Aug. 2, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| When we were dominating the debate on critical race theory in late 2020 and then really 2021, you saw the left retreat from these issues. | ||
| All of a sudden, Robin DiAngelo was nowhere to be found. | ||
| Ibram Kendi was on the defensive. | ||
| And then you saw this shift in the debate. | ||
| When those same teachers and districts that had been pushing critical race theory in 2021 started really doubling down on especially trans, non-binary, and queer identity formations as the new thing, the new trend, the new current thing with capital C and capital T. | ||
| And they thought that they could really just shift the debate and win on these grounds. | ||
| And so in a sense, they're complementary. | ||
| They can play three-card Monty with these two ideas. | ||
| But I think there's also a deeper nexus or connection between the two. | ||
| You know, students at the elementary school level, high school level, you know, they can | ||
| be shamed. | ||
| They can be told that they're racial category. | ||
| Let's say, for example, white students are told that they have white privilege, white fragility, unconscious white racial superiority. | ||
| They're part of the systemically racist society by virtue of their ancestry. | ||
| But that doesn't really, in some ways, help tremendously. | ||
| You can't change your race. | ||
| They can't do anything about it at the level of their own identity. | ||
| But these sexual identities offer an escape from the guilt and shame that was instilled on the critical race theory narrative. | ||
| And they offer an escape. | ||
| So you get, in some cases, you know, I talk to teachers that say, You know, 40% of my white female students in middle school now identify as non-binary, queer, transgender, etc. | ||
| And so it gives them an avenue for participation, not just at the level of ideology, but the deeper level of identity. | ||
| And so in some ways, critical race theory serves to push people into some of these constructs | ||
| as an avenue out. | ||
| ♪♪ I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today | ||
| is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the brand new book, | ||
| America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. | ||
| Chris Rufo, my friend. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| It's great to be with you. | ||
| Chris, did they conquer everything? | ||
| Everything, Chris? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, obviously there's a little bit of fun and hyperbole. | ||
| Certainly they haven't conquered your studio or my studio, even though they might be banging down the door at any minute. | ||
| But in all seriousness, they really did. | ||
| I mean, I think that's what we really learned in 2020. | ||
| All of a sudden, people looked around and they saw that all of their institutions had been conquered by the ideologies of the left, whether it's critical race theory, radical gender ideology, so-called diversity, equity and inclusion. | ||
| All of our private companies were really riding that BLM line, and so many Americans looked around and said, well, what happened? | ||
| How did this suddenly occur that all of these neo-Marxist ideologies seem to be at the forefront of all of our institutions? | ||
| And the reason I wrote this book was to answer that question and to dig deep into the history, going back more than a half century, explaining how this happened, what is going on with our institutions, and how we can fight back. | ||
| All right, so I want to dive into all of that, and clearly my audience knows an awful lot about it and has tracked you for quite some time. | ||
| You've been on the show a million times. | ||
| But for somebody that's watching this that is not too familiar with your work, how did you get involved in this whole thing? | ||
| Because you've become sort of the center of fighting back against this. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It really all started with my investigative reporting for City Journal Magazine. | ||
| I looked at some training programs in the summer of 2020. | ||
| Sources around the country were sending me documents from their DEI programs talking about systemic racism, white privilege, white fragility. | ||
| Segregating employees on the basis of race and shaming some employees and praising other employees based on their ancestry. | ||
| And this reporting really exploded in the season of 2020. | ||
| And I identified that the ideology that was driving this kind of programming was critical race theory. | ||
| I went on Tucker when he was still on Fox News and asked President Trump to sign an executive order abolishing CRT trainings from the federal government. | ||
| He did so. | ||
| And that really launched this whole line of reporting, this line of activism, and really this line of inquiry to say, you know, in a democracy we think that majority opinion should be translated in our public institutions. | ||
| That's not the case. | ||
| For example, when schools are pushing CRT on kids over and against the best wishes and the desires of parents, And so while I made my name in a certain sense as an activist, as a muckraking reporter, what I wanted to do was also give those readers a chance to go deeper, a chance to really understand what's happening under the surface, what is the genealogy of these ideas, and really go beyond the quick hit headlines and news bites and giving something very substantive so that those of us on the right or in the center or even the center left | ||
| All right, so let's do some 101 for some of the people that are just catching up on this stuff. | ||
| start fighting back against these ideologies, both at an intellectual level, | ||
| but also at a political level. | ||
| All right, so let's do some 101 for some of the people | ||
| that are just catching up on this stuff. | ||
| Can you define critical race theory? | ||
| Sure, critical race theory is an academic discipline that holds that the United States | ||
| is a fundamentally and systemically racist country, and that all of our institutions, | ||
| from our legal system to our constitution, even to the Civil Rights Act itself. | ||
| are smoke screens that preach the values of liberty and freedom, but in reality serve to uphold a system of naked racial domination. | ||
| And so, it's this idea that any disparity in outcomes can be traced back to a hidden, a secret, or an invisible racist system, that the critical race theorists believe they're privileged in their ability to ferret out all of these hidden racisms. | ||
| And so, Critical race theory, though, is the ideology at the tip of the spear, but it traces back decades upon decades back to neo-Marxist ideology that's really the very basis of this. | ||
| And so, while critical race theory was hotly debated in the headlines for a number of years, we have to understand that in order to really root it out, we have to go even a further step deeper. | ||
| So, when we had that, like, three-month blip, probably about a year and a half ago, where everybody in mainstream media kept saying, oh, they don't teach critical race theory in schools, they don't teach it in schools, and yet every day, those of us that live at least partially online, we would see, you know, curriculum that was getting leaked, we'd see teachers, you know, caught on the DL admitting they're teaching it, etc., etc. | ||
| What was that like for you? | ||
| Because it wasn't necessarily that they were handing a book to the children that said, this is critical race theory, but they were figuring out other ways to leak the ideas that you just expressed into all of the stuff that they've been teaching. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it was unbelievable because I was publishing these stories with leaked curriculum documents. | ||
| I was always posting the original source materials, sometimes hundreds of pages of materials. | ||
| And then even in states like California, Washington, and Illinois, they were putting critical race theory explicitly in their state-mandated curriculum. | ||
| But for months, the left said, critical race theory doesn't exist. | ||
| It's a boogeyman. | ||
| It's a kind of phenomenon of a fevered right-wing imagination. | ||
| And in all of these pieces attacking me, they never once addressed the specifics of my reporting, where I put it in very clear black and white. | ||
| This is what they're teaching. | ||
| These are the principles of critical race theory. | ||
| This is the intention of these lessons. | ||
| And so they tried to maintain that posture for a long time. | ||
| The critical race theory doesn't exist. | ||
| But what happened is that we hit them every day with more facts, more evidence, more concrete documentation. | ||
| So that position slowly became untenable. | ||
| And even the more honest writers and journalists on the left started to say, well, you know, critical race theory is in the curriculum. | ||
| Maybe it's not labeled critical race theory, but certainly the principles are at play here. | ||
| And so there was a kind of concession for a little bit, and then it flipped, following the really natural script that we've seen over and over. | ||
| Then they started saying, yeah, there is critical race theory, and good, we want critical race theory in the curriculum. | ||
| So you saw even the largest teachers' union in the United States. | ||
| pass a resolution saying that we want to have critical race theory in all fourteen thousand local school districts uh... you know that they said it very explicitly by name we love c r t we want c r t everywhere uh... and then the media started defending critical race theory but there was one thing that was really interesting is that Parents, throughout this whole debate, throughout this whole subterfuge, and really manipulation on behalf of the media, they knew what was happening. | ||
| And that's why they showed up at school board meetings, that's why they were protesting, that's why they were demanding changes to the curriculum, because they saw, not just my reporting, But what was happening in their local communities, what kids were bringing home in their backpacks every day after school, and they said, wait a minute. | ||
| We do not want racial scapegoating in our curriculum. | ||
| We do not want our kids being judged as avatars of racial categories. | ||
| And we do not want to be taught a false history of the United States that condemns it as a racist society through and through. | ||
| You know, that was the arc of the debate, and I think ultimately, whether you look at public opinion, whether you look at legislation, whether you look at even the posture of our opponents on the left, I think we resoundingly won that debate over the course of that year or two-year period. | ||
| Can you talk about how this is connected to all of the gender stuff so it's not just race stuff? | ||
| Because when you talk about the parents, I think the thing that lit the parents on fire, they were pissed to a degree about the race stuff. | ||
| But to me it was the gender ideology and then the election of Yunkin in Virginia that lit that on fire. | ||
| And then we'll talk a bit more about Disney and DeSantis because you had something to do with that as well. | ||
| But how the gender piece of this is connected, oddly, to the race piece of this. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, if you look back 50 years at left-wing ideology, once they abandoned the orthodox Marxist idea of class conflict, so the two great categories are, you know, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or the capitalist class and the working class. | ||
| That stopped working by the mid-20th century and left-wing intellectuals were looking for other soft spots, other lines of attack. | ||
| And they settled on race and sex or race and gender. | ||
| And that was the new formulation. | ||
| And so when we were dominating the debate on critical race theory in late 2020 and then really 2021, you saw the left retreat from these issues. | ||
| All of a sudden, Robin DiAngelo was nowhere to be found. | ||
| Ibram Kendi was on the defensive. | ||
| And then you saw this shift in the debate when those same teachers and districts that had been pushing critical race theory in 2021 started really doubling down on especially trans, non-binary, and queer identity formations as the new thing, the new trend, the new current thing with capital C and capital T. | ||
| And they thought that they could really just shift the debate and win on these grounds. | ||
| And so in a sense, they're complementary. | ||
| They can play three-card Monty with these two ideas. | ||
| But I think there's also a deeper nexus or connection between the two. | ||
| You know, students at the elementary school level, high school level, you know, they can | ||
| be shamed. | ||
| They can be told that they're racial category. | ||
| Let's say, for example, white students are told that they have white privilege, white fragility, unconscious white racial superiority. | ||
| They're part of the systemically racist society by virtue of their ancestry. | ||
| But that doesn't really, in some ways, help tremendously. | ||
| You can't change your race. | ||
| They can't do anything about it at the level of their own identity. | ||
| But these sexual identities offer an escape from the guilt and shame that was instilled on the critical race theory narrative. | ||
| And they offer an escape. | ||
| So you get, in some cases, you know, I talk to teachers that say, You know, 40% of my white female students in middle school now identify as non-binary, queer, transgender, etc. | ||
| And so it gives them an avenue for participation, not just at the level of ideology, but the deeper level of identity. | ||
| And so, in some ways, critical race theory serves to push people into some of these constructs as an avenue out. | ||
| And I think that we're seeing that in many places. | ||
| And in some ways it's actually been a harder debate to win. | ||
| I think that with CRT we had a very successful debate. | ||
| And I think that with gender, and I'd be curious to hear your perspective, and sexuality, we're still in a very kind of amorphous situation where it's not quite clear which side is winning. | ||
| It's not quite clear. | ||
| Both of those apply. | ||
| But it's not quite clear or clear, you know, where this debate is heading. | ||
| I think there's a stalemate in some sense. | ||
| And I'm not sure, what's your interpretation of where we are today? | ||
| I mean, one of the things that, you know, I had Douglas Murray on last week and that we've talked about for quite some time is that the L's and the G's and the B's, which are a sexuality, not a sexual identity, really need to separate from the T's. | ||
| I am not denying, or gay people, let's say, are not denying biology. | ||
| They are not trying to force a young person to alter their body in a way that is not congruent with reality. | ||
| Now, you could have a personal religious belief on homosexuality. | ||
| Personally, I think that's fine as long as you're not trying to legislate it. | ||
| But there's a fundamental difference between sexuality and sexual identity. | ||
| And that sort of blurring of reality is the problem. | ||
| So as I often say, and I'm sure you've said something similar, there's no group that is more anti-LGB than the T's. | ||
| And the T's, there's also no group that is more anti-female. | ||
| Then the T's, who now want biological men to beat women in sports. | ||
| So I think the confluence or the combination of those letters has been really, really dangerous for gay people in general. | ||
| Yeah, that's interesting. | ||
| I do wonder, too. | ||
| I think that there's something happening on the political right where, you know, there was a kind of a concession, in a sense, on the political right. | ||
| The moral majority of the 1980s and 1990s has really disappeared as a political force. | ||
| You don't see anything analogous to the Ralph Reeds or the Pat Robertsons, you know, the 700 Club guys. | ||
| That generation of social conservative, Christian conservatives has, I think really, you know, in some cases that literally died off, but in other cases just kind of disappeared as a political force. | ||
| There was a period, I think, where there was a kind of truce on some of these social issues. | ||
| And so it's been interesting to watch the right start to change a little bit. | ||
| And I think what's really led to this, and I think it's a disastrous move on behalf of the radical gender activists, is to actually say now, hey, we're going to come into institutions, come into schools, and then push not just tolerance of Gay sexuality. | ||
| So saying, hey, there are gay kids in schools. | ||
| They should be treated equally as everyone else. | ||
| They shouldn't be bullied, shamed, or humiliated because of their sexuality. | ||
| They should be brought into the wider community. | ||
| I think that virtually everyone supports that kind of basic dignity and tolerance. | ||
| But what we're seeing now in schools is that they're saying, they're pushing it as an ideology, saying, you know, not just transgender or transsexuality, which is, you know, in its modern sense roughly a hundred years old, but they're actually now inventing, you know, genders and sexualities of, you know, non-binary, two-spirit, all of these boutique identities that, in a real sense, are fake categories. | ||
| And they're pushing them onto kids. | ||
| And they're really desiring and really using kids that are impressionable. | ||
| As pawns in a greater political game. | ||
| And I think that's what people are really revolting against. | ||
| They're saying, hey, wait a minute. | ||
| You have a policy where you can secretly transition my child into a non-binary they-them, and then push the identity into a political activist posture, without even notifying me as the parent, is so deeply manipulative. | ||
| And I think that You know, it is, I hope, a miscalculation on behalf of these activists because I just don't think that that can stand over the long term. | ||
| A lot of people on the right are uncomfortable talking about these issues, uncomfortable activating against them. | ||
| As we've seen with all the detransitioners, we see with these horror stories, it's untenable in the medium term. | ||
| And so I think that while the debate might be a bit of a stalemate now, I think that ultimately it's got to shift, it's got to go back to the center. | ||
| Yeah, well you're right about what a damn shame it is, because you're right, the moral majority, the Rick Santorum's, Mike Huckabee types, they've moved on from these things. | ||
| Trump ran first term as pro-gay marriage. | ||
| People put it to bed. | ||
| And then they've just rehashed all of this stuff, and the average gay person really wants nothing to do with it, but you know, the activist class always needs something to do. | ||
| But to that point, you know, as we've exited Gay Pride Month, and thankfully we can go back to shame, hallelujah, you know, there were so many, that ridiculous flag that once was the rainbow that included everything, but now they've politicized the rainbow with this triangle and the circle and the brown and the whole thing. | ||
| The fact that they're putting that up at the White House, when you see that up at the White House, equal with the American flag, which actually might be a violation of the Constitution, or when you see that hanging outside of the Canadian Prime Minister's office, I think most people don't realize it's a political flag. | ||
| People think, oh, it's just celebrating sexuality, but it's actually political in nature. | ||
| That's really what you're saying. | ||
| Yeah, a hundred percent. | ||
| I mean, it is a political movement and it's a political movement with its own iconography, which its own, you know, kind of propaganda messaging. | ||
| And it's like any other political movement. | ||
| It has its set of symbols. | ||
| And certainly what I think of when Biden hung the progress pride flag, I guess it's called now, the one with all the different shapes. | ||
| Look, it's a basic political patronage move. | ||
| Biden knows where the energy is on the activist part of his political base. | ||
| He knows that this is a very important part of his coalition, and he is essentially rewarding the activists within that coalition with this symbolic display and kind of White House ceremony. | ||
| You know, I think that In a sense, it's kind of normal patronage politics. | ||
| And so that's how I view that. | ||
| And Biden is, you know, for all of his faults and for all of his seeming, you know, kind of slow kind of mental capacities as he ages, he knows which way the wind is blowing. | ||
| He knows where the Democratic coalition is. | ||
| And I think that it shows really the power of that activist narrative, | ||
| the power of that activist apparatus, that they get their flag hung up. | ||
| Where really, only kind of the American flag or the national flag should be hanging in my opinion. | ||
| And I think that the debate about flags and symbols is really important. | ||
| The things that we elevate symbolically are the things that we value | ||
| in a more human and meaningful way. | ||
| And so we should be quite careful and quite deliberate and have really an open debate about what kind of symbols that we put in places of national prominence. | ||
| And certainly in a public school, you know, you couldn't hang a crucifix at the top of the public school, a religious symbol. | ||
| You know, you couldn't claim, you couldn't hang a, you know, partisan political flag at the top of a public school classroom. | ||
| And so I think that it's very interesting that the Pride and Progress Pride Flag are given an exemption for restrictions on religious and political symbolism in classrooms. | ||
| It's a pretty sophisticated reason that that is the case. | ||
| They've been very, very good at Kind of laundering the political message that is the essence of this with kind of vague, tolerant, diversity, equity, inclusion, surface-level messaging that allows it to be displayed in places where the analogous flags of any other political or religious movement would not be allowed, would not even really be contemplated. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, they say it's all about inclusivity, but that flag does not include me. | ||
| It doesn't include Douglas Murray or Peter Thiel or Spencer Clavin or the litany of Rick Grinnell or plenty of other gay people. | ||
| But let's move on for a sec, because one of the other things that sort of caught fire in the last year was the war that DeSantis went at with Disney. | ||
| And you were a piece of that at a couple of different fronts. | ||
| But am I correct? | ||
| You were the one that leaked the original Disney videos, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, I have a source inside Disney, actually multiple sources inside Disney. | ||
| I had reported on their Critical Race Theory employee training program in 2020, or in 2021, rather. | ||
| And in 2022, as the Disney fight was brewing with DeSantis, one of my sources leaked me these really incredible videos from inside the company, as well as some other supporting documents, that kicked it off. | ||
| And even Governor DeSantis at the bill signing, stripping Disney of its special privileges. | ||
| He said during the ceremony, he said, you know, if Rufo hadn't leaked these videos, I don't know if we'd even be here. | ||
| That was really a pivotal moment in this fight. | ||
| And it's an important fight because it not only marks a fight about gender ideology in schools. | ||
| You'll remember that that's what this was all about, the Parental Rights and Education Act. | ||
| But it also marks a shift on the political right against this libertarian, corporatist, we can call it a neoliberal tendency on the political right, where the corporations are always right, we never fight with corporations, we never get crosswise with the Fortune 100. | ||
| DeSantis changed that very dramatically. | ||
| And although I think it enraged libertarians, I think most conservatives are now thinking, wait a minute, These companies are not just creating products and services, adding to the GDP, but they're actually waging ideological fights. | ||
| They're wading into partisan cultural fights. | ||
| And they're now crosswise with conservative voters, and we need to have ...political leaders that are willing to stand up, not just to our traditional opponents on the left, but even these new opponents within our traditional coalition that have now deviated from support of the political right and waded into the culture war on behalf of the cultural left. | ||
| Right, so when that happened and then DeSantis decides to use state power to push back against it, were you surprised to see some of the, you know, whether we want to call them neoliberals or fake conservatives, you know, guys like Mike Pence, oh, this is too much government power, Nikki Haley, too much government power, when finally a conservative was actually doing something about the things that they're always complaining about? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I wasn't surprised, but I was certainly frustrated and disappointed because they're just repeating this brain-dead script that has been programmed in them since the 1980s. | ||
| But it's not the 1980s anymore. | ||
| And while that was probably the right ideology or philosophy or policy for the time, things have shifted a bit. | ||
| And even on their own terms, though. | ||
| I argue with libertarians all the time on this, and then sometimes they concede. | ||
| I say, wait a minute. | ||
| Even on libertarian grounds, I think DeSantis did the right thing. | ||
| And they say, what? | ||
| He interfered with a private company. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| I say, well, look at it. | ||
| Disney, decades before DeSantis was in office, used their economic power, used their lobbying power, and used their cultural power to extract special privileges from the state of Florida. | ||
| They had special tax structure, special regulatory structure, special real estate structure. | ||
| You know, they had the right to create their own nuclear power plant at some point through the kind of sweetheart deals they'd negotiated with the state. | ||
| And these are special privileges, crony capitalist privileges, that none of their competitors and none of the other private companies had. | ||
| And in fact, DeSantis didn't... SeaWorld doesn't have a nuke? | ||
| See what? | ||
| SeaWorld does not have nukes, although maybe it should, you know, and send them to the Ukraine or something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But, you know, none of the other companies had these privileges. | ||
| So, in fact, DeSantis was doing nothing but level the playing field so that Disney had to compete with all the others. | ||
| And it created, actually, a more free market and a less crony capitalist system. | ||
| And of course then they turn very silent and they say, uh-oh, I can't fall back on my ideology anymore. | ||
| You know, Ayn Rand is somewhere in the corner, you know, crying. | ||
| You know, we actually have to have a substantive debate about culture and libertarians are very nervous. | ||
| They want to be accepted by the left on culture. | ||
| But what I think it really shows is that on all grounds, except for the simple friend-enemy grounds, if you're on the left, I think that his move was defensible on all grounds. | ||
| And not just defensible on all grounds, but really put the priorities in the correct rank order. | ||
| It said, look, Protecting the flourishing of our society and of our kids and of our families is more important than protecting corporate interests. | ||
| To me, that is the fundamental. | ||
| America is about the protection of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| And our economy and our companies should all be thought of as means in order to achieve the end of human happiness. | ||
| So I think DeSantis is in the right. | ||
| Looking at our founding principles, looking at libertarian principles, and looking at what might be considered social conservative principles. | ||
| So as long as we're talking about DeSantis doing some stuff right related to this, I think one of the other institutions that's done some stuff right lately, obviously, is the Supreme Court. | ||
| I take it you are pretty happy about the reversal of this affirmative action decision at Harvard, and if you wanna talk about what you're doing here in Florida, that would be fine as well, but that basically we are removing some of this, what some might call structural or systemic racism from the system. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I think this is a huge ruling, although it's certainly not enough. | ||
| I'd like to see some other precedents, such as Griggs vs. Duke Power Company overturned. | ||
| What is that one? | ||
| Sure, it's what really established the notion of disparate impact. | ||
| A policy or a system is neutral. | ||
| It doesn't favor one racial group or another, but it creates disparate outcomes. | ||
| You can read racism into that. | ||
| That could be deemed illegal discrimination. | ||
| And so to say, for example, that elderly Asian females are incarcerated at a lower rate than Very simple. | ||
| you know, young white males or young black males or young Latino males, you know, you | ||
| could read into that saying, oh, that's a disparate outcome and therefore racist, we | ||
| have to interrogate it. | ||
| I think we have to get to, on the other hand, a system of colorblind equality. | ||
| Very simple. | ||
| We treat you as an individual with equally under the law, with due process. | ||
| We don't discriminate against you on cause of your race or ancestry, but you're actually | ||
| put into our system and you'll be judged on your individual merit. | ||
| That is the only kind of system that can be successful at the kind of scale that we have with, you know, more than 300 million people in our country. | ||
| You can't treat people as reflections of a racial group or as symbols of a racial group. | ||
| You have to treat people equally. | ||
| And so I think we're getting there. | ||
| We're getting there slowly. | ||
| The Supreme Court is quite a big help on this path. | ||
| But we have to really push further. | ||
| I want everyone to feel that they're given a fair shot, that they're treated equally. | ||
| And that their outcomes in life are, of course, dependent on where they came from, their origins, but also dependent on their hard work and fair treatment so that what people earn, they really feel like that they have earned it through their own efforts. | ||
| They haven't been punished or rewarded on anything else besides their own efforts, their own contributions. | ||
| What do you do, you think, with the people that use every positive thing that comes out of the system as proof of the system's failure? | ||
| In other words, so we get a good decision, let's say, that you and I are agreeing from the Supreme Court on affirmative action, but then if you watch MSNBC or you watch CNN, you listen to AOC or Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. | ||
| For all of them, it was proof that the court is corrupted, thus proof, we could probably take this back to critical race theory, proof that the system itself is designed against the people. | ||
| That seems like an intractable problem, that every time we try to free the people more, that the certain set of activists, which now includes people literally like the President of the United States, use that decision to undermine the system itself. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think it's a dangerous game that they're playing. | ||
| They interpret every political loss for them as evidence of corruption, racism, and then that justifies the need to abolish the system, reform the system, pack the courts, and so it's a circularly self-reinforcing argument. | ||
| Every time they win, it's evidence of the virtue of their ideas. | ||
| Every time they lose, it's evidence of the corruption of their enemies. | ||
| And to a certain extent, all politics is like this. | ||
| Certainly, many people on the political right and many people on the political left share in that mode of thinking. | ||
| It's a basic partisan reflexive thinking. | ||
| However, we really have to, in this case, on the political right, we really have to shift the debate | ||
| to the substance and the merit. | ||
| One thing too that was totally lost in the Supreme Court decision is that they were saying, | ||
| oh, this is evidence of white supremacy. | ||
| But the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case were Asian Americans. | ||
| That was totally lost. | ||
|
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Asians are the new white supremacists, dude, come on. | |
| The Asian white supremacist. | ||
| The Chinese immigrant white supremacist. | ||
| I mean, you know, so we have to really, what I found most effective in all of my debates and narrative kind of warfare with the left is that the more you can stick to the very specific, concrete, tangible, Elements of the story the more that you can make a persuasive case that is substantive that sticks to Reported matter or sticks to the real concrete narrative the more likelihood we have to win We did it on critical race theory. | ||
| I think we're doing it slowly You know on gender and I think we can also do it on policies like affirmative action where by the way Americans of all racial backgrounds white black Latino Asian uh... all those the major racial groups oppose affirmative action and so we have to take that public sentiment we have to reinforce it with a uh... a political narrative and substantive reporting and and and court cases et cetera | ||
| And then start to actually say, you know what, we're going to take this momentum, we're going to take all of this goodwill and public support and start to change the system. | ||
| And look, Republicans have been very wary of any reforms to our civil rights bureaucracy in the United States. | ||
| It's time that we start pushing in that direction. | ||
| We have to reform the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which codifies disparate impact analysis into federal law. | ||
| We have to move beyond that and reform our civil rights law, and in some ways really strengthen our civil rights law, in order to ensure full colorblind equality for everyone in our country. | ||
| What do you think about the idea that some states now will just continue to do it right and some states will continue to do it wrong? | ||
| So as you know, I very publicly left Cali for Florida. | ||
| I feel like I live in a different country here. | ||
| I mean, the set of values in this state are 180 different than they were in Cali. | ||
| Cali is continuing to go down that road. | ||
| Florida is stopping that. | ||
| Tennessee, let's say. | ||
| Texas, more in line with us. | ||
| New York, Connecticut, Jersey, going down that road. | ||
| Do you sense that it will just continue to go that way, and also that's partly because of the migration of people, where the blues are going to get bluer and the reds are going to get redder? | ||
| And does it even matter, I guess? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it appears that that is the trend and I anticipate that the trend will continue, but I actually think that in a larger sense, a structural sense, that that's good. | ||
| That's exactly how our government was intended to be. | ||
| We were intended to be a federalist system with states that can pursue very different visions of governance, very different sets of values that they orient as their kind of hierarchy of values, let's say. | ||
| And so, in a sense, I like to see that California and Florida and Idaho and New York are pursuing very different visions of government. | ||
| It gives the citizens of every state the ability to look at what's happening, to judge and compare, to decide what they want, and they can either fight and advocate within their states, or they can move to another state that's more friendly. | ||
| This is actually good, but there's one big caveat. | ||
| States like such as California should not be allowed to violate federal law and should not be allowed to violate the principles of our Constitution. | ||
| And so when states like California... I recently exposed a UC Berkeley law dean saying that even though affirmative action is illegal in the state of California, we do it secretly and this is how we do it. | ||
| That's not just a policy that California can have or not have. | ||
| That's a violation of the 14th Amendment. | ||
| And as a law professor, you know, Dean Chemerinsky should know this. | ||
| But we should be cracking down at the federal level for any kind of violation of the Constitution while giving states the latitude to pursue their own vision in their other state policies. | ||
| And so, look, I live in Washington state, which has its advantages and disadvantages. | ||
| I spend a lot of time in your neck of the woods in Florida. | ||
| I see the difference. | ||
| I'm holding out strong here, but I certainly appreciate the fact that states like Florida, Texas, Idaho, Tennessee are pursuing a different path and are doing some really good things. | ||
| What's the school that you're working on here in Florida? | ||
| Is it a new school? | ||
| No, it's Florida Tech? | ||
| That's right, the New College of Florida. | ||
| Yeah, so New College of Florida is a perfect example. | ||
| Governor DeSantis appointed a group of trustees, including me, to take over this college, to reform it, to abolish their DEI bureaucracy, to install principles of colorblind equality, to hire new faculty with expertise in the classical liberal arts, and to give the college a renewed mission of pursuing the classical liberal arts education, which, kind of paradoxically, is now coded as a conservative education. | ||
| It's my life story right there. | ||
| Disappeared from all of our institutions in the last few decades. | ||
| And so, look, this is going to be a home for a wide diversity of opinion. | ||
| And we're actively recruiting scholars aligned with the classical liberal mission. | ||
| And so we're hoping to announce some new professors. | ||
| I think some of the people that maybe you might be excited about are currently in the mix for professorships at the new college. | ||
| And we're going to be transforming this institution that is not just important for the campus itself, but it's important because it's a model for all other red state governors and legislators and citizens to say, You don't have to put up with, you know, America's cultural revolution. | ||
| You don't have to put up with all of your institution being captured by left-wing ideologues. | ||
| There is now a playbook for retaking the institutions, reforming the institutions, and reorienting the institutions towards your values. | ||
| I got one more for you, Rufo. | ||
| We're posting this same week that the book is coming out. | ||
| I have no doubt that it is going to do extremely well and that it will also be left off the New York Times bestseller. | ||
| I hate to tell you, that's how it works. | ||
| But I wonder, just in terms of media strategy, I know you're willing to go into the lion's den and go after these guys. | ||
| Are you willing to go into MSNBC and go to CNN and go to Say the New York Times board over there and all of those things. | ||
| You're not going to get the invites and they're also not going to respond to you. | ||
| But just for the record, so that once it's all out there. | ||
| Yeah, of course I am. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I've not only stated publicly on Twitter that I'm open to interviews and stories and media appearances with all of my critics, but I've actually reached out, my team has reached out proactively to all of those outlets. | ||
| And I will say, and this is a point of optimism, I think you'll be happy about this, I'm sensing a bit of a shift. | ||
| I've actually got a lot of response from people at everywhere from Jacobin to MSNBC to the New York Times to the New Yorker. | ||
| They're starting to re-engage and so I think you'll see... But are they putting you on? | ||
| Are you going to be on MSNBC to talk about this book? | ||
| MSNBC is the one that has not responded, unfortunately, but a lot of the print publications on the left have responded. | ||
| They might engage with interviews. | ||
| They might engage with podcasts. | ||
| They might engage with reviews of the book. | ||
| And so I really hope that the book, which, look, I think a lot of center-left audiences are going to read this and say, wow, I'm actually, I heard that Rufo is a right-wing fanatic, but actually his book is totally right. | ||
| I agree with it. | ||
| I think we might see the beginnings of a re-engagement Now that the kind of George Floyd hysteria has started to die down, I sense that the left is maybe willing to start coming back to the table and start engaging in debate. | ||
| I hope that the book launches that, accelerates that trend. | ||
| I hope that not only conservative readers appreciate it, but also center and even center-left readers appreciate it. | ||
| I really want it to be a Focal point for re-engaging in this conversation. | ||
| At the end of the day, we're one country. | ||
| We all have to live here. | ||
| And we'll all be much better off if we can engage substantively with one another. | ||
| And I hope this book contributes to that process. | ||
| The book is America's Cultural Revolution. | ||
| And if they come for... Look, you've even got a copy. | ||
| You truly are a professional, my friend. | ||
| If they come for you in Washington, you're always welcome in the free state of Florida. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Good seeing you, man. | ||
| You too. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of mindless drivel, 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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