Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - October 11, 2021


Ep 503 | Now Is the Time to Double Down | Guest: Chris Rufo


Episode Stats

Length

53 minutes

Words per Minute

179.2173

Word Count

9,507

Sentence Count

498

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

15


Summary

Southwest Airlines had to cancel over 1,000 flights over the weekend because of employees walking off the job in protest of the vaccine mandate. Good for them! I m all about supporting those who are fighting back against these mandates.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Monday. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. Wow,
00:00:15.820 wow, wow. I am very fired up. I was fired up coming into the studio this morning because
00:00:20.720 there is a lot going on right now. We're going to talk about all of it this week, or I'm
00:00:26.000 going to try to talk about all of it this week. Southwest Airlines, this is probably the biggest
00:00:30.760 story going on right now, had to cancel over 1,000 flights, I think almost 2,000 flights over
00:00:36.460 the weekend, apparently because of employees walking off the job in protest of the vaccine
00:00:42.940 mandate. Now, that's not being covered by the media, so we're kind of relying, including myself,
00:00:48.460 I'm relying on people who work for this airline to tell me what's going on. There are many
00:00:53.240 conservative journalists who are kind of in the same boat. Southwest is saying it had something
00:00:58.260 to do with weather. That's why a bunch of flights got canceled going in and out of Florida, but
00:01:04.760 other airlines did not have to cancel their flights going in and out of Florida, and people in Florida
00:01:09.060 are like, what the heck, our weather is fine. It turns out that at least from voices on the inside,
00:01:15.240 they are saying that people are protesting this vaccine mandate. We're hearing rumblings of other
00:01:21.320 airlines who have mandated the vaccine, like American Airlines, that this is going to happen
00:01:26.920 as well. Thankfully, the unions, which I'm not a big fan of what unions have become. I understand and
00:01:34.900 appreciate the original need for labor unions, but they have become these very left-wing bureaucratic
00:01:45.600 bodies that mostly exist for themselves and their own power and not actually representing
00:01:50.540 workers' needs and speaking truth to power and all of that. But in this case, it seems like the airline
00:01:55.860 unions, the pilots' unions and just the airline unions in general are actually pushing back against
00:02:04.560 these mandates. And from what I have learned, there are just a few thousand pilots at Southwest Air that
00:02:12.360 are saying, no, either, no, they're not getting the vaccine or they have gotten the vaccine and
00:02:18.220 they're simply pushing back against what they see as an unjust and tyrannical mandate. And you know
00:02:24.980 what? Good for you. Good for you. Good for you, pilots. Good for you, flight attendants. I truly,
00:02:32.440 sincerely feel for everyone whose plans were disrupted over the weekend. Like there truly are few things
00:02:38.500 more stressful than being stranded at an airport and getting a flight canceled. I had to fly over
00:02:43.380 this weekend. Um, I don't travel that much, but I had to go to places this weekend and I actually had
00:02:50.300 to fly three different airlines, which is very unique to me. I'm typically, uh, an American airlines
00:02:56.240 girl. It's just what I've always flown. Um, but I didn't fly Southwest at all this weekend. And I'm like,
00:03:01.640 Oh, thank you Lord for your providence and helping me get home because I would really hate to be
00:03:06.600 stranded in Detroit where I was or stranded anywhere. But, uh, that's where I was on, uh, on
00:03:12.740 Saturday. And so I'm very thankful, very thankful for that because I really feel for the people who
00:03:19.020 are stranded at airports, even as I am fully supportive. I'm fully supportive of everyone who is
00:03:25.840 pushing back, um, in this way, like to pilots, to teachers, to flight attendants, to nurses that are
00:03:33.560 pushing back against this in a peaceful and effective way, hold the freaking line. Like this
00:03:39.620 fight matters. It absolutely matters. This is not an anti-vaccine stance. Although there are people who
00:03:46.900 are, uh, against, uh, the vaccine. Okay. That's fine. But more than anything, like the mass protests
00:03:52.920 that you are seeing around the world, the protests that you are seeing here that very often aren't
00:03:57.560 covered by the media, the boycotts that you're seeing, the walking off of jobs that you, um, are
00:04:04.360 seeing. It's a big, massive pushback against these mandates, against these passports that are a huge,
00:04:13.300 uh, infringement upon people's liberty and their ability to provide for their families. And honestly,
00:04:20.760 I just have so little understanding at this point of Christians who don't see what's happening,
00:04:26.840 who don't see this as a huge infringement upon people's liberty, who don't see this as an
00:04:32.120 injustice, who don't see why, uh, all of these different restrictions, regulations and mandates
00:04:37.240 and passports have a cumulative effect of oppression and totalitarianism. How do you not see that that's
00:04:43.300 where we're headed? Like if you are someone over the past year who has talked about police brutality,
00:04:48.000 and yet you're looking at what's going on in Australia, where people are being beaten in the streets
00:04:52.620 because of, because they're peacefully protesting, you don't have anything to say about that. Or maybe
00:04:57.660 you think that's good. Or maybe you think the police should be enforcing these vaccine mandates and
00:05:02.100 vaccine passports and mask wearing and all of that. You're a giant hypocrite and you don't see what's
00:05:07.500 going on. Like too many people did not pay attention in history class when it, when it came to the history
00:05:15.760 of the 20th century and the patterns that we see leading up to totalitarianism. So many people are
00:05:22.800 just so dedicated to believing that everything is well and good, that the right is always blowing
00:05:29.340 things out of proportion, that everything is fine. It's okay that Australia, parts of Australia have
00:05:33.880 become a police state. It's okay that pastors are getting arrested in places like Canada. Oh, maybe they
00:05:39.340 deserve it. Maybe it's really for our public health. It's fine that there's a mandate that is causing
00:05:43.760 thousands of nurses to quit, apparently in the midst of a pandemic that's putting a strain on our
00:05:48.640 hospitals. Oh, it's fine that military servicemen and women who signed up to pay the ultimate
00:05:54.040 sacrifice are now being booted out of the military because they won't get a vaccine that for a disease
00:06:00.420 that they probably have natural immunity for. Or if they don't, they simply don't want to get the
00:06:05.480 vaccine and that choice should be honored. Oh, that's all fine. It's just a mask. It's just another
00:06:10.540 restriction. It's just a mandate. It's, you know, just the Biden administration saying that they are
00:06:17.860 going to cut antibody supply to these certain Southern states that won't go along with his
00:06:24.120 authoritarian mandates. It's fine. It's all for public health. You're asleep. You're asleep. And I
00:06:29.440 just have so little patience for that anymore. How do you not see what's going on? How do you not see it?
00:06:34.860 I don't know. I don't know. And then what we're talking about today, we're talking about Merrick
00:06:41.660 Garland mobilizing the FBI against concerned public school parents. We're going to talk to Chris Rufo.
00:06:47.260 He is a journalist who has been one of the loudest and most persistent voices against critical theory
00:06:52.400 in both the government and in schools. I don't see how anyone could look at this story that we're
00:06:59.600 going to talk about today. The other stories that I just mentioned, and gosh, I haven't even talked
00:07:03.660 about the supply chain issues. The fact that there are shipping containers all around outside of the
00:07:07.900 United States that can't actually unload all of their supplies because we have a worker shortage.
00:07:14.460 The fact that the Biden administration claimed that they were going to add, you know, half a million
00:07:19.280 jobs last month. It was less than 200 million or two. Sorry. Yeah. Half a million jobs. 200,000 jobs
00:07:25.920 were only added last month. The economic crisis that we are going through and are about to go through.
00:07:31.520 I haven't even talked about all of that. How do you not see what's going on that we are being
00:07:35.220 destroyed from the inside? How do you not see it? Anyway, we only have time to talk about one of
00:07:41.240 these things today. We'll talk about the rest of them, uh, for the rest of the week, but we're going
00:07:46.240 to talk about this. Uh, we're going to talk about this memo from the attorney general today and what it
00:07:52.800 all means. And then I'll have, um, just a couple words of encouragement at the end for you.
00:08:03.760 Chris, thank you so much for joining us again. So I noticed in the memo that it doesn't actually
00:08:10.340 say anything about critical race theory. Um, in your tweet, you talk about how this seems to be,
00:08:16.640 um, a referendum on the parents who are pushing back against critical race theory. So can you tell
00:08:22.560 us how you kind of got there? Yeah, well, you know, at first it was, uh, kind of a hypothesis,
00:08:29.820 but now we've actually confirmed it. So America first legal led by Stephen Miller, uh, has uncovered
00:08:34.980 evidence that he's now sent, uh, to the department of justice, that this was really a kind of inside
00:08:40.380 job. This was a request that originated within the department of justice and the FBI. Uh, they farmed it
00:08:45.820 out to the national school boards association, uh, asking them to request it, to give them a
00:08:51.420 pretext. And then the national schools boards association, original letter, which came out just
00:08:55.900 a few days before the attorney general's announcement, uh, requested that not only the attorney general
00:09:01.220 unleashed the FBI on parents, uh, but that he classified some parent protesters as domestic terrorists
00:09:07.740 and prosecute them under the Patriot Act. Um, and then what we're seeing now, and I have a document,
00:09:13.000 uh, request a FOIA request that I will confirm this. And we're also getting this from reports from
00:09:18.060 America first legal is that this is a really a collusion between the teachers unions, the national
00:09:23.940 school board association, the Biden administration to take the heat off of these school administrators
00:09:30.260 that have been under tremendous pressure from parents and then unleash the state against them.
00:09:35.080 Uh, it's something extraordinary, uh, that I think we haven't seen in a long time.
00:09:39.320 And to those who say, and I know that you've talked about this many times, I've talked about
00:09:43.940 it as well to, to those who still say, because I'm still seeing this a lot, not just from elected
00:09:49.940 officials, but, um, just from people in the public sphere saying, look, critical race theory is not
00:09:57.180 being taught in schools. These parents who are pushing back or just believing some grand conspiracy
00:10:02.160 theory, or maybe they're even racist as one candidate for governor said in Virginia, Terry McAuliffe.
00:10:08.760 Um, can you give us just some examples of what it might look like for critical race theory, which was
00:10:14.000 once kind of an obscure collegiate legal theory being taught in grade school?
00:10:19.880 Yeah. Well, I mean, it, what I think is happening is that they're playing what I call a linguistic shell
00:10:25.340 game. They're using the definition of words. They're changing them. They're hiding them. They're moving
00:10:30.100 them in order to confuse parents in order to shift the blame in order to avoid responsibility. But, uh, you have to
00:10:37.600 know the principles of critical race theory to know whether critical race theory is being taught.
00:10:41.860 So if you see something like white privilege, uh, white fragility, internalized, uh, white supremacy,
00:10:47.720 uh, if you see unconscious bias, which is derives from critical race theory, all of these key terms,
00:10:54.520 often diversity, equity, and inclusion, not always, but I think more often than not adopts the principles
00:11:00.520 of critical race theory into its pedagogy. So if you're seeing any of these key terms or buzzwords,
00:11:06.380 uh, you are finding whether they label it critical race theory or not, the key tenets of critical race
00:11:13.320 theory, which divides the world into oppressor oppressed by racial categories, uh, which advocates
00:11:18.440 for, you know, really, uh, uh, uh, uh, crushing, uh, existing, uh, liberties, freedoms, constitutional
00:11:24.860 guarantees in order to liberate the country in their word, uh, from racism and oppression.
00:11:31.640 Yep. And this is not just some kind of random deduction that you're doing or labeling every,
00:11:37.900 um, you know, social justice, racial justice phrase is critical race theory, or especially any,
00:11:45.140 um, teaching about racism as critical race theory. Like you can read, for example, Richard Delgado's
00:11:51.540 introduction to critical race theory as I have, and you see where all of those ideas originated.
00:11:58.540 This is not an attempt to call everything that we don't like or every controversial teaching
00:12:03.580 critical race theory. It truly does originate from the ideas of the original, uh, critical race
00:12:11.200 theorists. Part of the problem is that this is actually supposed to be an obscure legal theory,
00:12:17.600 obviously one that I don't agree with, but that's where it's supposed to live. And yet these elementary
00:12:23.060 school, middle school, high school teachers who are not at all even trained in this legal theory
00:12:28.620 are trying to boil it down in its most crudest, in its crudest forms and, uh, teaching them to kids.
00:12:36.740 What's going to be the effect of this? Do you think if they are continued to be allowed to do so?
00:12:43.000 Well, there's two ways of looking at it. One is that, uh, American public schools in many cases
00:12:47.780 are so incompetent. Uh, they have trouble teaching anything. Hopefully they will have trouble teaching
00:12:52.640 this, but I think more likely is that this seeps into the background knowledge of kids. And I think
00:13:00.160 what I've heard from parents over and over is that when they're teaching intersectionality,
00:13:03.880 privilege, oppression studies, et cetera, um, it, it, it creates a kind of guilt and shame complex among
00:13:11.520 majority race kids, but also creates a kind of fatalism and fear complex within minority kids.
00:13:18.920 You know, I had a father who was a interracial couple in Arizona. Uh, he actually ended up speaking
00:13:24.200 out at the school board meeting, you know, black father, white mother. And he said, this is ripping
00:13:28.380 my family apart. It's filling my kids with fear. Uh, you know, they, my, my 10 year old is now asking
00:13:34.040 to sleep in, in, in, in the bed with mom and dad again, because he's, he was terrified by what the
00:13:39.380 lessons that they learned during black history month, which should be a celebration of black
00:13:43.660 achievement and black resilience in the United States. Uh, but this father said it, it, it filled
00:13:48.540 him with fear that he would be hunted down and murdered by the police at any moment, uh, that he couldn't
00:13:53.320 ever succeed in life. And I think we're seeing now enough of these examples where they're saying
00:13:57.840 not just that there has been historical groups of people in the United States with power and
00:14:02.660 privilege, which is absolutely true and should be taught extensively, honestly, sometimes even
00:14:07.900 brutally, but it's saying that you five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old by virtue of your
00:14:13.480 skin color are inherently oppressive. You are responsible for the collective crimes of the
00:14:18.680 past committed by people who look like you. It's one thing to teach honest history.
00:14:23.320 It's a quite another thing to teach critical race theory.
00:14:26.500 Exactly. And that's the accusation that, um, people, teachers, parents are getting from the left
00:14:32.860 that, um, people who are pushing back on this just don't want anyone to talk about racism or they don't
00:14:39.880 want anyone to talk about, um, you know, the history of white supremacy or slavery or Jim Crow in the
00:14:46.120 United States. And that's not true at all. And not only do I believe that those things should be
00:14:51.640 taught at the right time in the right way, but I actually think that critical race theory
00:14:55.820 gets in the way of, of teaching those ugly points in American history accurately. Because if you are
00:15:02.880 only looking at history through the lens of black oppressed and white oppressor, then you're missing
00:15:09.800 a lot of, uh, nuance. You're missing a lot of, uh, nuance. You're missing a lot of in between. You are
00:15:15.220 missing the other reasons that other kinds of injustice happen. Like you are teaching a form of
00:15:23.600 morality that is based on skin color and not based on actual character, not based on motive, not based on
00:15:30.780 intention, not based on things that actually happened in the outcomes that were actually, uh, that were
00:15:38.540 actually exacted. Uh, you unfortunately are giving kids not only an inaccurate look at history, but also
00:15:48.440 I think an inaccurate look of what it means to be good, what it means to be evil, because you're actually
00:15:54.060 reducing it down to people's skin color and these very, um, often inaccurate categories of bad versus
00:16:02.260 good as white versus black. And so I just imagine it's not only oppressive to kids' minds, but it's
00:16:09.000 very confusing and it actually inhibits them from being able to learn things accurately and well.
00:16:16.500 I think that's right. And what you see throughout the critical race theory literature, I've read,
00:16:20.880 you know, thousands and thousands of pages of this stuff over the last year is that, uh, it's at
00:16:25.800 heart, a philosophy of racial pessimism. Uh, and the founder of critical race theory, Harvard law
00:16:30.760 professor, Derek Bell says very explicitly that racism is a permanent and indestructible force in
00:16:36.420 the United States. It was the foundation of this country and it will always be the foundation of this
00:16:41.400 country. It will always be essentially the most important thing. You can boil down anything in the
00:16:46.320 United States to racism, racism, racism. And again, I think as, as you're saying, as I'm saying,
00:16:52.640 obviously the United States has a history of racial injustice, sometimes really brutal, evil,
00:16:58.260 and horrific injustice, uh, which we should reckon with, which we should explain to people,
00:17:03.400 which we should teach in schools. Uh, absolutely. Uh, but you also have to not have a one dimensional
00:17:09.780 story of the United States as evil only and evil always. You also have to teach the story of the
00:17:16.460 United States's highest ideals first declared in the founding fought over and consecrated in blood
00:17:22.600 during the civil war, uh, codified into law in the 1960s. Uh, and then now I think now seeping into the
00:17:28.320 culture. I think most people in the United States, uh, today are probably the most tolerant people, uh,
00:17:34.580 in the history of the world. I mean, we have people from every country on the planet, uh, and we have
00:17:40.000 a peaceful, productive, cooperative society. Uh, and how did that happen? If the United States is
00:17:45.720 a permanently, essentially, uh, just a kind of racist oppressor nation, how have we built the good
00:17:52.180 things that we've built over the centuries? Critical race theory doesn't have an answer to that. And
00:17:56.720 therefore it's a one dimensional philosophy. It's a philosophy of racial pessimism. It's a philosophy
00:18:02.060 that will kill, that will fill kids, not with a sense of hope and optimism and possibility,
00:18:07.360 but a sense of despair. That's not, I think what we should be teaching our kids. And, and importantly,
00:18:13.140 I think this is a crucial point. According to polling data, uh, recent polling data in the 20
00:18:19.200 fastest growing cities. So places that are diversifying quickly, parents from every racial category,
00:18:25.080 white, black, Asian, Latino, all oppose critical race theory in the classroom. And together,
00:18:31.780 as a whole, they oppose it by a 42 point margin. I mean, it's just overwhelming people of all racial
00:18:39.000 backgrounds do not want this in the classroom. Yeah. No one wants their kid to learn to hate
00:18:44.060 themselves or to hate someone of a different skin color. I mean, that's supposed, that's the exact
00:18:48.640 opposite direction that we are supposed to be going. And that I think that we were going for a long
00:18:53.000 time. It seems like over the past 10 or so, but especially the past six or so years, I mean,
00:19:00.520 we have turned a very dark corner. I was actually looking at, um, a Gallup poll recently that asked
00:19:07.960 people what they think the, you know, black Americans, white Americans, how they feel about
00:19:12.220 race relations in the United States. It's the worst that it's been at least in 30 years, black and white
00:19:19.100 Americans feel that we are very divided among race. Now, how can that be possible? If as the critical
00:19:26.480 race theorists say that critical race theory is supposed to make us reckon with our history,
00:19:31.280 that it's supposed to bring us together, we're supposed to find some kind of restoration and
00:19:36.260 reconciliation by, you know, reckoning with that we really started in 1619 on slavery and not on all
00:19:43.720 of these very good founding ideals that are found in our founding documents. It's obvious that these
00:19:49.100 kinds of principles, which really became more popularized and mainstream while Barack Obama was
00:19:53.500 president, um, it's obvious that it has torn us apart, which is in its nature. That is what critical
00:19:59.800 race theory is and does. Like you said, it believes that America essentially has to, we have to start
00:20:06.600 back at zero and rebuild something different in order for, you know, people to be liberated and equal
00:20:12.940 and equitable and, and all of that. But it has no, um, it doesn't have in its nature and it has no
00:20:21.180 suggestion for how we build from zero. It only has plans for destruction and division. It doesn't
00:20:27.000 have any plans to actually bring us together and build. Do you agree with that? Yeah, that's right.
00:20:31.700 And that's one of the most striking things when you actually read the literature of critical race
00:20:35.920 theory, you go through, you read the books and you say, okay, you know, point, point, point diagnosis
00:20:41.760 of the problem, problem, problem. And what should we do about it? And on this point, the critical race
00:20:46.060 theories are more or less silent. They have very little to offer in the way of practical solutions,
00:20:50.880 but what you see at the kind of end of a lot of these essays or, uh, in the kind of margins of a lot
00:20:56.960 of these books is that they default to the old leftist ideology that has always animated that political
00:21:03.400 movement. Uh, they want to seize and redistribute property. They want to severely limit or restrict the
00:21:10.300 first amendment. They want to, in essence, abolish the spirit of the 14th amendment, replacing equal
00:21:16.580 protection with group identity-based protection. Uh, and then they want to, uh, subvert and destroy
00:21:22.500 the system of free enterprise and capitalism, uh, and want to install a bureaucracy with an almost
00:21:28.280 totalitarian reach, uh, in order to enforce their ideology of quote unquote anti-racism. And then you
00:21:35.440 get, uh, the kind of outlines of a system that looks not much different than the kind of bureaucratic
00:21:42.800 socialist regimes of the 20th century, which all ended in disaster. So, uh, if you're looking for
00:21:49.100 hope, if you're looking for solutions, you're not going to find it with CRT.
00:21:53.640 No, you're not. And what's interesting to me is that, you know, they've been saying the same things
00:21:57.940 for a very long time. I picked up a book by Thomas Sowell that was read, uh, that was written in 1984
00:22:03.180 and it was called civil rights, rhetoric or reality. I think it's rhetoric or reality. And he addresses
00:22:09.120 all of the things that we're talking about because they've been around for a few decades now. I assume
00:22:14.240 that that is the reason why the media doesn't elevate Thomas Sowell as an influential black
00:22:18.660 voice that we should be listening to because he has destroyed all of these arguments with basic
00:22:23.100 economic data for a very long time. And what it comes down to really for critical race theorists,
00:22:29.660 as you just said, is power. It's about power. It's as you know, all communists, uh, are they,
00:22:37.260 they're always about power. And I think we see this even today in something like the push for
00:22:43.720 vaccine passports, Ibram X. Kendi, who kind of, you know, he draws a lot of inspiration from
00:22:49.940 critical race theorists, even though he would say maybe he doesn't, um, his whole shtick is that
00:22:55.520 any law that has the impact or the outcome of a disparate impact on black and brown Americans
00:23:01.380 is racist. It is the impact, not the intent. Um, and so considering that the majority of black
00:23:09.080 Americans, there's the highest percentage of, um, uh, of people in, in black Americans that are
00:23:15.560 unvaccinated things like vaccine passports will disproportionately affect black Americans.
00:23:22.040 And according to Ibram X. Kendi and other critical race theorists, that is then by their definition
00:23:26.840 racist. And yet I see maybe a few black lives matter people talking up, uh, talking or standing
00:23:32.480 up about the, uh, for that, uh, against that, pushing back against that in places like New York
00:23:37.180 city. But for the most part, I don't see Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi and a bunch of Democrats
00:23:41.940 on the left who call themselves anti-racist pushing back against things like vaccine passports,
00:23:46.900 even though they will disparately disproportionately affect black Americans. Why do you think that
00:23:51.860 is? Well, it's actually, there's a twist to the story. Ibram Kendi spoke, uh, in Minneapolis,
00:23:57.300 I believe a few weeks ago and, uh, the Twitter account, uh, myth informed, uh, went to the event,
00:24:03.480 asked him, do you think vaccine passports are racist? Kendi, because he knows where his bread
00:24:08.300 is buttered. He knows, uh, that he doesn't want to offend the greater project of the left said, well,
00:24:13.360 no vaccine passports aren't racist. Healthcare is racist and society is racist and history is racist,
00:24:19.880 which, which leads to things that may look like, uh, racist outcomes, but aren't. Uh, and, and,
00:24:26.480 and, and, and I mean, stumbled into this, this ridiculous thing, got exposed and embarrassed
00:24:30.680 on Twitter. And then, uh, surprise, surprise, Twitter just hunted down and took down all of
00:24:36.100 these videos. Uh, you know, yeah, they did. They took down the videos with, with really no explanation.
00:24:41.260 Um, uh, and then, you know, temporarily, uh, block the accounts of people who were posting them,
00:24:47.380 uh, to protect Ibram Kendi's reputation because he had botched this question so bad. Uh, and,
00:24:52.780 you know, I don't think vaccine passports are racist. I think vaccine passports are a bad idea.
00:24:57.600 I think they're a violation of our liberties. I think they're unnecessary. Right. I think they're
00:25:01.280 a path towards a kind of state of being that we really don't want. Um, but certainly the anti-racist
00:25:09.220 should be consistent, but what we see over and over is that they're not consistent because their
00:25:13.880 goal is power. Their goal is control. Their goal is to move the country left. And I think that,
00:25:19.080 uh, you have to think race is the means. Marxism is the end. Yeah. This is the kind of two-part
00:25:25.840 formula that they've used for decades that we see very clearly, uh, patterns. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm with
00:25:32.740 you. I don't buy this definition that impact, not intent, um, is, you know, is the formula or the
00:25:41.020 qualification for what is racist. So I don't think they're racist either, but gosh, like you said,
00:25:47.480 if anything, according to their definition of racism is racist, it's certainly vaccine passports,
00:25:52.880 which are not just disproportionately affecting black Americans in some like intangible way. I mean,
00:25:57.800 you're literally segregating them from society. Like you are blocking on vaccinated people,
00:26:02.760 which happen to be disproportionately black in places like New York city, you're blocking them
00:26:07.240 out of polite society. And wow, what a coward, you know, that's not the only time that Ibram X.
00:26:13.620 Kendi has been, um, exposed for something that is hypocritical. Or in this case, it was something
00:26:19.920 that wouldn't be popular on the left. He made some comment in an interview that he would be really sad
00:26:24.120 if his daughter came home and said that, you know, or his daughter, I think did come home and say that,
00:26:29.140 you know, she thinks she's a boy now. And instead of him celebrating it, he said, you know, that really
00:26:34.160 made him really sad and distressed. And that got buried real quick. You have to, I guess, protect
00:26:39.800 Ibram X. Kendi at all costs. Um, now I want to get back quickly to, uh, this DOJ, um, this DOJ memo.
00:26:49.480 What, what I want to know is, and I, I kind of, I know the answer, but I want you to tell us,
00:26:56.220 is there any evidence of concerned parents, um, threatening or causing violence towards school
00:27:04.920 administrators, school board members, at least in large numbers? Like is the DOJ justified in any
00:27:10.940 way to mobilize the FBI against allegedly violent parents? Uh, no. And I'll explain why. I mean,
00:27:18.020 if you look at the evidence outlined, the Biden administration DOJ memo cites zero evidence,
00:27:23.440 right? They cite no evidence of threats. They cite no evidence of violence, no absence of any
00:27:27.520 kind of credible, uh, claim towards domestic terrorism. Uh, but the NSBA letter, which started
00:27:33.700 this whole thing was served as a pretext, actually went through every footnote in the letter, every
00:27:38.480 report, every bit of data. And they only provided one single example of parent violence against a
00:27:45.080 school official, uh, uh, uh, an individual, 30 year old man in Chicago was being taken out of a
00:27:50.520 school meeting after disruption. Uh, and then he committed a battery against a school official.
00:27:55.940 It's not clear whether he swung at him or pushed him or her, uh, but a, a, a simple battery, which
00:28:02.480 is condemnable. You shouldn't be, uh, assaulting or committing battery against school officials or
00:28:06.500 anyone else, obviously. Uh, but it's hard. One case of a simple battery is hardly the pretext for
00:28:13.600 a national counter-terrorism investigation involving every branch of government. Um, and
00:28:19.360 guess what? Shoving a school board official is not domestic terrorism. It's something that can be
00:28:24.360 easily handled by local law enforcement. Uh, you arrest the person, you charge them, you, you take them
00:28:30.020 to trial and then, you know, at, at, at, at worst they serve a little bit of time in jail as they
00:28:34.740 should. But, uh, what they're doing is they're taking this energy that's out there and they're,
00:28:40.960 and because it's conservatives, um, they're using it as a pretext to say white supremacy, domestic
00:28:46.680 terrorism, uh, kind of criminalizing dissent. Uh, and I think what you're seeing is that you don't
00:28:53.140 need a real pretext in this society right now. Uh, MSNBC will go to great lengths to cover for you.
00:29:01.160 The New York times will go to great lengths to cover for you. They're going to present.
00:29:04.400 We'll go to great lengths to cover for you. David French might go to the greatest lengths of all.
00:29:09.240 I mean, his, his, his length is, uh, is on this stuff is, uh, endless, uh, and his hypocrisy is,
00:29:15.360 is boundless. Um, but, um, but really they know they're going to get cover from the left wing and
00:29:21.820 then kind of, kind of formerly right wing, uh, media. Um, so they can just brazenly lie to say
00:29:27.340 that parents who show up and they're angry, uh, parents who show up and they're yelling,
00:29:31.180 parents who are showing up and they're disruptive. It's not just that this is a kind of boisterous,
00:29:36.040 loud part of democracy. Uh, maybe parents should tone it down a little bit. Uh, I, I think it would
00:29:41.080 be better if they did personally, uh, but no, no boisterous, loud arguments, yelling, uh, this is
00:29:48.600 domestic terrorism. I mean, I mean, it's absolutely absurd. And, and the idea that anyone would buy
00:29:56.020 into it, uh, I, I find really disturbing because if they can use this as a pretext, um, they can use
00:30:02.900 anything as a pretext. They can come after you. And, you know, the point on, on David French,
00:30:13.840 like I have really learned a lot from what he, you know, used to write. I appreciate a lot of his
00:30:20.200 advocacy work for things like the first amendment. And I've given him the benefit of the doubt many,
00:30:25.140 many times because I don't think he's a bad, I don't think he's a bad person. His evolution,
00:30:30.860 at least in my eyes over the past couple of years has been disturbing, particularly on this. When I did
00:30:36.240 ask him, I tagged him, you know, underneath your tweet asking him, and he said that there, you know,
00:30:40.880 has been an increase in threats and things like that. And so I looked into it and the, the letter
00:30:46.420 that the NSBA sent does include a couple examples of what they consider domestic terrorism.
00:30:52.840 Apparently, according to them, there was a guy giving a Nazi salute at a meeting. One guy called
00:30:57.620 a recess at a school board meeting because of his opposition to critical race theory. Um, there was a
00:31:03.560 video that went viral reported on by the Washington post of parents in Williamson County, Tennessee,
00:31:07.900 yelling at the heck health experts called to give testimony at a four hour school board meeting in
00:31:12.520 favor of mask mandates. School board members in Loudoun County, Virginia say that they have gotten,
00:31:17.200 um, death threats. But again, to your point, and I would agree with this while we would say,
00:31:22.580 you know what, that really doesn't help our cause. Can parents try to be as respectful and raising
00:31:27.460 their ruckus as possible? Like the death threats. And of course, any kind of like Nazis, I don't even
00:31:32.400 know, um, anything like that anywhere at any time. It's never the right idea. I mean, but I think it's
00:31:43.100 like, you have to know local politics. Like I participated in local politics throughout my life
00:31:47.440 and it does attract some, some strange, some nutty people, some weird people on, on both sides. I mean,
00:31:56.360 I participated in Seattle and you get some real, uh, you know, kind of psychotic people that, that,
00:32:02.020 that show up because there's conflict. Um, and, and we should all condemn that. We should minimize
00:32:07.920 that. We should attempt to marginalize that kind of behavior. Um, but parents have a legitimate claim
00:32:13.840 and 98%, 99% of parents are just hardworking middle-class people who are showing up after work
00:32:21.760 hours on their own private time to say, Hey, look, I don't want you teaching my kid that he or she's an
00:32:27.080 oppressor. I don't want you teaching my kid that this country, uh, is out to get him. Uh, uh, and,
00:32:32.680 and these are good people with a real grievance. And I think that they're following the process.
00:32:38.580 This is how the process works. If you want change at your schools, you show up at your school board
00:32:43.400 meeting. And once we criminalize this basic form of dissent, we're not just telling parents to shut up
00:32:48.740 and sit down. Uh, we're also telling parents that the bureaucrats are in charge. Yeah. It's not you
00:32:53.960 who gets to decide what's taught, how the school runs, who gets elected, what the curriculum looks
00:32:59.060 like. No, it's the experts, the anti-racist, uh, program directors, the school board officials,
00:33:05.080 the teachers union bosses, we are in control. You're merely a kind of cash, uh, service for us.
00:33:12.760 Yeah. And that's the message that they're sending. And I think parents are really revolting against
00:33:17.720 that because they want to, they want to know that they still have democratic rights and democratic
00:33:23.100 participation, uh, within our system, especially at that local level. Yep. And it's obvious what
00:33:30.120 Democrats and bureaucrats in general think about this. Terry McAuliffe, again, running for Democrat,
00:33:35.520 running for governor in Virginia recently said, um, in an interview or no, in a debate actually
00:33:42.400 against his Republican contender that parents don't shouldn't have a say in what gets taught
00:33:48.500 in schools. And this is, that's not just one thing that said, obviously he's a mainstream Democrat,
00:33:53.480 but we have heard this kind of rhetoric coming from, um, academics coming from left-wing researchers
00:34:00.960 coming in so many words from, um, activists and politicians on the left that really parents just
00:34:07.280 need to step aside. They need to step aside for a second and realize that, uh, these teachers
00:34:13.200 teaching, not just racially divisive, um, racially divisive lessons, but also in some cases, sexually
00:34:21.200 explicit and confusing, uh, lessons and curriculum to kids. They just need to be the ones that are,
00:34:28.660 um, who are in charge and parents just kind of need to be quiet. So you would see why parents are
00:34:33.920 really frustrated about this. This is a really big deal. I mean, you're talking about the only
00:34:39.440 people in the world who have, uh, the biggest interest in their child's wellbeing, who will live
00:34:45.480 with whatever consequences, um, their, their child has to endure because of whatever they may be
00:34:52.000 learning or not learning in school. I mean, you're talking about the parents, the only ones who are
00:34:56.600 waking up in the middle of the night to comfort their child. The only people who know everything that
00:35:02.200 makes their child tick that their child loves their child hates. I mean, parents are the people who
00:35:07.400 are tasked with protecting, providing for loving their child, not the state. I mean, what right
00:35:13.760 does Terry McAuliffe or anyone in a teacher's union or school board have to say what a child should be
00:35:19.080 learning, um, in a way that trumps what the parents say. It's just so bizarre to me.
00:35:25.280 It's bizarre, but unfortunately it comes from a very long lineage. Uh, the, the writer,
00:35:29.780 Christopher Lash wrote a book called Haven in a Heartless World, where he looked at family
00:35:34.400 politics over the course of, uh, a few hundred years. And he traced the lineage of the left-wing
00:35:40.400 idea that the family is an oppressive structure. And even Lash's death, uh, in the literature of
00:35:48.720 critical race theory, they make it even more explicit. They say that, uh, the family is a,
00:35:53.480 the nuclear family or the bourgeois family is a capitalist white supremacist construct, uh, meant to
00:35:59.700 oppress children, uh, oppress women, uh, and then keep society, uh, essentially serving, uh, the
00:36:07.000 capitalist interests. And in order to break up this patriarchal racist and capitalist oppression
00:36:14.180 structure, the family, um, we actually have to undermine it at its deepest roots, which will allow
00:36:19.900 us, uh, the dent to then liberate each component part of the family, uh, liberate the wife or the woman,
00:36:26.120 uh, liberate the children, uh, from the oppression of the father, from the oppression of the greater
00:36:31.200 society. And so this has a long historical legacy. And in fact, uh, I, I did a story, uh, a scoop in
00:36:38.000 Buffalo public schools. Uh, they were teaching in as part of their official, uh, racial justice
00:36:44.320 curriculum to disrupt the nuclear Western family. They were teaching kids as young as kindergarten,
00:36:49.820 that your family is oppressive. Your family is evil. Uh, you need to be in inducted into our
00:36:55.680 politics and liberated, uh, even from your own parents. Yeah. And, and, and, you know, without
00:37:02.200 putting too fine a point on it, you see this in China's cultural revolution in the 1960s, where
00:37:07.800 they're using children, they're using young people, they're using students, uh, and turning them against
00:37:12.920 their parents, whether they're, uh, ratting them out to the authorities, whether they're hauling their
00:37:17.820 teachers, uh, out of the classroom, filling their mouths with dirt and then executing them. I mean,
00:37:23.260 you had teenagers doing this kind of stuff on behalf of the state. Um, we're not anywhere near
00:37:28.200 there. I don't mean to say that there's a parallel, uh, but certainly there is a kernel of this same
00:37:33.680 kind of cultural spirit that I, that I see in this, uh, left-wing ideology at this point, thankfully,
00:37:40.420 at least in the abstract. Yeah. And I see it. I'll say, I'll say there's a parallel, obviously not to
00:37:47.180 that level, but it all does come from the same lineage. And I mean, you saw it throughout the
00:37:52.640 20th century. You saw it in Pol Pot's Cambodia. You saw it, um, in anywhere there was totalitarianism
00:37:58.700 and in particular communism, but also fascism, especially in the 20th century, you see this
00:38:04.020 recruitment of children for the cause of the people in charge. And you see this also in the dystopian
00:38:10.780 novels like Brave New World in 1984. They both get certain things right, um, about the moment that
00:38:17.120 we're in and lots of moments throughout the past 100 years. But the one thing that both of those
00:38:21.640 books share is the disintegration of the family. And I get really disappointed when I see well-meaning
00:38:28.120 people say, um, you know, well, there are some good tenets to critical race theory that we need
00:38:32.840 to hold on to. This is mostly Christians that I'm talking to and saying, um, but not queer theory,
00:38:38.740 not the other critical theories, just critical race theory. But what you've kind of, yeah,
00:38:42.780 what you've kind of just explained is that essentially, like maybe there are different
00:38:46.860 premises, but essentially they're all the same, especially in this one sense of liberating
00:38:52.620 different people from what they see as, as, uh, oppressive hierarchies. And one of those
00:38:58.920 is the family. We see this certainly in the form of what queer theorists would call like sexual
00:39:05.280 liberation of kids. That's part of why we are seeing a lot of what parents are uncovering at
00:39:10.420 these school board meetings, reading, I mean, just sexually grotesque, glorifying things like
00:39:15.700 pedophilia and child rape in, in, uh, books that are recommended to and assigned to middle schoolers.
00:39:22.500 It's all, it's not, that's not critical race theory, but that is part of the umbrella of critical
00:39:28.560 theory, the liberation of children, the disintegration of the parent child relationship.
00:39:33.620 It all works together. Don't you think? Yeah, it does. And we're seeing all of these interlocking,
00:39:40.200 uh, theories now, uh, really come to fruition in the school systems. And it, it all starts with the
00:39:46.980 original critical theory, which in the United States came to its kind of high point in the,
00:39:51.560 in the late, uh, 1960s, early 1970s, and then spawned all of these related ideologies, whether
00:39:57.220 it's post-colonial theory or gender theory, queer theory, uh, critical pedagogy, critical race theory,
00:40:03.220 critical whiteness studies. All of these, all of these ideologies share, share as central, uh, what,
00:40:08.640 what the philosopher Herbert Marcuse called new sensibility. And they operate by negation. Uh,
00:40:14.600 it's a, it's a dialectical philosophy that operates, uh, by destroying, shredding and
00:40:19.700 undermining existing institutions, which are deemed oppressive with this idea that once you shred them,
00:40:25.300 once you destroy them, uh, those individuals that are caught in those social institutions will be
00:40:30.480 liberated. And I guess for, for my, uh, my, my, our, our, our, all of our friends, uh, who are
00:40:35.480 Christians or, or like, like me and a Catholic, um, I mean, guess what, uh, in this ideology,
00:40:42.540 the greatest oppressor of all is God. Um, it's a myth that's used, uh, in their words, uh, it's a myth
00:40:49.400 that's used to subjugate people, to habituate them to oppression, uh, to provide them sucker of,
00:40:55.820 for the afterlife, uh, while actually exploiting them in the present life. Um, you know, going all
00:41:01.960 the way back to Marx, this has been the steady line. And, uh, this is not the civil rights movement
00:41:08.380 in the 1960s, which, uh, which harkened back to two things. They predicated their philosophy on two
00:41:13.800 things, the declaration, Martin Luther King, famously student of the declaration. Uh, and then
00:41:18.940 also the Bible. These were, this was a largely Christian movement, uh, formulated and really
00:41:24.720 advanced from black churches. Uh, critical race theory likes to claim the mantle of the civil rights
00:41:30.960 movement, but it's neither an appreciator of the declaration of independence, which they'd say is
00:41:36.400 a white supremacist document, uh, nor the Bible. Uh, this is an explicitly atheist movement. Uh, so the
00:41:42.580 idea that you can kind of pick and choose like some sort of, uh, some sort of fine buffet, uh, and only
00:41:49.180 take what you want back to your, uh, back to your chair, uh, I think is false. And, uh, critical race
00:41:54.840 theory is a totalizing ideology. If you take any part of it, it's going to metastasize and grow and
00:42:01.320 spread until it can express itself fully. And this would be a disaster for families, uh, for churches,
00:42:07.360 for schools, for our country. Yep. And I was just thinking when you were talking about it, it boils
00:42:13.660 down to very often an assault on, um, fatherhood. I mean, we saw that in the Black Lives Matter
00:42:19.220 website, um, that it wouldn't mention fathers. It said mothers and parents, we want to disrupt the
00:42:24.600 nuclear family. They took that down after a lot of backlash. They put it down the memory hole, but
00:42:28.660 thankfully we have, uh, we have receipts of that. And when I think about Christianity, uh, fatherhood,
00:42:35.380 God, the father is central to, um, the eternal plan of redemption. I mean, we see that all the
00:42:42.000 way in Genesis one. And then of course the Bible also ends in a marriage of the bride and the
00:42:46.740 bridegroom, Christ and the church. And so anytime you see a specific attack on the family, anytime
00:42:52.880 you see a specific attack specifically on fatherhood, and like you said, on God himself, like, you know
00:43:00.040 that that is going to be a destructive ideology, a destructive movement. And that's what we're seeing.
00:43:04.860 Um, a couple of points. I just, I just want to make, uh, like you already talked about the fact
00:43:09.460 that we really don't see any evidence cited of this huge issue of parents, like threatening school
00:43:14.300 board members. Of course, when it happens, we condemn it, but there has been evidence, um, at
00:43:19.160 least a few instances, the other way around in Rochester, New York and Penfield central school
00:43:23.780 district, a father claims that when he told a school board member to quote, be respectful and
00:43:28.760 said, this is not about you, bud about whatever they were discussing. The board member yelled an
00:43:33.340 expletive at him, the F word, and tried to physically fight him. Uh, the daily wire uncovered
00:43:37.980 that teachers in Loudoun County, Virginia conspired together on Facebook, uh, to make a blacklist
00:43:43.680 of parents that they suspected disagreed with things like critical race theory. And as we've
00:43:49.160 already discussed, like, let's not forget what parents are actually uncovering here. What they're
00:43:53.420 uncovering is worth a lot of outrage. It's worth a lot of the energy, respectful, peaceful, but
00:43:59.400 the energy that we are seeing. I had a mom on a couple of weeks ago who said that her eighth grade
00:44:05.140 daughter in Texas was recommended, you know, 10 books by her teacher. One of those books had a child
00:44:11.760 gang, rape glorified pedophilia. A couple of books had rape. One of them opened with a how to guide
00:44:17.360 to commit suicide in a variety of ways. Um, and so why isn't that the thing that is causing outrage
00:44:25.480 from the Biden administration? Why isn't that what is, I'm not even saying that the federal government
00:44:29.740 should have any part of this, but if anything, why wouldn't that get the ire of the department of
00:44:36.040 justice? If they're going to meddle at all, why is it that the parents that are concerned about that
00:44:40.720 filth are the ones that are the threat and not the curriculum itself? Oh man, I didn't know about all
00:44:46.860 that. Um, I've seen some of these examples and they're, they're really horrific. And, and you,
00:44:51.100 you, you, you truly wonder, I mean, uh, who is running a lot of these institutions? Is this
00:44:56.700 deliberate? Is this accidental? You hope in some ways it's accidental, but then it comes up so many
00:45:01.800 times and it has to go through so many hoops in order to get there. Uh, someone should have stopped
00:45:06.860 it. And I think that, listen, we have 14,000 school districts in this country. They're supposed to
00:45:13.020 operate with, uh, independence. They're supposed to tailor their curriculum, uh, to the needs and desires
00:45:18.720 and, and democratic will of the people within those districts. We should get back to that system
00:45:24.620 so that this isn't necessarily even a national political fight. It's just handled at the local
00:45:29.700 level. Hey, look, if Berkeley, California wants to have some, some books like that, uh, in their
00:45:35.500 curriculum, you know, go for it. Uh, that's, you know, that's, that's their right in many cases.
00:45:40.400 Uh, and if, and if a district in Texas doesn't want it, that's also theirs. Uh, but what we see is a
00:45:45.740 one way ratchet, uh, where things have to get more extreme. And then any pulling back from it is seen
00:45:53.180 as a censorship and attack on free speech, uh, kind of, uh, parents who have, who have, are overstepping
00:46:00.500 their bounds, domestic terrorism. Uh, and, and I, we have to figure out a political approach to solve
00:46:06.460 this because if you say, Hey, look, I don't want critical race theory in my schools. I don't want,
00:46:10.860 uh, you know, pedophilia oriented, uh, literature as the featured book of the week for my fifth
00:46:16.660 grader. Um, that should not only be, uh, not controversial in the least, uh, it should be
00:46:23.220 easily done. It should be done immediately. Uh, and, and the fact that it's not the fact that
00:46:28.660 they're holding on the fact that they're resisting, they're digging in their heels. They're appealing to
00:46:32.720 the, to the federal government. They're really just trying to entrench themselves with this ideology
00:46:37.900 against the will of parents, uh, should be a wake up call for people. Hey, look, our institutions,
00:46:43.540 our great American institutions, uh, that, you know, defeated Nazism and fascism in World War II,
00:46:49.780 uh, that built a great country, uh, uh, you know, over this massive continent are not what they were
00:46:56.400 in the past. Uh, they're not what they were even in the 1990s. Um, they're very different. Uh, and,
00:47:02.800 and we have to treat them, uh, not necessarily as institutions to be reformed,
00:47:07.900 uh, but as institutions to be attacked, uh, because it's going to take some more aggressive
00:47:13.280 political action in order to get them, uh, to heal. Yep. We like to say, raise a respectful
00:47:19.120 ruckus. We want you to be respectful. We want you to be convincing. We want you to be peaceful
00:47:23.400 because I think peaceful can be very persuasive. That doesn't mean that you can't be boisterous
00:47:27.500 and energetic and organized. We think that you should be, or I think that you should be,
00:47:31.900 I won't speak for you, but I'm, I'm sure that you agree with that. Um, and this is an attempt
00:47:37.340 to, um, to intimidate you parents. This is an attempt to try to silence you to preemptively,
00:47:44.720 um, try to get you to stop, um, you know, uh, stop criticizing the system. Um, but my encouragement
00:47:54.660 to parents is to double down, don't back down, double down, keep raising a respectful ruckus
00:48:00.280 for the sake of your kids, because it's absolutely worth it. Um, now how can they support you, Chris,
00:48:05.600 where can they follow you and all that good stuff? Yeah, I'm, I'm most active on Twitter
00:48:09.620 at real Chris Rufo. Uh, you can also visit my website, Christopher Rufo.com. That's Christopher
00:48:14.660 Rufo.com. Uh, all of my, uh, essays, articles, videos. Um, I've also have a critical race theory
00:48:21.340 briefing book that's free for parents, uh, to give them the background on CRT, to give them
00:48:26.060 the language that they can use at school board meetings. Uh, and then you can also sign up to
00:48:30.000 support me, have a great community of, uh, now 2,500, uh, small supporters and, uh, grateful
00:48:35.640 for, uh, for everyone who does. Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
00:48:40.680 Thank you.
00:48:47.280 All right. I just want to give you guys a couple words of encouragement. I know that I came in hot
00:48:53.420 at the beginning of this episode. I'm still coming in hot at the end. I'm just super fired up about this
00:48:58.480 moment that we're in. And I want to see Christians and Christian leaders speaking up about this
00:49:05.540 as Christians should have spoken up in, for example, Soviet Russia. I'm not saying that we
00:49:11.440 are in the exact same place as the, the Russians were during the Soviet revolution at the beginning
00:49:17.200 of the 20th century. We're not in the exact same place, but we see similar preliminary patterns. I mean,
00:49:23.380 totalitarianism is so boring. Like it always follows the same kind of path and paths. And I hope that
00:49:30.880 we're not going in that direction here. I'm not saying necessarily that we are, but let's speak
00:49:35.020 up while we still can. When we are just starting to see the silencing of dissent and the squashing
00:49:42.280 of free speech and the trampling upon individual liberty. I mean, Solzheniten, one thing that he says
00:49:49.640 in the Gulag Archipelago is that the reason that people got where they were, the reason that the
00:49:56.040 Soviet revolution happened is the reason that any totalitarian revolution was able to take root in
00:50:00.880 the 20th century. And that is, he said that men have forgotten God. And so it is incumbent upon
00:50:08.120 Christians following the strong reformed Christian tradition that we have to push back against tyranny.
00:50:15.240 As you can see, maybe we can pull up my John Knox quote over here on the side. If you are watching
00:50:21.140 from on YouTube, resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. That is a way to love your neighbor. As we
00:50:31.020 say, politics matter because policy matters because people matter. Politics affects policy. Policy affects
00:50:36.420 people. So this is a way, not the only way, maybe not even the primary way to love your neighbor,
00:50:42.280 but one way to love your neighbor is to push back against tyranny, to hold the line, to raise a
00:50:47.700 respectful and peaceful ruckus. You push back. What you're seeing right now, you're seeing people
00:50:54.560 organized with other like-minded people in their organization. They're strategizing, they're coming
00:50:59.160 up with a cohesive message, and they're taking a risk. They're taking a risk to make a point that they
00:51:04.120 don't want their individual liberty trampled on. And tomorrow, when we talk about this a lot more,
00:51:09.720 we're going to talk about some COVID stuff tomorrow. I'll try to come up with some resources for you
00:51:13.460 guys because I'm constantly asked, what do I do? How do I, you know, how do I push back against this?
00:51:18.480 How do I protect my individual choice? My husband is losing his job. I mean, I've talked to wives of
00:51:23.140 firefighters, of police officers, of servicemen, of all kinds of different employees and different
00:51:31.860 workers in our economy who are losing their jobs and their means to provide for their families
00:51:36.340 because they're willing to stand for their individual choice, whether they've actually
00:51:40.460 gotten the vaccine or not. That is honorable. That is, I am behind you and I will support you and I
00:51:46.680 will help you however I can. Hold the line. Hold the line. It is worth it. It's worth it. Like,
00:51:54.180 now's not the time for nostalgia. When we look back at the 1990s or the early 2000s, when it seemed like,
00:52:00.020 you know, America was better. It was still this beacon of liberty and that people could come together,
00:52:04.100 the right and the left. We just don't live there. We don't live at that time anymore. It's time to
00:52:07.720 stop looking back. We can't go back. The only way is for it. And the only way that we even have any
00:52:13.400 chance, I don't know if we have a chance, honestly, the only way we have any chance or any hope of
00:52:18.060 preserving the liberty that so many people have fought and died for is to do our own part in holding
00:52:23.640 the line and sharing the arrows with people who are holding the line in very risky ways by
00:52:29.140 potentially losing their job standing up for this liberty. So that's our role. If you don't know
00:52:34.640 what to do, how to fix all of this, we can't. We still serve a sovereign God who is totally in
00:52:39.640 control. All we can do is the next right thing in faith with excellence and for the glory of God,
00:52:45.640 both big and small. That's the only role that we have, whether that's speaking out or just doing
00:52:50.860 what's right in front of us, big and small ways. That's all we can do is, um, is the will of God
00:52:57.520 with joy. All right. That's all I got for today. We'll be back here tomorrow to talk about the rest of it.