Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 308 ｜ The Battle for Our Future： America vs. Critical Race Theory ｜ Guest： Christopher Rufo

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Friday. I am so excited for you to listen to today's

00:00:14.200 conversation with Christopher Rufo. Man, it is mind blowing. We're talking about critical

00:00:20.660 theory, where it is, how it exists, how it's going to break down society if we do not push

00:00:25.800 back against it. And this is just one of those conversations that is going to leave you shaking

00:00:30.680 your head, but also feeling so informed, equipped and empowered. So without further ado, here is

00:00:36.020 Chris Rufo. Christopher, thank you so much for joining me. It's great to be with you. Can you

00:00:40.800 tell everyone who you are and what you do? Sure. I'm Chris Rufo. I'm the director of the

00:00:45.760 Discovery Institute Center on Wealth and Poverty. I'm also a writer for City Journal. And the last

00:00:50.280 two years I've been covering the issues of public disorder in West Coast cities. So looking at

00:00:55.020 homelessness, addiction, mental illness, crime. But starting in the summer, I took on a new beat

00:01:01.160 looking at critical race theory in our public institution. So that's been keeping me quite

00:01:06.300 busy the last 90 days. And what caused that transition from looking at these West Coast cities

00:01:11.980 to looking at these ideologies like critical race theory in our government? It all really emerged from

00:01:19.600 my work looking at the policies in the city of Seattle. And early in the summer, I got a message

00:01:25.740 from a city of Seattle employee that told me, you know, hey, the city of Seattle is now holding

00:01:30.880 segregated diversity trainings. There's one civil rights training for white employees and one

00:01:36.820 training for people of color working at the city. So this immediately caught my attention. I thought

00:01:42.280 that, you know, the kind of irony of the Seattle Office of Civil Rights holding racially segregated

00:01:48.400 training sessions had the makings of a good story. So I filed a records request. And when I got the

00:01:54.100 records request back, I was just shocked, horrified and dismayed at the content that they were teaching,

00:02:00.180 which was totally in line with critical race theory, which I've been following as an observer

00:02:04.500 for the last number of years. And that story, once I reported on it, I put out the documents,

00:02:10.220 I wrote the analysis for City Journal and the New York Post. That really set me off on this journey

00:02:16.640 where I started getting dozens and then hundreds of whistleblowers from public institutions all over the

00:02:23.260 country telling me, hey, we have trainings that are on the same kind of thing happening here. And I was

00:02:28.640 particularly interested in the training sessions that were teaching these extremely divisive and kind of

00:02:36.020 racially kind of toxic principles in the federal government. So that's the story that I really latched

00:02:44.380 on to. I did the Treasury. I did the National Nuclear Laboratories. I did the CDC. I did EPA. I did State

00:02:49.960 Department. You name it. This is something that has pervaded our institutions. And I thought that it

00:02:55.700 was something I should follow as a journalist. And tell me, what is the content of these trainings,

00:03:02.720 at least in general? Yeah, it all kind of critical race theory is this idea in the American context that

00:03:08.940 the United States is fundamentally an irredeemably racist country, and that all of our social institutions

00:03:15.640 from the Constitution, our legal system, our social structures, how kind of the government and economy

00:03:21.580 works, is kind of a smokescreen or kind of a camouflage for a naked racial oppression. And the

00:03:30.120 idea is that because our institutions are actually not leading to equality, to freedom, to equal protection,

00:03:37.460 they're actually enabling white supremacy. The only choice is to destroy them. And what that means in

00:03:44.200 practice is that they argue that, you know, white employees in the training context can be reduced

00:03:50.300 to this racial essence of whiteness, which is a kind of white supremacist in nature, whether overt or

00:03:57.040 covert, whether externalized or psychologically internalized. And the values that we think of as

00:04:03.040 good, such as objectivity, intellectualization, rationality, mathematics, comfort, all of those things

00:04:11.460 are actually just kind of rationalizations for white supremacy. And they have to be dismantled in the

00:04:19.140 workplace, in individual psychologies, and in society at large. And these are ideas that, you know, have

00:04:25.300 been percolating in academia for decades. And you can kind of laugh at them and mock them and dismiss them

00:04:31.520 as the kind of fevered fantasies of an intellectual class. But what's happened almost silently and invisibly

00:04:38.860 is that these ideas have jumped out of the academy and started really infiltrating into all of our

00:04:45.740 public institutions. So that I think without hyperbole, I can say in almost every school district,

00:04:52.300 in almost every federal agency, in almost every kind of university and education system, this has become

00:04:59.820 the dominant ideology, the kind of political philosophy that has the most power and authority within the

00:05:08.060 institutions. And I think once it's exposed, once people truly understand what it means in a kind

00:05:13.740 of concrete, tangible way, once they actually read the documents, I think people have been

00:05:18.940 unanimously horrified, whether they're on the right, in the center, or on the left.

00:05:22.940 And you talked about that critical race theory asserts that whiteness, as it is defined,

00:05:30.540 not just by the color of your skin, but by certain constructs and concepts,

00:05:35.260 even as basic as objectivity and a certain perspective of history and mathematics and

00:05:40.860 science and things like that, that it has to be dismantled, critical race theory asserts,

00:05:47.020 or it has to be destroyed, I guess. And how does critical race theory and these trainings,

00:05:52.940 how do they suggest destroying and dismantling these concepts and constructs of whiteness?

00:06:00.380 Yeah, that's a great question. I think if you look back at the actual literature of critical

00:06:05.740 race theory, some of the founding texts from the 90s and early 2000s, they're very explicit. They say

00:06:12.140 we're deeply skeptical of the idea of progress, we're deeply skeptical of the constitutional system,

00:06:16.540 we're deeply skeptical of the kind of legal structures that we have of individual rights,

00:06:22.860 and they want to replace them with kind of group identity-based rights and a group identity-based power

00:06:29.500 system that is, in their own language, incompatible with the American constitution.

00:06:36.380 And they're actually doing a good job at dismantling these because the first step is really to kind of

00:06:43.020 create a social system where upholding the American constitution, upholding the American values,

00:06:50.460 upholding objectivity or individual rights is seen as somehow wrong or evil or aberrant.

00:06:56.940 And then they're attacking individual psychology and the individual psychology of people that are in

00:07:02.380 these institutions, creating a tremendous sense of fear where they're able to establish kind of

00:07:07.740 institutional dominance. And then they're really kind of corrupting the institutions from the inside

00:07:12.140 out. They're gaining political power, often at taxpayer expense in the kind of bureaucracies,

00:07:18.220 whether it's education, university system, or the kind of government. And then they're slowly kind of

00:07:25.100 dismantling the structures from within. And I think the height of irony is that for people who don't believe in the

00:07:32.460 American system, the greatest kind of advocates of critical race theory are funded by American taxpayers.

00:07:39.660 And I think that this is what we have to wake up to. We have to say, you know what, if you're going

00:07:43.580 to be kind of at the taxpayer expense, if you're going to be a public servant, you have to serve the public

00:07:50.300 and you have to believe in the fundamental kind of principles and systems of the United States.

00:07:55.580 And if you don't, you're out of here. You can practice critical race theory under your First

00:08:00.140 Amendment protections on your own time and your own dime, but you don't have the right to be subsidized

00:08:05.500 by taxpayers. And I find it absolutely outrageous that every poor American, every working class American, 0.99

00:08:13.420 every plumber and Uber driver and electrician in this country is going to pay the six figure salaries of

00:08:19.420 critical race theorists who have nothing but contempt for the American people, nothing but hatred for

00:08:25.100 American history and nothing, no greater ambition than to destroy the United States itself. 0.81

00:08:31.900 So I understand the philosophy from an academic perspective, but I'm wondering what they believe

00:08:40.540 this looks like practically, especially like within corporations or local governments or within, you know,

00:08:46.780 federal agencies, you know, they're probably not. I mean, you tell me just coming out and saying in these

00:08:53.660 in these trainings, hey, look, our goal is to dismantle the American system and the Western

00:08:58.860 rule of law because we hate America and American history and white people and whiteness. 0.94

00:09:03.340 And so we're going to replace all of these things with subjectivity and collectivism.

00:09:08.700 They're probably not just coming out and saying that like I'm guessing that's not what the training

00:09:12.460 entails. I'm guessing it's a little bit more insidious than that. Like it's a it's a little bit more

00:09:18.460 subtle and sly. And so I'm curious, what does it sound like in these trainings in a way that

00:09:27.180 they make it relevant to, you know, the people's jobs in these agencies and in these local governments

00:09:34.060 and and these in these corporations? Does that make sense? Like, what does it actually

00:09:38.060 look like on on a practical level in these trainings?

00:09:40.620 Yeah, it really they operate on two levels, the explicit and the implicit. And in some cases,

00:09:46.860 they're actually explicit about it. I broke a story about a Department of Education funded organization

00:09:52.620 that was hosting a conference with a keynote speaker who advocated for abolition, abolition of prisons,

00:09:58.780 abolition of schools, abolition of of the wage labor system, because the schools are prisons.

00:10:04.940 That was the kind of metaphor. We need to abolish the public education system and replace it with the 0.86

00:10:09.260 kind of social justice system. And she advocated explicitly for the abolition of all of the kind 0.89

00:10:15.260 of American institutions. And then, you know, when I broke the story, she was shocked and upset because

00:10:21.340 I had I had essentially revealed publicly what they have been saying privately for years.

00:10:26.940 But in most cases, you're right, it's implicit. And I think that the model is not, you know,

00:10:31.020 the kind of revolutionary model of a kind of flag waving, let's overthrow the system. It's implicit,

00:10:38.140 it's insidious, and it's psychological in nature. And what they do is they rely on a series of

00:10:42.380 psychological techniques that, you know, could be described almost as cult indoctrination, where

00:10:47.660 the first step is to convince the employees that there's something fundamentally and inherently wrong

00:10:53.420 with them. They'll say, actually, these are kind of your internalized white supremacy. That's a phrase

00:11:00.380 that they love to use, where you think X, Y, and Z is true, but actually, X, Y, and Z are merely expressions

00:11:06.140 of your own kind of internal psychology and your own internalized white supremacy.

00:11:11.340 All those things that you thought were good are actually you being racist.

00:11:15.660 So you've got my attention now. I'm actually racist. I didn't know about it. I don't

00:11:19.580 treat people in a racist way. I don't think racist thoughts. But subconsciously, you know,

00:11:24.380 I'm deeply racist is what they're telling you. And then what they do, once they hooked you in with

00:11:29.660 persuading you of your kind of innate psychological aberration, then they say,

00:11:35.260 we actually have the solution. We're going to fix you psychologically. And by fixing you

00:11:40.540 psychologically, we can kind of wash away your sins. And then we can begin this great work

00:11:45.900 of rebuilding society in the image of kind of anti-racism or social justice.

00:11:52.300 But then they do something very tricky, which is again, kind of consonant with your basic kind of

00:11:58.780 brainwashing techniques. They say, you're going to become anti-racist, but because you're fundamentally

00:12:04.620 and kind of irreversibly defined by whiteness, you can never quite get there. And society,

00:12:12.540 because it's fundamentally based on institutional racism and white supremacy,

00:12:17.180 can also never quite get there. So you're going to be permanently on this journey of anti-racism

00:12:23.580 that never ends. And we're always going to remind you of your of your evil, but always dangling the

00:12:30.140 kind of potential for good in front of you. And then they hook you. They have you on a constant

00:12:35.580 journey of anti-racism that never ends. That, by the way, is fun. It kind of always demanding new

00:12:41.660 funding and multimillion dollar grants for the anti-racist trainers.

00:12:44.860 Well, also saying that capitalism is terrible.

00:12:47.500 The new priestly class, that capitalism, terrible. Yeah. And it's so wrought with contradictions. 0.78

00:12:53.100 It's so absurd on the face of it that it only works because they bully people and they intimidate

00:12:59.580 people in that which prevents them from speaking out. But that's changing. We cannot let this kind of

00:13:06.940 intellectually and morally bankrupt ideology intimidate us anymore. We have to speak it out. We have to call

00:13:13.260 it out for what it is. And I think that when enough people have the courage to stand up and just say,

00:13:19.420 no, I'm not going to do this. This is wrong. I'm going to fight this. This is something that

00:13:25.740 I think could crumble because let's face it. It's a it's a it's a critical race theory is a critical

00:13:31.020 threat to the country, but it has nothing in comparison to the fights that America has won before.

00:13:36.780 Yeah. And I think that once we stand up to it, it'll crumble like a house of cards.

00:13:40.940 Mm hmm. I've said before that the antidote to critical race theory is is critical thinking.

00:13:46.780 Critical race theory hates critical thinking, because like you said, it's a house of cards and

00:13:51.420 it's wrought with contradictions. And once you start poking holes in it, really just kind of asking,

00:13:55.820 clarifying questions. Well, OK, what does justice look like? Why are we ascribing guilt and innocence

00:14:01.900 based on people's skin color and not what they've actually done? What does the world look like

00:14:06.380 without prisons, without real schools, without police, without the rule of law? Can we look

00:14:12.540 throughout history and can we look at what these left wing revolutions that have been waged in the

00:14:17.100 name of equality and liberation have looked like? Have they ended well? Well, thankfully,

00:14:22.060 history is a great teacher and does tell us that. And so critical thinking does a lot, I think,

00:14:27.100 in the way of of pushing back against critical theory. The question is, what do people do who

00:14:33.820 are caught in these situations? Like I get these messages all the time. And quite frankly, I don't

00:14:38.380 really know what to say when people say at my job, I'm having to go through what they call diversity

00:14:43.740 and inclusion training. They typically don't, I guess, call it critical, you know, critical race

00:14:47.900 training, diversity and inclusion. Well, that sounds universally positive and great. So they sit in there,

00:14:52.300 they learn about how whiteness is terrible. They need to divest from their whiteness 0.99

00:14:55.580 and their company is, you know, intrinsically racist. And now they're working to be anti-racist,

00:15:01.580 all this stuff. Well, a lot of people who listen to me know that that is a crock,

00:15:05.260 but they don't know what to do. They don't know how to push against it. They don't know

00:15:07.980 what to say. They feel powerless. They say, do I quit or do I leave my church because this is

00:15:12.780 happening in the evangelical church? Or do I say something? So what is your advice? I know every

00:15:18.220 situation is different, but if someone were to say something, to speak up and to say, you know what,

00:15:22.540 I'm pushing back against this ridiculousness, what would that look like in an effective way?

00:15:27.820 Yeah, there's a lot of different tactics that I can use. And my advice would always say,

00:15:32.860 go as far as your courage can go. So, you know, take what risks that you can take. But certainly,

00:15:39.580 you know, that's a different formula for everyone. But there's a couple of things. One is that if it's

00:15:44.220 something that is especially egregious, get the documentation, take screenshots, download PDFs,

00:15:50.860 snap video clips, and then send them almost as a whistleblower to media. Send them to anywhere that

00:15:57.900 you feel like might be carrying the story. Because once a spotlight has shined on these programs,

00:16:02.700 especially in local media context, people kind of back away from it very quickly. And that's happening

00:16:08.540 even in very progressive cities like Seattle, where they're running some programs that are kind of

00:16:14.140 crazy and parents don't like it, and they start pushing back. Second, find allies within your

00:16:19.980 community. Find like-minded people that agree and show a united front. Because if it's one person,

00:16:25.820 it can be dismissed. But if it's 20 people, 30 people, 100 people, they will have to listen.

00:16:32.140 Third, look at the legal recourse. The president's executive order that has followed some of my reporting

00:16:37.500 provides a pathway either through the attorney general's office or through the kind of local

00:16:43.340 courts where some of these trainings that are kind of explicitly whiteness is bad and you people are 0.53

00:16:50.300 bad because you're white or you people are good because you're this or whatever, that likely constitutes

00:16:55.980 a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. So there may be grounds for a lawsuit. And when we get

00:17:01.340 enough of these lawsuits going across the country, corporations and universities and educational

00:17:07.020 institutions are going to actually look at critical race theory trainings as a legal risk.

00:17:11.980 And that will outweigh the kind of woke signaling that is driving them currently.

00:17:16.620 And then, you know, third, I think that, you know, there are also other avenues for kind of

00:17:21.580 investigations. I know that from my reporting just in the last 90 days, it's launched a Department of

00:17:27.660 Justice investigation into the city of Seattle. It's launched Office of the Special Counsel

00:17:32.140 investigations into multiple federal departments. It's launched a Department of Education investigation.

00:17:38.940 There are people that are starting to take this seriously. And you should reach out to kind of the

00:17:43.580 institutions that might have some legal sway and just start hammering these people because the

00:17:49.100 ideologies that they're pushing, in my view, constitute racial harassment, constitute toxic work

00:17:57.020 environments. And I think that what I'd love to see moving forward again, the president who released

00:18:02.140 an executive order on this is a great start. But I think that we need to start a concerted campaign to

00:18:07.820 push back against this stuff through every mechanism and every avenue possible.

00:18:13.180 And explain to people if it's not obvious enough already, but really just spell out if we take critical

00:18:20.860 theory to its logical conclusion. If it got its way by tearing down all of our institutions, 0.88

00:18:26.060 infecting all of our corporations, our school systems, whatever, what do you think it would

00:18:32.300 look like? Like what would justice and education and our systems look like in America if critical

00:18:40.460 race theory is able to fully manifest itself?

00:18:44.220 Yeah, I mean, I think you'd basically, you can go through the first 10 amendments,

00:18:48.940 you can go through the Bill of Rights one by one. And, you know, certainly the First Amendment would

00:18:53.500 be gone. Because in critical theory, you don't have a right to speak a hate speech. If your speech

00:19:00.940 is kind of enabling a systemic racism, that should be actually curtailed and controlled by the government.

00:19:08.460 Certainly, the Second Amendment would be gone. I think there's a kind of critical theory based

00:19:12.620 argument where you could say, the right to bear arms has historically been used as a tool of

00:19:16.780 oppression. And we actually need to get rid of that. And you can go and so on and so forth.

00:19:21.900 And then I think even the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law,

00:19:26.380 that would be gone. Critical race theorists and critical legal theorists have argued that

00:19:31.340 those kind of the idea of equal protection under the law enables racial disparities, enables kind of

00:19:38.140 race based oppressions. And they want to replace individual rights with group based rights. 0.89

00:19:43.260 So you'd immediately see a legal system that recognizes not the individual, but the kind of

00:19:48.860 immutable characteristics of group based identity. Then you'd see a power structure and an economic

00:19:53.820 structure that distributes power, that distributes money, that distributes economic benefit on the basis

00:20:00.140 of kind of group identity. And the result of that, we've tried this, right? Historically,

00:20:06.060 we've tried to implement these policies, these kind of ideas, not in the United States, but outside the

00:20:10.380 United States. And they always end in famine, genocide, economic collapse, death, destruction,

00:20:18.220 mayhem, and despair. So it's not a very good recipe. I mean, it's like, if you're a baker,

00:20:25.100 and you try baking a recipe that always turns out bad every time, at a certain point, you have to say,

00:20:30.140 you know what, I think I'm actually going to try to just make a nice sourdough that historically has

00:20:34.060 turned out pretty good. And we've evolved the kind of recipe for these breads over 1000 years.

00:20:39.580 But you have a kind of committed, utopian, kind of radical utopianist philosophy that just says,

00:20:47.580 the only thing that's standing in the way of a perfect society on earth are these kind of

00:20:54.060 outdated conservative institutions. And if we just destroy them, through no effort except for the

00:21:00.060 effort of destruction, something beautiful and something perfect will emerge. Unfortunately,

00:21:05.660 that's never happened. And I don't think ever will.

00:21:08.700 Yeah, leftism just continually gets human nature wrong, which that's the reason why socialism,

00:21:15.180 communism, these left wing revolutions have not worked, because it doesn't understand basic human

00:21:20.700 nature. I encourage people, I have encouraged people before to go to go learn about what happened

00:21:25.980 under Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, a revolution and change made in the name of liberation for indigenous

00:21:32.300 people that actually ended, not just in destroying the white farmers in Zimbabwe, but also the indigenous 0.99

00:21:38.860 populations there. Why Zimbabwe is the way it is today is because of these left wing revolutions that

00:21:44.460 are being waged in a much similar fashion to what's going on here. And like you said so well, it always

00:21:51.820 ends in destruction. It doesn't actually lead to the liberation that people are looking for.

00:21:58.860 Can you talk a little bit more about the president's executive order and what it actually accomplishes?

00:22:07.420 Are the agencies listening? Is it going to do anything?

00:22:11.660 It is, you know, they released after after kind of the initial volley of reporting about this,

00:22:18.700 the president's directed the OMB director to to issue a memo. And now that memo has been expanded

00:22:24.700 in a formal executive order earlier this week. And it's actually quite breathtaking. The ambition

00:22:29.820 of this executive order is is is nothing short of astonishing. What it does is it it basically prevents

00:22:36.060 federal funding going towards critical race theory in any capacity. So what it does is, first of all,

00:22:42.700 it instructs the federal agencies to stop doing any training based on the principles of critical

00:22:48.460 race theory, which constitutes kind of race, a race and sex based harassment. So it's automatically

00:22:55.340 out at any of the federal institutions and they've built in some enforcement mechanisms. It's out in the

00:22:59.980 United States military. Critical race theory had been making inroads the last couple of years and

00:23:04.540 in the military. That's now gone. And then third, and this is really, I think, the most ambitious

00:23:11.180 and kind of a kind of incredible jujitsu move. The order says that anyone who wants to do business

00:23:17.100 with the federal government. So this is probably the majority of Fortune 500 companies that have

00:23:20.940 federal contractors. You can no longer teach critical race theory based trainings anywhere in your

00:23:26.620 company. It's now a requirement, just like anti-discrimination elsewhere has been a requirement.

00:23:31.820 You can't do it. So they're going after the corporations in this way. And then another

00:23:37.180 great piece is that it's saying any federal grants, any federal research grants, academic grants,

00:23:41.660 university grants, none of those can fund critical race theory based programs moving forward. So this

00:23:46.940 is going to cripple potentially hundreds of research projects moving forward. And I think it's basically

00:23:52.940 just saying we're going to actually use the levers of power to go after this ideology. It has no

00:23:58.940 business. You can do it privately. You can do it on your own time, your own dime,

00:24:03.180 but this is no longer going to be subsidized by taxpayers. And they really pulled out all the stops

00:24:08.380 to push at it and to cut off the funding throughout all of our public institutions and even our kind of

00:24:15.260 private institutions. You're no longer able, you're going to be able to push this. And certainly there will

00:24:21.180 be fights moving forward, how it's implemented, how it's enforced. But I think that for the moment,

00:24:26.060 we have to kind of celebrate this is a unprecedented move and people have been pushing back against

00:24:31.820 critical race theory intellectually for years. But this is the first time it's actually been

00:24:36.540 operationalized and institutionalized from a position of political power.

00:24:41.500 Yeah. Yeah. You talked about what the conclusions would be like if we didn't push back against it.

00:24:47.260 I'm very, very thankful that the president has made a stand on this, that people like you

00:24:51.420 are reporting on this, that people within their companies and within federal agencies where

00:24:55.980 unfortunately this is happening, people are speaking up, people are noticing it. I feel like for

00:25:00.540 so long, people just, they didn't notice. But now you have people actually, you know,

00:25:05.340 Nicole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, a lot of these activists actually coming out and just

00:25:09.900 saying the quiet part out loud. Ibram X. Kendi, I think he is the one who recommended that we,

00:25:16.380 you know, have basically like an anti-racist task force, which is a group of unelected people that

00:25:22.700 would kind of go around and determine which policies are creating or allowing for disparities

00:25:28.300 between racial groups and would take legal action to, you know, overturn those policies or,

00:25:34.140 you know, perhaps indict the people that are in power. And so I feel like one of the big reasons

00:25:42.060 why this idea that critical race theory has become so popular is the misunderstanding that

00:25:48.460 disparities in outcome always means discrimination and policy. And so when people push back against

00:25:56.060 critical race theory and, you know, push back against the ideas of people like Ibram X. Kendi,

00:26:01.180 they assume that, well, if you're pushing back against that, it's because you're racist,

00:26:04.700 because you like disparities, because you like discrimination. And this is the only way

00:26:10.540 to create equality. Obviously, people like Thomas Sowell have pushed back against this a lot,

00:26:15.500 that discriminate or disparities in outcome doesn't necessarily mean discrimination and opportunity.

00:26:20.460 We are looking for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Correct. But, you know,

00:26:26.460 I think that's part of why it's become so popular is because of that misunderstanding. Do you agree with

00:26:32.700 that? Or how do you think this is this is taken root so firmly? Yeah, I think that's the mechanism

00:26:39.660 by which it works. And I think what you're describing in my mind is really the kind of rhetorical power of

00:26:45.980 critical race theory. If you disagree with critical race theory, if you push back, if you dissent,

00:26:52.060 the automatic kind of translation, the pushback is, well, you're only disagreeing with us because that's

00:26:57.580 an expression of your white privilege, your white internalized white supremacy, your white fragility. So embedded

00:27:04.460 in the argument is that if you disagree with the argument, it's just an expression that you are actually the

00:27:10.380 problem. And this is a kind of circular logic, right? They try to construct it in a way where

00:27:15.580 you can't disagree. So that's one. But two is that these are extraordinarily powerful words.

00:27:21.900 I mean, if you called someone if you call someone a white supremacist, for example,

00:27:26.540 a couple of years ago, I mean, that is like, yeah, it's the worst thing you can be. There may be a

00:27:32.700 couple other things like horrible crimes you could commit. Yeah. But I mean, that is kind of like one

00:27:37.500 of the greatest moral crimes. And justifiably, white supremacy is wrong. It's wrong in 1950. It's wrong in

00:27:43.500 1850. It's wrong in 2020. It's a kind of universal wrong. But what they've done is that they've essentially

00:27:50.220 kind of white supremacized everything. I've read recent articles where they say square dancing is white

00:27:56.060 supremacist. Math is white supremacist. Logic is white supremacist. Dogs are white supremacist. Someone told me boats

00:28:02.460 are white supremacist yesterday. Right. And it's like so what they've done is that they've overplayed their hand.

00:28:08.140 They've actually stripped the language of all of its rhetorical power. And I think that's actually

00:28:13.900 going to be a turning point because they no longer have that as a weapon to strike fear into the hearts

00:28:19.340 of people, to intimidate and to bully people into silence and compliance. As they've degraded the

00:28:25.660 rhetorical power of those words, they've also lost a bit of their kind of political power. And then,

00:28:31.740 you know, kind of in the deepest irony, they've actually kind of, kind of, kind of muddied the

00:28:38.140 waters so that it's really hard to tell kind of what is right and wrong because they've kind of

00:28:43.740 flooded the vocabulary. They've flooded the op-ed pages with this kind of extraordinary and reckless

00:28:49.660 rhetoric that I think most people are kind of confused to saying, you know, is, is, you know,

00:28:54.780 is Rice-A-Roney, is white supremacist? I don't know what to do anymore. But I think that presents a

00:29:00.220 problem, but also an opportunity. It presents the opportunity where people essentially have nothing

00:29:04.700 to lose and they can start fighting back. They can start retaking the territory.

00:29:09.580 Yeah. You know, I have noticed that simultaneously, while, while critical theorists,

00:29:13.900 critical race theorists, you know, I'm a Christian. This is partly, I mean, this is a Christian

00:29:17.340 conservative podcast. So we talk about how this stuff is seeping into evangelicalism and, and the

00:29:22.700 church. And it seems like these activists are getting louder and louder, but so is, so is the

00:29:27.500 dissent. And it's a shame that it's kind of taken us a long time. It seems like to realize that,

00:29:33.020 that it has a name, that this is what's happening, not just in the church, but in all of our systems.

00:29:37.900 But I agree with you, people of all different faiths and ideologies and backgrounds and academic

00:29:42.620 persuasions, it seems like are saying, hang on, actually, objective truth is important. Actually,

00:29:48.620 the Western rule of law is pretty good. Actually, capitalism, not so bad. The police and prisons are

00:29:54.700 probably necessary. That doesn't mean there aren't necessarily, you know, reforms to be made

00:29:58.940 in these areas. But I do see a lot of people pushing back. And I hope people feel empowered

00:30:04.300 by that. And unfortunately, you will be called a racist, you will be called a bigot. But like you

00:30:11.020 said, those words, unfortunately, I think it's a travesty that they're losing the power that they

00:30:16.060 should have. But at the same time, it's almost a good thing, because people can kind of plow ahead

00:30:20.540 and say, you know what, I'm going to be called a racist. But it almost doesn't mean anything if

00:30:23.900 what you're doing is not actually, actually racist. I'd like to, you know, kind of make a point that

00:30:33.020 I think is really important and really relevant to your views and your audiences, is that critical

00:30:38.380 race theory, if you're in a church, and they're thinking of adopting this stuff, you should remind

00:30:42.700 them of the lineage of critical race theory. It doesn't emerge from the Judeo Christian tradition at

00:30:47.260 all. In fact, it's deeply hostile to the Judeo Christian tradition. And it really emerges from 0.52

00:30:54.860 a kind of radical atheism. You can trace it back to Marx, who obviously is deeply hostile to

00:31:00.620 Christianity. And then to the Frankfurt School, where they're trying to take economic Marxism,

00:31:05.580 and then kind of grafting identity politics on top of it. These, again, are kind of militant atheists

00:31:11.820 and deeply hostile to Christianity. And then even the kind of Black Lives Matter movement of the day, 0.72

00:31:17.500 again, is not coming from the tradition of Martin Luther King, who was inspired by the declaration,

00:31:23.420 inspired by the Bible. These are coming from a totally different tradition. They have nothing to

00:31:29.180 do with the kind of Christian sense of justice. And in fact, all they want to do is undermine it. 0.63

00:31:35.420 So I think it is just really the height of folly for churches to be adopting this. You're adopting

00:31:42.380 something that at the end wants to destroy you. And I think that people should be very vocal and

00:31:48.140 very strong in keeping this out of our faith institutions.

00:31:51.260 Yes, you're absolutely right. That's such a good point. And I think that critical theories have

00:31:56.620 become very strategic and very effective at infecting the minds of a lot of Christians by

00:32:01.820 saying, oh, no, no, no, no, this is just a fight for justice. And God tells us to do justice and to

00:32:06.620 love mercy, not realizing there's been a sleight of hand there. There's been an exchange in the

00:32:11.020 definitions of justice that is not biblical justice, like you said, as a part of the Judeo-Christian

00:32:15.260 tradition, which God's justice is truthful, it's proportionate, it is impartial, and it is direct.

00:32:22.540 And that is not the justice of critical theory, which is collectivist and doesn't really care what

00:32:28.540 you did or did not do, but ascribes guilt and innocence just based on whatever oppression

00:32:33.100 group according to your skin color that you are in. But the people who kind of buy into critical

00:32:39.500 theory within the church don't realize that when they say, oh, yeah, you know, I'm just pushing for

00:32:44.220 racial justice and justice that the justice that they are very often pushing for is not real justice.

00:32:50.700 It's not real biblical justice. And so, but you hear it's a lot of the same things as like in the

00:32:56.460 secular world, when you hear that, you know, you need to divest of your whiteness, whiteness is an 0.99

00:33:02.860 internalized white supremacy is something you need to get rid of. And here's, you know, what you do to do

00:33:08.380 that. And, you know, objectivity and all of this stuff is punctuality. That's all a traditional family.

00:33:15.260 That's all a matter of white supremacy. We also hear that within the church. We hear things that biblical

00:33:20.540 inerrancy, the belief that the Bible is inerrant and authoritative, that that's a part of white supremacy,

00:33:25.820 that having a certain biblical definition of justice is white supremacy, that believing that Jesus, even within the

00:33:32.780 church, that Jesus is the only way, truth and life, that's white supremacist. So it's the same thing. It

00:33:37.260 mirrors it very well. They push back against the institutions of Christianity that have held it 0.90

00:33:45.660 together as, you know, the religion that it's been for thousands of years by saying these things, these

00:33:53.340 pillars are actually associated with whiteness. And it is an effort to do exactly what you said. It's 0.92

00:33:58.700 actually an effort to make Christianity a form of agnosticism, in the same way that it's an effort

00:34:03.740 to make America, you know, some form of socialist dystopia. And I think a lot of people within

00:34:09.100 Christianity, and maybe other religions do, I don't know, they don't realize that in taking on these

00:34:13.960 definitions, they're actually aiding and abetting the destruction of their faith and, and of their 0.56

00:34:20.040 country. But I just wanted to note that I got one more question for you. And that is, do you think

00:34:25.660 that the riots and the violence and the chaos that we are seeing that seem to have been just

00:34:30.920 exploded over the past few months, but have been building for the past few years? Do you think that

00:34:35.500 any of that is a result of this ideology of critical theory that's being propagated?

00:34:41.180 Yeah, absolutely. And, and, you know, it's not even you don't even really need like an analytical

00:34:45.240 analytical capacity to say, actually, the riots are emerging from this ideology from this philosophy,

00:34:51.120 all you have to do is go to live streams, all of the kind of protests around the country,

00:34:55.640 especially in the West Coast cities, they're actually live streaming the speeches live streaming

00:34:59.720 the demonstrations, you can find them on Twitch and other platforms. And all you have to do is

00:35:04.360 listen to the speeches from the riot leaders from the protest leaders, they're really kind of have

00:35:10.060 translated the academic theories of critical race theory, into the kind of language of street

00:35:15.400 protests, where they're saying, this protest is about George Floyd, but it's really about

00:35:19.740 dismantling the patriarchy, overthrowing them, overthrowing capitalism, and burning the

00:35:25.320 Constitution. And you see these American flags, you know, these flags are kind of a kind of legacy

00:35:31.140 of imperialism, let's light them up. And all you have to do is listen, and with a kind of open mind,

00:35:36.560 and then kind of a curious mind. And if you have the background, if you understand where these ideas

00:35:41.460 emerge from, you'll, you'll find that the riots are kind of a crude translation of a very refined and

00:35:48.420 intellectual academic theory. And, and they've, they've done something remarkable, which is they've

00:35:53.440 repackaged a 1960s and 1970s cultural Marxism, from Marcuse and the Frankfurt School and others.

00:36:00.860 And they've revived it with a kind of millennial twist, which is kind of the, the black clothes and

00:36:07.240 the Antifa flags and the kind of, and the kind of Molotov cocktail throwing, kind of new enemies of

00:36:13.840 ICE and the Department of Justice, etc. But this is simply kind of reheated and warmed over a 1960s

00:36:21.220 Marxism. It's nothing new. And to imagine that it's really just about police brutality is to really

00:36:28.500 be blind to the rhetoric that exists on the streets. So again, there's a direct line from critical theory

00:36:35.320 to the diversity training program in the federal government, to the Molotov cocktails that are 0.50

00:36:40.500 smashing against government buildings in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and other cities.

00:36:44.880 Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. And I think a lot of this has been preplanned and building up

00:36:48.640 for a long time. The person who wrote in defense of looting, which NPR covered actually said back in

00:36:54.640 April, you know, I feel like there is a movement that's brewing, there is a push coming up for,

00:37:00.280 you know, for pushing against the system using looting. That was back in April. That was before George

00:37:05.480 Floyd. So I think this has been brewing for a long time. And I certainly agree with you that

00:37:10.780 critical theory is at least in large part to blame.

00:37:14.160 Yeah, no, that's right. And one last tidbit, I'd leave you with to ponder something kind of very

00:37:19.020 small, but I think very suggestive detail is that you just look at kind of the traditional RIP,

00:37:24.940 right, rest in peace, the idea that in the afterlife, you're going to hopefully ascend to a kind of

00:37:30.320 transcendent existence, something that is peaceful, something that is kind of an end state for human

00:37:36.220 good, light and consciousness. But the kind of protesters and the race theorists, they've chose

00:37:42.700 rest in power, because they believe essentially, there is no afterlife, the next world is just like

00:37:48.460 ours, it can be reduced, not to a kind of human goodness, but it can be reduced to a struggle for

00:37:54.720 worldly power. And I think that detail is something that encapsulates and kind of captures everything.

00:38:01.140 Do you want a world and a kind of transcendent metaphysics where you can rest in peace in

00:38:06.900 eternity? Or do you want to be trapped in a struggle for political power for till the end of time?

00:38:12.680 That's your choice. So if you're listening, and you want to choose, that's the fundamental choice.

00:38:18.080 What world do you want to believe in? And what are your fundamental convictions? And I think with any

00:38:22.400 kind of thinking and right person, they would choose that wisely, as they think about these issues.

00:38:30.300 Yeah, how freeing is it to realize that we can actually regard people as individuals with individual

00:38:36.280 souls and individual personalities and wants and interests and talents and needs, rather than

00:38:41.160 ascribing characteristics or guilt or innocence to people based on their on their their group identity,

00:38:46.680 that really is, ironically, an oppressive way to think that kind of collectivist mentality.

00:38:53.060 And what people need to realize is that it is not in the nature of critical theory to unite.

00:38:58.020 So people who are like, we need reconciliation and and unity and intersect is intersectionality is the way to get

00:39:03.480 there. It's not in its nature. Its nature is division. Its nature and end is destruction.

00:39:09.380 As you have explained so well. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Can you please tell

00:39:14.820 everyone where they can follow you, how they can support you?

00:39:18.680 Yeah, great. I'm on Twitter at real Chris Rufo, last name R-U-F-O. That's just real Chris Rufo.

00:39:24.920 That's been a lot of fun to be on Twitter lately. And then if you want to learn more about my other

00:39:29.560 work and read some of my papers and op eds and articles and then support my work, it's just

00:39:34.160 ChristopherRufo.com. Again, that's R-U-F-O, ChristopherRufo.com. And it's really great to

00:39:40.020 sit down with you. Thank you so much, Christopher. I really appreciate you taking the time.

00:39:43.860 Thank you.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - October 02, 2020

Ep 308 ｜ The Battle for Our Future： America vs. Critical Race Theory ｜ Guest： Christopher Rufo

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