Chris Rufo argues America remains stuck in 1968’s ideological battles, with movements like BLM and Antifa echoing the Black Panthers and Weather Underground, while Nixon’s pragmatic solutions—desegregation without chaos, revenue sharing, and engaging China—were discarded. He blames left-wing capture of universities, corporations, and agencies via CRT, DEI, and ESG, crediting Trump for exposing these frameworks and framing Trumpism as a Nixon-style realignment to reclaim institutions before conservative gains erode. [Automatically generated summary]
Rural Americans deserve access to the best our nation has to offer, especially when it comes to health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families health.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.
Don't cut rural health care.
Joining me now is Christopher Ruffo.
He is a prominent American writer, filmmaker, and conservative activist, renowned for his influential role in shaping contemporary debates on culture, education, and public policy.
He's the author of America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered America, a best-selling book that traces the intellectual roots of progressive ideologies and their impact on American institutions.
Chris, welcome into the Stone Zone.
Thank you for having me.
I have wanted to have you for a long time.
I'm glad we're able to finally get this set up.
You wrote a piece entitled Bring on the Counter Revolution.
This is, I think, one of the most important things written in the last 10 years in terms of understanding how the past is prologue and how what America is going through today is what America has gone through in the past.
And as the subhead of your piece says, conservatives need a national agenda that reclaims America's institutions from the left.
A blueprint exists, but from a surprising source.
That source, according to your piece, is one President Richard Milhouse Nixon.
I'm just going to read the first sentence and let you kind of take it away.
America is trapped in the rupee of 1968.
The politics of that fateful year have set patterns and bounds of our current national life and national life for decades.
Chris, take it away.
That's exactly right.
And, you know, growing up, I bought into what was and unfortunately continues to be the conventional wisdom about Richard Nixon's presidency.
But as I dug deeper and read the history, and this is, of course, something that you know from your own firsthand experience and relationship with the former president, it was very different.
The reality was very different than the narrative.
And one thing I learned studying Nixon is that all of the great political questions and dramas and archetypes that we're grappling with today really first emerged in the first and the first part of the second term of President Nixon.
And in fact, he anticipated many of these questions.
He had some wisdom on how to potentially address some of these questions.
And I think that he really is the kind of skeleton key to modern politics and should be reappraised for those of us, especially on the right.
Yeah, I obviously agree with that.
I think one of the great tragedies, of course, is that many of his great accomplishments, strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviets, the desegregation of the public school system without bloodshed or incident,
the saving of Israel unilaterally in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, federal revenue sharing where public monies are best spent at the local level, the war on cancer, bringing China in out of the cold at a time that China was a dirt poor, agrarian society with little technology, without a strong military.
Most of the Chinese did not have indoor plumbing.
The rural areas had no electricity.
There was no way for Richard Nixon to know that 30 years later, President Bill Clinton would give the Chinese most favored nation trading status, and he would also sell the Chinese some of our top military secrets, including our missile targeting technology in the Loral strategy, those two things playing a major role in making China the great danger it is to the country today.
You make an excellent point about the fact that the Black Panther Party of the 1970s now reappears as Black Lives Matter, and the weather underground re-emerges as Antifa.
Past really is prolonged.
As you say, the cultural revolution that began a half century ago is now reflected in the, as you put it, deadening sequence of acronyms, CRT, DEI, ESG, and more.
So I think what you say is absolutely true that Nixon anticipated these things and frankly, he dealt very effectively with them.
It's a terrific piece entitled Bring on the Counterrevolution.
I highly recommend it to you.
But in your new book called America's Cultural Revolution, you talk more about the parallels between how the Chinese and American institutions have been conquered by communists.
Talk to us about that.
Yeah, I mean, that's right.
And I think, look, President Trump has really outlined this in his very unique and colorful way.
He talks about the radical left lunatics at Harvard and Columbia and Princeton and other elite universities.
And the ideologies that are really manufactured within those universities have now extended outwards.
And, you know, what I found particularly fascinating is that the Black Panther ideology, the Weather Underground ideology, the new left ideologies that were really at the fringes of that time, suddenly after 2020 became proliferating throughout our institutions, universities, corporations, schools, government agencies.
And really what Nixon feared came to pass.
And the tactics and techniques that he had contemplated then unfortunately were not implemented at that time.
And now we're going to have to take much more dramatic action.
That's why I think we've seen in the first almost 100 days of the Trump presidency, this really brutal, you know, drag out, knockdown fight with the Ivy Leagues.
And I think that is targeting exactly the heart of the problem.
He's kind of lifted up the rock and finding all of the critters that are hiding under these in the dirt.
And it's really time to take these ideologies, These ideas that have baked in these places for so long, and to actually try to mount a proper and true defense.
Rural Americans deserve access to the best our nation has to offer, especially when it comes to health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24/7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families health.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.
Don't cut rural health care.
He's certainly unique.
I watched him the other day talking about Canada.
I've never seen him so crisp.
And he basically said, Look, we buy virtually nothing from them.
They really have nothing that we really need.
They buy a lot from us.
As I like to tell Governor Trudeau, I mean, who else would say that?
Can you picture Ronald Reagan calling the prime minister of a foreign country governor, a governor, as if they were governor of the U.S. state?
I mean, the guy is part stand-up comedian.
He's part statesman.
He's part salesman, but he's also part stand-up comedian.
The guy is hysterical, but it was one of his most crisp deliveries in terms of messaging that I have seen.
I mean, look, we saw yesterday that tariff revenue is up to $15 billion, which is an all-time high.
That was in April.
Yet inflation remains relatively low, unless you're Jerome Powell and you can't read.
So that to me tells us that Trump's underlying economic theory is correct.
Well, yeah, it's a good question.
And I think that, look, his economic theory is really at odds with, again, the conventional wisdom.
And I'm not an economist.
I won't hazard any predictions, but we're going to see if the conventional wisdom holds or whether Trump, who arrives at these questions intuitively rather than purely intellectually, is actually right.
So we're going to see that.
But on the point of his humor, I'll admit, in 2015 and 2016, I was turned off by the way the president spoke.
I didn't quite click in with it.
I thought that it was outrageous.
But then there was a moment in his first term when I was watching him at length and it suddenly clicked with me.
I said, he is hilarious.
I mean, he knows exactly what he's doing.
It's this dry sense of humor.
It's this New York attitude.
And from that moment, when I really understood the president's humor and wit, was really when I really understood him as a president, as a public figure.
And he really, I mean, I'll tell you my favorite line of his.
You know, during the 2020 debates, they were questioning him.
You know, today's basically saying, oh, you're racist.
And he's in this big debate hall and he shields his eyes from the Klieg lights.
And he says, you know, I can't see all the way in the back, but I'm pretty sure I am the least racist person in this room right now.
And it's just the outrageous, you know, totally off the wall.
I mean, it's an inborn talent.
You can't teach that.
You can't develop that.
You can't practice that.
He's just a kind of creature that is totally unique in American life.
Well, something President Nixon once told me is that the only thing wrong in American politics than being wrong is being boring.
And Donald Trump completely understands that.
He is never boring.
He's always interesting and he is also entertaining.
I think he also recognizes that if you're not interested, well, the voters begin to look elsewhere.
But the other thing is that he is, I can tell you, he's completely unscripted.
I mean, what you see is what you get.
We couldn't get him to even think about using a teleprompter until after he had won the nomination in 2016.
He flatly refused to do it because he thought it was phony.
I don't want to look like a politician, he would say.
It was hard enough to get him to speak from just notes.
He spoke contemporaneously off the cuff almost all the time.
Now, after the first time that I think it was Paul Manafort persuaded him, please once, just once, try the teleprompter.
Well, once he tried it, he loved it.
However, when he's using the teleprompter, you can always tell when he goes off a teleprompter into one of his rhetorical cul-de-sacs that are always pretty funny.
And then he'll come back to his main topic.
He calls it weaving.
He will say, you see how I weave that?
The guy is very, he's very funny.
Which American institutions that have been captured by the hard left are most crucial for the American people to reclaim in order to preserve the country?
Well, look, I think you have to start with the universities.
You have to then continue to the schools.
And then you have to burrow into the civil rights regime.
So HR, legal, and other professional class institutions.
And I think that that will go a long ways.
And what President Nixon saw the beginning of, and we're really arriving to this in mature form, he talked about what was known then as the Eastern establishment.
But I think now it's really a nationwide, kind of bi-coastal, professional managerial establishment.
And as much as we may disagree with the popular ideologies within that establishment, that really is where policy gets made, how the narratives that circulate through the country get made, and where politics is shaped and formed.
And I think conservatives are going to really have to think in the next three and a half years, how can we influence that sector of society?
Because what I see right now in President Trump's second term is that you have a charismatic leader at the top who really is a force of nature.
And you have the MAGA base at the bottom, kind of working class, middle class, a lot of especially working class men, massive support across racial demographics.
But what we need is a kind of middle layer of professionals, institutions, and administrators that can take the raw democratic power of the base and the charismatic leadership of the president and then translate it through these captured institutions so that we can start to arrive at significant reforms.
Yeah, I think, I guess the answer to my question is kind of obvious.
Charismatic Leader and Base Dynamics00:02:24
We have to take back the schools.
If we don't take back the schools, then we lose the youth.
If we lose the youth, well, we lose the country.
I also think people don't understand that Trumpism is far, far broader and far, far deeper than the Republican Party.
There are people who voted for Donald Trump, who voted for Jimmy Carter and voted for Barack Obama.
The appeal of the MAGA movement, the America First Movement, far more, far broader than the Republican Party.
And now when you add to it, what I call the common sense Democrats like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., like Tulsi Gabbard, who's now a former Democrat, like Rod Blagojevich, like the mayor of Dallas, for example, you have a realignment very similar to the realignment that was fashioned by Richard Nixon in 1968, in which white Southern conservatives,
working-class blue-collar Catholics in the Northeast combined with traditional Republicans in the country to form a new majority.
That coalition may have been frozen temporarily by Watergate, but by 1979, it was flowing again.
It elected Ronald Reagan.
It is fundamentally the same coalition that would go on to elect Donald J. Trump.
Rural Americans deserve access to the best our nation has to offer, especially when it comes to health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families health.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.