Chris Ruffo is a writer, filmmaker, and senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute, as well as a contributing editor at City Journal where his writings explore issues such as gender ideology, identity politics, addiction, crime, and the decline of American cities. Chris gained attention as an outspoken critic of progressive ideologies and policies, fighting against CRT and DEI, and even inspiring a presidential order and legislation in 15 states where he s worked closely with lawmakers to craft successful public policy. In this episode, we discuss how to create a free society through duty and responsibility, and how leftist ideology has evolved and planted itself into all of our social institutions. Plus, we delve into how Chris transitioned from a young leftist to a force for good in the conservative movement. This show is sponsored by Genusell. Just a reminder: Some of our conversation at the end will be exclusively for our Daily Wire Plus members. If you re not a member yet, click the link at the top of this episode s description to get the full conversation with Chris and his co-host, Ben Shapiro. Thanks so much for joining the show. It s good to be with you! Ben Shapiro - The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special with Special Guest: Chris F. Rufo (America Lost, America's Cultural Revolution) Subscribe to the show on Podchaser: PodChaser: Subscribe to The Daily Wire + Subscribe to PodChaver: Podchaver: Subscribe on iTunes and Subscribe on PODChaver's Podcasts? Learn more about your ad choices and other links to become a supporter of the show? Subscribe on Audible and Pizzarello: Peeves & Peevers & Pajeeves and Peezy Peever Peegee Peeve is a Reviewed Podcasts & Pied Peece Peegee is a Friend? . Thank Me And Other Things? And Peechie Peeze And Other Links , v= Vibes & More Thanks Me And Geeves And Acknowledged by Peeg And A Friend & Support Me And A Good Friend & A Friend And Support Me And & And His Story And A Thank You & A Good Gee And A Shout Out To This And More? & Also A Good Day Out And A Support Me Out
00:00:00.000I just started looking at the people around me, and these kind of left-wing, radical student groups and political movements, and what I found is that these were people who were the sons and daughters of the most elite people from around the globe.
00:00:14.000These are people who are using this vocabulary cynically to establish their own status, to establish their own power, and then after a couple years of wearing the keffiyeh, are going to go on and take over their father's company.
00:00:28.000If these people are utterly amoral frauds, maybe there's something wrong with these ideas.
00:00:34.000Christopher F. Ruffo is a writer, filmmaker, and senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute, as well as a contributing editor of City Journal, where his writings explore many issues such as gender ideology, identity politics, addiction, crime, and the decline of American cities.
00:00:50.000Rufo gained attention as an outspoken critic of progressive ideologies and policies, fighting against CRT and DEI, and even inspiring a presidential order and legislation in 15 states where he's worked closely with lawmakers to craft successful public policy.
00:01:04.000As a filmmaker, Rufo has directed four documentaries for PBS, Netflix, and international television, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities.
00:01:13.000Chris has a popular substack where you can follow all of his work on critical race theory, gender ideology, institutional capture, and social decay.
00:01:20.000His new book, America's Cultural Revolution, covers the period between the 1960s and the summer of George Floyd.
00:01:26.000In this episode, we discuss how to create a free society through duty and responsibility, and how leftist ideology has evolved and planted itself into all of our social institutions.
00:01:35.000Plus, we delve into how Chris transitioned from a young leftist to a force for good in
00:01:51.000Welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
00:01:53.000Just a reminder, some of our conversation at the end will be exclusively for our Daily Wire Plus members.
00:01:58.000If you're not a member yet, click the link at the top of this episode's description to get the full conversation with Chris Ruffo and with all of our awesome guests.
00:02:30.000We meaning, you know, the rational people in America who don't believe that boys are girls and such.
00:02:34.000Well, I think first it's that in politics there's no ultimate victories and there are no ultimate failures.
00:02:40.000And so you have to figure out what the combination is amongst the two opposites.
00:02:45.000And so I think that we are demonstrating effective models for winning, both on the media side, the activism side, the political side, the policy side.
00:02:55.000But that hasn't translated into a broad-scale reversal of some of these cultural phenomena that we are fighting against.
00:03:02.000But look, I think we're in an experimental phase, and the experiments that we've been running, I think, have been successful, whether it's critical race theory or gender or some of these corporate boycotts.
00:03:13.000And these are the models that we'll need, and we'll need to replicate and to deploy across different domains in order to be successful.
00:03:22.000So, Chris, one of the critiques that we hear from you a lot from the left-wing media is that they're not sure exactly what you are.
00:03:32.000Because you're pretty obviously not hiding the ball when it comes to your own political persuasion and the things that you're hoping to do, but you're also uncovering a lot of news and breaking a lot of news and making a lot of news.
00:03:41.000Yeah, I like to maintain a posture of strategic ambiguity.
00:03:45.000But, you know, I think that what I've come to a conclusion about is I try to work of what excites me, what interests me, what I think is effective.
00:03:54.000And so I pick and choose from the variety of different backgrounds and disciplines and genres of work to put it together to do something quite simple.
00:04:03.000I'm a politically engaged writer, journalist, policy analyst.
00:04:08.000I want to put big victories up on the scoreboard.
00:04:11.000And I use journalistic techniques to achieve some of these things.
00:04:14.000And so it's a hybrid role that I've kind of created through my own experiments, drawing on my background as a documentary filmmaker, drawing on journalistic techniques, and then really by accident at first, translating it into the domain of activism and leadership and public policy.
00:04:32.000And so I've created this, I think, somewhat unique system, this somewhat unique approach that confounds my critics.
00:04:42.000And that just makes it all the more delicious.
00:04:44.000It makes it all the sweeter that they can't quite put me in a box and they don't know what to make of it.
00:04:50.000Now, Chris, one of the things that you've uncovered that really is fascinating is that you'll pick a story and people will immediately leap to the conclusion that the story is an outlier.
00:04:58.000And then you'll hit them with a bunch of other stories along the same lines.
00:05:01.000And they'll say, well, you know, it's not really happening, but it's good that it is.
00:05:05.000Or eventually they end up at the position that the thing that you've been saying all along they've been trying to do is the thing they've actually been doing.
00:05:10.000How do you know when what you're covering is an individual story and when it's actually an important trend that needs to be explicated and brought into public view?
00:05:19.000Well, I think, look, a lot of us know that some of these things, whether it's critical race theory or gender in schools or any other kind of issue, they are widespread.
00:05:31.000But what I found as a general rule of thumb, Is that you need to do somewhere along the lines of 10 to 12 reported stories to establish a trend, to establish a body of evidence, to establish a kind of irrefutable pattern that then forces the left to engage in debate.
00:05:48.000And so whenever I'm designing a campaign or reporting campaign or a policy campaign, that's pretty much the rule of thumb.
00:05:55.000I really try to do 10 to 12 stories over the course of 10 to 12 weeks.
00:05:59.000And I found that if you can be hitting these stories, exploding them into the media, establishing them as a
00:07:27.000In terms of policy and publicity that happened in the 2010s.
00:07:31.000In other words, was there sort of a lurking monster for 50 years that was gradually eating ground and then finally we saw it in the 2010s?
00:07:37.000Or did it all sort of happen all at once?
00:07:39.000Yeah, I think the lurking monster theory is probably the most accurate and, you know, what I found in researching this book that traces the radical left's long march through the institutions from 1968 to 2020, those are the great bookends, the kind of historical frame, you know, what I found is that intellectually The left's ideology was fully formed in 1968-1969.
00:08:02.000They had the ideas, they had the theories, they had the basic coalitional patterns, they had even the very language that we see used today was already in use in the far left, radical journals, publications, and pamphlets by 1968-1969.
00:08:21.000And so, in some sense, there are no new ideas on the left.
00:08:24.000since that time. But what has changed is the placement of these ideas within institutions.
00:08:30.000And so from that period of 1968 to 2020, with the death of George Floyd, everyone taking the knee,
00:08:36.000everyone posting the black square for BLM, what you had is this long march process. And what I've
00:08:43.000tried to do is trace not just the ideas as abstractions or as a kind of empty vessels,
00:08:50.000but actually the flesh and blood march of these ideas through institutions.
00:08:54.000And so you see it in universities, you see it in K-12 schools, you see it in government bureaucracies, and then you see it even in Fortune 100 companies.
00:09:03.000And so it took that basic pattern over a very long period of time.
00:09:07.000And what I think the left has done very brilliantly since 1968, when their intellectual development It's essentially ceased is that they've understood how to identify weak points within institutions, identify choke points where ideologies can take hold, and then distribution mechanisms where they can have a minority of individuals within, say, a Fortune 100 company that are exerting power with great leverage from the middle register all the way to the CEO suite.
00:09:37.000And so that, to me, is really fascinating.
00:09:39.000And I think the right has done a poor job historically.
00:09:42.000We want to have a debate as if politics is an Oxford style exchange of ideas and the best ideas win.
00:11:48.000And you don't have to take my word for it.
00:11:50.000Some of those folks who were leading this movement, notably the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse and his student, the black communist radical Angela Davis, you know, they gave a speech at UCLA in the late 1960s outlining their strategy.
00:12:04.000And they thought very clearly at the time that the universities were their initial revolutionary institutions.
00:12:10.000That's the kind of phrasing that they were using.
00:12:12.000And of course, universities have always been open, have been friendly to radical ideas, have been a home for left-wing political radicals for a very long time.
00:12:23.000But what they deposited for the first time, really, was to say, we don't want to go towards the production of knowledge.
00:12:31.000That's no longer the goal of our politics within the university.
00:12:35.000We want to transform it, the university, into a revolutionary institution, into an activist institution.
00:12:41.000And so they changed the telos, or the ends, or the purpose of the university.
00:12:47.000That's what they were preaching at the time.
00:12:56.000The trustees of those universities tried to tamp down some of the radicalism, tamp down some of the academic takeovers.
00:13:03.000But they lost institution after institution, department after department.
00:13:08.000And, you know, conservatives, as you said, made a grave error by condescending to campus life and to say, oh, these are, you know, blue-haired radicals studying queer theory.
00:13:26.000They didn't get the jobs that existed at the time, but they created jobs like DEI administrator Microaggression investigator.
00:13:34.000All of these fake ideological jobs, these commissariat-style jobs that have really mushroomed and exploded not just in campuses but in really all of our institutions.
00:13:46.000And so, you know, look, In 1968, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Information, in that period, Eldridge Cleaver, really truly said, we want to seize the factories.
00:14:00.000We want to seize the means of material production in the United States and start making, you know, school buses instead of, you know, Ford trucks.
00:14:08.000They still had that orthodox Marxist idea that the means of production were the source of wealth, the source of power.
00:14:15.000Nobody believes that on the radical left anymore.
00:14:19.000They don't want to manage agricultural facilities.
00:14:22.000They don't want to do any of the hard physical work that it takes to run a modern physical economy.
00:14:27.000They just want to have those prestige cultural institutions.
00:14:31.000They've seized the means of knowledge production, of ideological production, and that's the situation we find ourselves in today.
00:14:38.000We find ourselves in this Paradoxical and very contradictory moment where the means of capitalist production are still very much oriented towards the private market, towards capitalist production.
00:14:52.000But our cultural institutions, our knowledge production institutions are very much in the hands of the radical left.
00:14:58.000And so we are in this, I think, precarious spot where we have to take a hard look at the status quo and figure out what our next move is.
00:15:06.000So, to go back to the universities for a second, because I want to move into corporate America momentarily.
00:15:10.000When we look at the universities, what do you think was sort of the immune failure of the universities that allowed them to be taken over so easily?
00:15:18.000Because this movement really breaks out in the late 60s, and by the early 70s, they're basically completely taken over.
00:15:23.000I mean, the switch happens incredibly fast.
00:15:26.000And it does lend some credence to theories that have been heard from some corners of I'd say an integralist crowd that classical liberalism is a failure, that classical liberalism, the idea that everybody's voice should be heard, that free speech carries the seeds of its own destruction because it turns out that if people walk through the front door and they say, well, my version of free speech is that you shouldn't get free speech and you're a victimizer and actually the entire superstructure of free speech is actually a reflection of power structures.
00:15:54.000You have no systemic immunity to that because you've allowed that view in the door.
00:15:58.000There actually has to be a rule to classical liberalism that is not universal, and that is that if you attack classical liberalism, then you are outside the realm of classical liberalism.
00:16:05.000But many of the people at universities were not capable of actually implementing that.
00:16:10.000The basic idea was, if this is a place for free speech, then free speech also includes people coming in and saying free speech is incredibly bad, you're a victimizer, and you should hand power to us to demonstrate that you're not actually a victimizer.
00:16:21.000I think that is absolutely part of it.
00:16:22.000And I think that if you say, well, why did the universities fall?
00:17:13.000You had an ideological sorting rather than a sorting on a hierarchy of real values towards transcendent values like truth, goodness, and beauty.
00:17:22.000And once we abandoned that highest point, You had a totally lateral system and in that kind of system, a horizontal arrangement of power without a highest point, the strongest wins.
00:17:34.000You have a Nietzschean kind of battle of wills.
00:17:37.000And so that brings me to the second point.
00:17:40.000And the second point is one of character.
00:17:42.000And you had old line liberals running these institutions as they had been run for many decades.
00:17:48.000And they were simply, did not have the fortitude, did not have the strength, did not have the character.
00:17:53.000to resist the left-wing radicals. And so you can see this, you know, you said they walk in the
00:17:58.000front door, but actually they don't walk in the front door.
00:18:01.000Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis at University of California, San Diego, they had a famous
00:18:06.000incident where they, they knocked down and broke down the front door to the registrar's office,
00:18:11.000occupied it, and then, you know, the rest is history. And so you had old line liberals managing these
00:18:16.000institutions that, that, that professed these values of propriety and civil discourse.
00:18:21.000But when they were confronted with violent left-wing radicals that wanted to take over their
00:18:26.000institutions by intellectual and physical force, they did not have the ability to resist
00:18:31.000just as a matter of temperament, as a matter of character, as a matter of will. And so, and,
00:18:38.000and, and, In a sense, what you had were people that were trained in the streets, people that were trained in revolutionary violence, people that were, you know, hitting police officers in the back of the head with batons.
00:18:50.000They entered the faculty lounge and they find a bunch of middle-aged, predominantly men, with tweed suits, and they said, these people are no match.
00:19:01.000The antibodies, or the defenses of the universities, We're so weak intellectually and temperamentally that it was only a matter of time before there was a demographic turnover until what we see today, which is a wholesale recomposition of academic life that signals that at least in this limited domain, the left has won.
00:19:21.000That seems like the next move for the left after taking over the heads of universities was to then filter that out into the entire education system because ed schools become sort of the vanguard of the revolution.
00:19:31.000And now the idea is we're going to see these ideas in kids, an entire generation of kids all across the United States using the teachers unions, making sure that every public school classroom is reflective of these values.
00:19:43.000And that also requires a nationalization of the education apparatus.
00:19:47.000And so when people look at why do young people think the way they do, the answer is because
00:19:51.000they've been taught for two generations to think the way that they do.
00:19:55.000How did the bleed over happen from the faculty lounges to the ed departments to public schools?
00:20:00.000This is the great transmission that I tackle in the third section of the book.
00:20:04.000I really show how these ideas went from originally the kind of philosophical core to the street activist revolution and then into these great organs of values transmission in the K-12 schools.
00:20:18.000And so, absolutely, it starts with graduate schools of education.
00:21:29.000And I think that conservatives again failed because they were not able to do that.
00:21:32.000They had an implicit trust in public institutions like K-12 public schools to a great degree.
00:21:40.000They bought into this idea that they were neutral entities that taught children in as neutral a manner as possible, that sought to show both sides and let students learn how to think, not what to think.
00:21:54.000Which is, of course, one of the most awful ideas in practice that you could have.
00:22:00.000And I think conservatives also didn't contest those school board elections, didn't try to take control over the curriculum.
00:22:10.000And then consequently, you have an open playing field that over the years allowed these left-wing pedagogists
00:22:17.000and activist teachers to take over the entire transmission chain so that now,
00:22:24.000and I think that this is the most remarkable piece of research that I found doing the work for the book,
00:22:30.000was you could read the radical pamphlets of the Black Liberation Army.
00:22:36.000These were violent revolutionaries that were assassinating police officers, robbing banks,
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00:24:35.000So failure and success look exactly the same.
00:24:38.000The only sort of success that actually exists is an ideological success, and failure just looks like getting fired, and you're not getting fired because you have a government contract.
00:24:45.000So you can see pretty easily how this takes over the bureaucracy, but most Americans,
00:24:48.000because we don't tend to think of the unelected fourth branch
00:24:52.000of government, the bureaucracy that actually runs all of us as being very important, we ignore all that.
00:26:54.000You use administrative and executive power to try to remove the top layer of policy decision makers in the bureaucracy.
00:27:02.000And you find and train and credential conservatives that can go in and actually replace those folks to to run the bureaucracy at that top level,
00:27:12.000or you can try to decentralize the functions and create in a sense of patronage network
00:27:18.000from the government to smaller groups according to subsidiarity.
00:27:23.000And so this is the model for state level school choice programs
00:27:27.000that have been remarkably successful in recent years because of the failure of these centralized teachers unions,
00:27:34.000the rise of critical race theory and radical gender ideology in schools.
00:27:37.000And then of course the COVID lockdowns.
00:27:39.000And so the idea here is to say, we're gonna give parents the chance
00:27:42.000to take their seven, $8,000 a year per child to any institution of their choice.
00:27:48.000This is from the public budget, but it's going into the hands of parents and individual families, and they can create a side market that bypasses the great centralized K-12 public education system.
00:28:02.000These two almost paradoxical approaches An approach of ideological centralization of the bureaucracy and an approach of financial and administrative decentralization providing the funding to smaller units in society.
00:28:18.000I think some combination of these two is the way forward and we have to get really smart and really aggressive in how we execute them.
00:28:26.000So let's move on to the part that I think conservatives have found the most troubling.
00:28:29.000I think it's become a truism for conservatives for a long time.
00:28:32.000Universities are run by the left wing.
00:28:34.000Educational institutions are run by the left wing.
00:28:37.000The one that I think took conservatives completely by surprise over the course of the last decade is the takeover of corporate America.
00:28:43.000This is a place we had always thought would be safe, not because we assumed that every executive was going to be a conservative or Republican, Because the market was supposed to be the deciding factor in how decisions got made.
00:28:53.000the idea that you were going to pile a bunch of ESG or DEI on top of the fundamental market mechanism
00:28:59.000and in so doing, weigh down your profit margins and destroy your efficiencies,
00:29:04.000that seems completely unthinkable to a huge number of Americans,
00:29:07.000especially considering the fact that if you were gonna do all that,
00:29:09.000the assumption was that there wasn't going to be giant scale collusion,
00:29:12.000that there'd be another firm that would come along and out-compete you by not participating
00:29:31.000So what exactly happened inside the halls of corporate America where if you look at actually the individual donations by corporate heads, they still, I believe, majority go to Republicans, but corporate donations go by far to Democrats.
00:29:43.000So yeah, and I tackle this a bit in the book, but what I've done is I've tried to talk to a lot of C-suite executives and board members of Fortune 500 companies off the record to try to get a sense of what's happening.
00:29:56.000And the basic picture that I could paint for you is something like this.
00:30:00.000Um, you have to think of corporations and especially C-suite executives as amoral operators that are merely putting their antennas up and then responding to incentives, responding to pressure, responding to economic and cultural and political forces for their immediate short term safety and protection and security.
00:30:21.000And so that's kind of how the entity operates.
00:30:24.000And what executives have learned in the last 20 years, and especially the last 10 years, is that they've secured their economic interests from the political right.
00:30:33.000Since the Reagan administration, the political right has lowered corporate taxes, has created more favorable regulations, and has opened up free trade agreements, including with communist regimes like the Chinese, that allow American companies to make a lot of money, to maximize profits in a really spectacular fashion.
00:30:52.000All things being equal, I think you and I would agree.
00:30:54.000That's, you know, good with some, maybe some caveats.
00:30:58.000But what happened is that when corporations felt like they had secured everything that they needed from the political right, they felt like they could also pander to the political left on culture.
00:31:08.000So they're trying to have it both ways.
00:31:10.000They're trying to have their economic fortunes taken care of by the right and their cultural status taken care of by the political left.
00:31:17.000And so you see the creation of DEI bureaucracies, you see these kind of corporate marketing campaigns, you see their corporate donations and funding and philanthropic contributions that are really going all towards the cultural left.
00:31:30.000Because they were getting a lot of pressure from the cultural left.
00:31:33.000The left has very effective kind of elite mechanisms for putting pressure on companies to do these very things.
00:31:40.000And so what you've also had then is the situation where a CEO is facing this kind of situation.
00:31:46.000They're facing activist employees within the corporate hierarchy in their identity-based activist groups that were sanctioned by the CEOs.
00:31:56.000The Black Employees Union, the LGBTQ Plus Employees Union, the Latino or Latinx Employee Resource Group.
00:32:04.000So they're feeling pressure from below and within.
00:32:06.000They're feeling pressure from these very effective left-wing activists laterally.
00:32:11.000And then sometimes they're also feeling pressure from above, from their corporate board members, who are, after all, rich.
00:32:25.000They want a pat on the back from elite institutions.
00:32:28.000They want to go to the kind of corporate dinner and then get the kudos.
00:32:33.000And so they say, hey, we need to put trans characters in our movies.
00:32:38.000For example, that's kind of what happened with Disney.
00:32:41.000This is corporate board level pressure.
00:32:43.000And so Corporate executives are facing a situation in which they're getting three-dimensional pressure, and as amoral incentive responders, they make the obvious choice was to kowtow to these left-wing cultural policies, and really without any countervailing pressure from the right.
00:32:59.000So I think that it's been a simple calculus, so it shouldn't surprise any of us that corporations, especially those big corporations, that kind of brand entities, have really buckled to the left over and over and over in recent years.
00:33:14.000We'll get to more on that in just one second.
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00:34:21.000One other element that was pointed out first, I think, by Christopher Caldwell in his book Age of Entitlement was the idea that these massive legal structures have also been created that essentially create massive liability for a lot of companies if they don't kowtow to the left.
00:34:36.000So the way that you Prevent some sort of mass lawsuit on your hands over racial discrimination is you force everybody to take some sort of diversity training.
00:34:44.000The way that you make sure that you don't get sued for some form of racism is you make sure that you have a DEI policy to make sure that it's crammed down on everybody.
00:34:54.000Now in the normal market mechanism, one of the things that probably would happen here is that Counterintuitively, what would happen if you try to force diverse crowds into a business and create additional liability for the business is people just don't hire them.
00:35:07.000If you suggest that there's an additional liability risk for every, for example, LGBTQ plus person that you hire, then people will stop hiring those people because they're afraid of the liability risk.
00:35:15.000So then a legal system comes up where if you don't have enough of those people in your company, then NASDAQ will delist you.
00:35:21.000Or you will have a situation in which you will be sued for discrimination for not hiring, and then once people are hired, then you have a massive risk of those people actually suing you for having hired them, and now you're mistreating them, or you fired them.
00:35:33.000And it makes people unhireable and unfireable simultaneously, so the best thing to do is you just create these broad-based policies, and this somehow is supposed to be a legal cure-all for all of this, which would mean, as per the usual arrangement, that the only way to fight that would actually be via legislation.
00:35:47.000I mean, despite all of the talk about libertarianism, it just doesn't work in a world
00:35:50.000where the laws are written the wrong way.
00:37:14.000And so if you know anybody in, let's say, a corporate marketing department, I know a lot of people in corporate marketing department for tech firms here in the Seattle region, and they'll say very easily, yeah, you know, I'd say maybe 50% or more of our marketing budget is totally wasted.
00:37:31.000It's based on doing something that somebody likes for reasons unrelated to maximizing competitive pressure, etc., etc.
00:37:39.000We have entire departments that are not profitable.
00:37:41.000We have entire product lines that are a waste of time.
00:37:45.000I mean, there is an enormous amount of waste, even in the most profitable companies, kind of paradoxically.
00:37:51.000And so what I think that people are thinking in the C-suite is that these DEI programs, these ideological programs, are a form of insurance.
00:38:04.000They don't create products and services that customers want.
00:38:06.000But it's a form of political insurance and legal insurance that's simply deducted as a cost of doing business.
00:38:12.000It's like paying a tax or in the past, it's like paying the mafia for protection, which I actually think is an even better analogy.
00:38:20.000And so, you know, these companies stumble on.
00:38:22.000And Adam Smith, of course, said there's a great deal of rot in a nation.
00:38:27.000The same thing, you know, God bless him, can be said.
00:38:30.000There's a great deal of rot in any of one of these firms.
00:38:34.000Well, that raises sort of the broader question that's come up with regard to some of your work, which is, what should conservatives seek to do with government?
00:38:41.000So this has been a broad-scale debate inside conservative circles.
00:38:44.000You know, how far is too far with regard to government interventionism?
00:38:47.000In a perfect world, obviously, you have free competition.
00:38:50.000You don't have monopolistic situations.
00:38:52.000Really, monopoly is created by government regimes.
00:38:54.000I mean, really what you have is not even market power monopoly.
00:38:57.000What you have is essentially A monopoly of ideas that's been created by forced government collusion.
00:39:01.000If the government sets a standard, everybody has to hop to that standard.
00:39:04.000There's no ability to out-compete that because the government set the standard.
00:39:07.000That's true for DEI, ESG, lawsuits, and all the rest of it.
00:39:11.000But this has raised questions for a lot of conservatives about, you know, let's say that you are the governor of a state, a state like Florida, and now you have the ability to take over a college or university that is state-funded What should you do?
00:39:24.000Is the thing that you should try to do to reestablish a sort of classically liberal idea of a thousand flowers bloom?
00:39:30.000Or what other standard should you utilize in order to pursue an educational institution that actually does good?
00:39:38.000So what the left will do is now, after having lost the election, they will then attempt to revert back to classical liberal principles and argue through that Trojan horse.
00:39:46.000After having destroyed classical liberalism, By basically arguing for critical race theory, which argues that, for example, classical liberalism is itself a power structure that must be destroyed.
00:39:55.000Now that they've lost the argument, they'll start arguing, well, but we need our argument back because classical liberalism allows us to be there.
00:40:01.000And so you can't actually bar us because that's a violation of freedom of speech.
00:40:04.000Sure, we're arguing against freedom of speech.
00:40:06.000Sure, we're arguing for Herbert Marcuse's repressive tolerance.
00:40:09.000But you have to allow us to do that and to redestroy the system.
00:40:12.000And if you don't allow us to do that, it's a violation of your classical liberal principles.
00:40:18.000Well, I think there are really two important points, and the first is this.
00:40:23.000I mean, I find it astonishing that some of our libertarian and maybe kind of libertarian conservative friends are appalled that states are restricting critical race theory in the classroom, that states are passing legislation saying that teachers are not allowed to racially scapegoat students or to categorize, shame, humiliate, and segregate them on
00:41:12.000In the case of K-12, over 90% of the market.
00:41:15.000And in the case of higher education, colleges and universities, 75% of the market.
00:41:20.000And so even under the most stringent libertarian philosophy, in a condition of a government monopoly, those rules, kind of non-intervention rules, do not apply.
00:41:29.000And then of course, you know, it's absolutely absurd to say that a kindergarten classroom should be a freewheeling open debate where all opinions are welcomed.
00:41:40.000No, you have to shape the values, you have to shape the character, you have to even shape the souls of kids that are that young, and you have to teach them principles that reflect the values of their parents and the society and the political regime that they live in.
00:41:57.000And so I think government is, of course, well within its right.
00:42:21.000And so we have this really absurd pretzel-twisting on behalf of libertarian conservatives that seem to not even understand their own principles.
00:42:29.000I think they're deranged by Trump, deranged by DeSantis, deranged by the so-called new right that is seeking to replace limits on these institutions.
00:42:39.000And then second, briefly, and I'd love to talk about this more, is we've mistaken what classical liberal arts education means.
00:42:47.000We've reduced it to a procedural value of freedom of speech and academic freedom and the free marketplace of ideas.
00:42:54.000But that actually has, you know, has nothing to do with the ultimate aim or the ultimate purpose of education.
00:43:01.000And of course, classical comes from the Latin classicus and liberal comes from the classic liber.
00:43:08.000You know, it is the kind of upper class or the free.
00:43:13.000And the idea of a liberal or an elite versus a base or a vulgar education.
00:43:19.000And so embedded in the very terms, classical liberal, is this idea of a highest point
00:43:25.000towards which we should all be aspiring that creates limits on this notion of unfettered access.
00:43:33.000And so it requires us to make judgments.
00:43:36.000It requires us to say racial scapegoating of children is either good or bad.
00:43:41.000And if we determine as a society that it's bad, it should be restricted from, let's say, the elementary school classroom.
00:43:47.000And so classical liberal arts education at heart means the education of a free man or woman In a free society.
00:43:55.000And it's not just liberties which can become licensed, but actually has corresponding duties and responsibilities and limits that we should seek to reimpose in the interest of teaching students the great trinity of the true, the good and the beautiful, and being unapologetic about orienting our education system towards them.
00:44:17.000Well, this is one of the areas where I think that, for a lot of libertarians, they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of liberty itself.
00:44:24.000Is liberty an instrumental value, or is it an inherent value, is really the question for them.
00:44:29.000And there are several different types of liberty.
00:44:31.000If you were to say that liberty is an inherent value, then that leads directly to moral relativism.
00:44:35.000I mean, because at that point, you're basically just saying whatever free choice anybody makes, those are all of equal value.
00:44:39.000It's liberty to make the choice that is the thing that is of value.
00:44:42.000But the reality is that nobody actually thinks like that.
00:44:45.000Nobody actually believes, there's an Israeli philosopher named Joseph Raz, nobody actually believes that if you have the free decision to murder the person next to you, that that is more morally praiseworthy because you have utilized choice than the person who is forced to murder the person next to him.
00:44:58.000In fact, it becomes worse because you chose to do it.
00:45:01.000The real question as to limits on what the public can do in the name of the good are more utilitarian than they are values-laden.
00:45:09.000Meaning, you can make the case pretty easily, I think, that the free speech principles, the sort of libertarian full free speech principles, should be applied at the federal level as opposed to at the very, very local level.
00:45:19.000Which, by the way, the founders understood, which is why the First Amendment is about Congress not abridging freedom of speech.
00:45:23.000It is not about you and your local HOA abridging freedom of speech.
00:45:26.000Because the reality is that when there's a great level of unanimity among people that you live around, your ability to actually, as a community, legislate, to maintain a certain social lifestyle for your community, is a core element of freedom and also decency.
00:45:40.000But as you abstract up the chain, as you go to the federal government, for example, and it's governing 300 million people, it's a lot harder to say, well, here's the singular standard that should govern for everybody because it's a very diverse country with a lot of different ideas in it.
00:45:51.000And so on a fundamental level, I think it's a lot easier to make the case for the kind of government involvement except for basic principles like Non, you know, non violation of the 14th Amendment.
00:46:01.000But if you're talking about what should be taught in schools, this is something that shouldn't be mandated by the federal government.
00:46:06.000This is something that should essentially be done in a place where you and your fellow parents have a pretty good idea of what it is that you want taught to kids.
00:46:13.000It's the left that's arguing that the federal government should be able to cram down from the top down the notion that, for example, boys are girls and girls are boys.
00:46:20.000It's why the libertarian argument seems to kind of drown the government in the bathtub idea.
00:46:26.000There's an argument for it at the federal level.
00:46:28.000There's significantly less of an argument for it at the state or at the local level.
00:46:49.000I think that the curriculum should be decided at the local school district level.
00:46:53.000That would be the ultimate kind of locus of authority in my ideal society.
00:46:58.000Right now, it's actually at the state level.
00:47:00.000In almost all states, the state mandates the basic curricular standard and then delegates the implementation to local school districts.
00:47:07.000But what we're talking about is parents saying, and voters saying, Hey, we do not want you teaching our kids how to be a non-binary, pansexual gender theorist in fifth grade.
00:47:22.000And we want to restrict the ability of the government, the public school, to promote those values and ideologies to our children.
00:47:31.000And so we have to remember that individuals have free speech.
00:47:35.000The idea of free speech was that the government should not infringe on the free speech right of the citizen.
00:47:41.000But in this case, the citizen has every right to limit the speech and conduct of the government.
00:47:49.000That's the entire purpose of having representative government.
00:47:51.000The government does not have unlimited power.
00:47:54.000The government can be limited and restrained by the people through the process of passing legislation, through the process of governing these institutions.
00:48:05.000The left, though, sees the government as a citizen, as actually the primary citizen in the republic.
00:48:12.000And it wants to endow the government with all of the rights that were initially intended to be secured for the citizens.
00:48:19.000And so we have this really, the Leviathan is a beautiful metaphor because the Leviathan has now been endowed with rights of the individual.
00:48:28.000It is the most powerful individual in society and it can impose its will with no restrictions on the average person.
00:48:36.000And so I think we are in this very precarious space where even conservatives and libertarian
00:48:44.000conservatives have bought into the great myths and superstitions of the left to the point
00:48:49.000where they're functionally, they're theoretically defending individual liberties, but they're
00:48:53.000functionally defending the Leviathan that seeks to override and destroy the actual liberties
00:49:10.000This is where you get into the really fundamental debate with a lot of libertarians.
00:49:13.000There are a lot of libertarians who will argue Or we'll acquiesce to the argument that local governments have the ability to restrict what's taught in third grade.
00:49:21.000Because obviously you're talking about parents delegating a particular agency to the government.
00:49:27.000And the idea that you've delegated complete power over your kids to this group of government bureaucrats is really silly.
00:49:31.000When it comes to corporate America, however, They say that, you know, the government really shouldn't step in and do anything that is viewpoint discrimination if the government steps in and, for example, does what Governor DeSantis did with the special tax district for Reedy Creek and Disney.
00:49:45.000That Disney decided to get itself involved in a deeply political conversation about what kids ought to be taught in public school and their special tax district went away.
00:49:55.000And the argument is that this is a violation of free speech principles because this is a private actor now that's being acted upon by the state government.
00:50:02.000Well, what is the countervailing argument on that one?
00:50:05.000So there's there's an easier one and there's a more difficult one.
00:50:07.000So the easy one with Disney is, well, wait a minute.
00:50:10.000Why does Disney have special tax status that no other corporation in the state of Florida has?
00:50:16.000I think they had the ability to create a nuclear reactor on the Disneyland campus in Orlando.
00:50:21.000And so in a sense, what Ron DeSantis did is said, hey, The state of Florida had negotiated in previous years a sweetheart deal, a kind of crony capitalist deal, with the Walt Disney Company because there was a general and mutual interest that this would benefit the people of the state and the society as a whole.
00:50:41.000By participating in the political process, by seeking to overturn the will of the people of the state of Florida, we are simply revoking your special status and putting you on an equal free market and fair competitive playing field as your other competitors.
00:50:56.000So you can make a free market defense of Disney.
00:51:00.000The harder argument is to say, well, what if that wasn't the case?
00:51:05.000What if, let's say, that the government was saying, you know, we're going to actually create a special standard for this one company.
00:51:12.000I think that's a much more difficult case.
00:51:14.000And I think that conservatives and free market conservatives are right that that can go too far, that that can run amok, that that can be problematic.
00:51:21.000But what I think is the best approach is to say, that you can actually create general regulations and
00:51:28.000general laws governing how corporations behave that don't provide special rewards or punishments to any
00:51:34.000one firm, but say that, hey, these are the standards of conduct.
00:51:37.000For example, on ESG, you know, ESG, I think, is a perversion of the purpose of the free market,
00:51:45.000which is to create a high standard of living, is to create goods and services,
00:51:49.000is to create a kind of mass prosperity for our society.
00:51:54.000ESG is a hijacking of that purpose, a reorientation of that purpose.
00:51:57.000And I think a general law saying that ESG standards are illegitimate, they're not in the best interest of shareholders, and they're not in the chartered purpose of the corporation, because of course corporations are chartered by the state.
00:52:11.000I think we're on firmer grounds for something like that, and so I would like to see general legislation in that effect that seeks to counteract the special levers like the kind of abuse of the civil rights bureaucracy outlined in the Caldwell book, but I think also some more activist measures to say we do not consent to this Anti-democratic, activist-led injection of ideology such as ESG into the structures of our corporations.
00:52:40.000I think that's, you know, it's well within the legitimate purview of legislatures to enact legislation to that effect.
00:52:48.000It is going to take some aggressive action on this front because the game that the left has realized is that they can basically, through corporatist means, mobilize business on their own behalf to do the work the government isn't allowed to do.
00:52:57.000We're obviously seeing this with regard to social media.
00:52:59.000There's now an injunction on the FBI and the DOJ from talking with social media in the upcoming election because during the last election we obviously saw the FBI and the DOJ going to social media and basically dictating to them what they think they ought to do.
00:53:13.000And in so doing, essentially curb the free speech rights of Americans.
00:53:18.000As that boundary between private corporations and the government has blurred, it's very easy for private corporations to seek the immunities that private corporations ought to have while at the same time acting as tools of a government that shouldn't have that immunity in the first place.
00:53:31.000And I think there's a simple test here also, even on libertarian grounds, why this is justified.
00:53:36.000Because, again, on libertarian grounds, in conditions of monopoly and in conditions of limited competition, there is some government intervention that is justified.
00:53:45.000And so what I'm seeing as I'm looking at the landscape is companies like YouTube that are an effective monopoly over video services.
00:53:52.000You know, they have the lion's share of the market.
00:53:55.000They've been entrenched for a number of years.
00:54:03.000I think he's an abominable human being that has values that are not aligned with mine in any sense.
00:54:09.000But I remember what happened to him was quite remarkable.
00:54:11.000He was banned from one of the social media services.
00:54:14.000And then within 24 hours, he was banned from nearly the entire Internet.
00:54:19.000And so this suggests to me either a kind of collusion that is direct at the staff level or a cascading collusion in a de facto sense, where if you are if you are deemed a kind of persona non grata, according to the kind of left liberal hierarchy, you can be wiped away from wiped off the Internet from basically all of the firms who, in theory, are competing against one another.
00:54:43.000And so that to me, even on libertarian grounds, and I'm not a libertarian, thank God, but even on libertarian grounds, justifies some intervention to say, look, in a conditions of a dominant firm position, we could have basic rules, like let's say common carrier standards, to say that you can't be purged from the entire internet simply because you have a naughty opinion or even an abominable opinion.
00:55:07.000You can't be making actionable death threats against people.
00:55:12.000I think that there are kind of prudent limits on these that can be negotiated between social actors and between courts and government and companies.
00:55:23.000But certainly, we can push those boundaries outward to protect a wider range of speech.
00:55:29.000And I think that's a totally legitimate use of government power.
00:55:32.000Folks, our conversation will continue with Chris's personal story, how he became what he is.
00:55:37.000Apparently he grew up as like a communist.
00:55:39.000We'll talk about that, but that's only for our Daily Wire Plus members.