Sept. 23, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
30:32
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| It's deeply anti-intellectual and it's frankly racist. | ||
| I think we should call it out for what it is. | ||
| If you look at the kind of white supremacist ideology of the 1950s, which we all denounce, it has the same categorization as the critical race theory ideology of today. | ||
| You reduce people to a racial essence. | ||
| Back then and today, it's whiteness and blackness. | ||
| You create a group identity-based hierarchy. | ||
| Again, it's different, but it's the same concept. | ||
| And then these critical race theory trainings are essentially denouncing people, not on their individual characteristics, but on their inborn identity. | ||
| This is something that was wrong in 1950. | ||
| It's wrong today. | ||
| And we should be very on high alert. | ||
| and we should all be working together to jettison this ideology. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report at www.rubin.com. | |
| As always, guys, make sure you're subscribed on our YouTube channel and have that notification bell clicked on. | ||
| And joining me today is a research fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Wealth, Poverty, and Morality, and contributing editor at the City Journal, and perhaps more importantly, Mr. Critical Race Theory himself, Christopher Rufo. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| It's great to be with you. | ||
| What do you think about that title, Mr. Critical Race Theory? | ||
| I think it's a little bit misleading because I think a lot of the proponents of critical race theory would disagree with that. | ||
| They would say I'm kind of Mr. Anti-CRT more than anything. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, we're going to discuss that for the next half hour and then we'll let the people decide. | ||
| So really why I wanted to have you on is you're one of the people, at least in the Twitter world, although now you've made it to Tucker, so that's a nice bump, that has been explaining critical race theory Clearly and and honestly and openly and it is a set of ideas that basically has infiltrated almost every part of society and has so much to do with why we're seeing such chaos at the moment and why everybody is sort of picking their set of facts or their worldview and we can't come together on anything. | ||
| So I really want to just unpack all of that with you so that my audience can understand it a little bit more because I think when you say critical race theory people don't know exactly what it means. | ||
| There's a lot of different definitions, all that. | ||
| So just one thing quickly before we do that, which is how did you get involved in all of this in the first place? | ||
| And then we'll take it from there. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I've been reporting the last two years on homelessness, addiction, mental illness, and kind of West Coast street disorder. | ||
| So this has been a bit of a departure, but it all started when I got a whistleblower email that said, hey, the city of Seattle is now holding racially segregated diversity trainings. | ||
| And this is the segregated system for white employees is called interrupting whiteness and internalized white superiority. | ||
| And this just immediately piqued my interest. | ||
| I filed a records request, forgot about it for a couple months, and then got this trove of documents in that was just astonishing. | ||
| And, you know, I've been following the kind of conceptual ideas of critical race theory for the last few years. | ||
| But this was the first time I'd see it really implemented in a way that was crystal clear, that was extremely divisive. | ||
| And then once I released them publicly, it kind of took on a life of its own and I became really the kind of key source for whistleblowers in every institution in the United States. | ||
| And since then I've had more than a thousand whistleblowers contact me. | ||
| Everything from the smallest school districts in middle America to the highest levels of the federal agencies. | ||
| And they're all saying that critical race theory has become the dominant ideology in these institutions. | ||
| It's ripping us apart, but we're scared to speak out, and that's why we're contacting you. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why I thought this was such an interesting topic because, you know, for the years that I've been doing my show, I've had on an awful lot of people who have been fighting these ideas, but there wasn't sort of a name around it. | ||
| There wasn't like a way to look at it through at an institutional level. | ||
| So when you're getting all of these emails from little institutions up to the big federal stuff, It's like, I've been seeing these emails for the last five years, and we've been seeing, you know, Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State, what happened, and Lindsey Shepard, and just the litany of examples of people fighting this thing. | ||
| Okay, so let's just do 101 here. | ||
| What is critical race theory? | ||
| So that's a question with a thousand answers, but the best that I can describe it. | ||
| It's basically, you take the Marxian dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed. | ||
| So you have one group in society that is the oppressor, one group that is the oppressed. | ||
| Traditionally, that's been the kind of bourgeoisie and the proletariat, so it's an economic stratification. | ||
| Critical race theory basically contends that we're going to do away with the economic categorization for now, and we're going to essentially graft identity politics onto this Marxian dichotomy, so that it's no longer the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. | ||
| It's whiteness and blackness. | ||
| It's kind of white Americans versus people of color. | ||
| So that's really what it is. | ||
| It's an old Marxist idea that's been repackaged with the racial politics of our time. | ||
| So do you see a moment where it went from an economic theory to a racial theory? | ||
| Was there just like a moment that that happened or did it just slowly infect the whole thing? | ||
| Yeah, I think, you know, there's many moments. | ||
| It's a lineage that is a pretty long lineage. | ||
| But if you can trace it back to the Frankfurt School. | ||
| And the Frankfurt School theorists, I guess now 50 years ago or more, really realized that economic Marxism had its limits. | ||
| They realized that it couldn't make inroads in Europe and the United States because we had too big of a middle class. | ||
| In the United States, you have a suburban house, you have an automobile, a washing machine, and people didn't really feel that the oppressor-oppressed dynamic of social class was really speaking to them. | ||
| And so the kind of Marxist theoretician said, we're not going to make success that way. | ||
| Let's figure out how we can set up a new dynamic that could be more salient. | ||
| And unfortunately, this works. | ||
| It is something that I don't think has much basis in reality or in fact, but is tremendously powerful psychologically. | ||
| And you have our elite class has really adopted this rhetoric that I think has no basis in their daily life. | ||
| But it's become a very potent weapon, a very powerful weapon that's found resonance because it combines this kind of innate American discomfort about race and then weaponizes it into a political tool. | ||
| Does it strike you as sort of deeply anti-intellectual also? | ||
| I mean, that's the part that is sort of amazing to me. | ||
| When you see it seep into the places of higher education that are supposed to be about intellectualism, and yet they're taking a set of ideas that whittles us all down to our skin color as if that's the most important thing. | ||
| It seems like it's deeply anti-intellectual, not actually intellectual. | ||
| Yeah, it's deeply anti-intellectual and it's frankly racist. | ||
| I think we should call it out for what it is. | ||
| If you look at the kind of white supremacist ideology of the 1950s, which we all denounce, it has the same categorization as the critical race theory ideology of today. | ||
| You reduce people to a racial essence. | ||
| Back then and today, it's whiteness and blackness. | ||
| You create a group identity-based hierarchy. | ||
| Again, it's different, but it's the same concept. | ||
| And then these critical race theory trainings are essentially denouncing people, not on their individual characteristics. | ||
| But on their inborn identity. | ||
| This is something that was wrong in 1950. | ||
| It's wrong today. | ||
| And we should be very on high alert. | ||
| And we should all be working together to jettison this ideology. | ||
| And I think something that's really important is that if you look at Martin Luther King, the kind of gold standard of how we should think about the country, how we should think about a race, his philosophy was deeply rooted in Christianity. | ||
| He was obviously a preacher. | ||
| But it was also deeply rooted in the Declaration and the Constitution and the work of Abraham Lincoln. | ||
| He was a student. | ||
| You can read this in his essays. | ||
| He was a student of American history and realized that we had to kind of bring forward the highest ideals of the country. | ||
| The Black Lives Matter movement, the critical race theory movement. | ||
| They self-consciously reject the ideology of Martin Luther King, they reject the ideology of the Declaration of Independence, and they reject the ideology of Christianity wholesale. | ||
| It's a different lineage. | ||
| It comes from the kind of Marxist theoreticians of the 1960s and has no kind of resonance in our in our kind of organic homegrown cultural tradition. | ||
| Do you see what they want to build on the other side of this? | ||
| That's the part that is unclear to me. | ||
| I get all of the bad ideas here. | ||
| I think a lot of my audience, because we've been talking about this stuff forever, gets a lot of the bad ideas. | ||
| But it seems to me that I can't really see what they wanna build. | ||
| I can see what they wanna destroy, which is pretty much everything, which is what we see happening right now. | ||
| Hollywood's crumbling. | ||
| Our cultural institutions are crumbling. | ||
| Our academic institutions are crumbling. | ||
| Our political institutions are crumbling. | ||
| They've infected everything. | ||
| So I get the destruction phase, but do they even really talk about the people that buy into this? | ||
| Do they ever really talk about what they will build after this? | ||
| I mean, is it really going to be a world? | ||
| Are we going to have anti-white laws? | ||
| Like, is that really where we're headed with this whole thing? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's two ways to look at that question. | ||
| One is you're absolutely right. | ||
| Critical race theory and critical theory in general is not a philosophy of a substantive positive. | ||
| It's a philosophy of pure negation. | ||
| They're arguing that they should deconstruct existing social institutions, point out how they're kind of coded for racial dominance and oppression, and then obliterate them. | ||
| They're not clear, and this goes back all the way to Marx in the 1840s. | ||
| Marx posited that we have to have the revolution, we have to destroy the social order, we have to destroy all of the kind of underpinnings of our society. | ||
| But even Marx gave no clarity on what the world looks like after that. | ||
| It was pure utopianism. | ||
| There was no concrete plan or development or even a vision of what would happen. | ||
| It's really this blind faith that if you destroy what's bad, something beautiful and good and eternal will emerge. | ||
| But our history in the last 450 years globally has shown that that's absolutely wrong. | ||
| When you demolish a social order, when you empower ideologues, that divide people on the basis of group identity. | ||
| It leads to famine, it leads to war, it leads to genocide. | ||
| It leads to everything that is bad in the world. | ||
| And I don't see the critical race theorist positing something | ||
| substantive in there, in its place. | ||
| And I think what you can also see, the second way of looking at this, is that | ||
| if you look at the kind of, in practice what emerges, look at the chas. | ||
| You remember the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle? | ||
| Black Lives Matter and anarchists took it over. | ||
| They said, once we get rid of the police, once we get rid of the Seattle government, once we have our own kind of utopia, we are going to set up a government based on social justice principles. | ||
| And what happened? | ||
| They set up racially segregated facilities. | ||
| There were meetings and gardens and elsewhere that were explicitly endorsing racial segregation. | ||
| And it devolved into a violent nightmare. | ||
| It had a homicide rate that was 50 times greater than the city of Chicago. | ||
| It led to the senseless death of African-American men. | ||
| And it didn't work. | ||
| And although that's obviously a very small example, I think it's an important one because it gives a kind of glimpse into what happens when you demolish law and order, when you demolish the existing social order, and you try to replace it with a utopian vision. | ||
| So one of the questions I get all the time from people is they'll say, Dave, why is it spreading so quickly? | ||
| Like it's almost as if if you weren't paying attention to this, like if you weren't watching the few YouTube channels about it or the podcast or whatever, you suddenly it was as if it never existed. | ||
| And then one day it burst forth and now it's. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| Have you thought about that? | ||
| Just sort of how it has been able to spread its tentacles so seemingly quickly? | ||
| Even for the people that saw it coming for a while, it does seem like there was suddenly like a catalyst that really exploded it in the last six months. | ||
| Yeah, I think you're right. | ||
| And I thought a lot about that. | ||
| And I'm basing it really empirically on talking to folks in these agencies, in these institutions, who have been unable to resist it. | ||
| And I think the explanation is really this. | ||
| Critical race theory, the intellectual argument of it, is constructed almost like a mousetrap. | ||
| It's quite ingenious. | ||
| And embedded in the premise is that if you oppose critical race theory, Yeah. | ||
| That's merely an expression of your white privilege, of your white fragility, of your internalized white superiority. | ||
| And they make any resistance, any disagreement, they just rationalize that as a proof that you are the thing that they're fighting against. | ||
| So it's constructed in a circular way where you can't truly fight back against it. | ||
| And they're using a very kind of bare-knuckled social shaming and social kind of castigation process where if you even raise your hand in one of these trainings and say, well, you know, this is a little bit simplistic. | ||
| I see it in a more nuanced way. | ||
| I see it in a more complex way. | ||
| You're going to be berated by at least one person in the room who says you're a racist or a white supremacist or a fascist or what have you. | ||
| And frankly, most people who are, you know, working a regular job, they're raising families, they don't want to take the risk. | ||
| The social pressure is so extraordinary that they essentially just sit and take it. | ||
| But I think what we're finding out, in the last few months especially, is that people have had enough of it. | ||
| It goes against their experience, it's tearing apart workplaces, and people are starting to finally speak out. | ||
| And I think, you know, your show, certainly Weinstein and James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, They laid a theoretical foundation against critical race theory. | ||
| But what I'm trying to do and what others are trying to do is trying to put that into action and actually elevate some of those ideas into a position of political power and fighting against critical race theory. | ||
| in every institution in the United States and not giving an inch. | ||
| Because if we allow this to essentially take over our public institutions, | ||
| in my view, it's the beginning of the end of our constitutional order and a system of government | ||
| that has shown a steady capacity to adapt and progress for nearly a quarter millennia. | ||
| Man, it's like everything you're talking about, it sounds alarmist and yet it's the stuff | ||
| that we all now know to be true. | ||
| I mean, I've been screaming about this without having the words exactly for it. | ||
| There was a bunch of us, you just named a couple of the people, that were screaming about it and everybody kept saying, no, no, no, it's just a bunch of college kids. | ||
| That was the criticism I was getting often from mainstream media. | ||
| No, no, it's a bunch of college kids. | ||
| You guys are making it up. | ||
| I wonder, have you thought about this a little bit? | ||
| That it seems to me that the liberals, the good remaining liberals, whoever they are, there's not that many left because I think so many have been sort of either silenced or coerced into this crazy lefty thing. | ||
| Do you sense that the liberals have any defense against this? | ||
| I think this is where I have a bit of a difference with some of my friends in this, where I think some of them still think the liberals have some defense mechanism against this. | ||
| I simply don't believe that anymore. | ||
| I think it's either the conservatives, and in a weird way, it's Trump, or bust. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| Yeah, I 100% side with you. | ||
| And I think that what we've seen in Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles, that the kind of old line liberals or the kind of moderate liberals really have no ability to push back or even restrain the most extreme progressive ideologues. | ||
| And that kind of experience in the last 10 years in these very liberal cities on the West Coast is now being nationalized in our discourse. | ||
| And frankly, Joe Biden is not going to offer any kind of restraint against this. | ||
| It's completely naive and absurd to think so. | ||
| I think it's also kind of naive and absurd to think that there's some great third party unity ticket that could fight against it. | ||
| The kind of Brass tacks of it is that kind of dissident liberals, mainstream liberals, they have to create an alliance with conservatives in order to stop this. | ||
| And I'm encouraging all of my friends on the center left to move over and forge an alliance, at least on these critical issues with us within the conservative movement, because The bottom line is really this. | ||
| Kind of writing an op-ed, no matter how good it is, kind of appealing to civil discourse, appealing to restraint, appealing to the center, is not going to change the minds of the fundamentalists who are running the kind of intellectual architecture of the left. | ||
| And they have to basically make the decision, we are going to tactically align with conservatives to stop this. | ||
| And I think there's precedent. | ||
| If you look at the 1970s, who became the kind of neoconservatives? | ||
| These were a lot of New York intellectuals that were liberals, that were in some cases even on the very far left. | ||
| And they were mugged by reality. | ||
| And then they moved over to the right and became kind of prominent members of this kind of big tent kind of conservative infrastructure. | ||
| The same thing has to happen today. | ||
| And I'm really pleading to all of those folks on the center left. | ||
| Look at the actual political landscape as it exists, not as you imagine it in your hopes and dreams. | ||
| Let's get together, let's push back, and let's exert some actual political muscle. | ||
| Chris, honestly, I don't know that I've ever been more relieved by an answer that I've ever gotten | ||
| from a guest on the show, because as you know, that is what I believe, and it's causing | ||
| a certain pain point for me with a lot of what I would say is my old crew. | ||
| It's the liberals that can't accept that. | ||
| But do you think some of that? | ||
| The inability to understand the landscape as it is, not as you want it to be. | ||
| Do you think some of the aversion to that is simply because of Trump? | ||
| That if it was somebody else fighting this stuff, they could get on board, but because it's Trump, they can't get on board. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. | ||
| And you know, I'll be very honest. | ||
| I've been very honest with my own views. | ||
| You know, I didn't vote for the president in 2016. | ||
| I shared a lot of the reservations that a lot of the people in the center left shared. | ||
| But I've realized that the world as it is, is a binary system. | ||
| That's been our political system for almost 250 years. | ||
| That's how it's going to be for the next at least 100 years. | ||
| So we have to operate in A or B. And for me, it's a very simple choice. | ||
| You have Joe Biden, who essentially at this point is a kind of armored carapace, where he's going to bust through to the Oval Office and then the people who are driving the movement of progressivism are going to man the agencies, are going to man the kind of facilities and push this ideology even faster. | ||
| Or Trump. | ||
| You know, if you have reservations about his character, I get it. | ||
| If you have reservations about some of his policies, I get it. | ||
| But he's come out very strongly in the last 30 days. | ||
| He's denounced critical race theory by name. | ||
| And he is the only politician in the United States, frankly, that would have done it. | ||
| Jeb Bush would be hiding under a desk. | ||
| He wouldn't want to touch this issue. | ||
| And I think that the president, for all of his flaws, is someone who's willing to stand against this. | ||
| And you don't have to like your allies. | ||
| You just have to recognize from a pragmatic point of view that you are fighting the same battle. | ||
| And when that battle's won, you can go back to your separate sides. | ||
| But I think that I've come to realize the president has earned my vote specifically because of his action on these issues. | ||
| And I would encourage folks, if they have to, hold your nose and pull down the old lever. | ||
| I'm so with you on that, and I'm glad that you explained it as cleanly as you did, because I think the problem with the last remaining liberals is they want to write the Harper's letter, they want to say all the things, address all the problems, as long as they can say, oh, but we don't support that guy who's actually doing the work to fix the thing. | ||
| So can we talk about that a little bit? | ||
| That Trump is actually doing things to get critical race theory out of our system. | ||
| And of course he's being called a racist for it. | ||
| But can you talk, you talked to Tucker about this a little bit. | ||
| Can you talk about what Trump has actually been doing and not just talking about? | ||
| The libs are all good at talking about the things. | ||
| He seems to be actually doing things. | ||
| Yeah, you know, the president, after following some of my reporting on critical race theory in federal agencies, he immediately tasked his OMB director, Russ Vought, to issue an executive action at his request to abolish all critical race theory trainings throughout the federal government. | ||
| This is a pretty bold move. | ||
| And then he followed it with a speech at the National Archives, where he dismembered the ideology of critical race theory in actually kind of a surprisingly intellectual dialogue. | ||
| Where he called it out by name. | ||
| He linked it to the 1619 Project. | ||
| He linked it to the riots in the streets that have been going on since the death of George Floyd. | ||
| And he says, these are all kind of birds of a same feather. | ||
| These are all interlinked phenomenon, and I'm going to stand against it. | ||
| I'm going to essentially put myself in the breach and fight against it on principle and in practice. | ||
| And I think a lot of our friends on the center left are willing to fight in principle, but they're not willing to fight in practice. | ||
| And this is a kind of huge error. | ||
| And I look at it like this. | ||
| They were saying, we don't want Trump to fight this. | ||
| We don't want him to create this executive order banning critical race theory. | ||
| And I'm saying, well, OK, that's essentially saying we want to keep losing because if we win a little bit now, there might be a backlash. | ||
| That, frankly, is a defeatist attitude. | ||
| I find it totally untenable on the level of kind of prudential politics. | ||
| And I would, again, encourage everyone to abandon that way of thinking and have some courage and step up. | ||
| Yeah, it's one of those things I liken it to like, you know, the barbarians are at the gate and the one guy who's guarding the gate still, you got all the intellectuals going, ah, he talks funny and his hair is crazy. | ||
| And it's like, guys, we got a bigger problem on the other side of that gate. | ||
| So then after Trump issued this speech and everything else, then he, the CDC, they said they were still gonna continue, right? | ||
| But then he put an end to that as well. | ||
| Yeah, it's actually multiple federal agencies. | ||
| I reported new whistleblower documents from the CDAC, the EPA, the Veterans Administration, and the State Department, all of which are moving forward with critical race theory trainings in direct violation of a presidential order. | ||
| And I think this is both a problem substantively, right? | ||
| The kind of principles that are in these documents are divisive, pseudoscientific, racist, and really destructive for the workplace. | ||
| But it's also a problem at the level of our constitutional system. | ||
| The president is the president. | ||
| He controls the agencies. | ||
| And my friends and colleagues at the Claremont Institute and elsewhere have long warned about the administrative state becoming the unconstitutional fourth branch of government. | ||
| And I think this is another illustration of that pattern, where you have mid-level and even senior bureaucrats basically saying, we can openly defy the president. | ||
| We're going to do what we want, even though nobody elected us and we don't have this power in the Constitution. | ||
| We're going to keep doing it. | ||
| So I think, you know, in the short term, this is not a big deal. | ||
| The OMB director will shut these down. | ||
| But in the long term, on the kind of theoretical basis, this is a major problem. | ||
| You have an administrative state that is essentially, doesn't think of itself as beholden to the political order. | ||
| And I think that is a huge problem and we've got to tackle that when the time comes. | ||
| In effect, I mean, you're talking about the deep state there, when you say the administrative state. | ||
| Did you make a distinction or you just don't like that phrase? | ||
| Yeah, I think, you know, I don't like the phrase. | ||
| I think there's a really kind of strong body of scholarship on the phrase, the administrative state. | ||
| I think the deep state can kind of verge into kind of conspiratorial territory. | ||
| So it's a personal choice, but I think administrative state is on much more solid intellectual footing. | ||
| And we have a long list of folks who have done the background, done the homework, done the reading that I would encourage everyone to look up. | ||
| So let's say through this executive action, Trump is able to get this stuff out of the federal agencies. | ||
| It sounds like it's still going to be a fight to do so, and who knows if that's even really possible. | ||
| But let's just say that that kind of works. | ||
| Are you worried then that what will happen is we'll have federal agencies that will have removed this stuff? | ||
| But in effect, we'll just have all the private institutions, the private schools, all of our businesses, our television networks, all of these things, they will still be infected. | ||
| And that infection will almost create a situation where the federal government will be unable to operate because the outside forces won't let the federal government do what it's supposed to do. | ||
| Something to that effect. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I would kind of contextualize it in this way. | ||
| I think we've long been concerned about this for the last few years, but this is the first time that we've actually got anything done about it. | ||
| I think it's really substantively the first successful pushback against critical race theory on institutions, but it's not the first. | ||
| This is really the opening shot in a long war. | ||
| And I think that we can start with federal agencies. | ||
| We can start with other public institutions. | ||
| We can kind of shut off the spigot of funding that goes towards the university programs that are creating this intellectual framework. | ||
| We can go after local school districts and local institutions that are funding this. | ||
| And then what we do is we change the calculation for corporations that I think will adapt very quickly. | ||
| What we need to do is we need to raise the cost of doing these programs, because right now the kind of risk management protocol for corporations is, well, we really don't lose anything by doing this, but we insulate ourselves against the attack of being a big bad corporation. | ||
| And so what they're doing is they're protecting their economic prospects with our existing policies. | ||
| And this is a way of risk management for their kind of social policies and social status in the world. | ||
| What we have to do is we have to change that formula. | ||
| Where we significantly escalate the cost of doing these programs. | ||
| And I think the next step is clearly a kind of campaign of legal warfare against these programs. | ||
| Peter Kersenow and others have argued persuasively that these constitute workplace harassment, that these violate the Equal Protection Clause. | ||
| And I think that's the next step, and I really think that I'm excited, I'm energized by this initial victory. | ||
| We have a long way to go, but I think that if we work together, we get our heads out of the clouds, and we actually fight, kind of swords out on the ground, I think we can win this, because I think the vast majority of Americans, if they actually find out what this theory is advocating for, would wholeheartedly reject it. | ||
| I'm with you, man. | ||
| Do you think that there's sort of a micro way of fighting and a macro way of fighting? | ||
| So it sounds like Trump and what you just described there, that's sort of the macro level of we have to fight at the governmental level. | ||
| But one of the questions I get All the time, especially from college people is, well, how do I fight it just personally? | ||
| If one of my friends has been, you know, just wholly brainwashed by this set of ideas and I don't know that there's a great answer, you know, I'll tell them, well, you know, you can share some PragerU videos or some of the, you know, listen to Larry Elder or read a book by Thomas Sowell, but that's sort of all intellectual stuff in a certain way that, you know, often you're not going to get. | ||
| younger people to take the time to do. | ||
| Do you have any tricks on the micro level on how to wake people up about this? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, I don't. | |
| I actually, I've kind of come to the personal conclusion that the kind of micro-level one-on-one is probably a waste of time. | ||
| You find yourself debating some dude you went to high school with on a long Facebook thread. | ||
| It never goes anywhere. | ||
| I think that this is really at heart an institutional battle. | ||
| You have to win it institutionally. | ||
| So rather than arguing with your roommate, you should be kind of waging a kind of sophisticated campaign against the dean of your school. | ||
| And I think that's the way to do it. | ||
| I think that, unfortunately, we're in this kind of Really awful political environment where in order to maintain kind of one-on-one friendship sometimes you just have to put politics off the table. | ||
| So I think again it's an institutional fight and that's really where the most progress can be made. | ||
| Yeah, so I said here right before we started that I wanted to keep this exactly to a half hour because this is the type of video that I want people to be able to say to their friends, even if what you're saying is right, that you don't want to be debating the Facebook friend. | ||
| Here's a half hour video. | ||
| Hopefully you got some of it. | ||
| So for people that do want to explore this more and your work more, where can we send them? | ||
| Yeah, come to my website. | ||
| It's ChristopherRufoRUFO.com. | ||
| I'm on Twitter at Real Chris Rufo. | ||
| Again, that's R-U-F-O. | ||
| And, you know, join the fight, join the fun. | ||
| I mean, we are really waging a very active campaign. | ||
| We're trying to get things done. | ||
| And my motto is Swords Out, Swords Up, because that's what it's going to take. | ||
| Chris, for real, you are fighting the good fight, and I like the fact that you're enthused about it. | ||
| I know, even for me, we get beaten down by this stuff. | ||
| You wake up every morning, and there's another thing on Twitter about another institution that failed, or just some other horrible story, and it can get you down. | ||
| But you got a smile on your face in the midst of this, which is actually pretty great. | ||
| You gotta be a happy warrior, and I know without a shred of doubt that we're gonna win. | ||
| It might take time, there'll be losses, but we're gonna win this fight. | ||
| Christopher Rufo, thanks for joining us. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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