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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report and it's time for another Friday panel extravaganza. | ||
Today we're going to be talking all about critical race theory, social justice, and our crumbling institutions. | ||
And I'm joined by Christopher Ruffo, who is the director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute. | ||
Ali Beth Stuckey, who's the host of Relatable on Blaze TV, and James Lindsay, author, math PhD, and founder of New Discourses. | ||
Guys, gals, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
I'm ready to do it, man. | ||
This is the topic. | ||
This is the topic. | ||
All right. | ||
So James, I will start with you because you jumped in there first. | ||
When people hear the phrase critical race theory, although for the people that know the four of us, I think they have a pretty decent sense of what it is, but if someone's tuning in for the first time and they keep hearing critical race theory, CRT, all of these buzzwords, can you give me the 60 second recap of what this thing is? | ||
I can try 60. | ||
We'll see. | ||
I'll give you 90 seconds. | ||
Go. | ||
It is not diversity training. | ||
Start there. | ||
It is not racial sensitivity training. | ||
You might say it's racial hypersensitivity training. | ||
If you want to like play little games with words, But what it is, is it is a worldview that assumes from the outset that the ordinary operating system of society is racism. | ||
Systemic racism is what they call it. | ||
So they say in their own words that the first assumption of critical race theory is that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society. | ||
The question is not did racism take place, but how did racism manifest in that situation? | ||
The people who are equipped to figure out how racism took place in that situation are called critical race theorists. | ||
So it starts there. | ||
It then draws into question things like traditional civil rights. | ||
This is, in their own words again, the liberal order, enlightenment, rationalism, equality theory, and neutral principles of constitutional law. | ||
That's on the first paragraph of the book, Critical Race Theory and Introduction, which is a standard textbook in the subject. | ||
So it is a completely radical way derived from what's called critical theory to view race and racism to where you assume that race is the key thing that you have to be thinking about all the time. | ||
Racism is the ordinary state of affairs. | ||
Perpetuates itself. | ||
So if you benefit from racism, you are therefore motivated. | ||
It says not to understand racism, not to be able to question your complicity in racism and therefore want to maintain racism. | ||
So it's a very corrupt way to think about race and racism. | ||
And to make race and racism relevant to every single possible topic. | ||
So that's why I say not to be playing word games. | ||
That it is like racial hypersensitivity training. | ||
It teaches people to look for racism in literally every situation, interaction, phenomenon, and institution. | ||
Well, James, I didn't have a timer going there, but I think that was pretty solid. | ||
That was pretty good. | ||
The reason, actually, that I thought having you three on would be particularly interesting for this is because I think, James, you're sort of hitting it from the intellectual side. | ||
I think, Chris, you're sort of hitting it from the educational side. | ||
And, Ali, you're hitting it from sort of a religious or foundational belief side. | ||
So I thought it would make for an interesting three. | ||
Chris, what can you add to that on sort of how this set of ideas, assuming you agree with what James basically laid out there, how the set of ideas has sort of infected all of our education systems, pretty much at every level. | ||
Yeah, I actually think it's actually one step beyond that. | ||
You know, in the 1960s, Rudy Dushka talked about the long march to the institutions, the idea that the way to overthrow capitalism, overthrow the United States, overthrow the kind of global white supremacists Hegemony was to take control of key institutions, and critical race theory, I think, has essentially done that. | ||
You've had people who are more progressive in education and universities for a long time. | ||
Critical race theory, by morphing itself into kind of racial sensitivity training, which, as James suggested, is really kind of a cover story, they've been able to actually put this operating ideology into institutions where you think it wouldn't go, like corporations through HR departments. | ||
Like federal agencies. | ||
And you know, I did a story, an investigative story of even the National Nuclear Laboratory. | ||
So people who design America's nuclear weapons have been put through critical race theory trainings where white male executives were forced into a retreat center for three days. | ||
They are asked to denounce their identity, told that by being white males, they were analogous to the KKK, to white supremacy, to lynching, to MAGA hats. | ||
And then forced to write letters of apology. | ||
So this is not just an obscure academic theory. | ||
It was in the 1990s, but now it kind of has blossomed throughout all of our institutions and I would argue has become the default operating ideology of America's dominant institutions. | ||
Yeah, so it starts with the intellectual side, moves into all of the institutions, especially the governmental institutions right now. | ||
And then Allie, can you talk about how it's affected some of the religious institutions and what, if any, tools they have to fight back? | ||
Yes, so this has been interesting to watch, particularly in conservative evangelicalism, which I am associated with. | ||
Typically, this is It's a worldview that's affiliated with liberation theology, which is a Marxist type of theology that has been around for a long time, and it was popularized in the mid-20th century by a man named James Cone, who was an avowed Marxist who believed in socialism and basically believed that Jesus came not to save sinners from their sin and give them eternal life, which is kind of the Orthodox Christian belief, but rather to liberate oppressed people or perceived oppressed people | ||
Uh, from, you know, the hegemonic power structures that kind of we have been talking about. | ||
Um, and so intersectionality has been a part of some sections of Christianity for a long time, but now we see it coming into conservative evangelicalism. | ||
Not so much saying explicitly, hey, yes, I'm a Marxist and hey, yes, Jesus came to, um, liberate people from white supremacy. | ||
Maybe not explicitly going that far, but saying things like, Well, white people need to repent of different things than black people do, and hey, we need to divest of our whiteness, or we need to deconstruct our faith, or we need to decolonize our understanding of the Bible. | ||
And it's basically all of the same thing as both Chris and James have been saying, but it's a little bit Christianized. | ||
The problem is, going back to something that James said in the beginning, is that this is a worldview. | ||
Critical race theory is a worldview. | ||
It's not just a philosophy that you can wed with other philosophies. | ||
So it's not like this is a part of my Christian faith and this is just one compartment of it. | ||
No, it changes how you view the entire world. | ||
How from a Christian perspective, you view human nature, sin, salvation, sanctification, eternal life. | ||
It's got a different view of the end times, our purpose here on earth. | ||
And so they can't coincide. | ||
And what we're seeing right now is the evangelical church trying to make them coincide. | ||
And that's why You're seeing so many fissures even within conservative evangelicalism over this. | ||
Yeah, and by the way, it's not just conservative evangelicalism. | ||
I mean, we've seen many versions of this in the Jewish community and in many different religions. | ||
Actually, why don't we just do that since, James, you got into a little hot water for talking about this, why this is so dangerous for Jews, this whole set of ideas. | ||
Yeah, I touched the third rail a little bit. | ||
Well, the truth is that critical race theory is pretty antisemitic in and of itself. | ||
First of all, just as a, history has taught us that everywhere you see | ||
identity politics being forwarded, we're now gonna care about people's identity and their race, | ||
and we're gonna attach that to privilege, that this tends not to work out well for Jews. | ||
And critical race theory does that explicitly. | ||
But critical race theory also has other dimensions that are pretty explicitly antisemitic. | ||
They're very interested in who is white and how they became white. | ||
So they have a whole kind of long theory. | ||
There are entire books dedicated to this, like How Jews Became White People or something like this is the title of a book by Brodkin, 98 or something. | ||
This was written an entire book explaining how Ashkenazi Jews became White, European descended Jews became white and then they separate from Jews of color. | ||
So you're already separating Jews according to racial characteristics. | ||
And then what the argument is, is that the European descended Jews gained privilege that they then hide behind the Holocaust to deny. | ||
So you have this kind of group of people who are super privileged, they made themselves white, they threw black people in particular under the bus to achieve whiteness, they engage in anti-black racism, the argument goes, to achieve whiteness, they took over all of the, I mean listen to what, this is actually Brodkin's argument, they took over all of the cultural institutions at the highest level, media, law, etc. | ||
Establish themselves at the highest level of privilege to where they became these the trendsetters for white society for what it means to be white into To what whiteness means and then they deny that they have this privilege by saying oh, but the Holocaust happened Oh, but diaspora. | ||
Oh, but you know the Roman conquest all of these terrible things So they are they are critical race theory bills out Jews and this isn't even without touching the Israel-Palestine issue which they're also super anti-zionist but It builds out Jews, or I should say European-descended Jews, as being extremely white people who refuse to acknowledge their whiteness. | ||
And extremely white means extremely privileged. | ||
And again, when you start Calling Jews privileged, you're not that many steps down the road historically from a catastrophe. | ||
So I brought this up. | ||
Third world. | ||
There's also a great irony here, obviously, that everything that you just said there, it was like, well, Nazis would kind of dig a lot of that stuff, right? | ||
The ultimate racializing of everyone at every level. | ||
But Chris, at the educational level, I still think a huge amount of people can't figure out how the schools and the universities just had no defense. | ||
That at first, you know, a couple of years ago, it was like, oh, there's this weird thing happening at Evergreen State with Brett Weinstein. | ||
And we'd see like some random things happening at a school up in Canada or something. | ||
But now it's just ransacked across everything. | ||
Yale, Princeton, well Harvard for sure, they've fully accepted this. | ||
And now they openly discriminate against Asian people for the same reason that James is saying they can discriminate against Jews because they're successful. | ||
But are you shocked that there were just no systems in place? | ||
Like that these people just like all just put their hands up at once? | ||
Yeah, I mean, in a certain in a certain way, yes, but in another way, no. | ||
I think one of the thing that the critical race theorists and their kind of activist element has done very well is they've constructed their intellectual argument almost like a mousetrap where they make their argument, which I think a lot of us reject. | ||
I think most kind of right thinking people reject. | ||
But they embed a rejection of their argument as evidence of your guilt or your racism. | ||
So you can't really say no to them or they're going to call you racist. | ||
They're going to call you white supremacist. | ||
They're going to call you whatever epithet of the month they happen to be using. | ||
And this is really scary for people, frankly, and especially for people that are kind of professional class where they're attorneys or lawyers or work in tech. | ||
To be called a racist or a white supremacist or misogynist is a potential kind of death blow to their status. | ||
And consequently, all of our elite institutions were really kind of poorly positioned to resist this woke kind of infiltration, if you will, because they were essentially bullied into submission and silence. | ||
And I think that's what we've seen over the last few years. | ||
Although I think that in the last year, this has started to change. | ||
As the consequences and the damage of these ideological programs have started to manifest in these institutions, parents are starting to say, hey, wait a minute, at what point does the damage being done to kids and institutions outweigh my fear of being kind of labeled as a racist? | ||
And that equation, that equation is kind of tipping a little bit. | ||
And I think we're starting to now see parents who wouldn't have fought back a year or two, three years ago, are now really starting to kind of gear up for this fight and learning how to combat this ideology and really get it out of our key institutions. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
So let's pause on that for a moment. | ||
Cause that's where I want to end with this, because there are some solutions that you guys are actually all in your own way involved in. | ||
So we'll do that at the end, but Ali, you must be somewhat satisfied that three, what I would say are sort of Former liberal thinkers, however you want to define all these words, but I would say in many senses, but guys stop me if I'm speaking out of school, I would say our modern conservatives, because we're trying to conserve something that was once good and liberal, have kind of come around to your position on this. | ||
You must take some satisfaction in that. | ||
as a conservative. | ||
Well, to be fair, I've, well, yes, but to be fair, I have learned a lot from all three of you | ||
about this particular subject. | ||
This wasn't really something that even in conservative circles we were talking about | ||
a few years ago. | ||
Yes, we've always known that in particular, public schools and universities were indoctrinating | ||
students. | ||
And as a Christian, we've always kind of had this mentality, because it's a biblical mentality to have, that the world is going to have a different philosophy and have a different worldview than Christians do. | ||
And so this idea of the mainstream pushing kind of perverted ideas of justice, perverted ideas of love and equality, That isn't surprising to me. | ||
And I actually think Christians, and in particular Christian conservatives, do have a little bit of an edge in this because it's like, yeah, this is just the next crazy thing that the world has come up with. | ||
They're always trying to come up with new definitions of truth and right and wrong. | ||
And so, yes, there is a little bit of that there. | ||
But it's interesting to talk to people who don't have the same faith and don't have the same particular worldview that I have, still see the problems. | ||
And still be able to see the logical conclusion that all of this is going to take us to, which is resentment and bitterness and division. | ||
A lot of what we saw throughout the 20th century. | ||
And so, I mean, I'm happy to be kind of strange bedfellows with people who don't have the same that I do, but still have the same practical goals and still are able to see, okay, we might, you know, we might all disagree on what the problems are and some of the solutions are, but we know this critical theory stuff. | ||
Like, we know that's not it. | ||
So let's get away from that as thoughtfully as we can. | ||
Yeah, I mean, I think not that we need more like us versus them stuff, but in a weird way, it's sort of everyone versus the woke, and it's created a lot of strange bedfellows. | ||
James, a couple weeks ago, we did another one of these panels on belief and purpose and meeting, and I had your buddy, my buddy, Pete Boghossian on, and he was talking about how he finds it a lot easier these days, because of wokeism, to talk to evangelical Christians. | ||
He's obviously a well-known atheist. | ||
He wrote a book called Emanuel for Creating Atheists, so this isn't a guy who's shy about his opinions, But he finds it easier to talk to believers and religious groups and conservative groups. | ||
And I sense you're going through that too. | ||
I saw you just a couple of weeks ago at Turning Point USA, a scary conservative thing. | ||
Ali, I saw you there too, not to blow your spot. | ||
How's that shift been for you? | ||
It's been really interesting. | ||
It was uncomfortable at first, honestly, and it's grown more comfortable. | ||
I enjoy getting to meet people. | ||
I enjoy getting to learn what people think and to learn from people and to learn how they think and to see their perspective. | ||
So, that's actually been exciting. | ||
It is true that I, like Peter, also find it easier to speak with people, whether they are Christian, conservative, and that tends to be in particular, but if their eyes are open and they know what time it is, then if they do not, and then if they're woke, I mean, they just don't want to talk. | ||
I wrote a controversial piece a while back. | ||
Explaining why the woke don't want to debate. | ||
How it goes, in a sense, against, if we will, their religion to debate or compromise, to uphold discourses and ideas that go against their view and to lend credence to them by association or by platforming them. | ||
They can't compromise because then they leave half of the status quo on the table and that's against their faith. | ||
So I find it much more comfortable and easy to relate to and make friends with people whose eyes are open and they know what time it is. | ||
The productivity, of course, there's always learning and friction. | ||
So, you know, you and I have some disagreements, Allie and I would have some disagreements, Chris and I would have some disagreements, but we have a lot in common. | ||
And so we can actually, you know, get comfortable with one another, seeing that we do understand the big picture, and then we can get into that friction stuff more positively. | ||
And it's been very enriching. | ||
So I think it's actually one of the most beautiful things that's happened in my life over the past year, year and a half. | ||
So I'm really grateful for that, to be honest with you. | ||
Yeah, well, I have to say, when I saw you there and we got to talking, I was like, oh, I could feel it happening with you. | ||
I was like, oh, James is pretty quickly gonna realize, like, you were there, so you had already realized it to a degree, but to another degree, it was like, oh, guess what? | ||
No one here's coming to punch you in the face or do anything like that. | ||
Chris, can you talk a little bit about how I sense at least that these guys don't even believe most of the stuff that they're peddling. | ||
So I'm sure you guys all saw the video last couple of weeks of Ibrahim Kendi, who wrote how to be an anti-racist, which in essence is how to be a racist, but how he was on video talking about how quote horrified he and his wife were when their daughter came home from school saying that she wanted to be a boy. | ||
And it's like, well, wait a minute. | ||
Why would you be horrified by this stuff if intersectionality makes us stronger and being trans is so great and the rest of it? | ||
And it's like, it's odd. | ||
He didn't get canceled. | ||
Nobody called him out. | ||
There was no Twitter bannings, but I'm pretty sure if Tucker Carlson had said that about his daughter, things might've been a little different. | ||
Yeah, I think the double standard is really the point. | ||
And I think a lot of times conservatives point out the double standard and they, Kind of express outrage, but this is really the wrong tactic. | ||
I think the point of the double standard is that these people hold the institutional power. | ||
So the reason that Ibram Kendi can get away with this stuff, or Nicole Hannah-Jones can get away with this stuff, is precisely because they are protected by the institutions. | ||
They're in a way the key holders to this power. | ||
And if we want to actually make a difference, complaining about the double standard isn't going to work. | ||
It's actually going to be shifting the battlefield, shifting the power dynamics, and coming to a point of parity. | ||
Where the woke and the anti-woke actually have a kind of equal and opposite firepower so we can negotiate a kind of central playing field. | ||
Because right now, I think you find conservative organizations and conservative influencers and writers and thinkers are being held to one standard. | ||
But in a way, you have to stop being complicit in the double standard. | ||
That's the other solution to it. | ||
You have to basically say, hey, you know what? | ||
I'm not going to play by those rules. | ||
I'm going to stand firm. | ||
I think James has done a great job with that. | ||
I mean, James is the kind of guy who takes risks. | ||
He swings hard. | ||
He doesn't always land the punches, but I think that he doesn't operate on the opponent's logic. | ||
Ali, do you think conservatives have dropped the ball on some of this stuff that they may be, that I would, and I would include myself in this at this point, like that we all just, we all see it and we think by calling out the hypocrisy of it, that that's enough. | ||
It's like, oh, that will wake up people. | ||
These people are obviously frauds. | ||
Yeah, I think that conservatives just by nature and even maybe by definition are constantly on the defense and that's one of our defensive tactics to, Try to say, you know, look how crazy these double standards and this hypocrisy is, but we're very rarely on the offense. | ||
And I think everyone on this panel actually does a good job to countering the arguments of critical race theory and positing things that are better, positing ideas that are better, and talking about why social justice and social justice theology, social justice ideology is not just, and it's not equal, and it doesn't achieve the kind of Utopia that these critical race theorists say that it is going to. | ||
So I do think conservatives are sometimes afraid to be on the offense, especially when it comes to, for example, quote, racial justice issues or anything to do with race, because we've almost internalized this idea that certain kinds of privilege or certain kinds of categories discredit us from entering into these arenas and having these conversations. | ||
Like Chris said, we've got to get off that turf. | ||
Like, we can't be using their definitions. | ||
We can't be intimidated by the tactics that they're using to say, look, this panel of all white people isn't allowed to talk about critical race theory. | ||
That's exactly how they shut down conversation. | ||
And I think everyone here does a good job of saying, well, I don't care. | ||
Anyone with a logically thinking brain can talk about this and combat these bad ideas. | ||
And we should, totally unapologetically. | ||
Well, what is it, do you think, Ali, I'll start with you on this one, we'll go the other way around, what do you think it is about you that makes you brave enough to do it? | ||
Because I have no doubt that you guys get the same emails I get, I don't consider myself a brave person, I'm just saying what I think for some reason, I'm not really sure why, but like, A lot of people are just crippled by the fear. | ||
They don't want to deal with the Twitter mentions that James is getting a thousand times a day, you know? | ||
And even if these are not real people and they're bots and trolls and everything else, like, what do you think it is about you personally that allows you to do this? | ||
Well, I can't take a whole lot of personal credit for it. | ||
I think I'm motivated by the fact that I've seen this ruin people's lives. | ||
I've seen this tear apart people's churches. | ||
I've seen this put a strain on people's marriages. | ||
I've seen it tear apart families. | ||
This idea of categorizing people according to their perceived privilege and this idea of lived experience being elevated to absolute truth, it has absolutely destroyed people's faith and people's theology. | ||
And as a Christian and as someone who believes that the calling to truth is An eternal and primary one. | ||
I mean, I feel a lot like Martin Luther did when he said, you know, peace if possible, but truth at all costs. | ||
And I see this kind of deception that sounds so good to Christians who want to be loving, who want to be merciful, who want justice, not realizing that they have redefined all of those things away from what the Bible says they are to what secularists and what leftists and what progressives who want nothing to do with the Christian faith say that they are. And in so doing, they have completely | ||
shipwrecked their belief system and ruined relationships. And I just, it breaks my heart. | ||
It makes me sad. And so I don't know if it's so much courage as it is this sense of desperation | ||
that I don't want the minds of children corrupted. I don't want to be a victim of that. | ||
I don't want families torn apart by this. | ||
I don't want people's faith to be shipwrecked by lies. | ||
And so I guess I just feel a responsibility to kind of steward the platform that I have to tell the people who do listen to me, hey, this is wrong and here's why. | ||
And not only that, but from my perspective, you know, the Bible, the gospel gives us something better. | ||
There is a truth out there. | ||
It's not this, it's this. | ||
That's what I feel my responsibility is. | ||
Yeah, well, from the gospel then to Trump, Chris, in your world, from where you come from, it was not easy to say you were supporting Trump because he was fighting critical race theory in the institutions and everything else. | ||
How tough was that for you? | ||
Yeah, I mean, it was tough. | ||
I cut my teeth getting involved in local Seattle politics, which is absolutely brutal. | ||
And I remember that initial period of getting harassed, getting doxed, having people Float posters of my face around my house, having people yell at my kids at the playground. | ||
I mean, it really like visceral kind of rage and brutality and hatred from these people who, in their professional time, preach compassion and tolerance. | ||
And that beginning period was very scary. | ||
You know, the first time some of those epithets got thrown my way, it felt like an attack. | ||
On my identity and attack on my reputation. | ||
And I remember those moments, but then you get over that threshold and you realize that there's nothing on the other side to stop you. | ||
And I think once you break through that initial period where they really try to bully and silence and intimidate you, but if you can actually just make it past that and actually exert kind of strength and fortitude, there's nothing else to stop you. | ||
And actually at that point, courage Begets courage. | ||
Courage is kind of a snowball effect, and people recognize it. | ||
People support you. | ||
People come out to appreciate what you're doing, and I've just found that once you break through, you can achieve a kind of personal, kind of psychological inner freedom to really embrace what you believe, and then it's also battle-tested. | ||
Your ideas that you've been maybe privately believing, once you kind of expose them to public life, your ideas only get stronger. | ||
And your convictions only deepen. | ||
I love that, man. | ||
I mean, that's it. | ||
That really is it right there. | ||
So James, you know, last time I had you on my show, it was, I think I had you on with Pete and you guys were on together. | ||
And I said to you, when the cameras went off, I said, you know, you're gonna have to ally with the conservatives on this stuff. | ||
This is like two years ago. | ||
And I sensed you were a little, you know, maybe not yet, but then you did support Trump. | ||
So did you see that as sort of like an inevitable conclusion with all of this? | ||
Not conclusion, but well, just I guess the next step. | ||
I saw it as a necessary one. | ||
I don't know that it was inevitable, but when it got to the point where the media is holding Trump accountable for things that are just made up, if you wanna call that accountability, and they're not holding Biden accountable, I started to get nervous. | ||
When they start talking about packing the court, I get more nervous. | ||
Equity plans, I get more nervous. | ||
I'm like, oh, this is going to be he has no resistance against woke. | ||
So it was it became inevitable because of the behaviors of the two gentlemen over the summer. | ||
But something did shift. | ||
And I don't know what it was before the weight of that hit. | ||
I think I told you this when we were in Florida was I had this moment where I used to be horrified by everything Trump said. | ||
And we're just kind of I can't believe he says that. | ||
And then all of a sudden I realized it was funny. | ||
And all summer long, I couldn't stop laughing. | ||
And I'd watch him and I would laugh. | ||
And I was like, something has shifted. | ||
and I don't know what it is, but something has shifted. | ||
And so once I started laughing at him, I think it became inevitable that, | ||
but I'd already made my alliances at that point, right? | ||
I had already reached into the Southern Baptist Convention. | ||
I'd already reached into conservative Christianity. | ||
I'd already reached into different conservative strongholds, if you will, and started to build bridges, | ||
make friends, listen, hear, learn. | ||
And so it wasn't a hard step in that regard to take the, I guess, if you wanna call, you know, | ||
Okay, I'll vote for Trump with some reservations. | ||
Uh, you know, final step into, to, you know, off of the cliff or whatever. | ||
Apparently it was, people are still freaking out about it. | ||
I get canceled more over having said I would vote for Trump. | ||
And then I get told I've never explained it. | ||
I've explained it in a podcast. | ||
I explained it on TV in three countries. | ||
I mean, I don't know what in the world people want from me, but, um, it's like, they can't hear the explanation. | ||
It's so bizarre, but I'm glad you didn't ask me to, to follow both of, The two before me, and even yourself, where you said where the courage comes from, where you just said, you just say what you think and you don't really know why it happens. | ||
Uh, and I, Chris's articulation that courage builds courage was so good. | ||
And then Allie, I just really want to like hit the fact you brought up Martin Luther. | ||
It's funny that, you know, atheists or whatever that I have to say that I also think of Martin Luther an awful lot. | ||
And I always think, you know, here I stand for I can do no other. | ||
Um, And also, given my Twitter behavior, I suppose, I also think of his, I guess, famous, hopefully not apocryphal, line that, when I pass wind, Rome trembles. | ||
That's everyone's Twitter, I think. | ||
So actually, I think this would be a perfect one to go out on here, is that you guys know that one of the things I'm saying all the time is like, we can't just talk about this, we have to do something. | ||
And I do sense that the three of you are doing something. | ||
I think the thing that I'm doing Beyond just this part is that I started Locals because I felt that wokeism was gonna destroy big tech. | ||
So that's my foray into actually doing something. | ||
But you guys are all doing something different in your own communities. | ||
So Chris, I'll start with you. | ||
What are you doing on the legal side? | ||
Who are we suing? | ||
Yeah, right, everybody, everywhere. | ||
But no, we're... | ||
You know, when the election kind of happened and Biden won, I didn't follow the kind of rabbit hole on critical election theory. | ||
What I realized is that the executive order that Trump passed banning critical race theory-based programs from the federal government was going to get overturned by the Biden administration immediately. | ||
That actually turned out to be quite true. | ||
The first day in office, one of the 15 things that he did was get rid of the executive order signed by Trump. | ||
Right away. | ||
And so I spent the intervening months really reaching out to the conservative legal movement, to other institutions to say, Hey, who is suing government and corporations and schools that are doing these absolutely outrageous critical race theory based programs? | ||
And the answer was, well, nobody, nobody, nobody. | ||
Okay. | ||
Well, you know, I have now a database of, you know, more than a thousand whistleblowers across the country who would take up this legal costs. | ||
The answer was, essentially, we have not really fought this fight. | ||
The right, the kind of think tank right, has been really fighting on economic issues since the Reagan era, and they're not really set up or kind of organized to fight these cultural battles. | ||
So rather than kind of throw in the towel and give up, I took some leadership and I reached out to even smaller law firms and reached out to people who wanted to volunteer. | ||
I assembled a coalition. | ||
It's called Stop Critical Race Theory. | ||
Barely simple. | ||
We filed three lawsuits now against institutions that are doing these programs. | ||
We're going to be filing one again in the coming weeks, and we're going to be filing even more after that in this year. | ||
And the goal is really this, is to show not only is critical race theory a bankrupt ideology, | ||
but actually these programs that are based on critical race theory, | ||
that traffic in racial stereotypes, that reduce people to a racial essence, | ||
that harass people based on their protected categories of race and gender are actually illegal | ||
under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and unconstitutional. | ||
So the goal is to rack up some lawsuits, change the calculus for institutions, | ||
put them at legal risk for doing these programs. | ||
And eventually over the next few years, 'cause it takes time, | ||
to get at one of our cases in front of the Supreme Court of the United States, | ||
to win and to permanently essentially abolish these programs from American life. | ||
Yeah, I have to say that even as bananas as LA is, we had one of these special things | ||
that you could vote on in the last election that basically was gonna reverse the Civil Rights Act, | ||
that was gonna actually put racial markers to be the deciding factor on whether you get hired | ||
by the government here in LA. | ||
And believe it or not, the people of LA rejected it. | ||
I was beyond shocked. | ||
James, what are you actually doing? | ||
Because I know you're actually doing stuff. | ||
Well, there's a few things. | ||
One is, in fact, the Twitter behavior. | ||
So Solzhenitsyn becomes a huge inspiration in times like these. | ||
And so one of his statements that I take to heart, and I want other people to take to heart, is that he said, may the lie come into the world, may it triumph even, but not through me. | ||
So speaking the truth and just being willing to continue to speak the truth and not participate in the lie and to commit yourself to that is very valuable. | ||
So I've done that. | ||
I hope, obviously. | ||
I also am still working as hard as I can to, I am philosophical in some orientation. | ||
I'm a bit of a dork. | ||
I'm trying to lay out as much track as possible so people can understand what this is. | ||
and run the trains like the ones that Chris is trying to run that will get the lawsuits going, | ||
that will get legal entities equipped to be able to fight those legal battles. | ||
I'm also trying to reach out to, I have limited reach, but I've had some success so far, reach | ||
out to conservative Republican governors and state legislatures to try to copy that rescinded | ||
executive order at the state level. Not only would that have been necessary, or is that necessary | ||
with Biden having rescinded it. | ||
I think, you know, exactly on that first day, it would have been necessary anyway. | ||
I received hundreds, if not thousands of emails asking me, you know, I work for the state of Oregon. | ||
I work for the state of Wyoming. | ||
Am I protected by this federal executive order? | ||
And the answer is no, you work for the state. | ||
And so the states need to be copying this anyway. | ||
So I've, I've reached out, I've talked to some of the officials in Texas. | ||
I have some roads in on Florida, the two sanest states, it seems. | ||
I guess South Dakota is very sane right now, too. | ||
But we've got to get these Republican governors to take this issue seriously and to copy that order, clean it up a little bit, probably, and copy that order to start protecting people at the state level, and also to give, frankly, in a sense, that middle finger to the Biden administration for doing it. | ||
I'm also trying to encourage journalists to understand how hard they can push back. | ||
Biden rescinding that order. | ||
Means that Biden's administration wants to do one of the 11 things that that order prohibits. | ||
It turns out having diversity training is not one of them, see section 10. | ||
Teaching it in college is not one of them, see section 10. | ||
See section 2 though, it's racial discrimination, racial scapegoating, racial stereotyping, calling the country fundamentally racist and evil. | ||
Which one of those things, because it must be at least one of them, does Biden and his administration want to do? | ||
Why is he not being held to account for this Deliberate neo-racism that he's institutionalizing. | ||
You talk about systemic racism, he's putting it in on purpose, deliberately. | ||
Yeah, I mean, that's the fascinating thing. | ||
The people who are screaming about systemic racism all day are the ones that are actually now putting it into the system. | ||
Because if racism existed in the system, I have no doubt that all four of us would be screaming about it. | ||
Ali, what are you doing? | ||
Well, to be honest, it is a whole lot of talking and a lot of writing, but what I think it is accomplishing, at least from the correspondence that I have on a daily basis, is that people, in particular women, my audience is large | ||
majority women, a lot of them are young moms, they've got kids in school, or they're going to a | ||
church, or they're a part of a Bible study, or maybe they're in their college class, and they're | ||
hearing the importance of reading things like white fragility or how to be an anti-racist. I had a | ||
lot of friends post the Black Square after George Floyd happened over the summer, and I've just | ||
seen a lot of confusion among Christian women who are my age who just want to know, hang | ||
on, what is actually true? | ||
Because I'm confused. | ||
This sounds good, this sounds right, but there's something about it that doesn't seem quite true. | ||
And so my goal is not just to tell you, okay, this stuff is wrong, here's what the Bible says, which I do, obviously, from my perspective, think that's really important, but Here's what you say. | ||
Like, here's what you can say to your school administrator. | ||
Here's what you can say to your professor. | ||
Here's how you engage with your friend who disagrees with you on this. | ||
Here's what you say to your pastor. | ||
Here's some resources for you. | ||
And thankfully, the messages that I get are, I feel equipped for the first time to actually have conversations about things that a few weeks ago, I didn't even know, I didn't even know they existed. | ||
Or people who say, I'm going through diversity and inclusivity training or whatever it is, um, at work. | ||
And I actually, you know, held a meeting with my boss and I talked about where I think that it's going wrong and why I think it doesn't actually, you know, this descriptor of pervasively racist doesn't actually describe our workplace. | ||
And I was able to, you know, stop it or curtail it or whatever it was. | ||
And so there are real stories, thankfully, that I receive, and I'm sure all of you have received from people saying, I changed the curriculum in my kids' school. | ||
My pastor is no longer recommending white fragility to our church. | ||
Our professor has amended her syllabus. | ||
Whatever it is, my encouragement is to say, whatever sphere you occupy, you absolutely have influence. | ||
Because as Chris said, courage begets courage. | ||
It is very likely that there are other parents, there are other students, there are other congregants, there are other community members who feel the same way you do, but they don't want to be the racist. | ||
Uh, or the so-called bigot who speaks up. | ||
And so it is up to you. | ||
You don't have to be an influencer to have influence. | ||
You don't have to have a Twitter account. | ||
You just have to have a voice and you just have to be a little equipped. | ||
You have to have a little knowledge and a little bit of courage, just a little bit of each of those things to stand up in the spheres that you occupy and say something. | ||
And, um, I think at least on a local level, it's amazing how quickly that house of cards can crumble. | ||
And so change is possible. | ||
I don't know if I'm completely optimistic that it'll change on a large scale. | ||
I hope so. | ||
But I think people can make a change in the world and in the circle that they live in. | ||
Ali, bringing us home like a champ. | ||
Ali, James, Chris, I thank you guys. | ||
And we're gonna link to all your stuff down below. | ||
Have a nice weekend. | ||
And I'm gonna close up with the YouTubers. | ||
You guys can go do important work now, you know? | ||
All right, see you guys. | ||
Thank you. | ||
All right, guys, look. | ||
I think we gave you a little something there to think about. | ||
I know this stuff, it feels huge, it feels confusing. | ||
It's like, who wants to read every single book to understand every single reference and all of that stuff? | ||
And truly, I don't either. | ||
I don't either, because people need to live. | ||
But I think James particularly, although all three of them did, James particularly hit something at the beginning about the all-encompassing worldview that wokeism seems to have taken on, that it is sort of overriding everyone's belief in everything else. | ||
And if you don't believe in it, it will come for you. | ||
So let's do what Ali said there at the end, whatever that is in your local community, and what Chris said about bravery begets bravery, it's like, all right, if you can stand up a little bit, because I know that none of the four of us think we're that special in that regard, but if you can stand up a little bit, Maybe you can get someone else near you to stand up a little bit, and maybe they can get somebody to stand up a little bit, and then maybe we can fix this thing. | ||
All right, that's a little something to ponder for the weekend. | ||
Have a good one, everybody. | ||
I will not be on the Twitter, but I might be posting steak pictures over at reubenreport.locals.com. |