language by guys like Nick Fuentes and his hatefulness about Jews and Andrew Tate and the way he talks about women.
And we tolerate that, and there's a reason for it.
We are so shut down by the culture that tells us everything we say is racist.
Everything we say is sexist.
Whatever we say when we're just speaking the truth, we're phobic, we're homophobic, we're Islamophobic, we're all kinds of phobic, that it sounds like strength to push back against them by saying things that are actually racist and sexist.
It sounds like we're being courageous by standing up to that censorship.
But in fact, that kind of behavior is a sign of fear.
It's a sign.
It's what animals do when they make themselves big or they pound on their chest or they make noise, trying to keep predators away because they're afraid of what will happen when the predators attack.
Now, I believe that if you walk in the truth, that you've got magical supernatural powers backing you up and you don't have to be afraid of anybody.
And I think a person who is polite but will not be moved is the kind of warrior we need.
And this is one of the reasons that I actually really, really like Chris Ruffo.
Universities And The New Proletariat00:15:25
I think he does.
He has been doing such a bang-up job and I've never seen him lose his cool.
I've never seen him be rude, and yet he has made more.
I'll just read you some of the praise on the back of his book.
And these are from people, you know, Tucker Carlson says Christopher Ruffo is in fact one of the most effective journalists and filmmakers in the country.
That is absolutely true.
Dr. Peterson, Jordan Peterson calls him an international class troublemaker, also true.
Ben Shapiro, who you may have heard of, calls him one of the most important journalists in the country.
And the Atlantic Magazine calls him one of the most gifted conservative polemicists of his generation.
Chris, it is great to see you again.
It's been a while.
It's good to be with you.
And I'm really enjoying the book.
Well, before we talk about the book, it's called America's Cultural Revolution.
What are you doing now?
What other projects are you working on?
Well, I mean, you know, this is it.
And the labor of writing a book and then launching a book out into the world is a huge endeavor.
And so I'm at this kind of crossroads.
I'm not sure what I want to do exactly next, but I'm in the midst of a few projects, maybe putting together a new book.
I'm working on policy with Governor DeSantis' team in Florida.
We've retaken a public university in Florida.
We're now governing that institution.
So what I'm trying to do, and I think I'll be doing in the next year, is taking a lot of the ideas and concepts that I develop in the book and trying to actually implement them in the real world.
That to me is the most exciting thing to do.
It's just, you know, getting out of the life of the mind and into the life of human action.
That's something that I think is quite fun and quite compelling to me right now.
Yeah, I mean, you did it.
It was wonderful to watch you take back that university.
And I've been kind of, I'm not appalled at this point.
I'm not surprised by any of this stuff, but the way they have characterized the reforming of the universe and make it sound like you're being racist and that you're banning books and all this stuff.
But there's been none of that really, A, and B, I wanted to ask if you are expanding those efforts, if DeSantis is expanding those efforts throughout the state, and are you going to be part of that, do you think?
Yeah, there's more reforms to come.
This year was a huge year for university reform.
I worked with the governor to abolish DEI departments in every public university in the state of Florida.
That's a big accomplishment.
There's conservative research centers that are cultivating the next generation of more conservative-leaning scholars in now three of the flagship state institutions.
And of course, at New College, where I'm a trustee, we're overhauling the university top to bottom.
We fired the leadership.
We brought in new leaders.
We have a new core curriculum that's in development.
We've recruited the largest incoming class in the college's history.
So people now want to attend New College of Florida.
That's great.
And I think what we're going to do and we'll announce in the coming months is some incredible scholars from around the country who are sick of being kind of pummeled and pushed around and silenced and shamed.
You know, we're creating an open environment at New College, supporting people who are from a wide variety of disciplines, of perspectives, but who share a classical liberal arts mission.
And that's really the catchword that we're focused on is reviving the classical liberal arts, which is not the same thing as DEI or gender studies and critical race theory.
Now, we're trying to actually go back to a classical model that's informed and sustained the West for 2,000 plus years and bring it a new home on the beach in Sarasota, Florida.
That's great.
That is great.
So the book is called America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
And it's about what's usually called the long march through the institutions.
Can you describe to people what that is?
Yeah, in the late 1960s, left-wing radicals that were organized as the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, the Communist Party USA, and other groups believed that they could foment an armed revolution against the American government and found a new Marxist utopia beyond the constraints of capitalism and the Constitution and class and other institutions they viewed as inhibitions.
This crashed and burned.
You have Richard Nixon elected in 68.
You have Nixon elected with 49 state landslides in 72.
And so by 1972, the Marxist groups were scattered.
They were dismembered.
They had been disrupted by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.
And they were seeking a new strategy.
They said, well, how do we get these ideas?
Our ideas are right.
It's not that our ideas are wrong or we should reconsider them.
Merely how we've implemented them through armed revolution has not worked.
So what do we do now?
And so they had a strategy actually at the time out of desperation, out of their lone limitations, they said, well, we're going to burrow into the existing institutions.
We'll bring the ideology in from the outside.
We'll use these chokeholds and these gatekeeping mechanisms within established institutions.
And once we gain power there, we solidify our power.
Then we'll impose our ideology on everyone else through this institutional politics.
And lo and behold, decade after decade after decade, they had the patience, the self-discipline, the strength, and the political savvy to actually make this happen to the point where most Americans in that summer of 2020, they saw all of the institutions kind of hook line and sinker, following the BLM line, supporting critical race theory, kowtowing to the gender activists.
And most Americans said, well, how did this happen?
How did all of a sudden our institutions seem to be captured?
all at once.
The answer is that it didn't happen all at once.
It wasn't by accident, but it was part of this many decades in the making and all part of this plan.
Now, this is something that has always mystified me.
And this is one of the best histories of this I've ever read.
I'm not sure I've read anything as clear as this.
One of the things that's always mystified me is you can say something like this, but it's like a generational plan.
You know, it's like taking a spaceship to another star.
You have to actually have new generations of people coming in.
What was the mechanism that allowed them to do this?
Why were they so able to take over these institutions?
Were the institutions themselves rotten inside?
I think a couple key reasons.
One is that they selected their targets and the sequence of their targets quite brilliantly.
They began, of course, with the universities.
The 60s radical student movement was their initial base of support.
They found very sympathetic environment within the universities.
So that was first and foremost.
Then they went into the graduate schools of education.
They had saturated those completely.
And then when you have the universities that teach undergraduates, the graduate schools of education that teach teachers who then go out and teach K through 12, primary school students, secondary school students, you have a built-in transmission belt of ideology.
And you have one that is totally subsidized by the state and therefore not subject to any kind of market discipline.
If you're a college professor in a state university, you're really buffered from any kind of economic constraint or limitation or discipline.
The second reason, though, and this is more significant, and this really falls on the shoulders of conservatives and a failure of conservatives and institutionalists over the last 50 years.
Conservatives bought into two ideas.
First, that there is such a thing as institutional neutrality, that this is the goal towards which we should strive as a mode of governance.
And then following kind of Reagan-Thatcher ideology, that the government was the problem and therefore we should seek to reduce the size of government and participation in government is somehow compromised, is somehow dirty, is somehow antithetical to a libertarian ideal.
But what this did, the false notion of neutrality, plus the abdication and the denigration of governance, let all of the institutions and the leadership positions within public institutions in particular, it left them open territory.
And the center-left liberals, who may have been administrators in public universities or even faculty department chairs in public universities, were not able to resist the very tough kind of street-level tactics of those radicals and people who had participated in revolutionary movements.
They ran right through these departments, bowled over the center-left liberals, and conservatives had decamped.
They had left the institutions wide open under this false myth that they would somehow remain neutral.
And so that sequence of events over time, and then conservatives after the Cold War thought that they had won the war against the radical left, won the war against the Marxist left, left all of our institutions totally unguarded.
And so when all of a sudden you see everyone bending the knee to BLM in 2020, having done the historical research, having understood how they achieve power, having understood their tactical brilliance, it was really not a question of if, but when.
2020 happened to be the inciting incident to this story, but there was certainly a backstory that drove it to that moment.
You know, one of the things that I find highly comical is the left now crying out that we are waging a culture war.
And I think, yeah, it's a war now because before it was just an invasion while we sat down and sort of lay down and they marched over us.
But it does seem guys like DeSantis are fighting back in a new way.
And I have to, you know, I have to give credit to Donald Trump as well for sort of opening it up and being too unchained to basically even, I don't even think he knew what he was walking into when he did it.
But it is a big change.
Talk a little bit about this guy, Marcuse.
Marcuse, is that how it's pronounced?
Because I remember when I was 18 years old and a liberal, a guy explaining Marcuse to me and saying, that sounds like insane and it also sounds like fascist.
Who was this guy and what did he believe?
Because he's kind of at the heart of the whole thing.
He really is.
You know, Marcuse was a German-American philosopher.
He fled the Nazis in the 1930s, came to the United States.
You know, he's part of the famed Frankfurt School.
And so he was a leading figure many decades later.
In the 1960s, he became this guru of the student radical movement and the personal mentor and doctoral advisor to Angela Davis, who became the most famous black radical, you know, Communist Party USA member in the United States.
And so he was at the heart of this.
And he had these students who really flocked to him as this sage.
And he was a brilliant man.
He was a scholar of Hegel and Kant and Marx and the European tradition, of course, on the left.
And what he did was quite interesting.
He legitimized and rationalized and provided an intellectual argument for the impulses of the student radicals and the impulses of the underclass in the inner cities that was starting to riot in the 1960s and express their political will through violence, through looting, violence, arson, destruction.
And he saw this as a new proletariat.
He said that the working class in America was anti-revolutionary.
It would never be a Marxian proletariat movement.
It was satisfied with the washing machine, with the Ford car, with the white picket fence around the suburban house, and that it had been permanently put to sleep by the capitalist system.
And he said, what we have is a new revolutionary proletariat, the white intelligentsia and the black underclass.
That became the new revolutionary subject for him.
And so the ideas that he espoused at the time were the new revolutionary subject, the repression of conservative ideas within academia, and then the legitimation of revolutionary violence against the state.
And then, of course, the long march through the institutions, which he developed with a German student radical.
And so those four key concepts generated by Marcuse all between 1968 and 1972, in my mind, are still the driving heart of left-wing ideology and left-wing politics today.
You can't understand the modern left without understanding Marcuse.
And then, of course, if you look at his relationship with Angela Davis, the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, you can see his influence even in BLM.
And so to me, understanding Marcuse is understanding the modern left in a more profound way.
Well, to that end, can you explain a little bit, because this was the thing that stopped me as an 18-year-old listening to these ideas, how he rationalized taking away free speech.
How do you talk to Americans about what is essentially the entire basis of our country and convince them?
What was his argument?
His argument, I mean, it's a sophisticated, I mean, it's a wrong argument, but it's a sophisticated argument.
And so his basic idea is that if you want to have a truly tolerant society, you need to be intolerant towards those who would have a regime of intolerance.
And so kind of bicorollary argument by the same principles, you know, he said that we don't have free speech in the United States because the corporate media, the establishment, the politicians, the military generals, the military-industrial complex had created a system that has the illusion of free speech, but really rigorously and systematically suppresses any radical and left-wing ideas.
Kind of ironic to say that in 1968, but still, that was his idea.
And so therefore he said, in order to have true liberation, in order to have true free speech, which always leads towards left-wing ideas and a left-wing conception of society, regrettably maybe we must suppress any kind of conservative establishment, reactionary, or fascist ideas within our institutions.
And so he said that he wanted a platonic dictatorship of the intellectuals more than he would want the existing dictatorship of generals, politicians, and then the kind of public majority.
That was his, if he said, if I have a trade-off between these two, I want the dictatorship of the platonic and theoretically left-wing intellectuals.
And actually, a journalist asked him in the late 70s as he was an elderly person, died just a few years later, said, you know, you've been criticized for this.
But the journalist was trying to give him a fair reading or a charitable reading.
He said, but you don't really mean that, right?
So a conservative professor who advocates for free markets, who advocates against welfare state programs, certainly you wouldn't want to suppress or eject or banish this person from the university.
And Marcuse says, oh, no, no, yes.
That kind of research in the university should not be tolerated, should not be allowed.
That person should be booted from the institution.
And so, I mean, he was pointing fascism at others.
But his ideas, when you actually think about how they would be implemented, resemble something that is certainly, I think, fair to describe as authoritarian.
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There are no easing funny bad ways.
The book is America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything by Christopher F. Ruffo.
Really entertaining and really helpful to understanding what's going on right in this moment.
Why, when the Soviet Union collapsed, did this not put a bug in anybody's ear?
Did nobody in this group say, hmm, you know, maybe that didn't work out too well?
Or was the idea, the old idea, like, oh yeah, but it wasn't real socialism or something like that?
Yeah, unfortunately, the latter, and that's one of the interesting things that I saw in my research.
Then in the biographical portraits of these four figures that were die-hard, left-wing, Marxist, radicals, they rationalize, they rationalize, they rationalize, even in the face of the evidence.
So one of the characters, Paolo Freire, who's the most important education theorist in the United States, unfortunately, in the 1980s was still saying that Chairman Mao's cultural evolution was, quote, the most genial solution of the century.
After the bodies had been counted, after the devastation had been documented, after the starvation from Mao's regime over the preceding decades had been incontrovertibly, incontrovertibly proven, he still said, ah, no, fundamentally, he was right.
And so Derek Bell, the godfather of critical race theory in the final section of the book, he says that America is fundamentally racist.
All of our institutions are racist.
Abraham Lincoln's a racist.
The 14th Amendment's racist.
Civil Rights Act is racist.
Brown versus Board of Education is racist.
It's a rotten, cynical society that is, you know, that can, and racism can never be eradicated because it is at the core of the American experience.
Well, his mentee, while he was a professor at Harvard Law, a guy named Barack Obama, becomes president.
And Derek Bell in his old age in 2012 or 2010 or 2012, something along there, is interviewed.
And they say, well, Professor Bell, you've been so negative about race in America.
You say that it's white supremacist, that there's no such thing as racial progress.
Your student, your mentee, Barack Obama, is now president.
Faith In The Average Citizen00:07:46
How do you explain that?
And he says, you know, Barack Obama is, I can't remember the exact phrase, to paraphrase it, is a black face of a white supremacist country.
Nothing has changed.
It's not gotten any better.
Progress is impossible.
And so the core movement of the left, the core historical pattern is idealism to cynicism.
I mean, that's what you see over and over and over because the ideas start with a utopian fantasy.
The midpoint is kind of practical consequences of these ideas, which is disaster.
And then they adopt this really cynical, pessimistic, even nihilistic posture at the end.
And then the cycle continues.
Nihilism is easier than saying I was wrong.
I mean, there's one of the hardest things for human beings to utter the words, I was wrong.
So at the end of this, you sound a note of hope.
But it was interesting to me that your hopefulness was based on the human spirit.
It wasn't actually a program, or am I misreading this?
I mean, you don't, do you have when people say, I mean, people are very dispirited.
You know, they very much feel like we're being overwhelmed.
We have a Department of Justice that acts unjustly.
We have a president who is utterly corrupt.
We have a press that doesn't report the truth.
And we watched our cities burn while people stood in front of burning buildings saying this demonstration is mostly peaceful.
And you sort of think like, oh, I mean, I've gone into wonderland.
What do you think we should do?
And I mean, each of us, I mean, each person who wants to bring America back to the celebration of individual freedom.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm optimistic fundamentally.
And I think that what we see right now is a profound disconnect between our democratic structure and the wishes of the people and the governance and the ideology of our institutions.
And so we have to figure out a way to get these two phenomena in alignment again.
And look, I trust the average American citizen still.
I'm optimistic.
about the average American citizen.
I think that if we put more faith in the intuitions of the average person in this country, we'd have a much better country than if we put our faith in the intuitions of the kind of intellectual class that pushes around, you know, CRT, et cetera.
But what I really think we need in this country more than anything is a reinvigoration of our republic and for our citizens and for our legislators to rediscover that there is a profoundly important task for them.
It's not merely to win elections or to talk on television or to solicit donor dollars, but it's actually to govern on behalf of the people who elect them.
And I think Republican legislators, let's say even in conservative states, abdicated that responsibility for a long, long time.
They let left-wing ideologues take over their universities, take over their K-12 schools, take over their state bureaucracies.
And they have essentially, they govern institutions that oppose them, that despise their values, that seek to undermine them.
And so what we need is to reinvigorate the democratic process and have legislators that are going to retake institutions, reform institutions, abolish institutions as necessary, and make sure that all public institutions are oriented towards the public interest, that reflect the values of the public, and will advance the spirit of our Constitution, of our Declaration,
of the best version of how people think, how they feel, how they want to raise their kids, what they want to transmit to the next generation.
And so I think that the democracy problem that we have is the critical one.
But the good news is that the legislators write all the rules.
If the legislators in Oklahoma, for example, to take one state, did not want DEI in any of their schools or any of their public universities, they could write a three-paragraph bill, pass it through their supermajorities in the legislature, get it on the governor's desk, sign it, and they're gone the next day.
We have the power, the people, to elect legislators to reshape public life.
But we have to have the courage to do it.
We have to have the intelligence to do it.
And so I tell people who bring up the issues that you raise, oh, it's hopeless.
We have this, that, and the other thing.
The greatest limitation for conservatives is self-limitation.
The left is nothing compared to that.
We have everything that we need still intact to reshape public life towards the good.
And it's only the limitations that we have inside and as a movement, as a political force, that those are the only things that we should really focus on.
Those are the only things that ultimately that we need to overcome in order to prevail.
it's a really excellent point and i have noticed this and talked about this the the way that concern i mean despair is one of the worst it's not only It's not only unbiblical.
It's also an incredibly bad strategy.
It's just the worst political strategy there is.
So you write this book, America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
Anybody invite you on their mainstream newscasts?
Any left-wing people ask to talk to you?
Things are changing.
A year ago, two years ago, I think the answer would have been 100% no.
And now the answer is maybe just 75% no.
So I was able to do some left-wing podcasts, small magazines, the intercept, some other things that are on the left, but a bit smaller.
I did not get any invitations, despite my publicist for HarperCollins reaching out on NPR, CNN, MSNBC, NPA, whatever, the other kind of big ones.
But there was actually one unexpected kind of surprising, maybe bright spot in a bit more dialogue.
I had an op-ed I wrote, kind of based on some of the work I've been doing that highlighted in the book, actually get accepted and published in the New York Times, which I don't think would have happened a couple years ago when Tom Cotton famously published an op-ed and everyone got fired and it was a whole scandal and it was a big problem.
They tried, you know, the left-wing activists tried to do that last week when the Times published my op-ed.
They didn't get much traction.
They didn't get much energy.
They didn't have any fear in the editorial room and in the New York Times.
And so I think, and I hope that things are changing.
I hope we can engage in a bit more of an exchange, a dialogue with some of our interlocutors.
But while that's fun, while I enjoy it, while I think there's a theatrical benefit to it and perhaps a kind of public intellectual benefit to it, to that kind of exchange, my focus is still, you got to write, you've got to reach your audience, you've got to reach your people, you've got to change the minds of legislators who are already predisposed to advancing your ideas.
And ultimately, that's the real work.
And so it's fun to chat on the kind of left-wing podcast for sure.
But I'm not under any illusion that the real task ahead of us is really an internal task for our folks to get out there and make those incremental changes.
Really smart stuff.
Chris, it's great to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
The book again is America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
Good luck with it.
You deserve it.
And next time you're in my neighborhood, buy me a drink.