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May 13, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:09:51
A Blueprint for How to Save Higher Education | Chris Rufo & Stephen Blackwood
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christopher f rufo
59:01
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dave rubin
33:57
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stephen blackwood
28:55
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Speaker Time Text
christopher f rufo
I think we have a problem that actually the universities are too ideological, but not political enough in the true sense.
And so I think that the return of the political simply means that it's the return of deliberative decision-making.
I ask university trustees and even university presidents, A very simple question.
And I try to ask, you know, kind of left-wing university presidents these questions to see what they say.
I ask them, what is the purpose of a university?
You'd be surprised how few people have any answer at all, you know.
It's, well, to build new buildings?
Well, no, that's probably not it.
You know, to raise money, to, you know, it's like, to train, you know, activists for the next, you know, change the world.
Whatever kind of platitudes that they come up with, you realize something very quickly.
People have forgotten the purpose.
And then there is nobody making decisions, and those decisions are then delegated by default
to the most manipulative, the most ideological, and the most disagreeable people in the institutions.
stephen blackwood
Welcome, everyone.
It's an exciting afternoon for us here.
I'm going to introduce myself for the sake of those who are going to be following us online.
I'm Stephen Blackwood.
I'm the president of Ralston College, a new university in Savannah, Georgia, that aspires to become one of the great universities in history.
That's at least an aspiration, what we're aiming for.
I have the great pleasure today to welcome Mr. Dave Rubin and Mr. Chris Rufo to join us in a conversation about cultural renewal.
And I'm just going to say by way of introduction to that, that some of you have heard me say this before, that I've long been convicted that the only way you can build something is out of a positive vision.
And that's really what our conversation today is going to center on.
Let me introduce, for those of you who are not familiar with these two gents next to me, Dave Rubin and Chris Ruppo.
Dave Rubin is, of course, the host of the popular talk show, The Rubin Report, which has been the site of a number of conversations related to higher education and our culture at large.
Last year when I was in Miami to shoot the Exodus Seminar for The Daily Wire, I had the privilege of going on Dave's show, and so it's a pleasure to have the second conversation with him right here at Ralston College in Savannah.
Welcome, Dave.
dave rubin
Good to be with you guys.
stephen blackwood
Our other guest, Christopher Rufo, has been at the center of a number of important conversations, let's say, and activities, we might say, with respect to the future of higher education.
Mr. Rufo is a documentary filmmaker, an author, and has held research fellowships with the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, and the Discovery Institute.
His best-selling book, America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, how's that for a subtitle, was published last year and he writes regularly about cultural issues in higher education and beyond on his Substack.
He's also been appointed by the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, to the Board of Trustees at the New College of Florida.
So, Mr. Ruffo, Mr. Rubin, both of you, welcome.
Chris and Dave.
christopher f rufo
Thank you.
dave rubin
Good to be here.
stephen blackwood
Well let's start off with maybe a little reflection on what positive building looks like and Professor I'll just say by way of setting our expectations for the time that we're going to be together here at Ralston College and this is our favorite slot Thursdays at 5 p.m.
except it's a Wednesday at 5 because we've moved it to Wednesday today.
It's our favorite slot.
christopher f rufo
We've got to be in Idaho Thursday at 5 p.m.
stephen blackwood
It's Thursday somewhere.
It's 5 p.m.
somewhere.
No, Thursday's at 5, as we all know, is our typical slot for a lecture because it follows our weekly ritual of a college dinner together.
We've moved that to Wednesday today in honor of these chaps who are visiting.
And so what we're going to do is talk for maybe 45 minutes to an hour, the three of us, and then we're hoping that that whole time you're just going to be Raring to go with questions that will be building up in your minds because really, more than anything, my hope this afternoon is that all of you emerge as examples of what it means to undertake positively, to build and renew a culture through the agency of human individuals.
All of you have chosen to come to Ralston College with all of the other things you could have chosen to do.
You've come to this startup college in only its second year.
And I'm hoping that why you're here and what you're about will come out, because that's the greatest testament that any college could ever have to what it's really about.
So we're going to open up in that second half to a kind of a Q&A and a back-and-forth, and that'll take us up to dinner together.
So by way of introduction, let me say this.
I make no bones about the fact that I don't like brutalist architecture.
I know there are some fans out there, but I find brutalist architecture demeaning and degrading, anti-human, ugly, it's a kind of, you know, what else could I, what other adjectives can come into mind?
I find it demeans the whole prospect of human existence.
It's a big, but it's a concrete in your face.
And it's sort of telling you, you know, you're nothing.
You don't matter.
You have no access to higher order goods.
You are just, you know, worthy of looking at this concrete wall.
And so you can tell I get a bit, you know, worked up about brutalist architecture,
but anti-brutalism, no matter how much you dislike it, no matter how much you might dislike anti-brutalism itself,
anti-brutalism is not a program for building a single darn building.
You can only positively, only build something out of a positive vision for, you might say, architecture, proportion, and human scale, and certain traditions, and decorative elements, and so on, and the golden mean, and all that kind of stuff.
I think the same is true of any aspect of anything, whether it's a physical or a cultural edifice that you're looking to build.
You can only build from a positive vision.
And I think it's true enough to say that across the political, geographical, demographic, economic, and demographic spectrum, That we're living in a time in which, you know, perhaps things are not going so well with our culture, with our cultural institutions, with our sense of what our civilization is about and able to achieve.
And there's a lot of ink spilled, and, you know, criticism is important, but I wonder if at the end of the day how much of the spilling of that ink, how much of the criticism, Results in building and so the topic today for a conversation is with these two people who have really devoted so much of their lives to intervening in culture from various angles
The topic today is, what does it mean to intervene positively, to build for the long term?
So with that said, maybe I'll welcome your initial thoughts on this and we'll let the fire of this conversation take flight.
dave rubin
Sure.
Well, first off, let me just say that the president of your college just said it's five o'clock somewhere, which is a great motto for a college.
Have done something right, that's for sure.
Before we start, actually, I would just say one thing that kind of struck me this afternoon, but now sitting with you guys right here, like, I know it'll be awkward for a second, but just look around for a moment and look how you are all dressed right this moment.
Like, you guys are all here to be professional and you're here for a reason and dressing accordingly is not disconnected from that and it's interesting particularly in the last two weeks in light of the events at so many of the college campuses where people are quite literally dressed up as terrorists that you guys are here dressed up properly and I think that that is probably indicative of much more widely what's going on here at Ralston
So all that being said, it's a pleasure to be here, and in terms of building things, you know, it's interesting because I started doing sort of a different version of the Rubin Report, but I got on YouTube back in 2013, which seems like, for me, it seems like many lifetimes ago, but it's only about a decade ago.
And all I was doing really at the beginning was just kind of telling people what I thought about things, which I didn't think was particularly innovative or actually, in some respects, I didn't even think it was that interesting.
I was just like, I'll just get on there and talk about, I'll just sort of say things and, you know, I'll respond to things.
And quickly what I realized was that there was an absolute Starvation for just honestly assessing things.
And, and then what came along with that for me, as I'm sure some of you guys know, is I was on the left at the time and I definitely had a, had a bit of an awakening and started talking to people that were a little more conservative in nature and, and then going through that process and doing it live where you could see conversations that I was having.
Uh, there's a very famous one with Larry Elder, uh, but then with Ben Shapiro and with Dennis Prager, Glenn Beck, Jordan Peterson, there were all these people that I was talking to that I thought I was so ideologically opposed to and I just sort of did it in an honest way and there were moments of disagreement but what I found was it was like, wow, I can sit down with people and have a conversation with them and maybe we didn't see eye to eye on seriously important things.
Could be abortion, foreign policy, taxes, whatever it might be.
But that the spirit of doing that seemed to be what was interesting to people, that I was able to do that, and so few people seemed to be able to do it at that time.
And then subsequently, just by doing that, just by doing actually what we're doing right here, I started building a business out of it.
The show really started taking off.
We built a production company.
Eventually I built a tech company, Locals.com, which subsequently has merged with Rumble,
and that was really to fight the craziness of big tech.
And really all of it was just an extension of talking to people like what we're doing right now,
just sitting there and listening, and boy, people have different perspectives.
And then I had the honor and pleasure of touring with Jordan Peterson for a year and a half,
which as I said to you at dinner last night, It seems like a dream to me that it didn't even happen at
all.
And I think what I've learned as it relates to building new things is that if you look
at the media right now, and particularly the mainstream media, I mean, it is in catastrophic
freefall.
It doesn't even matter where you lie politically, but if you look at the big three cable news
networks, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, I mean, no one your age really is watching them.
You watch it as a joke, right?
I mean, it's thought of as sort of hilarious.
Every time I play a clip on my show of MSNBC, I call it the televised mental institution
known as MSNBC because you would have no difference in knowing if you were watching a camera,
a security camera in a mental institution or watching these guys present the news.
And I think the opportunity has presented itself thanks to tech.
Thanks to a crumbling media to present news in a new way, to present voices in a new way, to open up that Overton window a little bit.
And I guess I've been right in the center of that.
And then that puts me in situations where I'm meeting guys like you a couple of years ago, meeting guys like you a couple of years ago.
And then a whole bunch of us are, I would say in Chris's case, doing the academic work to take out some of the rot of the institutions.
In your case, helping build the new institutions, and it's like we all can have a place in that, and it's pretty fantastic, actually.
stephen blackwood
Well, thank you very much for that introduction, Dave.
I will say that we do have our college dinner later tonight, which is why perhaps some people are dressed especially smartly.
This may not be the day-to-day wear, but we do have dinner.
unidentified
This guy doesn't wear a tux every day, come on.
Come on, man.
He may be serving at dinner tonight.
stephen blackwood
But we do try to invite all of us to reflect the pursuits that we're after and the way we conduct ourselves in discourse and otherwise.
Over to you, Chris.
unidentified
Sure.
christopher f rufo
I kind of take it at a bit different angle.
I'm very interested and engaged in politics.
And so for me, politics is kind of Structured competition for control over laws and institutions.
That's what I think Machiavelli would say.
You have to control over modes and orders or laws and institutions, to put it another way.
And so, in the United States today, the competition over the law is, of course, a state and government function, but also, increasingly, the control over institutions are public questions.
The state, the government, controls about 90% of K-12 education and about 75% of post-secondary education, colleges and universities.
And so these are questions that for a long time had been obscured. I think that the
political left very sadly captured many of these institutions, not through the democratic process, but
through an extra democratic process.
And the political right in many ways consoled itself with commitment to procedural chimera.
Kind of procedural chimera of institutional neutrality, the free marketplace of ideas, and other instrumental concepts that were untethered from any ultimate purpose.
And this kind of dysfunctional marriage of two Political movements created over time the crisis that we are seeing today.
And so my work is predominantly to expose institutional corruption, to mobilize public opinion, and then to translate that into political action, legislative and executive action.
And when I think about institutions and destruction and creation of institutions, you know, when I'm kind of lining up different campaigns, I always think, and you have three options.
When you're looking at an existing institution, you can raise it, destroy it, you can capture it, take it over, or you can replace it, creating something new, an alternative, a competitor, a successor.
And so, on some of the recent campaigns that I've worked on, you know, that you might be familiar with, you know, we launched this Abolish DEI campaign last January, and since the launch in January we've abolished DEI, bureaucracies and public universities in seven states, and we've led this kind of Not public-side, but private-side movement to radically reduce the size of DEI bureaucracies in at least a half-dozen, really kind of a dozen, Fortune 100 companies that are starting to radically downsize DEI.
And so that is a kind of the first option to raise it.
The final proof of these is how many pink slips are getting delivered.
That's kind of the bedrock reality of it.
So, okay, you have, you know, kind of mass layoffs at University of Florida, University of Texas.
They're shutting down all of these institutions.
Okay, good, good night.
The second is to capture.
If you have an institution that is important, that may have also had a kind of deviation from its historical mission, or it's strategically valuable, you can exercise political power To capture it and then to reform it or restore it.
Governor DeSantis has led this effort and put me at the tip of the spear of the effort at New College of Florida, which was previously like Evergreen State University in Washington State.
You know Evergreen?
This was like the Evergreen State of Florida.
Extremely left-wing, you know, student body.
It was like the hub for left-wing activists, activism in the state of Florida.
You kind of gender studies was the centerpiece of campus life.
You had, you know, and it really just gone off the rails for a long time.
And so we captured it, replaced all the leadership, and slowly recomposing the faculty and student body.
And then, the third option, to go over it very quickly, is to replace.
So saying, this system is broken, let's create a new system that is better.
And so, in the fights that I was really working on in 2020 through 2022, looking at K-12 institutions, specifically at race and gender theory, in K-12 schools, we started this First it was an intellectual movement, then, kind of to my surprise, it became a grassroots parent movement, and then we were able to move state legislators to adopt, now in I think six or seven states, universal school choice programs.
So the idea is any parent can take generally between seven and eight thousand dollars per year per child, take it out of the state system, and take it to any private institution of their choice, including private school, religious school, homeschool programs, and the idea is that you're Trying to capture a large segment of this resource, tax dollars, and then radically redistribute it through individual choice.
So the money follows the parent's desire, and you're then creating a kind of front-leading startup funding and ongoing funding for a wider experimentation in primary and secondary school models.
And so those are some of the campaigns that I've worked on, and I think that it's really important.
The last point I'll make is that You can fight the culture war and just get trapped in a cycle of psychological distress, outrage.
Some of our colleagues in the media have gotten very good at doing this.
But I think that outrage is essential, but it always has to be directed towards something constructive.
And so if I'm, you know, As the New Yorker said, invented the conflict over critical race theory.
Yeah, fair.
Fine.
I'll take it.
But it was always then saying, and then we do this.
We reform the existing schools.
We have universal school choice.
We're always moving it towards something tangible that is going to make life better.
And I think that the use of the dark arts of politics, let's say, is something that is actually a prerequisite for some of these cultural renewal
projects that we'd like to see.
stephen blackwood
I'm going to pick up on that, because there's a really interesting sort of double-sided character to this.
I'm old enough that I had the privilege for the bulk of my graduate degree
to study with great teachers at whose feet I was privileged to study for years,
reading and grappling with great ideas and text and so on.
And...
The fact is, I really had no idea what most of their politics were.
I just had no idea.
There may be a deception here or there, you know, someone had kind of interest in this or that, but fundamentally I had no idea.
And it seems to me that though people can privately talk about what they like, One of the tragedies of higher education at the moment is that it has become highly politicized.
And so, you know, we talk about Homer or the Pythagorean theorem or the history of the Enlightenment.
These aren't owned by a political party.
They're what they are.
unidentified
they're what they are.
stephen blackwood
And so I guess my question here is, what does it take to recover institutional life
that isn't subordinated to a narrow politically sort of instrumental outcome?
I certainly agree that there are political dimensions to all these questions, but when it comes to, say, getting a degree in biology or history, You know, it shouldn't be fundamentally that, well, you've got to shop around to find the one who's... I mean, that's just absurd.
I mean, what does the 16th century have to do with contemporary Democratic or Republican politics?
So, I guess the question I'm driving to is, what does it take to recover, whether institutionally or civically, let's call it a shared human horizon, that actually, let's take, you know, the First Amendment.
This is a fundamental political institution necessary to democratic culture, necessary especially for minorities, so that their minority positions can be protected against the dominant majority.
This is just politics 101, fundamentally.
Let's take... Thanksgiving is a holiday that most people cherish in the United States, right?
It's a wonderful civic day of gratitude and thanksgiving.
You could say it's part of our political life, our civic fabric, but it's not narrowly subordinated to one political party or another.
And I would submit that most of the highest values that we want to live for are not the property in that sense of a political party.
And what I'm trying to get at here is what does it take for us to recover A position that is not already subordinated to this kind of neo-Marxist, nihilist claim that everything is always political, even as I would happily acknowledge that often the battles to, you know, to have a First Amendment, that is a political endeavor.
So what are your thoughts, both of you, on this matter?
dave rubin
Well I would say first we have to acknowledge that although I think everything that you said there is true and right and just and how the country was set up and how the country largely operated for 200 plus years, it's not the way a huge segment of the country operates now.
You sort of have, I mean we can see this very clearly with some of what's going on with Columbia with students making sure that other students based on either political views or quite literally their religion can't walk on campus.
But that's also coming from the professors, because we ceded the institutions, as Chris referenced.
The left largely took over the institutions, you know, whether you want to describe them as Marxists or Socialists or wherever, however, whatever the word you want to actually describe what they've done.
They've done it quite well.
You know, it's one of the funny things.
We can always make fun of these people.
It's very easy to make fun of the sort of blue-haired person screaming at the university.
But they've destroyed an awful lot.
They've destroyed a lot of the things that you just described there.
You know, it's funny.
Thanksgiving, obviously, which is my...
Favorite holiday by far and it's and I think it's most Americans favorite holiday in a weird way because having a secular holiday in America so whether it doesn't matter what religion you are that we're supposed to just be thankful on one day for this incredible country and all of the goodness that we have and everyone in this room has it better than their grandparents like that that is an unbelievably extraordinary thing except in a weird way it has become political now because now there is one political party that a huge percentage of it no longer
thinks that the founding of America is good. That is a problem. And then they have a media that is
constantly adding fuel to that fire.
We have the New York Times doing the 1619 project. There is a huge layer of
everything that is reverse of what you said there.
So how do we get back to it?
Well, first off, I think you have to just wake up as many people as possible to the level of Where we're at right now, sort of what time it is.
And the time I think is getting near to the point where we might be giving it fully away.
You know, you mentioned Evergreen State.
Evergreen, the reason any of you really probably know about Evergreen, unless you're from Washington State, is because of Brett Weinstein, of course.
I was the first person to put Brett on when I knew about what was going on there for about a month before it broke publicly because I was friends with his brother and he was showing me some of the emails and we were like, wow, there's something really crazy going on here.
Then when it got violent, then he was ready to, you know, they were literally chasing him and his wife.
His wife, Heather Hying, was also a professor there.
They literally chased him off campus with baseball bats.
But he was a lefty his whole life.
He certainly doesn't consider himself a Democrat anymore, but even he, a biology professor, really clever and everything else, smart, learned, et cetera, he was not aware of how radical his own University had come until all he asked was that they not segregate by race on one day.
I mean, that's what he was asking for.
The university was demanding or was telling, for those of you that don't remember, was telling the students that on a particular day they were going to have, I think it was going to be People of Color Visibility Day.
So they were recommending that white kids don't come to campus that day, which is completely absurd.
It counters everything that you just described in all of our Foundational documents and everything else.
And all he said was, I don't think that's a great idea, you know, in essence.
So I think the key first is waking people up.
And I think there's an awful lot of people waking up right now.
The sort of disaffected liberal, you know, if you watch Bill Maher's show every Friday, it's basically, he's trying from a classically liberal perspective to call out the lunacy that he now sees on the left.
I unfortunately think he'll end up voting with them, which is a separate problem.
Um, but you have to wake people up.
And then I think we also have to acknowledge that we may have lost certain things institutionally.
We may have lost some of the institutions will not be reformed.
Some of the states, California may just go the wrong way here.
I think we have to accept that.
And then I would also say that we have to know that The founders intended that in some way, right?
I mean, that's the whole purpose of the Federalist Papers, that we can move to places and have this laboratory of democracy.
So I think if we start with those two things, just acknowledging it first and then accepting that it may not be exactly as beautiful as it could have been, but we can find a different way for it to be beautiful, I think that that will at least get us on the path.
christopher f rufo
Thanks, Dave.
unidentified
Chris?
christopher f rufo
Yeah, I maybe take a slightly different point of view.
I actually think that it's exactly the opposite.
I think actually institutions are insufficiently political.
I think that the true nature of institutions is political, meaning that someone has authority, there's a deliberative process, and decisions get made according to that process by By majority, by consent, by, you know, diktat, whatever the institution might be.
And I actually think that this idea that institutions should be totally depoliticized and then operated according to what?
A scientific principle, a historical principle, procedural norms, none of which are sufficient to actually govern these institutions.
And they're all exploitable by people who want to bring ideology into the institution.
And then what happens is that responsible people who feel like they cannot wield any political power over the institutions have then made it impossible for them to solve these problems.
But in the case of, even more so in public universities, but also in private universities, but let's make the stronger case first.
In a public university, It's a public university.
People don't remember this, but actually it's chartered by the state, it receives appropriations through the state legislature, and it's subject to the governance of state boards of education and then also boards of trustees.
What's happened over many years Is that the public universities have become almost radically autonomous.
And then you have legislators and executives, governors, unable, unwilling or even unknowingly writing them blank checks.
And then trustees who, you know, tailgate at the football game, you know, once a year.
They go to the trustee meeting, they sign all the papers, and then they go out for a steak dinner afterwards.
But over the course of this time, because there was essentially no politics, there was no prudence, there was no governance, these institutions were captured and drifted.
And on top of that, compounding the problem is that they said, well, we want, you know, instant neutrality and free speech in the First Amendment.
You know, I'm a trustee of a public university.
The First Amendment is, I mean, great.
I support the First Amendment.
Fantastic.
But when you are to the point where you need to lean on the First Amendment as the backstop, you're already very far along the process of the destruction of other norms that should be that point of buffer, right?
You know, and so I think we have a problem That actually the universities are too ideological, but not political enough in the true sense.
And so I think that the return of the political simply means that it's the return of deliberative decision-making.
I ask university trustees and even university presidents, A very simple question.
And I try to ask, you know, kind of left-wing university presidents these questions to see what they say.
I ask them, what is the purpose of a university?
You'd be surprised how few people have any answer at all, you know.
It's, well, to build new buildings?
Well, no, that's probably not it.
You know, to raise money?
To, you know, it's like, to train, you know, activists for the next, you know, change the world?
Whatever kind of platitudes that they come up with, you realize something very quickly.
People have forgotten the purpose.
And then there is nobody making decisions, and those decisions are then delegated by default to the most manipulative, the most ideological, and the most disagreeable people in the institutions.
You can fill in the blanks and guess where those people are.
And so, you know, when I became a trustee at New College, the first thing that I did was fly down to New College with a little entourage.
And I said, I want to meet with the top six people.
I want 25 minutes with each of them throughout the day.
And we had a mandate from the governor of the state, capture the institution, completely change the mission, and then reform it along the lines of a Hillsdale College of the South.
That was kind of the line that they came up with, which was controversial.
And so, you know, I go in the room, and I'm enjoying this, actually.
This is quite fun for me.
And you see these administrators come in.
One woman comes in, the provost, and she is literally wagging her finger in my face.
And I said, you know, what would you say is the lowest performing academic department here at New College?
They're all very high-performing, you know.
Okay, you know.
And then she's kind of berating me, you know, at this meeting.
And I'm thinking, you're about to get fired, you know.
Do you not understand what time it is?
And I realized at that moment, she had basically bullied for 30 years at that new college.
She had bullied everyone that came in the door.
Made them all submit to the gender studies, to the DEI, to the outrageous pronouns, to whatever fad, you know, that they had been following.
It was the lowest performing public university in the state of Florida by a long shot on almost every measurable metric set by the state.
This was a failing university.
It was functionally insolvent.
And, you know, a large number of the dormitories were infested with, you know, mold and rodents and uninhabitable.
Like, this is not going well here.
But the problem is precisely that there was no one with the political authority to tell her...
I'm the boss now.
This university is a disaster.
All of you people are gone.
And now we're going to do something different.
That actually takes politics.
And so I think that the return of the political is, again, a precondition for the kind of change we'd like to see.
dave rubin
Just to be clear, I actually don't disagree with that, other than I think we just may have to concede that some of these places will be too far gone.
I just don't think it'll be a great use of energy.
There's only a limited amount of good educators and good administrators.
Good people behind the scenes to do all of that.
christopher f rufo
Sure.
stephen blackwood
Yeah, well, I would only say I think it's important to delineate we're using political in different registers and different uses of the different meanings.
So, on the one hand, we can use political in the sense of, you know, subordinated to a particular political party position.
In another sense, we can use political in the sense of the polis, you know, our shared political civic life.
And in the sense, I think, Chris, in which you're using it, it's something like the free agency of those who are Who have the responsibility and power to govern an institution, that their exercise of that responsibility is in some sense, in this sense of which you're using, political.
And I think it's simply a fact that the universities across the country would not be in the situation they're in if the people who... It's not that there was no one who had the power.
The boards had the power.
I mean, all of the power with any kind of institution is with some governing body, right?
We're talking about public institutions, as you are well familiar with.
They have different governing structures.
There's a relation to the legislature and the governor.
Private institutions have independent boards that are constituted according to the laws of the state.
And the people who are the trustees of that college have, effectively, all the power.
It's a non-profit that they are meant to govern.
And so what we have had over, you know, decades now are the people at the sleep at the switch who had the power to, let's just say, to keep the missions of those institutions on track.
Every one was founded with a certain purpose.
It was given charitable status by the IRS in order to fulfill that charitable purpose, whether it was the education of ministers or the formation of young women or the promotion of learning and the sciences and arts or whatever any of these institutions had as their purpose.
And what we've seen is the people who actually had the power, who are in charge of those, being fundamentally derelict in their duty.
So I take it your point is the recovery of these institutions depends upon those who are charged with that responsibility taking that seriously and returning those institutions, so far as possible, to their fundamental purposes.
And I think I've read that at New College, in fact, you've resurged You might say the ancient mission statement of the college is to say there's a kind of revolution in the true sense of the word, a movement back to origin of what the college was meant to be.
So in that sense, it's less capture than it is return to an originary purpose.
Let's talk a little bit about what the spirit—you know, here we have all these dynamic young people here finishing up their master's degree at Rawlston College.
It's a master's in the humanities, we call it.
It's kind of boot camp in Western civilization.
They start with two months in Greece, learning Greek very immersively, and then they come to Savannah, where—in Greece, I must say, it's not a terrible time to be on the On the shores of Samos, though it's kind of like boot camp meets the Grand Tour.
So very long days of immersive language learning, matched with going to Pythagoras' cave, or to see the Temple of Hera, or whatever the site may be.
And then they come to Savannah and they can undertake this trajectory through three two-month periods, quarters or terms we call them, through the ancient, medieval, and modern world, tracing the the unfolding of Western civilization, its ideas, its
ideals, its highs and lows up until the present. And so the question that I want to pose here has
to do with the fact that all of these, you know, bright young women and men here who are preparing
for their next steps and thinking about the impact they're meant to have or potentially can
have on the world.
And I want to talk something about the kind of spirit it takes.
We were talking earlier about the Founding Fathers.
Something about the spirit it takes to dedicate yourself to the, let's call it, the high things that are calling you forth.
And so, Chris, maybe we could start with you, because I know we had a very gripping account of what you think the spirit of the Founding Fathers of this country was.
I'm wondering if you would comment on that in light of what it means both to build new institutions and what it means to craft and build and have the agency in your own life.
christopher f rufo
Yeah, well, I mean, I think, you know, from my perspective, there are many of my esteemed colleagues in our philosophical camp that have this, what I think is a revisionist view of the American founders.
kind of a peacetime view, a very bucolic view.
You know, the founders were gambling through the fields and had a beautiful idea,
and Jefferson wrote it on a pen, and a fairy came down and they had America.
You know, it's like, it's this idea, and I have actually even kind of,
what I would say, you know, supposedly center-right conservatives constantly attacking me.
You know, you're too political, you're too polemical, you're too aggressive, you're engaging in propaganda, God forbid.
And the founding fathers would not have stood for any of it.
It's like...
Are you people insane?
Have you read even the basic biographies?
Go to Wikipedia, do the bare minimum here.
No, the American founders, modeling themselves on the great statesmen and political figures of the classical period, Samuel Adams was an out-and-out propagandist.
rabble-rouser.
He would be writing tracts for the Boston Gazette attacking the governors, the kind of royalist governors of Boston, and he delighted every time.
He literally chased them out of town, and when his pamphlets weren't enough, he assembled his band of, they called themselves the Mohawks.
They would dress up in kind of Mohawk Indian gear and face paint, and then go, you know, like I'm not endorsing this.
I think this is a bad idea.
I think it was appropriate for a time and place.
But, you know, they took Thomas Hutchinson, the kind of royalist governor, they chased him out of his home and looted his house, you know.
And so these were very vigorous, very ambitious, very political men in the true sense of it.
And while, of course, I disavow some of their specific tactics, The spirit of what they were doing was very high risk.
They risked ruin financially.
They risked ruin reputationally.
And they risked ruin physically.
I mean, you know, even Jefferson was at Monticello and barely escaped when the British soldiers had come to his home and they had just enough time to hide the silver and Jefferson was out the back door going to another property.
I mean, they were They were political men.
They studied rhetoric.
They studied statesmanship.
They studied philosophy in so far that it was useful to them in creating a new political order.
And so I think that, you know, again, I would defer.
I'm not a historian or a scholar or a classicist by any means, but, you know, the bits that I pick up as inspiration all point in a direction, at least for me, that these are people who were Oriented towards action, in many cases.
Not all cases.
There's some poets and dreamers and romantics.
Painters.
I mean, all that is beautiful.
But the key questions, in my mind, and then the key inspiration points.
Founding period, the classical period.
I mean, look at what they did.
did.
You know, these are like, you know, these people were not academic philosophers.
They fought in wars.
They engaged in real, meaningful debates.
They were running institutions.
They were writing their histories, oftentimes after living a whole other life.
And so, I think we need more of that.
I think we need people that are able to use the base of learning to actually engage in a life of action.
Not everyone, of course, but I think we have If I'm going to be frank about it, especially in our camp, in our kind of philosophical milieu, our great institutional formation, we have people that study as a form of abdication.
As an excuse not to act, and I think that it actually makes people constitutionally weaker, whereas I think all of these great works are oriented towards actually making people stronger, spiritually, physically, mentally, politically.
stephen blackwood
Actually, it's interesting the way you conclude that.
We had the heraldry of Ralston College, and the shield in particular, that listeners can look up online.
It has a star at the top, and then two spears or pheons on either side.
And those represent, you might say, the two sides of this.
On the one side, there's the stars, the light of knowledge, of intellect, truth.
That's the guiding principle, but it's not enough to sort of see it without the courage of action, the force of will to follow the truth and be true to it so far and to the best that you can.
Dave, what would you say?
dave rubin
Well, I would say, you know, when you're writing, if you want to write a great novel or a great movie or a television series, you want to show it, don't say it.
You don't want to just have the narrator doing everything.
And one of the things that I learned from interviewing all these people, even starting, say, seven or eight years ago, when we all started realizing, say, that big tech was a huge problem and there was a censorship problem, which now we know was far worse than most of us suspected.
Although I always said that I wasn't worried about the things I knew big tech was doing.
I was always worried about the things I couldn't Imagine that they were doing and then after Elon got Twitter we found out that they were doing a whole bunch of stuff That was well beyond what we thought and it was directly connected to the government infringing on our free speech But what I realized as I was having these conversations was I didn't want to do the just talk about it just talk about it endlessly it actually did
Do exactly what Chris just described.
It started feeling weak to me.
I was having important conversations that I knew were relevant.
Like I was bringing in tech people and I was bringing in philosophers and authors and all these great people, but the conversation started feeling, well, what the hell are we doing?
No one's doing anything about it.
We're just talking about it.
And that's nice for a while.
And maybe we've woke up a certain amount of people, including ourselves, but what are we really going to do?
And then I thought, all right, well, maybe I'll do something.
We need someone to do something.
I'm somebody.
Let's see if we can figure it out.
And I sort of sketched out this idea for Locals.com, which really, without getting too far in the weeds, the idea was, could we allow creators to build something for themselves that they would own without big tech being in the way?
A subscription model and could we, there was really only one other company in the game, Patreon, which had become extremely censorious and kicked people off the platform without any warning.
And I went ahead and I started building it and I found some tech people and we raised some money.
And as we discussed this a bit last night, but I spent probably two or three years of my life working on that way more than I was working on the show.
And the show is a full-time job.
And I suddenly had this other full-time job.
And then ultimately we merged with Rumble, as I said before.
But I mention all of this to say, as all of that was happening, It was also refining my political views because suddenly I started thinking things a little bit differently as it pertained to regulation and taxes because I was running a production company and a tech company.
And I started looking at, well, I live in California where I'm paying a whole hell of a lot of taxes and there's all these other loopholes I have to jump through.
And if I ever become too wealthy, they'll actually tax me on the way out and just a series of other things.
Also bringing in employees when you're in a high-tax state, you know, it becomes harder.
There was a milieu of different things.
So by doing something, by actually creating something, it reinforced the political beliefs
that I had started to come around to.
And I think that that was really good.
So I think it would sort of be a simplistic version of something
that Jordan would talk about, which would be that you have to aim at something.
And if you aim at something, I mean, look at all these kids at Columbia
right now that are trying to burn the place down or take over buildings or all of these things.
We can make fun of them, and I do often.
But it's like everything has failed them.
You know what I mean?
Their parents have failed them.
The education system has failed them.
The administrators there have failed them.
Everything has failed them.
So they're literally dressed up like terrorists, screaming about things that they know nothing about.
And I think if you aim at something, Whatever it is that any of you want to do.
Like, I want to be that.
I remember when I was in high school, I wanted to be Johnny Carson.
That was what I, which is like way before any of these guys.
But like, I thought I would watch Johnny Carson when I was 12.
And I thought, this guy is just like the coolest.
He's just chatting with people.
It's so interesting and funny and silly and whatever.
Now, I didn't become the host of The Tonight Show, but I did aim at something and I became something in that world.
So I think that that really is the key more than anything.
Like, figure out something.
There is something you want to do.
And it does not mean you will get that exact thing, but if you aim at it, I guarantee, I just, I think it's the nature of reality.
You will get something close to that.
And that's why it's so sad what's happening at so many of these other schools.
They've given them, they've told them everything's awful.
The system's rigged against you and then given them none of the tools to go ahead and do that.
And it seems like you guys are doing the reverse of that here.
So that's, that's beautiful.
stephen blackwood
That's certainly what we hope.
Let's talk a little bit about higher education, both in itself but also as an example of a broader stagnancy.
We were talking about this earlier today, the three of us.
You know, it's pretty easy to see that there's pretty widespread, just to put the point in a delicate way at least, pretty widespread problems across higher education in the United States and beyond.
And we can understand and diagram those problems in various ways, but they're widely acknowledged.
And we see manifest proof of those problems with various kinds of reductivist activism and kind of a nihilist ideology that, in my view, spreads from institutions of higher education through every aspect of our culture.
It's like a It's like a water main coming into a town.
You know, whatever you put into that water main, it could be, you know, fluoride or chlorine or whatever, eventually works its way into every tap in every household.
You can't say, I don't feel like fluoride in your second floor bathroom one day.
It's just, it's everywhere.
And I think this kind of, you know, to put it in one form, this kind of neo-Marxist, Marxist-reductivist sort of materialism or nihilism, you know, it works its way into architecture and brutalism.
It works its way into journalism and disbelief in truth.
It works its way into into family life, into brokenness, it works its way into
fractured politics, it works its way into art, denial of beauty, it works its way into
any aspect, every aspect of human life.
And yet, in higher education, this is, though many people are only waking up to this now,
this has been a problem for a long time.
You can go back to the 1930s, you know, lectures given at the University of Virginia, in which there's articulated a very clear sense of the emerging problems in higher education.
One of the ur-texts of criticizing higher education is William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, written in the early 1950s.
That's nearly a lifetime ago!
Seventy years!
Then you can look at Closing the American Mind, Alan Bloom in 1985.
So it's not as if we've lacked for prescient and clearly entrenched voices diagnosing the problem, and yet, in all that time, what have we done?
Here in the land of opportunity and renewal and new things and innovation.
So my question is, you know, what is wrong In our country and culture at large, that in a land that founded, that gave birth to between 3,000 and 4,000 universities over the course of mostly the 18th and 19th and early 20th century, that suddenly stasis.
Oh, you could never do something about that.
What I'm trying to get at here is an underlying weakness or malaise or passivity in the face of urgent problems.
What's going on and what can we do about it?
christopher f rufo
I mean, I think a couple problems.
Part of it is...
That if you look at the landscape of higher education today, as I mentioned before, it's 75% public, directly owned and operated by the state.
And then the additional, let's say, 24% plus change is highly subsidized by the state through direct grants, through research subsidies, through student loan guarantees, and other forms of indirect funding.
And so, you know, you have Higher education sector or institutions that are following the dictates of the state and so you have huge You know kind of state institutions directly state institutions and then you have inflated private institutions which does a few things one is that it makes it easier to centralize ideologically and
But number two, it crowds out the formation of private alternatives.
Because if you can go to a huge state university at an artificially low price, and the regulatory burden on entering the market through accreditation, through competition, through basic expectations, there's no rock climbing wall at this new university.
Well, I can't go there.
stephen blackwood
Do we have a rock climb?
christopher f rufo
Yeah, you guys should get one.
If you don't have one, you should quit immediately.
stephen blackwood
There is the hike up to Pythagoras' cave, which is something like a rock climb, but that's been there for a long time.
We didn't build it.
dave rubin
Take them up the stairs of that new building.
christopher f rufo
But you put it all together, it's prohibitive.
I mean, you should be able to start a small, private, let's say even experimental college for ten million dollars.
In a kind of ideal world, stripped of all of these barriers, you could do something very inexpensively, as some of you probably know.
You can't do that.
It's actually... The barrier to entry is extremely high.
The runway to launch a new institution is a very long runway.
And this is because of policy.
I think it's almost exclusively because of policy.
And kind of paradoxically, actually, we've had a The number of institutions as an absolute number has stagnated, but the percentage of, say, 29-year-olds with a college degree has steadily climbed.
And so you paradoxically have too few institutions and, I'll say it, too many people attending four-year undergraduate colleges.
I don't think that it's a healthy equilibrium for society to have, let's say, you know, I think it's 40% now, but trending towards 50% of students with a four-year college degree.
I think that's probably not ideal.
I think the ideal for a liberal arts degree is much smaller, and then better options for most students and most families is to have, you know, including state subsidized, technical schools, professional schools, In a compressed timeline that are oriented towards more practical outputs.
And we have something not like that at all.
We have these huge... I did even a report just now at Stanford, which is of course a private university, but it's the same elsewhere.
Stanford has 177 DEI bureaucrats.
With the highest concentration in the medical school.
It's basically one DEI bureaucrat for every 90 students.
You know, if you know anything about DEI bureaucrats, very few of them can deal, I think, a great amount of damage to an institution.
And so you have this, you know, I was talking actually with a friend of mine just today, a very successful investor, and he said, Chris, the fundamental problem in universities is that there are no costs to anything.
And when you have an environment where there are no costs, really bad ideas easily take root.
And so I think that what I'd like to see is actually, I think paradoxically, if we can tip the higher education sector into crisis, if we can put it into a contraction, start with the EI, that's the most fun thing to contract immediately, but actually put significant financial pressure on these universities Bring them back to a kind of essential reality.
I actually think we'll have more creativity and when we actually have more pressure.
Right now there's no pressure anywhere in the system.
It's just, you know, it's like you're at the club and there's somebody here with just, you know, dollar bills flying off his hand.
I think we need a return to reality which is going to require Significant increase in the predominantly economic as well as reputational pressure.
stephen blackwood
Certainly one of our primary objectives, you might say strategically, is to be able to create competitive pressure by showing a better way in order to recollect these institutions that we all know and at least used to love back to their fundamental purpose.
But I'm very skeptical that can be done without competitive pressure through new institutions.
Dave, you want to say?
dave rubin
Well, let me take a stab at it from a completely different direction and say that it has a little something to do with this thing.
The world is so fundamentally different from 20 years ago, or the iPhone came out I think around 2006, so just about 20 years, but even cell phones and everything else.
We are now all walking around with the world in our pocket.
You have access to literally everything and more of it than humans could have ever imagined Only one generation ago.
And because of that, the set of new ideas, new good ideas, bad old ideas, everything everywhere all at once, is in our pocket.
You can be distracted endlessly, you can learn things endlessly, you can fight endlessly, you can do it all anonymously.
You can put your name to it and suffer the consequences and the rewards of it.
But I think that in a weird way, the stagnation you're talking about has a lot to do with this,
and we can't quite figure out why. And I think it's fundamentally that we were given a technology,
I mean, this is a tool like a hammer.
A hammer, you can do a lot of good things.
You can build a house and all that.
And you can also unjustly kill somebody.
And that's basically what this thing is.
And we've been handed it.
And it has so changed us.
I mean, if you think, I was born in 1976.
I'm 47 years old.
It's not that old.
But I don't think, at least.
Maybe it is.
I'm having some back problems right now, which is why I keep shifting in my seat.
christopher f rufo
David, it's time for your Metamucil.
dave rubin
Yeah, it's tough.
It's tough, man.
That's a type of tequila, right?
christopher f rufo
Yeah, no, it's not.
dave rubin
But when I grew up, when the three of us grew up, you know, there were three news channels at 6.30, ABC, NBC, CBS.
You watch them, really, they basically showed the same thing, maybe in a slightly different order.
And you really watched it depending on whether you liked Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings.
And that was it.
And then Americans basically kind of agreed on what roughly was happening and we could all go about our day.
Now everyone is so blown apart and atomized into a gajillion different things.
And addicted to an unbelievable amount of things, not just substances but ideas and the rest of the stuff that's on here, that we have just created a situation that I think led us to this moment.
Nothing's kind of working because the new world is so fundamentally different than the old world and we're in this weird space right now where we're between these two things and we're trying to pick some of the pieces up.
From the old world and bring them at least those of us who I think will get us out of some of these problems and yet We've got this thing here where the same key I mean even if you look at it this way the same people right now who?
Led us into this strange tech thing that we're in that is highly censored and highly controlled and algorithmic mean Manipulated and every time you open up your phone You have no idea what either program or person affected the algorithm in a way that can manipulate you.
Chris mentioned to me right before we started that he was frustrated with some of the things going on with YouTube right now as it pertains to some of his videos.
And I've been in the game long enough to know there are times when it seems like I'm just unleashed and they let people see my videos and then months go by where people literally come up to me in the store and they're like, Dave, I haven't seen one of your videos for months.
So we're being manipulated in all sorts of ways and until we can... But the same people who did that to us are literally trying to get us to the metaverse now.
They are trying to get us to strap something onto our head and exist in that world.
And if you've seen Ready Player One or a plethora of science fiction movies, there's a reason that in some respects the same people who are destroying the natural world are actually trying to usher in that world.
They will still have a lot and they will, you know, Bill Gates isn't going to spend a lot of time and Mark Zuckerberg, I guarantee you his kids are not walking around with this phone.
christopher f rufo
I would add, though, the kind of flip side, the advantage of this, is that the technology has enabled unprecedented leverage.
And I think all of us can demonstrate the principle in concrete terms.
And so, Dave, your show, with a fraction of the budget, none of the kind of, you walk into a broadcast network,
they have a huge skyscraper, there's people everywhere, there's the server room that is humming
and buzzing in the middle.
I mean, there's these massive productions, and then they have small audiences.
And it's like, you know, they have built-in effects, they have contracts, they have kind of residual business that keeps them going at scale.
But your show has more influence than many of the broadcast shows.
Which go kind of in and out, it's fine.
You know, I think some of my work in political activism, political work, has had enormous leverage where, you know, people are like frustrated and saying, wait a minute, you know, this guy cannot, should not be able to have an impact in this way.
And in higher education, I think that what's great about the moment for something, an alternative.
Like Ralston College, like some of the other alternatives that are cropping up.
Is that I have no doubt that given the current social and technological conditions, a university that has a top flight program that can recruit kind of top flight talent, a university of 50 people, can have more influence over society than a generic state university with 50,000 people.
I have no doubt about that.
And so, you have, because of the winner-take-all environment created by technology, we saw it economically, right?
If you look at, like, influencers or whatever.
Are they called influencers?
That's the thing.
So, you know, billions of people have accounts, but, you know, the top 0.0001 are, you know, minting a million dollars a month on their content or whatever.
Those are network effects, power law distributions.
It's not just economic, it's actually cultural now as well.
And so, the ability to turn something small into something big I think has never been as strong as it is now.
And you also, with digitally kind of mediated communications, it can happen very fast.
I mean, the speed of transmission is instantaneous.
And I learned this very early on.
Some of the first work I was doing at a national level was on critical race theory.
And I was talking, I was doing reports about it, talking about it, you know, kind of publishing information about it.
Coming up with kind of persuasive rhetoric about it.
And I realized very quickly some of the exact rhetorical phrases that I was using that had gained traction in the discourse environment.
I'd then hear, like, Senator Josh Hawley using the same words, or, you know, President Trump.
You know, it's like, even as far as just phrases, you can put a phrase out as an individual, and through this transmission, it can become, you know, kind of repeated everywhere.
So it can achieve kind of scaled influence.
And the first time I kind of understood this, it was shocking to me.
It's like, this seems like it's got to be some sort of mistake.
But I think it just underlines this point that now is the time, actually, and as we are, as I think, and I think in these terms, you don't have to, you probably shouldn't, as you put your enemy's institutions into crisis, you're creating an opportunity to offload people who are not satisfied, and then also recruit people who are already kind of on your path in your lane to build those institutions in a powerful way.
I think that's the moment that we're in right now.
stephen blackwood
I think that's an excellent moment for us to conclude this part of our discussion, and we're going to open things up into a Q&A.
All right, well, we're going to open things up for questions from our students, and I think this is an opportune time to say to all of those watching us online that applications are still open.
for the one-year master's in the humanities that Ralston College offers. You can go to our website
www.ralston.ac to learn about this exciting program. You have to get your applications in
quick though because they're closing soon. All right, let's open it up. Now you say the link
is down below. That's right.
The link is down below.
christopher f rufo
We've got a professional.
unidentified
And then you point down.
stephen blackwood
And then you point down.
unidentified
The link is down below.
christopher f rufo
The link is down below.
The link is right there.
Click it.
Click it right now.
stephen blackwood
Which I dare say is the most exciting program in the humanities in existence.
But I'll let our students be the judge of that.
All right.
Have we got some questions?
unidentified
All right.
stephen blackwood
Go over there.
Take the mic.
Thank you.
Dressed to serve at dinner tonight, I think.
Yes.
unidentified
Thank you.
One of the things that you mentioned is that certain educational institutions may not be too political, but only too ideological.
I was curious to ask about your usage of the term ideological.
Would you say that's an inherently bad thing, or is it more so a matter of a bad ideology versus a good one?
And so I would ask you, Is it bad for an institution to be ideological, or do you simply want to replace the ideology?
christopher f rufo
Yeah, it really matters how you think about the word.
When Jefferson was writing the charter documents for the University of Virginia, and I saw this and my eyes popped out of my head, part of the course of instruction was in ideology.
I said, huh, that's interesting.
What did he mean by this?
And so I traced it around.
Then you have a later letter from John Adams during that period where he's saying, ah, you know, ideology is the big problem because ideology is the essence of what was happening during the French Revolution.
Taking pure rationalism, taking a kind of pure compressed one-dimensional orientation and trying to conform reality to it.
You could also use it in the sense that Antonio Gramsci uses it, which is more a political philosophy that is then compressed into ideology for dissemination to the society.
And so it really depends.
It's also a great rhetorical word because you can accuse your opponent of ideology while you have philosophy.
But I think that Maybe one way of looking at it is, I think Russell Kirk said, another interpretation of ideology is Russell Kirk, who says, ideology is a kind of system of thought that has a flattening or totalitarian impulse.
It promises a utopia now.
And so he has, of course, a skepticism to that.
And so I think, you know, and this is again a rhetorical, I'll give you the rhetorical secrets, don't tell anyone.
When your opponent does it, it's ideology, because it doesn't conform to truth, it doesn't conform to reality.
They're trying to impose an ideological vision onto an institution that should be beyond ideology or above ideology.
But as a practical matter, if you're just saying a general political philosophy, or a kind of, let's, we're not doing, I'm not doing philosophy, I'm not a philosopher, but if you're doing, having a political objective, political program, a political formula, Yes, you want to have your political formula be the political formula of the institution and not your opponent's political formula.
I think that you cannot, whether you call it ideology or not, you cannot escape that.
The question is not You know, what is the telos, or what is the ultimate purpose of the institution?
Not whether it has one or not.
It will have one.
Institutions are moving towards something, whether they know it or not.
The question, I think, the political question is, who decides?
And towards what is the institution moving?
What is that final destination?
And so, in that sense, institutions cannot escape ideology.
But I think, in another sense, institutions should escape ideology, if you look at it in the kind of John Adams way.
stephen blackwood
What have we said, Chris?
One of the posters we had in our recruitment Advertisement this year was education without indoctrination.
That's right.
And, you know, the mark, you might say, of not being ideological in that negative sense is that, in fact, you're actually open to correction when presented with the evidence or a better argument or whatever.
You're actually willing to relinquish in order to grasp a better or more accurate or more fundamentally true standpoint.
And so, you might say that's the... One of the things we talk about a lot at the college here is that That the pursuit of truth has sort of two sides.
It takes, on the one hand, courage.
You have to state what you think.
You have to be willing to go into the unknown.
But it also takes humility, because you have to be willing to say, it seems like maybe I got that wrong.
And so it seems to me the mark of being a non-ideological thinker is precisely your ability to hold where you need to hold, but also relinquish where you need to relinquish, in order to Open yourself up to a deepening.
Who knows everything?
christopher f rufo
Right?
stephen blackwood
I mean do you know it all right now already?
Or is there a process by which you can come more adequately to see what the truth of things is?
christopher f rufo
And I think testing it against reality as much as you can is important.
stephen blackwood
Nothing else to test it against.
christopher f rufo
If your ideology ends with you getting chased by some blue-haired freaks with a baseball bat, you have to say, well wait a minute, let's think about this.
That is not successful.
If your ideology ends with gulags and mass starvation, And, you know, and kind of a repressive, centralized, it's like, oh, maybe we should rethink our ideology.
This one is not quite working.
And so I think being open to reality and then trying to figure out, okay, is this working?
Am I, is it leading towards the desired result?
Is it, you have, you set the end goal, the highest end.
Well, what we've kind of formulated here is it getting us a bit closer.
And that's where the humility comes in.
And so you're not thinking one-dimensionally about it.
You're trying to open yourself up as much as possible.
stephen blackwood
Yeah, and if you can't do that, reality will destroy you, right?
And that's what all the Greek tragedies are about, is about a kind of partiality of vision, where you see one thing, maybe it's the good of family, or the good of nature, or the good of the state, but if you assert that in exclusion of other aspects of what's really real, it will destroy you.
And that's what all the tragedies in that sense chronicle.
And so, to stay alive, in a certain sense, is to be open to seeing what you don't yet know.
Next question.
Go ahead, Jairo, can you pass the mic over?
Thank you, Adam.
unidentified
Adam? I'm also serving dinner tonight. I had a question about you mentioned at
the sort of very beginning sort of an offhand arc and then coming off your
answer to Adam about rhetorical strategies I wonder if this may have a
similar answer when you said that the left overtook the institutions with an
extra democratic process We've all been reading Plato's Republic, and so Plato famously says that democracy is like the only one step better than tyranny, so it's not that great.
So my question is, had the left taken over the institutions with a democratic process, would that make it fine, or do you have another reason to sort of I would oppose it also, but it's just an extra insult to injury that they did it the sneaky way.
christopher f rufo
I think it's unfair.
And I think that it also undermines this great, the kind of great rhetorical point that we're going to see here in 2024.
It's about saving our democracy.
You know, I always ask people, what does that mean?
You know, what is our democracy to you?
And then the famous retort is our democracy is their hegemony.
You know, that's kind of what I think is really at play.
But I think it does matter.
I, again, probably more with Machiavelli than Plato, I think the Republic is the best form, all things being equal, if you have the conditions to make great one.
I think we have the best one that has existed in history.
And so I think that it is meaningful.
The means by which you acquire and exercise power is meaningful.
And if your opponents are breaking the rules, it's also practical to let people know that they're breaking the rules.
But I think it's also creates a nice rhetorical contrast.
If you can say, you know, you didn't, you know, you can tell the public, right?
You want to get people excited.
You didn't vote for this.
You didn't approve this.
They've snuck this into your institutions that you pay for, you know, without your consent.
And they're, you know, you know, they're doing all these terrible things
and you kind of lay out the litany.
I think you're in stronger rhetorical terms, because you still have to win a majority.
And at the end of the day, these are, in a two-party system, first-past-the-post electoral democratic system, These are ultimately have to be resolved in partisan politics.
And so as much I try to stay out of the electoral side, but I think it's important.
Look, I think it's important.
And I think it also undermines the great argument of the left that they represent.
You know, the democratic will.
I don't think that that's true at all.
And if the real problem in our republic right now is that the majority sentiment has a difficult time resolving into a kind of legislative action.
And so if you look at, you know, look at LA.
70% of people in Los Angeles want to clean up the illegal homeless encampments on the streets.
They haven't done anything in 10 years.
Majority public opinion, we used to have the rule of public opinion.
Because of these extra-democratic institutional barriers, we have a very hard time turning majority sentiment oftentimes into a majority rule.
I think that's a big problem.
dave rubin
I would also say, sort of connecting it to the earlier question, that Every institution leans leftward over time, almost with no exclusions, actually.
If we look at all of our educational institutions right now, all of our corporate institutions, things tend to go leftward.
There's an entropy to leftism because there's an idea that something new is there, so everyone's trying to go to something new.
So I think that, well, let's look at it this way.
Unless you guys are able to actually accomplish all of the goals that you have set out to
do, the entropy would be that Ralston College in 20 years from now would be more, let's
say, left because it would just drift that direction.
The challenge, and most institutions aren't up to it or didn't realize what the challenge
was, is to make sure that things stay ideologically where they're intended to stay.
That really is the challenge.
It's why we've seen it's then it's put into action through DEI and the rest of these ridiculous
departments and through these.
Well, I think that actually gets to a very profound question in the end, which is, what does it take to maintain a culture?
Because, you know, you can do a certain amount through the force of law.
the jobs and that exacerbates the situation.
stephen blackwood
Well I think that actually gets to a very profound question in the end, which is what
does it take to maintain a culture?
Because you know you can do a certain amount through the force of law, you can disincentivize
certain kinds of actions as we all know, but the most effective form of the promotion of
a culture is not coerced, right?
And so, you know, we talked about Thanksgiving earlier.
It's not maintained through force of law, right?
I mean, it's maintained because people come to love it, and it's handed on as a so-to-speak living tradition.
You know, you can look at the First Amendment as an example.
You know, there's no risk in the United States, really, that the First Amendment will be overturned.
It's very difficult politically to amend the Constitution.
It's nearly impossible.
But what that means is that having a legal protection of freedom of speech, which is necessary, is also not a sufficient condition for a culture of genuine free exchange and expression,
A kind of dialectical back and forth where you actually have the benefit of what other people think.
right?
We're living in an age where there's, you know, rampant cancellation and kind of, you know,
fear of speaking what you think.
And so I guess what this points to, you can talk about how an institution sustains itself over time.
You can also talk about how a culture sustains itself over time.
It seems to me that what we've lost in the West, broadly speaking, are the mechanisms for the transmission of the conditions of human flourishing.
The most fundamental, you might say, the elements, the aspects, the, you might say, the cultural conditions that enable human beings to flourish.
That's all Western civilization, or any civilization is meant to be about over time is a series of institutions and cultural
practices and ideas and ideals that enable, you might say, like the soil that a tree grows
in, it's like the soil a human being can live in in order to realize what their
potential.
And so this really gets us to the most fundamental question of any human civilization, of any
organization, of any family, of any country, of any political entity, of any institution
at all, which is how does it sustain itself over time.
And I don't actually subscribe fundamentally to the view that things must trend in relation to one political direction or another.
If it's trending in one political direction, that is surely because there are underlying conditions or a failure to transmit that is actually more broadly spread.
I mean, I don't think that a political party has some magical magnetic power.
It's because of a loss of vision to enable this to be a more substantial or higher or transcendent alternative.
To be transmitted, and so my question is, and we'll tee up our next question here as soon as you all are ready, my question is, what do you think are the elements to the transmission of what is most important?
And I'll just say, the late Roger Scruton, who was a friend of Rawlston College, had a wonderful phrase when he said, a culture is just the things we have loved.
And transmitting a culture is just teaching others to love them too.
And similarly, the philosopher Plutarch says, and this is perhaps not the best translation, but my Greek is not as good as our students, that the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lit. And certainly the purpose of Ralston
College fundamentally is to light the fires in our students, light up, to inflame their souls
with the love of learning and truth and high purpose. And so my question is, how do you think you
do that? Because this is the question that lies at the heart of the transmission of anything.
dave rubin
Well, I think you can tell the truth.
And if you do it over time and you do it for the right reasons that over time you will build good
I mean, that's probably the most cliche sort of simple answer.
Uh, but I actually think it's the true answer.
It's the true answer.
That that's why I'm saying it.
Um, but I was also, I would also say, since you're asking about transmission, you know, it's like we, we can all say, and even, and even some of the students now who are trying to silence other students, if you ask them if they believe in the first amendment.
Of course they say yes.
Everyone always says they believe in the First Amendment.
When it gets pushed on, you know, when it's something they don't like, then people can hedge a little bit or something else.
But since you said the word transmission specifically, I would bring it back to the phone again.
Because in the last 20 years, as we learned that we could all tweet and we could put comments on things and connect with each other and share pictures and all these things, we thought that it was just going to exist in a sort of non-manipulated way.
The algorithms came in, and by the way, you need algorithms.
Something has to order the information, otherwise you would go to Google and it would just explode, right?
You need something to have some parameters around what you're seeing.
But we now know that the government actually went out of its way to infringe on our First Amendment.
Jim Jordan, congressman from Ohio, he went into the Twitter files and found specific people that the government colluded with Twitter, with employees at Twitter, to remove their tweets.
One of my tweets was on that list, so the government actually silenced me.
I asked Jim Jordan at the Capitol, I said, well... Not very successfully, apparently.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah, I'm still here, but... We're gonna really silence you next time.
Yeah, yeah.
dave rubin
Right, well, but I... Government being in effect is what I want.
So I went, so Jim Jordan got this long list of people that were silenced, and it's many of our cohorts, and a lot of it had to do with COVID specifically, and I basically predicted that mandates were coming and that the shots weren't working as promised, something to that effect.
And the government, he absolutely has the information that that happened.
So they got in the way of transmission of free speech.
And I said to him, well, what's the recourse?
What recourse do you have?
The government actually violated my First Amendment rights.
And he said, well, there is no recourse.
Which is sort of a hard pill to swallow.
There really is, you don't get a letter, there's no, I thought, can someone in this building apologize to me?
The janitor, somebody, anybody?
Is there anything?
And there's actually no recourse.
So I would connect that to the question by, Saying that until we clean up the transmission part of all of this, we can say we have these ideas that we like and these documents that we were founded by, but now there is this other layer that is between all of us, this tech layer.
And then we could talk about China and Tik TOK and a whole bunch of other things that has really confused things to the point that, um, I don't know how many of us even know what, what the question is in the first place, in a certain sense.
stephen blackwood
I'll turn it over to Chris, but I'll first say that there is a sense in which this very conversation and the free agency or free inquiry of your own trajectory is an antidote to that suppression, right?
There is no ultimate antidote to totalitarianism other than the free critique of that very thing.
Chris, over to you.
christopher f rufo
You know, very briefly, I think that, look, that's the question of education.
Education is the transmission of knowledge, values, and principles from one generation
to the next.
That's the definition of it.
That's what you do when you're raising kids.
That's what you do when you send them to school.
And I think that what we need now is people who are willing to go the extra mile to make
sure that that process is in line with actually their own deepest principles.
I think there was a brief kind of, let's say, post-Cold War consensus.
The institutions are good.
All is well in the world, you know, you know the the bad evil Empire has been defeated everyone kind of agrees and On the basics, so you send your kid to public school, you then kind of set it and forget it.
I think after 2020, that's over.
Enough people have radically reset the education for their own children.
You know, you can look at it anecdotally, but even statistically, it's significant.
Homeschooling is through the roof.
There's a decline in the number of people attending public schools.
There's been a huge scramble, like more movement and more transfers between institutions than any time in recent memory.
And I think that this signifies that people are very concerned about this question of transmission.
And they're trying to find institutions that will work in concert with families to actually advance and
deepen and challenge their own values and commitments. And so I think
that we have to kind of break this you know century-long period of homogenization and
we actually need to decentralize as much power money and responsibility as
possible. We need to have small institutions that are creating
radically different alternatives and as I was saying I took my wife and I think I can't
remember how many kids we had.
Two kids.
She was pregnant, that's right.
Two kids.
unidentified
Two kids?
christopher f rufo
Yeah, two kids.
To Greece, and one of the highlights of the trip, I don't know if you all had a chance to do it, was to go to Meteora.
Did you guys do it?
unidentified
Yeah.
christopher f rufo
Like, son of a bitch!
These guys lived up here, and they roped themselves up this whole mountain, and there was the Ottoman Empire had been roving and destroying everything.
And these Greek guys were just having a cigarette, doing whatever they were doing, and we'll wait them out, you know.
And so that to me was like, this is amazing, you know.
That is a metaphor for what a small institution that is sufficiently protected can do during a period of chaos and dysfunction.
That was really the highlight of our trip.
My kids were like, they were like, this is amazing, you know?
And obviously it's amazing, it's like the James Bond thing, you know?
But actually, the symbol of why it matters, I think is actually more relevant.
One of my favorite writers, Antonio Gramsci, also has another metaphor that he uses that is probably more appropriate.
You know, none of us are going to haul the ropes and live in a mountain.
You know, that's kind of a weird thing to do.
Um, he talks about digging trenches and a world war one metaphor.
I think that's probably, um, yeah, that's probably more appropriate.
And so I always tell people, you know, what can I do, Chris, what can I do?
I live in suburb or here.
I said, you know, it's time to dig trenches.
Well, you know, it's a metaphor, right?
Don't actually like dig a trench.
Oh, you could, that'd be fun, you know, dig a trench.
But I think that's what it's all about.
And I think that the seed for greater renewal is going to emerge, not necessarily from the work that I'm doing, kind of waging war against existing large institutions,
but actually through this kind of protection that we can offer.
By waging war against existing large institutions, we can offer a sense of protection for people to start
digging those trenches.
That's what I think will be ultimately successful.
unidentified
And I think there's a beautiful sense.
stephen blackwood
The great cathedrals give us a kind of example of this, right?
Because we're living in this age of news cycles and, you know, that goes by so quickly.
And, you know, whereas you think about great cultural productions, you think about, for example, the cathedrals, most of which took many, many decades, often more than a century, sometimes more than one century to build.
And if you think about that, you know, what that means is that those who undertook to start the work Okay.
knew they would not complete it, while those who completed it
knew they had not begun it.
And so there's this sort of challenge to see yourself in a much longer arc in which your agency
is participating in something longer range, greater,
more important than some sort of narrow, narrow, narrow short-term vision.
Have we got another question?
Yeah, Jake, please.
unidentified
OK.
Remember, I am a fan of yours, both of yours.
Remember that as I ask this question.
Oh boy.
This is going to be the real one.
christopher f rufo
Here we go, Jake.
unidentified
Yeah.
So I've got my notes so that I can remember it.
Cause I'm a little nervous.
Okay.
So you say, just tell the truth, but what if people with completely different viewpoints have wildly different conceptions of what is true because the facets of capital T truth That stand out to each person are so deeply dictated by their implicit values.
And if groups of people become so radically different in what their fundamentally assumed values of what is good are, as those drift so far apart, how do we reconcile the problem of varied truths without something akin to religious wars?
dave rubin
Well, it's a great question.
I would say that we're seeing it play out right now on college campuses, right?
First off, there's only one truth.
You know, this notion that there's multiple truths or that you have your own truth.
You have your own experience in the world, but you don't have your own truth.
I think we've largely taught so many young people that they have their own truth.
That it has led them to some really wacky positions right now.
So if you see protests at one school and the counter protest there, it's not that they have different truths.
It's just that they've come to a position often in either a confused manner or really because the institution failed them altogether.
So that's why there is very little, you know, they don't respond well.
unidentified
It's why we're having so little debate actually.
dave rubin
If you were just to talk about what's going on in the Middle East, there's so little fundamental debate.
You know, can we arm these people?
Can we give money here?
There's that, but so little fundamental important substantive debate.
About what really is going on as it pertains to history and as it pertains to nation states and what right do you have to defend your citizens or be in this area or this or that and then there's of course a whole religious overtone to it.
I don't know exactly how we get out of that other than doing exactly what we've discussed here.
There's going to just be a certain set of people, unless you want to kill a lot of people, which some ideologies lead to.
I mean, you know, Marxists and communists end up killing a lot of people in the quest for utopia, right?
If you don't believe in that sort of authoritarian rule and don't believe that everyone has to bend to you, you're going to have to live in a society that I think increasingly will just have a whole bunch of people that think wildly different things than you and see things in completely the reverse way.
And all you'd need to do to see that is just turn on Fox News and watch something and turn on MSNBC and watch how they cover the same story.
And it is completely divergent, like 180 degrees divergent.
So, how do you bring those two things together?
Well, every now and again you can wake somebody up and usually it happens to them.
They'll have one little sort of red pill thing that happens to them and then it starts happening.
It's just the way life works.
They see one thing differently than they thought and then they'll see many things differently.
But I think there's really no way to arbitrage it, truly.
I think we've already had a huge sorting in America.
People are moving to red states and blue states.
Things are separating.
The institutions are separating.
And as I said earlier, I mean, that's what federalism is about.
That's what the founders intended.
It wasn't supposed to be that the president was supposed to be the king, that we were trying to escape, and that we were just going to live under, you know, the rule of one.
So I think there will just continue to be Yeah, I mean, I think you want to cobble together a common consensus.
That's very important.
And then you want to put that common consensus in the institutions and then transmit it.
christopher f rufo
I think you want to cobble together a common consensus.
That's very important.
And then you want to put that common consensus in the institutions and then transmit it.
I think a lot of the problem is that, I mean, even the phrase common sense,
what do you think of when I say common sense?
Well, everybody knows that, right?
It's that kind of feeling.
That's not what common sense means at all.
Common sense is actually something that is carefully constructed through persuasion, rhetoric, politics, and as a very last resort, war.
And so these are, you know, you can have a philosophical debate about the truth.
I think that's interesting.
I think that's valuable.
But ultimately, I think we're talking about institutions.
Those questions are settled through the structure that we have, and you create common sense more than common sense is pre-existing, right?
The common sense of things changes over time, and so if you have a commitment to what you see as the truth, and I hope that you're correct, But I think that the next step, then, is to fight to persuade others to also have that opinion, and then to try to create, over time, a common culture, a common set of commitments within a system that also allows for a diversity of opinions.
And so the innovation, as I read it, as I understand it, in the founding, was that they were trying to settle the theological-political problem In a different manner than the Europeans had.
Unsuccessfully done, right?
You're having religious wars, you said.
The idea was to kind of delegate religious questions, let's say truth questions, to the civil society, and then have the public society, state society, have a kind of minimum viable consensus.
on certain kind of terms and conditions, let's say.
And I think that that is, you know, maybe breaking down a bit right now,
but I think that it still has a lot of life left in it.
And so we're really looking for a minimum viable consensus in the United States,
but one that has to be propagated through the institutions.
That's the responsibility.
And so it's a competition and everyone has placed their claim to the truth.
You know, I'm always skeptical when people say, I know that, you know, I know the truth and everyone's got to follow me because I am kind of the sole kind of carrier of the truth.
There's maybe one person I would say maybe that fits, but Uh, you know, certainly not, you know, uh, kind of 2024 American politicians.
Uh, and, and so I, I think you're better off, um, As much as we can, delegating those fundamental endpoint religious convictions to allow for a kind of functioning, a decentralization of practice, belief, liberty, protecting people, but requiring people that have some basic civic obligations.
And I think if you start there, you're going to actually be more successful and have a better country in the long run.
stephen blackwood
Thank you very much, Jake.
I'll just add to that while the next question gets lined up, I think.
Lydia, I hope you'll all feel also free to share, if you are so moved, with Chris and Dave and with the audience watching, what your experience has been, what your experience at Brawlston College has been, you know, why you're here.
These are not questions I can give an adequate account for, because I'll never be a student at this place, and so I know we'd all be interested to Here, insofar as any of you would like to share that, I'll just add to this question in response to Jake's, I think, very powerful question is that, you know, one of the elements of this, and I think, Chris, you were touching on this by talking about the necessity to protect a diversity of opinion.
This is one of the things that the First Amendment is really about.
You know, you might say one of the cardinal meta-truths is that we never get to all of it, and therefore we need protections of our seeking of the truth, right?
That's what the First Amendment is about.
That's why you can't have a university without freedom of inquiry, right?
Because you need to have the principle according to which you can discover what you do not yet know.
Next question, comment, reflection?
Okay, please go ahead, Lydia.
unidentified
So I was a student last year, and it's been my privilege to accompany the university
as a tutor this year, and to see it grow.
And it's my opinion that the college is a process and not a permanence.
And it's very exciting to see you guys here.
So thank you for coming.
It seems to me that there has been much success, as you mentioned, Chris, with the decentralization of money in the education system by creating more opportunities for school of choice.
And I wonder if in thinking about colleges and students being the new adult humans who are trying to bring forward The next version of the world.
Would you agree that protesters against any war, whether they be students or otherwise, at least rightly stand against the use of the American tax dollar for un-American involvement in a war of some other kind of with which the United States has no quarrel?
And if that is true, what solution might you offer to young people who see a great, as a great agony, this inability to divorce their hard-earned, the fruits of their labor, from the destruction of the potential kind of community that we'd like to foster here and around the world?
christopher f rufo
Can you be a bit more specific?
Is there a kind of specific reference?
unidentified
What I mean specifically is I think that there are many young people who are distressed because they look to the truth and want to get there but feel very much thwarted by particularly governmental legislation, much as
maybe the business owner would feel thwarted, especially in California, by the degree to which the government controls
your property, whether that's through property tax, or that's through sales tax or whatever it might be. I think there
are many, many, many young people who are fighting over a communal pot of resources, because they don't have access
to their own labor in the same way that let's say, over 100 years ago, at least prior to the federal income tax in 1990,
1913, people would have been able to control their own action, and not necessarily need to come to a consensus.
We fight for consensus now, perhaps because we don't have access to our own labor in the same way.
And if that's true, which maybe it's not, maybe you disagree, but if that is true, what solution or what potential hope or leverage might you suggest towards those who are fighting on campuses today and perhaps trying to fight through their own conversations?
christopher f rufo
Okay, and just for a follow-up, just so we're clear, but what is the foreign policy element?
unidentified
That's what I'm asking.
What foreign policy element would you suggest?
Or would you recommend to young people a different way to think about how to divorce taxation
from military industrial pursuits with which the student doesn't have a particular end?
Want to take that one first?
dave rubin
I'll try.
So there's a couple things there.
First off, as a general rule, if you were to, and I argued for this in my first book, like I would be for a flat tax so that we didn't have so many selective pressures and punish people for making more money and everything else.
If you had a flat tax for, you know, let's say 15%, First off, I think you can make an argument for no tax, but putting like the pure libertarian thing aside, if you had a flat tax argument where everyone was just paying the same exact percentage, so if you made a million bucks you're paying 15%,
Or if you made 100,000 bucks, you're paying 15%.
I think that removes a lot of the problems you're talking about, because everyone feels that the skin in the game is exactly the same.
I would even, and I don't think that this fully, I don't think this is sort of moral in a sense or fully works, but just to throw the progressives a bone, I think you could probably say, all right, if you make under 50 grand, you pay no tax, and if you make over five million a year, throw a couple extra percentage points in.
I don't even think that economically works, or as I said, morally.
But just to make some sort of political agreement on that, I think it could work.
So first off, a flat tax would just, I think, sort of zero out a lot of the problems that you're talking about.
As it pertains to foreign policy, I mean, generally speaking, I believe speak softly and carry a big stick.
I believe in having a strong military so we don't have to use it.
I think partly what I think a lot of kids are seeing now, or young people are seeing now, are we've had a bunch of military adventures that have made Very little sense that haven't been sold to us properly were never sold properly The Iraq war never really made sense in the context of 9-11.
I know some Iraqis that That think it was good because Saddam was so bad and even though now in many ways Iraq is a failed state We also Obama took us to war to Libya, which we never We never declared war on they didn't want to declare war So he called it a kinetic military action and Libya is now in essence a failed state People look at the withdrawal of Afghanistan, which was the longest war that America had ever been in.
So young people grew up in all of these wars that nothing really made sense.
I would say that's very different than World War II, and certainly World War I.
But now they're looking at that and going, well, wait a minute, why am I paying for any of this?
And I think that that's a legitimate argument.
I also think we have a really whacked out sense of how we operate with the military industrial complex, because basically all the aid that we give to many of these countries, we don't give them money.
We give them money that they have to spend in the United States for more weapons.
So we're basically In a sense, it's a question about the reclamation of agency.
complex here, so we have an incentive to keep other countries at war. That's a huge, huge
problem that I think more and more people are seeing. So I think the less money in general
that you give to the system, it will probably put back a little less of the stuff that you're
worried about. I hope that roughly answered the question.
stephen blackwood
In a sense, it's a question about the reclamation of agency.
In a sense, over to you, Chris.
christopher f rufo
Yeah, I mean, look, I didn't... This is a... For the short and medium term, an insoluble
You know.
The political right has promised to reduce the size of government for a full century.
And has been remarkably unsuccessful and in many terms complicit in its expansion To the point now where my favorite statistic is that the United States of America has a larger public sector state sector as a percentage of GDP than Communist China So the Communist China has a more limited government as a percentage of GDP not in other ways I lived in China for sure not in other ways but I think it shows the kind of futility of continuing to make the same promise.
We're going to lower your taxes and reduce the size of government.
I find that to be untrustworthy when you hear it as rhetoric because it's extraordinarily unlikely unless we have some financial catastrophe and then even then Who knows?
That can go either way.
You can go the Venezuela route, or you can go the, even the kind of Russia route.
Russia has a, again, I'm not a fan, but it has a flat tax, you know, because a bunch of University of Chicago economists went in after it collapsed.
And I only bring that point up to say that in conditions of chaos and turmoil, you can get radically new kind of political and economic structures.
But if we are just on a normal trajectory, There's no answer to that question.
As an individual though, there are some things that you can do.
You can move to a lower tax state.
Certainly saving the 15% additional state income tax from California up to Florida or where I am in Washington is a huge incentive.
You can be an entrepreneur and hire a very aggressive accountant.
That's another way of actually kind of maximizing what you do.
And so it's an unfortunate situation.
Another great stat, it kind of shows you how far things have fallen, is during the American
Revolution, I looked this up, I was like, what was the effective tax rate of the Stamp
Act and the King George, what was the effective tax rate that made the American colonists
so upset?
It was somewhere between one and 2%.
He said, man, They fought a war over a 1% tax, and in California it's like, well, 52% could be worse, you know.
So I think, again, this is a problem that you can solve as an individual to a certain extent, but I don't think we can solve it structurally.
And on the question of foreign policy, as much as it's a rhetorical winner to say, you know, The hundred billion dollars to Ukraine, we could, you know, feed the veterans here at home, you know.
I hear that all the time, like, okay, fine, you know, but foreign aid, even foreign military aid, is a vanishingly small fraction of the overall federal budget.
The big questions, and look, you could zero it out, you could double it, I don't, you know, won't take a position, but would make relatively small difference.
As an absolute kind of budgetary figure, as a philosophical, symbolic matter, might not be true.
But the real drivers are Social Security, Medicare, means-tested welfare programs.
I mean, those have been, you know, just kind of steadily expanding in size since the mid-1960s, and there's no political will to wind them down.
unidentified
And so this is the situation you'll be in probably for your lifetime.
stephen blackwood
On that sunny note, we're going to turn over to the next question or comment from a student, and I think we can get one or two more in.
Anna, before we need to conclude.
unidentified
Thank you for being here.
I'm curious about the girl with the blue hair or the administrator who waved her finger in your face.
You know, maybe not them specifically, but are there people, I mean, you've even used the term sort of like the enemy, are there people who keep you up at night?
And would you give any advice to us as we go out to be either raisers or capturers or builders, any principles to maybe not leave them behind?
dave rubin
Oof, I mean, are there people who keep me up at night?
stephen blackwood
I mean... And how not to leave them behind, in some sense, in a vision for the future?
dave rubin
Sure.
I mean, yeah, I think we have people quite literally in our government from, let's say, Ilhan Omar and AOC and Rashida Tlaib and a couple others, all the way to the top.
I mean, if you just look at the border alone, somewhere between, and since Biden has been president, somewhere between 7 and 10 million illegals have come into this country.
Some of them have their reasons, desires.
Some of them may be brought family.
Often they're 25 to 35 year old men of fighting age with no family.
I mean, this is not the...
You know, this is not your grandparents coming to Ellis Island in 1940.
Um, we have a series of people now in our government and then a media that run cover for them, uh, who actively are indoctrinating young people into thinking that the country's fundamentally evil and then importing people either, you know, some people argue they're importing new voters.
They're either importing people to collapse the system, meaning you put so much strain on the systems, the system basically collapse collapses.
And then they point to that as evidence that the system never worked in the first place.
So I would say the people that are keeping me up at night are the ones that seemingly are doing everything to destroy the system.
They've set out to do something.
They're telling us this is not a fundamentally good place, which is ironic because then they want everyone to come here.
So there's a little bit of a disconnect there.
But I would liken this to if you guys saw the original Alien movie, which I just watched again a couple of days ago.
You know, in the Alien movie, the doctor on Ash is the doctor on the ship.
And you don't realize until a little bit into the movie that he happens to be an android.
And as the alien has now systematically just wiped out everybody except Sigourney Weaver and him right at the end.
Don't give it away!
It came out in 1977, so you guys will have to bear with me here.
Basically, he says, well, you're going to get a spoiler here.
Well, it's not even a spoiler.
You know that Sigourney Weaver's okay at the end of the movie.
You know that, right?
So it's not really a spoiler.
It's just an interesting little note that the doctor on the plane, the robot, He is, the android, he's actually quite impressed by the alien because the alien is remorseless.
It has set out to do something, as far as they know, just kill everybody on board.
And it's going ahead and doing it.
And I think that's why it's very easy for us to be glib and I can make all the jokes about the blue haired kid that's screaming and all that.
But if you look at the idea set that these people are coming from, they've destroyed an awful lot.
All of the things that we are now seeing in this country and the confusion that young people have.
That many people no longer, like it was a given when we were all growing up that life was going to be better, that our parents had it better than our grandparents and we were going to have it better than them.
I'm guessing most of you either don't think that or at the very least you think it's very, very up in the air, right?
So we have to give the devil his due here.
These people set out to do something They basically told us what they set out to do and they are doing it on our watch.
So that's where we have to get better at destroying their toolkit and building new things and all of that, because otherwise, uh, we will all stay.
Oh, and how do we bring them across?
You can, you, you can hope to wake people up every now and again.
It happens every now and again, someone suddenly has something that they hold very dear and they speak up and the mob comes for them and then they go, wait a minute, wait a minute.
That's how I behave to other people.
I see this all.
I mean, my email is full with this people that used to call me a racist that are suddenly like, you know, Dave, I guess you were kind of right.
Cause somebody called me a racist and I'm not a racist.
So you, you just have to give enough space for them to, to have their awakening as well.
I would say.
stephen blackwood
Chris?
christopher f rufo
I would take maybe a bit harder-edged position here.
dave rubin
Wipe them at the alien position?
unidentified
Maybe.
christopher f rufo
I haven't watched that movie in a long time.
But look, the finger-wagging provost, had we kept her at that job, she would have destroyed everything that we're doing now.
you have to make a hard cut and certain people are, you know,
certain people would be more aligned with other opportunities.
You know, you can say like a nice HR thing, you know?
And at New College of Florida, one of my favorite, you know, other lines is we had a turnover in the faculty.
I like to say that we gracefully facilitated the exit of about 40% of the faculty.
There's probably another harder way to say that, that is a bit more truthful, but you change leadership, you change incentives, and if the same group of people are... if the institution is composed by the same group of people that ruined it in the first place, you're not going to be able to improve it.
And so when the press came and it said, you know, new colleges is...
You know, we got terrible press for a long time, which is another fun challenge, but they said, oh, this is, haha, you know, we've got you.
40% of the faculty have left after the first year.
And I said, yes, this is a great disappointment.
I was hoping it would be at least 50%.
least 50% because I think that's the kind of bedrock of it and you know we
have you know an institution can have a certain number of Kind of dissenters, eccentrics, malcontents, critics, you know, blue hairs, whatever you want to call it, the kind of archetypes that make an institution rich.
A Marxist professor, great, you know.
It's always fun to have a Marxist, you know, professor as a little, kind of an eccentric.
But when they're 80% of certain departments or certain institutions, that's not functional anymore.
And so you have to be very judicious.
You also have to be very tough.
And you have to also be willing to say no.
And it starts with small things.
One of the, at New College, same story, the gender studies professor whose program we abolished, you know, tried to trick us at one of the board meetings because they elected her to the board of trustees.
And she said, well, I want to propose a kind of other business, a resolution to recognize Latinx Heritage Month, you know, or I don't know, something.
And I said, well, you know, that's cool, but it's also Columbus Day this month.
So would you be, you know, my esteemed colleague, trustee, Steve, what's her name?
Reid.
Would you be, it's curious, you don't want to issue a proclamation on behalf of all Italian
Americans as well.
On behalf of Columbus Day, and of course she went nuts and started mumbling about Indigenous
People's Day and such, and I said, you know, but that's not the point.
The point is, if we are to agree to take up our valuable board time, which we're delegating,
we're making decisions on multi-million dollar contracts, expansions, curriculum, if we're
going to also kind of reduce our role to kind of marking up the official calendar, and if
we were to say yes to Latinx Heritage Month, we'd have to say yes to every single other
month.
And we'd be wasting our time, which is a large part of what you guys were doing here previously.
And so we're not going to do that.
So no.
And I encourage all of my colleagues to vote no.
I think perhaps some of the other board trustees are looking around scared.
We can't say no to Latinx Heritage Month.
You know, someone's going to be upset at us.
That's precisely the problem though.
And then if it's one trustee, I think we have a nice, you know, and then one of them kind of the, the, the, you know, playing bad cop, we can push it back.
But you know, would it be better without that trustee?
Yes.
All people that are mission aligned, focused, have the same principles.
But certainly if you have a kind of plurality and then a majority, institutions can't function.
And I think that, I think people are too nice, to be honest.
That's what it is.
People are unwilling to say no.
I feel like no is the most underused word in the English language.
We'd be a lot more successful as a society if people said no more frequently.
And to me, like, a lot of it boils down to that, you know.
And I remember a couple moments during this conflict.
We had bomb threats, death threats.
They tried to shut down our events.
As trustees of this new college, there were protesters.
I got spit on.
A violent battery in the state of Florida.
You know, kind of insane anarchy and chaos.
And I kind of realized, like, absolutely not.
We're not going to let any of this stand.
We're not going to permit any of this.
We're not going to back down a single inch.
Um, because you know, the most manipulative, the most cynical, the most, um, uh, kind of pathological people under those rules will win every time.
And we're going to say absolutely not.
And, and I, and I, I forced the police to open the doors and said, Hey, look, you know, if they're going to take a shot, let them take a shot.
What are we going to do?
You know, Well, it's just too dangerous.
You can't do this.
You can't do that.
You know, and I said, all right, I'm going to hold the, this event outside in the middle of the mob, or you can let them in and protect me inside.
You know, what's it going to be?
All right, fine.
We'll open the doors.
Um, but had we not made those decisions at that critical moment of transition, the whole project would be, would be lost.
I think.
dave rubin
By the way, real quick, I would just connect that to politically what's going on here.
You know, liberals have a much harder time saying no.
So Chris went in and said no.
Liberals have a hard time saying no.
The Democrat Party did not have to get this crazy.
There were people around.
There were more moderates and true classical liberals in the party that could have fought against the radicals, but they were all afraid to say no.
They didn't want to deal with the things that were going to be said about them, all the rest of it.
And now in some respects, the inmates are running the asylum.
Um, so I think it's just, it's just the good people's ability.
They are just, they are just watching and waiting.
And the more they can get good people to just be quiet, the more they will just take and take and take whether it's a DEI bureaucrat or whether it's a politician that wants to burn the system down or whatever discipline you're coming from.
christopher f rufo
And they try all sorts of techniques.
Right.
And you know, um, I, I'm even currently under, I think it's ongoing.
A federal Department of Education civil rights investigation because the ACLU attorneys filed a complaint that in part complained that I did not use ZZR pronouns for one of the New College of Florida employees whose employment was terminated.
unidentified
It's like, you know, no.
christopher f rufo
I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to call—this is just a woman.
Maybe a nice woman, fine.
Perfectly okay.
You know, not a good fix.
We don't have a DI department anymore.
But I'm not gonna call this person a zeezer.
Just not gonna do it.
And it's not just liberals.
Conservatives actually, in some ways, have a... Look, the left, I mean, at least they're in the same camp, so they have trouble saying no to people who are kind of proximate to them.
In my world, conservatives have a hard time saying no, even to ideas that they, in principle, disagree with.
And because it's how kind of social arrangements work and so I think we need to kind of normalize saying no and then we have to recognize that any institution and look at the kind of the question on from I think the gentleman here on kind of competing conceptions of the truth.
I mean one of the fundamental responsibilities for any institutional leader is to set limits And so if you're unable to set limits for your institution,
your institution will go in the wrong direction very quickly.
And so part of the hard part about what I think needs to happen in the United States is the reimposition of
limits.
unidentified
Thank you.
christopher f rufo
You know, no, you can't be a man and turn into a woman.
Sorry, that's just not, that's outside the limits of reality.
You know, you can't, you know, free expression comes with a corresponding obligation to try to say something valuable.
You know, all of these limits and corresponding duties, which we've shed over time, And this is a political question that I don't know the answer to.
I think it's very hard.
I'm not necessarily optimistic in the short term that people have the stomach for it.
But I think that our hope is that by exercising that, you know, you said something very interesting earlier, you said, well, these trustees had the power, but they didn't use it.
I actually think if you don't use power, you don't actually have it.
If you're too scared to use the power that you technically have on paper, do you really have power?
And so I think we have to get, kind of train ourselves in the exercise of political power, in the exercise of imposing limits, in the exercise of saying no to things that are bad, things that are wrong, to things that are destructive towards those IRNs.
And that to me is the essential work in every institution.
And I think just as far as the American character, a kind of missing element to our national character
that I'd like to see successfully revived.
stephen blackwood
I'm gonna bring us to a close here in just a minute, just give each of our panelists a chance to wrap up.
But I wanna pick up on this, on saying no, because there is a sense in which a no
is also in light of a yes.
So if you have a toddler who's, you know, I remember one time one of my little brothers came in running, screaming, he'd been upset about something, he ran right into the wood stove.
And, you know, that was a bad move, you know, it went from bad to worse.
And so, you know, when you say no, don't do that.
Right?
It's out of a frame of a positive conception of why that's a no, right?
Because we're protecting, you know, your agency or a shared horizon of civic good or whatever the case may be.
And so, you know, I used to think, just to bring us back to where we started about how building can only happen in a positive A positive vision, you know, every positive vision is limited, so you can be this and not being that, right?
And if you don't hold to that in the way Chris is saying, you have nothing at all.
You know, I used to think that the great argument for starting new institutions was, and I would still die on this hill, was sort of Schumpeterian creative destruction.
It was, you know, if we can't break stagnancy without, you know, new competitors, and I say I would still, you know, die on this hill.
But I've actually come to think there's a more fundamental urgency to starting new things.
And that, you know, to take a metaphor, imagine that a starving young mother with her three emaciated children shows up at your door, you know, please please give me something to eat.
You know, if you say no, go down to the food bank that we both know doesn't have any food.
In some sense, you are morally culpable for that person's death.
And I think, actually, to take that metaphor to the realm of higher education, you know, none of us knows the future.
None of us knows what, you know, 10, 20, you know, the medievals and the ancients are very clear on this.
We don't see even a second into the future.
But the fundamental moral question I'm trying to pose here with respect to education is, are we going to give the young something to eat or not?
You know, that's a fundamental moral imperative.
And you might say, that extends into all of the work of cultural production and making.
Are we going to live our lives in such a way that enable, you know, human flourishing for the realization of human potential or not?
So I'd like to ask each of you, starting with Dave and then Chris, any final reflections on building new things?
Any final reflections on your time here?
Why you're here in the first place?
Anything you'd like to say by way of closing out this conversation?
dave rubin
Yeah, well, first I would just say it's been a pleasure chatting with you guys, and you know, I know when an audience is good.
I mean, every one of you has been looking at us this entire time.
I don't think anyone's looked at their phone or started doing anything else, and that's the mark of people who are paying attention, and I'm sure that's the mark of Uh, of everything that you guys are doing here.
Um, I would say that, uh, it's, it's a strange situation to be, I guess, your age and think that the world is way more, uh, or, or way less promised than what we had, as we discussed earlier, where we just kind of thought everything was going to kind of work and you could get a job and you could get a house and Build things properly and have a family and it was going to kind of work and we're now everything's feels very precarious.
And it's like, is the West going to continue?
Will America functionally continue in 20 years?
Will a country break up?
Like God only knows with, with all of the problems that we've talked about here and plenty of problems that we haven't talked about, but that is the opportunity for you guys.
And you guys clearly by being here, you already, are probably, I kid you, I don't think it's an exaggeration
to say you are probably 99% ahead of every single person your age at this point. That
probably is true. So if you can take that into the world and then you can aim at whatever you
want to aim at, you will be okay.
Because if all of the stuff fails, the jobs don't work out the way you want,
You go to a city and the city's not operating the way you want.
The state's not... You have this incredible opportunity still in the United States of America, for all of her flaws, to move to a place that's more in line with your values, to figure out a way to live a little more off the grid if you want, to work for yourself.
All of the things are still here.
The experiment is still ongoing.
My favorite The line that I quote from Dennis Prager all the time is about the great experiment of America.
Like, it's happening all the time.
You can go to the high-tax state if you feel that that's something that you want to be part of, or you can go to a state because they have legalized weed, or you can figure out all of the different reasons to go to different states and figure out a life that is yours.
It's still operable here.
It's still functional here.
It feels like it's not in some ways, but it absolutely is.
And you guys have a leg up, so can we do this in another year and see where they're all at?
What do you think?
stephen blackwood
You bet we can.
dave rubin
All right.
christopher f rufo
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's an incredible opportunity that you have to, you know, to study Greek, to kind of cycle through the great arc of history in an accelerated format.
It's certainly something that I think is going to become more and more relevant.
I see this in my own kids enrolled in a classical pedagogical environment where they do the cycle of history three times from K through 12.
I think there's a huge store of value in that, and one of the great things of books and speeches and poems that have stood the test of time is that the stakes are high, and I think that One of our great problems is that we don't have people, we don't create people with a sense of stakes as we used to.
And so if your ideal life is to get a degree from an Ivy League institution and to become a consultant for McKinsey and then become a product manager at Google, you know, that's a life for sure.
It could be a, an interesting life in certain regards, but I think that
there's something that's much higher that's out there, and there is a greater calling for
creative, confident, courageous people.
And if you have a year to develop some independence of mind, I think that it should, in theory,
if the pedagogy works, create some independence of means later, and then also an independence
of spirit, ultimately.
And to me, that's a very attractive prospect.
And I think that we have a kind of grey, dismal, institutional conformism.
And to the extent that you can distinguish yourself from that and then be willing to pursue your own path despite whatever trials and challenges that come along, hopefully an education will prepare you for that.
And I think that You know, what I've learned in some of my challenges and trials, some very difficult, you know, people trying to ruin your life or do, you know, attack you or defame you or, you know, destroy you or I'm in a party to a number of lawsuits right now.
You know, I was ducking the NAACP for a little while.
I don't know why they think I'm some sort of evil mastermind.
But through all of these challenges, the other side of the coin is that there are You know, a hundred times as many people that rally to your side and rally to support what you're doing.
And to me it shows that people are looking for a champion.
They're looking for someone to represent their values, to represent their commitments, to represent some sort of hope.
And I hope that something like Raulston College and some of the other educational experiments that are happening We'll produce, and maybe one of you has that kind of in your future, in your destiny.
And I think that we're going to need it in the coming years.
And so to me, it's very exciting.
And, you know, I think that we have a huge opportunity as things become more clear, Has the problems become more visible?
And it's a great line.
It's a line from Machiavelli and he talks about in a moment of revolutionary transition, the invisible becomes visible.
That's kind of like the metaphor.
And I think that we're in such a moment and to me that we should embrace it and prepare for it.
unidentified
And I hope that's what you're doing in your year here.
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