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Sept. 21, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

01:20:06

Sidebar with Christopher F. Rufo - Viva & Barnes LIVE!

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	Yes.
	It depends on which country and which place.
	I didn't say that.
	can.
	People.
	People, first of all, anybody watching the Alex Jones trial today, you'll notice that the judge is saying this case is not about politics a little too much.
	So much so that...
	In my head was repeating the line from Shakespeare, me thinks she doth protesteth too much.
	But I showed that highlight.
	That was from yesterday's cross-examination of the plaintiff's expert.
	Just to show that, you know, the judge, maybe she's been watching Barnes and me, asked for a basis for the objection, and it came as such a surprise to the plaintiff's attorney.
	Three seconds of silence.
	Basis.
	We had a deal, Judge.
	You're not going to ask me for the basis of my objections.
	I object, you sustain, and that's how it works.
	All right, people, we've got a limited amount of time with tonight's guest, so I'm only going to do a brief intro while everyone trickles in.
	I'm watching the Alex Jones trial.
	I'm not going to be streaming it every day because, first of all, I don't think there's going to be something for me to add every day other than running commentary to what's going on.
	And today we had two plaintiffs.
	As witnesses.
	And I'll say one thing.
	I find it very hard to watch the trial when the parents are talking about the deaths of their children.
	I find it stomach-churning, soul-crushing, full stop.
	This trial is being conducted as though Alex Jones was the person who was responsible for the deaths of those kids.
	And Norm Pattis, as counsel to Alex Jones...
	Is showing not just his prowess at being an attorney, but his ability to be a human.
	Because I actually find Norm Pattis, in cross-examination of the plaintiffs, who have suffered trauma that nobody on this earth should suffer, seems to be more humane and human and compassionate to the plaintiffs than I find their own attorneys, who seems very exploitive and opportunistically so, compared to Norm Pattis, who seems very human.
	In the job that he has to do.
	So all that to say, I'll be covering it.
	I'm not going to be streaming it every day when there's a noteworthy witness that I think we can learn from.
	I'll cover it.
	That being said, people, three minutes in, we're going to last only about 10 or 12 minutes on YouTube before going exclusive to Rumble.
	We've got an individual who you all know, Christopher F. Ruffo, who...
	I've spent the better part of the day listening to interviews, listening to some of his episodes on YouTube, did a great podcast with Jordan Peterson, reading articles on him.
	We're going to be discussing critical race theory, that thing that didn't exist before they told you it existed, and if you opposed it, you're a bigot.
	So we're going to get into it because it's part and parcel of the political discourse today, not just critical race theory, gender theory, queer theory, and how How it's infiltrated all aspects of the administrative state, if I'm summarizing it properly.
	Now, we've got Christopher Ruffo, or we call him Chris.
	Chris, how are you doing, sir?
	I'm doing well.
	How are you?
	Very good.
	Very good.
	I'm going to bring in Barnes, and I'm going to put myself on the bottom.
	Everybody watching, go to Rumble right away so we can save some time.
	We're going to do a brief intro.
	Robert, how are you doing, sir?
	Good, good.
	Personally, I think I find queer theory a little bit queer.
	Well, we're going to get into it because I've taken my notes.
	Chris, I took notes today.
	I want to know what the principles are of CRT, queer theory, and whether or not they are basically variations of the same ideology in abstractum.
	But before we even get there, 30,000-foot overview for people who might be watching and who might not know who you are, though I suspect everybody does.
	Sure, yeah.
	I'm Chris Ruffo.
	I'm a writer, filmmaker, journalist, a policy expert at the Manhattan Institute.
	A couple of things I've been working on in recent years.
	One, I did a long series of reporting on homelessness and urban dysfunction in America's West Coast cities.
	Then I did a long series of reports and activist work on critical race theory that caught the attention of President Trump, legislators in every state except for Connecticut for some reason.
	And now I'm working on radical gender theory in American schools.
	I'm finishing up an investigative series looking at exactly what's happening in the classroom as it relates to sex and sexuality.
	Could you give sort of a basic background in terms of where you grew up, what your parents did, any siblings, things like that?
	Yeah, you know, I grew up in Sacramento, California.
	My dad was an immigrant from Italy.
	My mom had moved to California from Detroit.
	Both of my parents were actually lawyers.
	So sitting here with you two feels very comfortable sitting around the table talking to attorneys.
	And they gave me one piece of advice, though.
	They said, Chris, you can do anything you want in your life.
	The one thing we recommend that you don't do is become a lawyer.
	And so I followed their advice.
	I took a totally different path, first in documentary filmmaking, went to Georgetown for my undergraduate degree, started in documentary filmmaking, did a series of documentaries for PBS and other broadcasters, got a master's degree from Harvard, and then started doing a lot of this journalistic work.
	What was your undergrad and master's in what?
	In documentary filmmaking?
	No, no, I got an undergraduate degree from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, so kind of...
	Training for diplomats, CIA agents, that kind of thing.
	And then I got a master's in government and liberal arts at Harvard.
	Why did you go to Georgetown?
	I mean, most people that go to that school do so because they plan to enter diplomatic service.
	Did you plan on doing that or was it just a topic you were interested in?
	Yeah, I did.
	Yeah, I thought I would do something along those lines, but I had a change of heart when I entered college, when I was thinking towards the end of it and what I wanted to do.
	And the idea of becoming a lifetime civil servant, a lifetime member of the Foreign Service, working your way up from GS14 or whatever you start at, just didn't appeal to me.
	I wanted to do something more independent, something more creative, something a bit more individual, something a bit more entrepreneurial.
	And so I kind of jumped ship, although I used a lot of the skills that I developed at Georgetown.
	You know, I did documentaries for PBS all over the world, in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia, other projects, other kind of commercial projects.
	And so I got my travel fix.
	I think that was the big thing for me is really figuring out a way that I could, you know, earn a living, earn a little income, and then travel the world in my 20s.
	So I kind of found the back door to doing that without having to...
	Sacrifice myself to the bureaucracy.
	I read that you ran for office.
	I don't remember the district.
	Where did you run for politics?
	Yeah, I mean, a bit overstated.
	I ran for Seattle City Council, looking back very naively.
	But I didn't run a full campaign.
	I launched a campaign, spent, I think, a month or two running, and then quickly decided, this is not for me, even if I were to win.
	It's not a job that I would want, so I dropped out of the race.
	And it was one of those things, I'll tell you, one of those things that at the time was very difficult.
	It was a bit of a humbling moment, kind of humiliating experience.
	You go for something, you realize it's not for you, it's not in the cards.
	And then you kind of bow out.
	But at the same time, you know, I'll tell you, I learned everything that I know about politics.
	Everything that I've been able to apply to national politics, I learned in that very brief period engaging in Seattle politics.
	You kind of really understand the basic building blocks of narrative, conflict, power, how institutions work.
	How messaging works.
	And so I'm grateful for that early failure in my political involvement for teaching me just a ton.
	Getting kicked in the ass sometimes is the best way to learn something.
	Yeah, I mean, if Eva could speak to that, he ran for office in Canada, and then he ran from Canada after experiencing what that was like.
	But how much do you think your father's Italian background?
	One thing I've been interested in is there's a real gap in a lot of response to wokeism.
	Well, you could say they're idols.
	Ideologies of reshaping gender relationships, reshaping race relationships, borrowing Marxist analytic principles to try to apply it.
	You know, Gramsci's slow march to the institutions and targeting education of our young children.
	What's interesting is there's a big gap between continental Europe and eastern, central, and southern Europe on this.
	There's been a lot of eastern, central, and southern Europe that's been hostile to this, has been adverse to this.
	Within the United States, Trump did particularly well with better than...
	Past Republicans with Americans who had ancestral ties to Southern Europe and Central Europe and Eastern Europe more so than Western Europe.
	How much did your father's Italian heritage have anything to do with how you saw the world?
	You know, I think it had a big influence.
	You know, I grew up speaking Italian in the home.
	I speak to Italian in the home with my own kids.
	You know, I try to spend part of every year back in Italy with my friends and family in our home village.
	Did that throughout my childhood.
	And so I had a big impact in a couple different and maybe contradictory ways.
	You know, first off, all of my relatives in Italy are very far left wing.
	You know, left-wing, Gramscian, communists, Democratic Party of the Left members, very much a left-wing political ideology.
	At the same time, however, the kind of paradox in Europe and even Southern Europe that most people don't think about...
	Is that although they have, in some sense, a more left-wing governing system of economics, you know, high taxes, high regulation, a lot of bureaucracy, it's not the Thatcher or Reagan kind of Anglo-American model.
	They still have actually a more traditional, social, cultural, and familial structure.
	It's a bit misleading.
	They tend to delay marriage.
	They cohabitate before getting married.
	A lot of the overt religious sentiment has disappeared.
	But they still have basically a conservative culture.
	And so that's provided a bulwark against a lot of the...
	And so what I think the lesson is, as I travel between the two countries and think about it, is in the United States, we have kind of right-wing economics and left-wing culture, whereas in Europe, you have almost the reverse.
	You have left-wing economics and not right-wing, but certainly a bit more conservative and stable culture.
	And by any measure, you have a kind of coherent cultural fabric.
	And so you don't see, you know, whether you don't see the kind of left-wing ideologies on race and gender dominating the institutions, and you also don't see those social pathologies that I think are the result of some of those cultural problems, like homelessness, tents, drug addiction, overdose, you know, catastrophic family breakdown, single-parent households.
	A lot of those things Europe has been protected from.
	I've kind of been able to understand a bit of these problems looking from both sides.
	Chris, that might be the perfect segue.
	I'm going to wind it up on YouTube, go to Rumble, everybody, but this won't interfere with us.
	Your first expose, or you first got put on the map for exposing the homeless crisis that was in Seattle proper, right?
	Yeah, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
	Now, how do you go about exposing that?
	And did you find...
	In comparing it to exposing CRT, did you get more or less hate from people and the government for what you did there?
	And while you answer that question, I'm going to close down on YouTube.
	I'll tell you, it's kind of an interesting thing.
	That's a great question.
	I think I got probably the equal amount of hate, but...
	There's something about local hatred that actually is much more threatening, much more sinister, much more dangerous than a kind of generalized national left-wing hate.
	And so in Seattle, it was stuff like, you know, I was doxxed.
	People would put up posters with my face and my home address on it.
	They would take pictures of my family on the side of the...
	You know, you get flipped off as people drive by, or people would even be kind of more menacing, threatening, kind of intimidating you, coming to your house, you know, showing up where you live.
	And so that was, you know, starts to get a little dicey.
	You start to live a bit looking over your shoulder all the time.
	Whereas the scale of the pushback on the national issues surrounding CRT was certainly more.
	You know, John Oliver will do a 25-minute segment, you know, posting your picture, you know, 15 times during his monologue, trying to attack you.
	You get the whole kind of New York Times and Washington Post and New Yorker and The Atlantic all spun up against you.
	And so that media scrum is difficult.
	You have to then figure out the tactics on how to fight back, how to leverage it actually for your own advantage and against your enemies or your opponents at the very least.
	But it doesn't actually feel as personal.
	It's not the typically, although it has happened a little bit, it's not the crazy person showing up at your front door.
	There's a kind of variety of hatred.
	There's a kind of beautiful cornucopia of different flavors and colors and varieties of left-wing hate, and I like to think that I've experienced most, if not all.
	Can you explain to people, you were ahead of the curve at predicting the scope of the homeless problem and how its ramifications would be for major urban centers.
	I remember starting to see it, little bits and pieces in places like San Francisco and places like Santa Monica.
	But then after I'd left L.A., went back, and if I rented an Airbnb in Venice, a nice part of Venice, I'd walk around the corner and there'd be a huge tent encampment.
	For a while in Austin, Texas, you couldn't go underneath the highway underpass without a massive homeless encampment.
	And this was happening partially for legal reasons.
	Court cases were misinterpreted to mean there was a public right of homelessness, but also because there was this sort of almost late 60s, early 70s leftist-style politics that we've seen reflected now in the criminal justice system, aspects of the educational system then, but even more egregious now.
	But, you know, where things got chaotic.
	People forget New York in the 70s was atrocious.
	San Francisco in the 70s is a place you did Dirty Harry films, that kind of thing.
	How much, what was it?
	That you really revealed, and were you surprised by the reaction to it?
	Yes, I think that analysis is spot on.
	I think that the homelessness crisis was driven by three primary things.
	First off, it was driven by an addiction.
	You had an explosion of heroin, addiction in the Northwest.
	You had an explosion of...
	Heroin and fentanyl and methamphetamine addiction down in the California cities.
	And so you had a large number of people that had significant drug habits, totally debilitated, that were unable to work, unable to provide, and then found themselves on the streets.
	Second, you had a mental illness problem.
	You had the number of...
	Psychiatric inpatient beds in the country reduced by 95% per capita between roughly 1960 and 2020.
	And so you have less pace to put people that are suffering from schizophrenia, severe bipolar disorder, etc.
	And then third, as you suggested, there's a policy problem.
	The mayors and city councils of all these major affluent urban...
	We're going to decriminalize camping, decriminalize drug consumption, decriminalize low-level property crimes.
	And so you created this perfect storm where you had in-migration from all of the other areas because of the permissive policy structure in these cities, plus a whole group of people who were mentally ill, seriously addicted to drugs, or both.
	You're talking about upwards of 75% of the people who are on the streets experiencing street-level homelessness.
	And you had this Perfect storm that, unfortunately, at the time, I think it's changing now, the kind of political powers of the time were just denying it.
	They're saying, no, no, no.
	It's about housing.
	It's about capitalism.
	It's about racism.
	It's about all these other things.
	When presumptively...
	Capitalism and racism are probably unchanged in the last 10 years, 20 years.
	I think capitalism is good.
	I think racism is bad, but I don't think there's any evidence that it's driving something like the homelessness crisis.
	And so you had this really incoherent response.
	And so what I tried to do is really show all of those three things through on-the-ground reporting, through...
	I think I made my case.
	And in fact, what's been actually kind of, I guess, I don't know, surprising in a good way in the past year or so is that a lot of the themes and ideas that I was hammering on three years ago that were really viciously and vehemently rejected are now starting to get embraced by Left-wing politicians in those very cities who are starting to realize, whoops, we went way too far.
	We're going to backpedal.
	We're getting too much heat from neighbors, from businesses, from other stakeholders in our cities.
	And without crediting me by name, I think many of them thought, okay, maybe Rufo had some good points way back when.
	Is there any racial over-representation in the homelessness issue out West?
	I asked the question.
	I actually have no idea what the answer is.
	Yeah, I mean, overrepresentation from a kind of baseline of percentage in the population, yes.
	I think that, however, overrepresentation compared to what, right?
	So if you compare it to rates of drug addiction, if you compare it to rates of previous incarceration, if you compare it to a lot of the kind of...
	Underlying factors that are highly correlated with homelessness, those numbers start to shake out a bit differently.
	And of course, it's different in different cities.
	In LA, it's a bit more heavily concentrated in African American and Latino communities.
	But as you move up north to the northwest, it's still predominantly a white phenomenon.
	So you see, you know...
	A plurality of the homeless in Seattle, for example, are white men, typically between the ages of 18 and 40. Before we get into how you got into critical race theory, could you define for people what critical race theory is?
	Sure.
	Critical race theory is an academic framework that maintains that the United States is a systemically racist country and that all of the country's institutions, everything from the Constitution to the system of law to the economic system to the cultural manners and mores, preach the values of liberty and equality.
	But under the surface, if you do the critical race theory analysis, you find that they're simply...
	Chris, I'm old enough to remember, once upon a time...
	I thought I was hallucinating.
	We were told that CRT didn't exist.
	This is from August 2021.
	And it went from CRT does not exist, Republicans are making it up as a talking point, to it's no big deal, you'd better accept it real fast.
	One of the articles that I was reading on you said that the CRT phenomenon sort of fell into your lap because COVID lockdowns occurred and everybody starts screen grabbing Zoom meetings, sending it your way.
	First of all, how accurate is that?
	Why would people be sending it your way to begin with?
	And is that how you actually sort of came to be the name of the opposition or at least, you know, the spokesperson for and against CRT?
	Yeah, there's a lot of truth to that.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, I reported my first CRT story from the city of Seattle, actually broke that story and it became a big national story on On Fox News, on social media, etc.
	And then I started just getting all of these documents.
	People said, I guess this is the guy that we send the leaked documents to.
	And so I started fielding dozens and then hundreds and then now more than 5,000 different sources around the country in K-12 schools and corporations and government agencies, in public universities, etc.
	And so I became this great repository of this information.
	And then I was able to contextualize it, digest it, report it, and then turned into kind of an activist on this issue as well, trying to get from the reporting, from the kind of exposés, all the way to public policy.
	And so it was a kind of fortuitous opportunity that I took.
	And during one of the early CRT stories I went on, Tucker Carlson, he gave me this kind of joint intro spot opening the show, that Precious Tucker primetime monologue moment.
	And at the end of the monologue, I called on the president of the United States, then Donald Trump, to issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory from the federal government.
	And to my maybe surprise in a certain sense, but also I thought he might be watching.
	He saw the program.
	He agreed with what I was saying.
	And I got a call from the White House the next morning saying the president wants to take action on critical race theory.
	Can you help the White House team on our executive order abolishing it from the United States government?
	And so that's really, honestly, when you see the progression of my CRT stories over the summer of 2020, once President Trump touched it, it then created a national political issue.
	If you hate Trump, if you love Trump, whatever you think of him, everyone knows that when Trump touches something, it becomes a big national story.
	And so that's really...
	What happened at the genesis of this anti-CRT movement.
	And it came up actually in the first debate, as I recall.
	Christopher Wallace mischaracterized what CRT was.
	That's right.
	What was it like watching that and seeing the so-called Fox News guy, the son of Mike Wallace, old school liberal, went over to CNN, CNN Plus completely failed because nobody actually likes to watch him talk.
	But to watch that.
	You know, I kind of was...
	Disappointed.
	I like Chris Wallace.
	I mean, I think he's got a great voice.
	You know, he's kind of has a good kind of old, new style persona.
	But I mean, he could not have blown it any more than he did.
	He said, oh, what's wrong with racial sensitivity training?
	And it's like, Chris, I've substantiated in the reporting.
	The Treasury Department hired an ex-communist revolutionary, American Marxist revolutionary.
	Teaching that the United States was fundamentally and irredeemably racist, categorizing people into racial oppressor and oppressed groups, and trying to marshal the federal workforce for left-wing political activism.
	This is not racial sensitivity training by any sense.
	And so he just totally botched it.
	And at the one hand, I was kind of disappointed.
	On the other hand, it's like...
	I'm sitting there watching the debate on television thinking, wow, the stories that I broke are now a hot topic on the American presidential debate.
	And so as a journalist, kind of take off the activist hat, put the journalist hat on for a bit, that was a really rewarding thing.
	It's like, wow, my work matters.
	My work is actually shaping the public debate, whether or not Chris Wallace had no idea what he was talking about.
	So CRT, we were told it didn't exist, and then it became undeniable, and then we're basically told you have to accept it because it's the new reality.
	But the idea that America's fundamentally racist, every structure is built off the oppression of the white majority, of it's not necessarily only black minority, but other minorities, sort of adopting mutandus mutandus imperialism, but at a social level in America, even the successful...
	The examples of tolerance have a white supremacist or a sort of a white dominance aspect to it.
	That's effectively what CRT is, is just breaking down the social structure that exists today and interpreting it in light of an underlying racist foundation.
	That's right.
	And they start with those governing documents.
	They start with the Constitution, the 14th Amendment, even the 1964 Civil Rights Act, making the argument that Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and even the authors of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were actually kind of covert racists advancing a smokescreen of equality while maintaining white racial domination.
	But they even go a step further.
	They say things like individualism, rationality.
	Mathematics, enlightenment values, neutrality, objectivity, etc.
	are all racist concepts.
	And so, you know, you get this almost reduction into the absurd where there was a debate last year.
	I mean, the dumbest thing imaginable.
	You know, the white supremacist math teaches that 2 plus 2 equals 4. But, you know, ethno-mathematics or critical race mathematics.
	Could actually yield the answer that 2 plus 2 equals 5, because math is racist.
	I mean, not even worth explaining.
	There's a reason that they get there.
	It's kind of word games.
	But you get really, I think, one of the kind of most idiotic movements, and yet it captured the attention of all of these major organizations, including in the midst of this controversy.
	Oh, CRT isn't in schools, they said.
	And then the National Education Association, the National Teachers Union, which represents 3 million public school teachers in all 14,000 local school districts, passes a resolution at their national meeting saying explicitly, we endorse CRT.
	We want CRT in all 50 states and every school in the country.
	And so it's saying, wait a minute, you guys are officially endorsing it, saying you want it in every school.
	We have evidence and documentation from all over the country.
	And yet we're not allowed to talk about it.
	And I think this is something that's happening with more and more issues now.
	It's happening with gender ideology.
	It's happening with COVID policy.
	It's happening with everything, where there's a certain position that is dangerous for the powers that be that is then just walled off.
	You can't talk about it because it's a conspiracy theory.
	You can't talk about it because it's misinformation.
	You can't talk about it because it's harmful information, racist information, whatever it might be.
	And so there's a way where they use this power of media, high-tech companies, activist organizations, government agencies, to wall themselves off from uncomfortable or damaging information.
	And to me, you've seen it.
	Building over the years.
	And then in 2020, it just kind of masked off.
	It went wide open.
	And to the point where today, it's kind of bizarre.
	I always think, even as I'm working, okay, and I imagine you guys are the same way with YouTube and Rumble.
	How do we kind of walk within those unwritten rules where we can still be effective, but we may have to communicate more esoterically in order to get our message across?
	Can you describe how they often disguise what critical race theory is?
	I mean, they do this in many other contexts, too.
	But how it's sold at the local school district, so that if you're at your local school district, you might not realize that what they're teaching is critical race theory.
	Yeah, I mean, the biggest, single, most important way that they do it is by labeling it diversity, equity, and inclusion, or some combination thereof.
	And so if you're a parent, let's say in 2019, 2020, you're seeing your school board, oh yeah, we're having a new diversity policy.
	We're going to promote inclusion.
	We're going to make sure that kids of all backgrounds are getting what they need to be successful.
	As a parent, that sounds great.
	I support that.
	You support that.
	Everyone supports that.
	It has a nice connotation to it.
	It seems like a good idea.
	It's responding to a real problem, right?
	We know that there are racial gaps in education.
	We know there are racial gaps in other social outcomes.
	I think all of us want to figure out how to close those gaps, how to raise those...
	Raise the performance or the success or the income or the educational outcomes of groups that are a bit behind.
	And so most people buy into it because they say, hey, inclusion sounds good.
	I want to include everyone.
	The problem, however, is that you look at the documents, you actually go to the nitty gritty, you read the PowerPoint, and it's like, all the white employees need to stand up and go to the corner over here.
	You are the oppressors.
	All the black employees and Latino employees need to go over here.
	You are the oppressed.
	All of the Asian employees, we're very sorry.
	We don't know where to put you, but maybe go over there with the white employees.
	And you're guilty of these crimes.
	You have to apologize for your privilege.
	You have to perform kind of public acts of contrition and penance.
	These really bizarre kind of racial guilt rituals that I documented in all these institutions.
	And then all of a sudden people are saying, hey, wait a minute.
	This isn't just inclusion.
	This stuff is kind of...
	Weather underground style, left-wing cult programming.
	We don't want any part of that.
	And so we're going to start fighting about this.
	And that's really what we saw.
	We saw immediately when parents started to see what was happening from the inside rather than just from that euphemistic shell.
	You had parents really in revolt in more than a thousand school districts across the country showing up at those school board meetings, holding their school board members accountable.
	Seeing what was going on in the classroom and in the curriculum.
	And so it turned into this actually really powerful and really effective parent-driven movement.
	Chris, I'm going to bring up a document.
	I think it's from seattle.gov.
	And if it's not the document I was thinking of, it's at the very least the same essence of the document.
	When people think CRT, they think anti-white discrimination.
	And you're going to tell me if I'm right or if I'm wrong or if I'm out in left field.
	I remember seeing somewhere that punctuality was deemed to be white culture that it should be not necessarily shunned, but it shouldn't be prioritized.
	We can't see the URL.
	It's from seattle.gov forward slash documents forward slash departments white culture handout.
	Chris, you're going to tell me if I'm not wrong, but...
	It sounds like CRT is not just discriminatory against white culture, however you define it, but in their definition of it, it's fundamentally discriminatory or bigotry by lowered expectations for not white as though what they think is a prioritized value of white culture, that presumption itself is fundamentally racist and belittling to all other cultures.
	White culture defines what is considered normal.
	It creates the standard for judging values.
	For example, think about how these terms are defined.
	Good parenting, stable family, well-raised child, individual self-sufficiency.
	Why is this not soft bigotry or hard bigotry of lowered expectations under the guise of CRT?
	Yeah, this document, as Seattle had it, the National Nuclear Laboratories did the same kind of training, the Smithsonian Museum.
	Set of concepts was really everywhere.
	It kind of proliferated in 2020.
	I mean, yeah, it's unintentionally very racist, right?
	Timeliness is a white value.
	And it's like, wait a minute.
	I've been to East Asia.
	People show up on time.
	It has nothing to do with being white.
	You know, clocks and schedules and work shifts and all of these things.
	I've been to other parts of the world.
	You have to show up on time at work in Mexico and Latin America.
	You know, what do they possibly even mean by that?
	And then the other examples you mentioned, you know, it's like stable families are a universal human value.
	People want to have family stability.
	They want to have family harmony.
	They want to have strong...
	Upbringing for their kids.
	And you go down the line, like rationalism is a, you know, rationality is a white dominant value.
	Individualism, you know, the rugged individualism is, you know, white value.
	I mean, you know, it's kind of a weird thing where the anti-racists end up sounding a lot like the kind of white supremacists saying, you know, that yes, individualism, rationality, punctuality, rugged, you know, rugged.
	Competitive spirit are exclusive to one group of people.
	And it's like you kind of look at that old skit from a couple years ago from the guys in the blue shirts, and it said woke and racist, and they were agreeing with each other all the time.
	It's like that embodied perfectly.
	And you've got to think, who are these people that are putting this stuff together?
	I mean, not only how stupid are they, But how stupid do they think that we are to read this garbage and to say that, oh, yeah, this is great.
	I'm going to, you know, really make sure that no one at my office maintains punctuality because, you know, that's really just a white person's thing.
	It's so insulting, you know.
	You know, and I, you know, I mean, my wife is not white.
	My wife was born in Thailand.
	And so as these things were coming through, I was talking with her all the time.
	Oh, you know, what are you doing?
	What's their documents?
	And she just looked at me very confused.
	She's like, what are these people all about?
	This is ridiculous.
	All these things are good.
	They're open to everyone.
	This is what America is about.
	We need to expand those kind of principles as individualism and striving and going for the American dream as a positive virtue that is available to everyone rather than trying to say, That it is foreclosed only for certain racial groups.
	And so I found that the majority of people, and really the polling data showed this explicitly, parents of all racial groups, white, black, Asian, Latino, rejected CRT in the classroom in polling.
	They said, no, we don't want to teach systemic racism.
	We don't want to teach white privilege.
	We want to teach colorblindness, equality, meritocracy.
	And so that really is still a universal American principle.
	It has broad support from people of all racial backgrounds.
	And it unfortunately was just hijacked by this very fringe and small group of people pushing the nonsense of CRT.
	And yeah, I have two questions there because it's a deeply anti-American system.
	What is their...
	Ideal society.
	If they actually achieved what it is they're setting out to achieve, what does that look like beyond just tearing down everything that makes America America?
	And then the second part, how did they achieve this extraordinary capture of so many institutions?
	Employment institutions, governmental institutions, educational institutions?
	Sure.
	Well, I'll answer those questions in reverse order because they build up.
	They really used essentially the civil rights architecture in order to gain a foothold in corporations, for example, companies that were trying to comply with the Civil rights regulations, EEOC regulations, said, hey, we need to have diversity training programs.
	We need to have race and gender non-discrimination training programs, which are good, right?
	We shouldn't be discriminating on the basis of race and gender in the workplace and government agencies and commercial life.
	It's a good goal.
	It's a good outcome to strive for.
	But what happened is that these...
	Jobs and programs then were hijacked by people who were left-wing activists.
	And then a lot of these ideas that came out of academia, that came out of the 1960s radical movement, started going into the education system through the graduate schools of education and then K-12 bureaucracy.
	And so the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy is looking for ideology to create content.
	And the critical race theorist said, here you go.
	We've been developing this stuff in the university laboratory.
	You can take it as a diversity trainer in a Fortune 100 company, as an equity department official in a K-12 school bureaucracy, or as a second-grade teacher teaching a diversity and inclusion module in the classroom.
	The second question, and this is a question that really hasn't been discussed as much as it should be discussed, is what do they want?
	Critical race theory, the vast majority of their own literature, the vast majority of the things that you hear, are exactly, these are the reasons why America is evil, these are the institutions that we don't like, here are the problems that we see and we've diagnosed as white supremacy.
	You have to really do the digging to figure out, well, what do they want?
	What do they see as the ideal governing system if they had their way?
	And so you can go back and read their big, thick red book, Critical Race Theory, the key writings that formed in the movement.
	It's a huge book, the kind of compendium of all the writing from the 1990s.
	And when nobody was looking in the 1990s, they were very honest about what they wanted.
	They said explicitly were followers of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci.
	We want to seize control of American elite institutions and institutions of cultural production to change law, to change culture, to change bureaucracy, to change policy from within, outside of the democratic system or the legislative system.
	And then, well, what do we want at the end?
	We want to severely restrict the First Amendment.
	They were really the first to say that hate speech or harmful speech should be restricted.
	This First Amendment should be dramatically curtailed.
	They want to end the interpretation of the 14th Amendment that says you have an equal right as an individual under law.
	They say, no, no, no.
	Equal individual rights are actually racist in their outcomes.
	What we want is group identity-based rights so you can have an equalizing factor.
	You're judged not as an individual, but you're judged based on group outcomes.
	And that's how we treat people.
	We treat people in the aggregate as groups.
	They say that we want to end the colorblind system of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
	Again, in the interest of what they call positive discrimination, discriminating on the basis of race in order to equalize outcomes.
	And then economically, they're also very clear.
	They say in their 1990s writing, we're looking to the decolonial regimes of Africa, which have suspended private property rights, seized land and wealth.
	From the white colonizers, and then redistributed them along racial lines.
	They say we should have a similar suspension of private property rights in the United States, redistributing wealth and power along racial lines, and only then could we think about restoring a limited right to private property.
	And so you guys are the lawyers, you tell me, but from my mind, when you get rid of the First Amendment, the 14th Amendment.
	I was just looking up to see what the headlines were as far as famine goes in various nations where they've attempted this very thing.
	But, Chris, it sounds like, to me, people who view the world through certain spectacles as the oppressor and the oppressed, and they just want to be the oppressor, but they need to find benevolent methods to get to the To being the oppressor.
	So we need to reenact or reimpose segregation.
	But for benevolent reasons, we've got to bring up those who have been oppressed.
	We need to enact hate speech laws to protect those who have been oppressed by words.
	And so basically, it's just power-hungry individuals that just want to be the ones with the power.
	Yeah, that's exactly right.
	I mean, Ibram Kendi, who is kind of like the mascot or the clown figure of the critical race theory movement, you know, he's not a heavyweight intellectual.
	He's not a critical race theorist, but he bases all of his work on the principles of critical race theory.
	He's said that in numerous interviews.
	He's very explicit about it.
	He says, in the past we had discrimination, racist discrimination.
	Now we need to have anti-racist discrimination.
	He's saying the goal is not to move beyond discrimination.
	The goal is to discriminate against the former discriminators.
	Of course, not the actual people, but people based on their racial lineage.
	And Thomas Sowell, the great black economist in the 1990s, had a great line.
	He was talking about the founder of critical race theory, Derrick Bell, the kind of godfather figure of critical race theory.
	And he said, you know, I followed Derrick Bell's career in academia.
	He was a Harvard Law professor.
	And it's very clear that Derrick Bell has given up on the colorblind society and wants to create a revenge society.
	That was Thomas Sowell's kind of characterization of it now 30 years ago.
	And I don't think there's really been any other more succinct and accurate summary of what's happening.
	Look, I think in fairness, it's a complicated question, right?
	How do you have a regime of legal equality, which I think we do in the United States?
	People are treated equally under the law.
	Let's bracket out any kind of affirmative action concerns.
	Take that out for now.
	I think people are treated equally.
	And yet we still have racial disparities.
	These are real.
	These are something that...
	That we all want to solve or fix.
	And so they're actually facing a very difficult, very real, very substantive question.
	But they've given up on every avenue of the colorblind theory.
	And they're saying, no, no, no, we want to fix it.
	We want to fix it now.
	We want to just use the kind of brute force of the government to forcibly equalize outcomes, equity, in a way that is, you know, inspired literally in their own work, in their own words.
	By the decolonial regimes of Africa, which, of course, also were seeking justice, but in their economic policies, a lot of those economic policies in the decolonial countries were a disaster.
	They didn't answer that fundamental problem, even with the heavy hand of the state.
	They couldn't figure out how to equalize those outcomes, how to equalize those outputs.
	We're left with, and I think conservatives need to grapple with this very seriously as well.
	We're left with the reality of disparities.
	What can we do with the interest of justice in mind?
	What can we do to improve those conditions to solve some of those problems?
	And one thing that always struck me was a lot of these ideologies always struck me as professional class means of attaining power for themselves, enrichment for themselves, and that what they need to continue that empowerment and self-enrichment is continued dependency.
	In other words, the programs need to not work.
	If they actually get rid of racial disparities, the excuse for their program and their power vanishes.
	So they actually have no meaningful incentive to do so.
	An example of that is there's been...
	Studies after studies after studies for decade after decade after decade, plus my own personal and professional experience, is that for people who grew up poor in working-class communities, and you look at what gave them the chance to succeed versus their neighbors and their friends and others, what you find is, more than anything else, it's an internal sense of reliance and empowerment.
	In other words, if you think an inner loci of control, if you think you can control your own fate, you will actually be able to more impact your fate.
	If you think from a victim mindset that there's all external control of your fate, then that almost dooms you to a lack of success.
	It's a variation where I say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing people he did not exist.
	The greatest trick the system ever pulled is convincing people they cannot resist, because it's actually that belief that makes that reality possible.
	Either way, how much do you think that...
	For the critical race theorists, their own self-empowerment, their own self-glorification requires that they actually not achieve the racial equality they claim to be seeking.
	Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it, and I've noticed the same thing.
	And really, even from a personal perspective, at the very beginning of it, I mean, look, the facts of discourse in the United States, I'm a...
	Highly educated, affluent, white man, male.
	And I'm fighting on critical race theory.
	This is a kind of identity position where you have to really think.
	And I think in some ways justifiably, okay, how do I know I'm right?
	How do I know I can fight on this issue?
	How can I be effective against my opponents?
	And one of the things that really gave me confidence, that gave me...
	A sense that I knew I was on the right track, I had the right ideas, I was correct in my thinking, and that I could have confidence in fighting my opponents is exactly...
	This point that I had spent the previous five years, before I started getting involved in politics, directing a documentary film about three of America's poorest cities.
	So I did extensive multi-year field research in a poor white working class neighborhood in Youngstown, Ohio, a poor urban black neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee, and a poor Latino and multiracial neighborhood in Stockton, California.
	And I learned that exact lesson that you just outlined.
	And I won't repeat it for that reason.
	You said it very nicely.
	Dovetails with all of my observations.
	And I realized very quickly, critical race theory is a scam.
	It is an elite scam that works to kind of sequester and reinforce.
	Elite social status within our institutions and universities and legal profession and Fortune 100 companies that actually has nothing to offer the poorest and most vulnerable people in our country of any racial background, and especially people from minority backgrounds in places like Memphis and Stockton, where I had spent a lot of time, many years, talking to people doing this fieldwork and documentary filmmaking.
	And so that really, even from a kind of identity or from a kind of positional standpoint and also from a substantive standpoint, gave me the confidence to say, you know what, this is really wrong, not just intellectually, but it actually does damage and harm to the people it purports to help.
	And so that's why I was able to say, hey, look, you know, gloves are off.
	We're going to fight this one out.
	And I'm happy to say, honestly, we won decisively in the realm of public opinion, all the opinion polling.
	Once we got the campaign up and running, once we made the case to the public, we educated, according to numerous polls, about 150 million Americans on critical race theory, and we swayed them by a two-to-one margin to our side, which is opposition to CRT.
	And so I think the American people get it.
	The problem is that elite institutions in the United States aren't always representing the values and interests of the American people writ large.
	Well, aren't always or pretty much never.
	I'm thinking as an analogy to the war in Ukraine, and you have these leaders from various nations saying, it doesn't matter what the people want.
	We know better.
	And that seems to be what's going on a little bit with, I'll say, gender theory.
	Critical race theory.
	It doesn't matter if you don't want a teacher with massive prosthetic boobs with erect nipples teaching your kid.
	It's gender expression and you're going to tolerate it whether you like it or not.
	And I hope we don't run out of time so that nobody leaves without a white pill of sorts, Chris.
	I know you're working on proactive measures to actually, instead of just complaining like I'm accused of doing, what can people actually do to, I say fight back politically, but to make a difference?
	This entire system that we're living in right now It didn't occur overnight.
	It occurred over decades.
	And so I presume the solution to this is not going to be an overnight fix of storming a building.
	It's going to have to be something methodical, thought-out, policy-based.
	How do you go about it?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	No storming of any buildings at all.
	Bad idea.
	But the process works.
	And I think that this is the big white pill is all of these problems can be resolved through normal democratic measures.
	By using the system, Peacefully, as it was intended, through the legislature, through the courts, and through the executive.
	And so on critical race theory, we've already made immense progress.
	We got an executive order from President Trump.
	We've passed legislation banning critical race theory and critical race pedagogy in K-12 schools in 22 states around the country, including huge states like Tennessee and Florida and Texas.
	And we've flipped school boards all over the United States, including in places like New York and Washington State and other blue enclaves, where new school boards have come in and they said, hey, we're not going to teach this.
	We're going to teach colorblind equality.
	And so the system is really working as it was designed to do.
	We have to be patient.
	We have to be relentless.
	We have to fight.
	We can actually make a huge difference.
	And we already have made this huge difference.
	And so the next steps are really figuring out where do we go from here?
	How can we start to reform some of those deeper problems in university system, in corporate HR and civil rights compliance, in the federal bureaucracy, how grant funding gets distributed, how bureaucratic DEI departments operate.
	And I think that the next really big problem.
	Building on the success that we've had over the last year and a half is really figuring out the bureaucracy problem.
	And this is the issue that I think is going to be a challenge, but if we can meet this challenge and solve this problem, it's going to yield a generational difference, is how do we get rid of these critical race theory-based departments?
	So you have a DEI department.
	These are people who don't...
	They don't teach kids.
	They don't produce value.
	They're not creative in any way.
	They're really political officers that enforce left-wing orthodoxy even in a supposedly neutral bureaucracy.
	And so figuring out how to transform those bureaucracies, I think, is the number one task ahead of us.
	Again, whether it's in universities, government agencies, K-12 schools or corporations, we've got to figure out how to kind of disrupt the DEI.
	Complex.
	And then kind of repeal and replace it with something along the lines of equality, merit, and colorblindness.
	To say, hey, look, we're reaffirming the principles of the Declaration, of the Bill of Rights, of the 14th Amendment, of the Civil Rights Act.
	We're reaffirming these principles and we're actually going to enforce them now.
	We're going to...
	We're going to bring them back into play as the bureaucracy.
	We're going to treat everyone equally as an individual.
	And bigotry or discrimination towards any group, whether it's the majority or the minority, will not be tolerated.
	It will be punished severely.
	And we're going to strive for a colorblind process throughout the system.
	And I think that's going to gain the confidence of a lot of people.
	And even though that sounds ambitious, it sounds audacious in many ways, I'd remind the listeners and the viewers that In Washington State, a campaign that I worked on, and in California, a campaign that I watched from the outside, the Asian American community launched ballot initiatives to ban affirmative action, to ban disparate treatment on the basis of race in college admissions and state hiring.
	And even in Washington State and California, the two bluest states in the country, those initiatives passed.
	Voters in all of those states of all racial backgrounds said, We don't want racial discrimination sanctioned by the government.
	We want colorblind equality.
	And so if we can have politicians where we give them the courage and the knowledge and the policy options to run with it...
	I think we can do a couple things.
	We can abolish affirmative action.
	We can end the disparate impact doctrine.
	We can mandate equality, merit, and colorblindness and replace systems of diversity, equity, and inclusion with those principles.
	These are big policy goals, but they would shift everything.
	Corporations would start coming into line.
	K-12 schools would start falling into line.
	We're going to start, I think, hopefully 2024, we'll have an opportunity to start pushing on some of these policies and really do a lot of good, I think, for everyone in this country.
	I know you got a hard out because you're on Tucker tonight.
	Could you tell me what you're working on now in the gender areas that are happening, particularly in our schools?
	We have little kids being taught about sexuality, teachers talking about their personal sexual preferences.
	You've got pushes for...
	Pedophilia, redisguised as minor attracted persons, otherwise known as perverts and criminals.
	What's going on in that setting and what you're working on in that context?
	Just bringing up the story from Canada, the teacher, they're suggesting it might be illegal to prevent that teacher from worrying.
	Massive prosthetic breasts with erect nipples to school.
	Sorry.
	I don't know.
	The Canadians, you know, God bless you guys.
	I don't know if that problem can be solved.
	But, no, I mean, it's quite a serious thing.
	I've just wrapped up 11 reported stories, exposés on school districts all over the country.
	They're teaching academic queer theory from the universities.
	They're teaching kids about to be pansexual, to be genderqueer, to be non-binary.
	They're pushing those identity concepts as young as kindergarten and first grade.
	They're having explicit, not even just sexuality, but kind of graphic sexual materials being promoted by the teachers union.
	I broke a story this morning that the NEA LGBTQ plus caucus I was promoting a set of resources for public school teachers with graphic instructions on sadomasochism, bondage, domination, muffing, and fisting.
	I'm not going to describe what those things are.
	You can use your imagination or use your Google search.
	Don't use your Google search.
	Don't.
	Imagination, people.
	Don't do it.
	But, you know, yeah, stick to the imagination on that one.
	But you have that happening.
	And then I think even more seriously, you have...
	The policy is now that teachers and school officials can facilitate child sexual transitions, giving kids new names, new pronouns, new sexualities, new identities.
	And their policy is that they have to keep it a secret from parents.
	And in Michigan, they're recommending that teachers should keep those sexual transitions a secret from parents, even if the child is suicidal.
	And so you have the government that is now facilitating child sexual transitions, imposing boutique sexual identities, and really filling kids' heads with pretty extreme sexual content, all secretly without telling parents.
	And I think that this is an explosive issue.
	We're starting to see it dominate the mainstream headlines.
	I've been releasing a story every week for the last three months.
	And I think now is the time.
	It's really starting to bubble up.
	It's starting to be an issue in campaigns.
	And really, the agenda, again, is simple.
	We have a list of about five to six or seven bullet points on policy to put an end to this nonsense in every school in the country.
	Can you tell people where people can follow you and support the very important work that you're doing?
	Yeah, follow me.
	It's Real Chris Rufo on Twitter.
	I have a YouTube channel, Christopher F. Rufo, that I'm getting off the ground now.
	And then you can go to my website, ChristopherRufo.com, sign up to support the work I'm doing, join some of those paid subscribers.
	I hope to see you there.
	It's been a lot of fun to connect with both of you.
	I've been following your work from afar.
	It's nice to actually have a chance to talk and shoot the breeze.
	Fantastic.
	It's been amazing.
	Thank you very much, Chris.
	All right, guys.
	Bye.
	Have a good night.
	Now, Robert, you got a few minutes?
	Yeah, we can answer some live chats and some rumble rants.
	Yeah, I've been taking pictures.
	Let me...
	And then we'll talk about it.
	Did you watch Alex Jones today at all?
	I mean, I saw some of his press conferences.
	He has not taken the stand yet.
	It's not clear that they're going to call him.
	There was some misinformation about the bankruptcy filing.
	There was some...
	Free Speed Systems is in bankruptcy.
	The bankruptcy court changed out certain personnel.
	The media tried to twist that into something that it wasn't so that the bankruptcy filing is still going forward.
	The court is still mostly losing her mind, but trying on occasion did not look like a complete rogue judge.
	Actually required the plaintiff's counsel to give a basis for objections because that's, you know, realized that it was embarrassing what she was doing.
	Also, you know, scolded.
	Plaintiff's counsel for certain behavior in the proceedings today.
	Continues, of course, sporadically to attack Pattis, who continues to stand up for his client's rights and his duty of advocacy, and he continues to do a marvelous job.
	Anybody that has any doubts what a political sham that trial is?
	Again, we're hearing lots of evidence.
	Particularly yesterday, but throughout this trial that has absolutely nothing to do with damages.
	I mean, they're talking about Ukraine.
	They're talking about a range of issues.
	And you had a guy who, particularly, it's a show trial.
	It's a lefty hit job.
	No better evidence of that than the so-called expert who testified that big tech never manipulates anything.
	It's only the right-wingers who manipulate big tech.
	That's how insane and incredulous his testimony was.
	Very effective cross-examination by Norm Pattis in that capacity.
	Alex Jones has been there in Connecticut because he was asked to be made available by plaintiff's counsel all week, but they haven't called him as yet.
	So he's been holding press conferences outside that the press reluctantly covers.
	When they do cover it, they try to spin it some way as they can.
	But the trial continues to be a show trial disgrace, in my opinion, and I think anyone watching it can see that and see what a show trial it is.
	I mean, evidence is being admitted that has absolutely nothing to do with damages in the case.
	I find it hard to watch spiritually, psychologically, because these parents have gone through the...
	It's indescribable horror.
	I get the impression, and I'm a cynical person, I'm not pro-Alex Jones on the substance, and that people who watch us, some of our subs have taken issue with me.
	I said, yeah, I think he might have said some things, which in an ordinary run of a trial...
	Ordinary evidence could have been found to be potentially defamatory with respect to certain people.
	He might have been found to be liable for certain damages, reasonable damages.
	And I take a little bit of flack for that.
	But I'm watching the plaintiff's lawyer.
	I mean, exploit is the word.
	I mean, it's a horror.
	The parents are reliving the memories they have of their children.
	And it's tragic and it really upsets me.
	And notwithstanding the fact that it obsessed me, it doesn't change the substance of the law.
	In the Supreme Court of Canada, one of the decisions they said, pity and sympathy cannot guide the court, but that's all that this trial is built on.
	And you have the plaintiff's counsel basically conducting this trial as though Alex Jones is the one who carried out this atrocity.
	And I find it hard to watch, but I mean...
	How does an attorney, I mean, if you're in Pattis' shoes, he's doing an amazing job, but how do you go about cross-examining these parents who have endured a suffering that nobody should suffer and not look like the abuser when doing it?
	Well, it's three different things.
	First, to clarify that Alex Jones had nothing to do with the shooting, number one.
	Number two, that they never sought a retraction or correction or apology at the time from Alex Jones.
	In fact, none of them did, to my knowledge, until the eve of suit.
	So, I mean, that exposes it.
	Alex Jones has nothing to do with this case.
	And third, expose their political bias so that they support gun control, they oppose Alex Jones for reasons beyond Sandy Hook, and that that's why they want to take their pain, and it's the way Norm Pattis described it in the opening.
	They want you to take the emotional pain and the guilt over what happened here and politically weaponize it against a dissident who had nothing to do with causing that pain.
	And so, which is best revealed in the fact that he both had nothing to do with Sandy Hook and the fact that they never even sought a correction, retraction, or apology.
	If you were offended or upset by what somebody said being inaccurate about you, the first thing you do is send a correction, retraction, or apology request.
	They never did.
	Quite frankly, I have serious doubts about whether any of them even saw the supposed statements they're talking about.
	But, Robert, their argument is going to be, we may not have seen these statements, but then we ended up getting harassed by people who did.
	That's a whole different animal.
	That's totally problematic.
	Again, then sue those people.
	Sue the people who harassed you.
	You're going to sue somebody because that person's speech you think had some impact on the person that harassed you?
	I mean, that's never been the law in America.
	That's ludicrous.
	That's holding people, I mean, under that standard, we could lock everybody up because somebody interprets a statement however they want.
	It's the person whose actions are wrong that should be sued, not the person who you think had the idea that somehow influenced them.
	And by the way, if that was really credible, where are the arrests?
	Where are the records?
	Because, I mean, I guarantee these reports, stalking reports, criminal reports, if they actually occurred, There would have been a litany of arrests.
	There'd be a bunch of evidence of that.
	Yet somehow that never happened, which makes you wonder exactly what did happen.
	Was this just more trollish behavior, roguish behavior?
	Or when they dug in, it actually had nothing to do with Jones, right?
	Most of the people that were, again, most of the hardcore Sandy Hook denier movement hated Alex Jones because they thought Alex Jones and InfoWars was not pushing the message because 99% of what InfoWars printed and published Was that Sandy Hook happened.
	So Paul Joseph Watson, the editor-in-chief of InfoWars, during this entire time frame that's at issue in these cases, was one of the strongest critics of the Sandy Hook denier movement.
	So that's why they could never have a fair trial.
	This had to be a show trial where people confuse what happened at Sandy Hook with Alex Jones and not allow Alex Jones to defend himself.
	Not allow him to say, I'm innocent from the stand.
	Not allow him to question anything about the case.
	It's a pure show trial, and you see the judge's lack of judicial temperament as part of that.
	It's a disgrace of a case, and it will stay and remain being a state.
	And if they were confident that the facts would be on their side, they would not be terrified of a trial by jury in very liberal, sympathetic political communities like Austin and Connecticut to do so.
	They knew that what they were telling was a fake case about supposed fake news because they're blaming Alex Jones for things that frankly have nothing to do with Alex Jones, and they couldn't have the jury know that was true.
	They couldn't have the jury know the truth because even a liberal jury would have rejected them.
	And you talk about people being motivated by other people's discourse, and you look at the guy in North Dakota who ran over an 18-year-old kid and released on $50,000.
	Bond.
	Taboo.
	And one thing about speaking to the evidence, Robert, one of the witnesses today specified in testimony, in chief, that she started getting comments, call it harassment, shortly after the incident.
	And I'm sitting there thinking, did that even have anything to do with any of the actual problematic words that I think Alex Jones might have spoken?
	It couldn't have.
	It couldn't have.
	Because again, the...
	Jones never said anything supportive of the Sandy Hook denier movement until several years after Sandy Hook occurred.
	And even then, it was scattered and small and short.
	And the bulk, and it was other people at InfoWars, the editor-in-chief, was on the opposite side.
	So I remember when I first heard about this from Matt Taibbi, I was like, well, I follow InfoWars.
	I never remember them saying anything in support of the Sandy Hook denier movement.
	So it turned out these were Jones statements made in response to callers in like the third or fourth hour of his program, that's the least watched part of his program, just scattered over several years in the middle.
	And that's why, because they never pushed this at all.
	They never promoted this at all.
	So the whole theory of the plaintiff's case is bogus.
	This is a political hit job being implemented by a corrupt rogue judiciary, propagated through a show trial.
	That's what this case is all about.
	I'll say, to Pattis' credit again, he brought up the point that Robert said in a tactful manner, one of the witnesses today, or the plaintiff, said, you know, he got him to admit that he became something of an activist.
	He petitioned the government for policy reform, and they're going to argue that those political motivations are...
	It's the entire...
	Why are 80-90% I mean, I know it's all 90% of Sandy Hook parents and siblings of the people who died not suing Alex Jones.
	I mean, did they not experience this?
	Or did they just never blame Alex Jones for what they experienced?
	It's only the politically motivated ones, it appears so far from the trial, that are bringing this case.
	That's why this case is a political case disguised as a libel case.
	One of the Rumble Rants from Rob A says, this is a Rumble Rant from Rob A on Truth Twitter and Locals.
	Thanks, Viva and Barnes, for being you, V. Robert, this was a good question.
	I mean, we could have asked it of Chris.
	How is the redistribution of wealth coming from CRT different from the redistribution of wealth coming from populism?
	This is from O Grammy Kim.
	What redistribution of wealth comes from populism, Robert?
	So, well, it depends on what you mean.
	Redistribution of capital.
	So some aspects of left populism absolutely embrace redistribution of power.
	Everything is redistribution of power, though.
	The fact that wealth is just merely a means of power, an expression of power, a sign, an indication of power, every policy is redistributing power.
	Every policy is redistributing wealth, whether it's the right or the left.
	Parts of the right have bought into this notion that anybody calling for redistribution of wealth or power is a communist or leftist or whatever.
	The reality is every ideology calls for redistribution of wealth and power.
	The only question is how.
	Should it be redistributed according to some system of merit?
	Well, then how do you define the merit?
	Should it be redistributed according to state role or a lack of a state role?
	Or which state?
	Which level of governance?
	Who gets to govern?
	Etc.
	So every question is a matter of redistribution of wealth and power.
	So left populism has traditionally embraced using the state in a...
	In a least administrative way, that's the difference between left populism and, say, left socialism.
	Left socialism wants to use the state as the means of redistribution with a big bureaucracy.
	Left populism in the sort of Huey Long style and much of what you find in Central and Latin America and parts of Africa and even Asia, that form of left populism tends to embrace the state having a minimal role of redistribution, literally taxing one group and redistributing it here.
	That also can be done in the form of capital.
	So it can be in the form of microcapital.
	I mean, for example, the Homestead Act was a massive redistribution of wealth, right?
	But populists on both sides embraced it throughout early American history.
	But it was a form of microcapital.
	Public education is a mechanism of redistribution of wealth and power.
	Or private school choice is redistributing wealth and power.
	So I don't get caught up in whether or not they want to redistribute the wealth or power because everybody wants to redistribute the wealth or power.
	The question is...
	Robert, do we have any questions in Locals?
	From the Locals live chat.
	For those that don't know, we have a live chat going at vivabarneslaw.locals.com where you can get exclusive content all year long.
	The first question that we did ask, please ask him about the gender theory.
	And how people can push back.
	And he laid out what those policy prescriptions are, and that he's continuing to come out with more that people can be personally participatory in.
	Second question was about employment settings.
	We also got into that with him about the problem, and he identified where he thought they could get at corporate America for redress.
	I think there's possibilities of individual suit in those cases, because I think all CRT training is racist and discriminatory and sexist, but just in a different way.
	It seems like the employers and corporations have the power to keep this stuff going, and there's not enough protective laws for employees, right?
	That's where he was addressing.
	That's where we need to address that at the legislative level.
	Thoughts on the SDNY lawsuit on the Trump family?
	So that's the Attorney General for the state of New York going after Trump.
	She committed.
	She said, if you elect me, I'll go after Trump.
	It's really quite outrageous that you're having such overt, open, But it's because the state and federal courts in New York refuse to limit her.
	So that's what that's about.
	I don't think Trump really cares, to be frankly.
	But it's just more punishment on Trump for being Trump.
	And it's a reminder that you can't be, in the modern political environment, you cannot live, reside, or do business in a blue state.
	Or you run substantial risk, as James O 'Keefe is constantly, continuously finding out.
	And it reinforces the need to remove the federal power of the District of Columbia as a judicial system.
	There should be no D.C. district.
	Congress can get rid of that.
	Congress created it.
	Congress can get rid of it.
	It needs to happen.
	If they had to go through the Southern District of Florida, grand jury, judiciary, trial jury, prosecutors, good chance that...
	Trump is not facing the issues he's facing.
	As I explained in the Barnes Brief, which is at VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.com every day, there was a misapprehension of the judges, the special master's order.
	I'm not a fan of this special master.
	He signed the FISA warrant against Carter Page.
	He's as deep state as you can get.
	Why Trump's people recommended him?
	Well, Trump has a bunch of ex-prosecutors, so it's not a surprise.
	Conflicted insiders.
	Make poor outsider challengers.
	They just do.
	Trump has constantly made resume and references the basis of his hiring ever since he's been elected president and is both his private and professional and political life, even though he himself denounced that when he was before he was president, that that's not how you pick people.
	That's not how you choose people.
	He just keeps making that mistake.
	But the media misinterpret it.
	The special master isn't going to make final decisions about any legal matter.
	The special master simply filters through which documents there might be credible claims of privilege for, identifies them, and ultimately the district court would resolve any dispute.
	The special master said he wasn't going to review whether these documents were classified or not unless Trump's team demanded.
	And Trump's team didn't, for whatever reason.
	They're like, that review will save for another day, another time.
	We're asserting privilege review, attorney-client, executive privilege, and that's what we're asking you to review.
	So the people thought it was an opinion.
	It's not.
	A binding ruling.
	It's not.
	And that he himself was saying, making a ruling.
	Are holding at some level that these documents had to be classified.
	He didn't.
	Honestly, he kind of couldn't in the role he has as a special master anyway.
	But the media deliberately misinterpreted that to try to skew it against Trump.
	Amazing.
	Now, do I bring up...
	Do I talk about the...
	I'll talk about the article of...
	Do you have any more Rumble rants or we got them all covered?
	Oh, let me see here.
	I got a couple.
	They were just...
	Thank you, Steph.
	Oh, well, Christopher F. Rufo is a member of the Manhattan Institute and may know one of my favorite authors, Heather MacDonald.
	That was from Entry Required, R-E-Q-R-D.
	We got Pamela R. Walker says, has this been put in place by the W-E-F?
	I don't know.
	Similar philosophies.
	They support wokeism, but their focus is more on economic population control.
	And then we got Balcott, B-H-A-L-C-O-T-T, enjoying this, just saying thanks.
	And Pamela R. Walker, who exactly wrote the book, CRT, and P. Moyer.
	I need to drop off in a few minutes for choir practice.
	Yay.
	I'll catch up later.
	But meanwhile, thanks, Chris, for being there.
	And thanks, as always, to you, Viva and Robert.
	You're great.
	Thank you.
	One of the people on the live chat was supposed to be a juror, and the DA kicked him off because they asked him a lot of questions about what firearms he owns.
	It's interesting that they would try to weaponize the grand jury process or trial jury process.
	To exclude jurors based on gun ownership and to have that information somewhere recorded and accessible to the government in that form.
	That is disturbing.
	And it depends on whether it was truly a necessary question for fair and partial adjudication as to whether or not that was a permissible question in the first place.
	But because courts often exercise no meaningful discretion over grand juries, and the Supreme Court let that happen, that's where it was a federal judge who once said a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich if a prosecutor asked him.
	That's how little...
	The grand jury was supposed to be independent.
	The grand jury is supposed to be an independent organization that controls prosecutors, not prosecutors control them.
	But courts have let prosecutors get away with controlling them, and it's a problem that probably requires institutional reform.
	All right.
	Fantastic.
	Robert, we're going to see each other tomorrow?
	Probably.
	Very nice, people.
	There's an event, which we might be together on.
	We'll see how it goes.
	And I'm going to be on Sports Wars tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, so about 40 minutes or so, discussing the Against the Spread show, predicting all the sports for the football weekend.
	You can find that at Sports Wars on YouTube.
	We've got one more Rumble rant just came in.
	Entry Required says, Viva and Robert, do you people see possibly swinging a call-in show?
	Oh, sure.
	Yeah, there's some people that want us to do a speaking tour and things like that, so we're taking a look at that as time avails.
	I'm going to be representing Amos Miller, the Amish farmer, and then I have about a half dozen.
	Substantial cases right at the moment where things are happening in the next two, three weeks.
	So I'm a little distracted at the moment.
	But we will get back to the possibility of doing a locals meet-ups at different places, of doing a speaking tour of some sort, and the rest.
	Yeah, let me answer that question.
	Did I re-answer that?
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Awesome.
	So people, stay tuned.
	Tomorrow, I'm going to have, when I'm able to go live, Keith Wilson.
	Who's representing Brian Peckford, who had a federal hearing today on the alleged charter violations from those measures up in Canada.
	And apparently Trudeau made the announcement that the Arrive Can app is going to be optional as of September 30th, which from what I've been told was on the eve of another federal challenge.
	So the science changes depending on the court proceedings.
	So Keith Wilson will be coming on live if all goes according to plan tomorrow in the afternoon.
	So stay tuned for that.
	And that's it.
	Robert, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much.
	Nine o 'clock, go see Robert at...
	Where are you going to be again, Robert?
	Sports Wars on YouTube.
	Sports Wars?
	Okay, there's a joke in there that I'm not going to make, but I know the chat's going to make.
	Sports Wars on YouTube, people.
	Check it out.
	And that's it.
	I'll see you all tomorrow.

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