Ep 503 | Now Is the Time to Double Down | Guest: Chris Rufo
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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
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Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Monday. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. Wow,
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wow, wow. I am very fired up. I was fired up coming into the studio this morning because
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there is a lot going on right now. We're going to talk about all of it this week, or I'm
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going to try to talk about all of it this week. Southwest Airlines, this is probably the biggest
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story going on right now, had to cancel over 1,000 flights, I think almost 2,000 flights over
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the weekend, apparently because of employees walking off the job in protest of the vaccine
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mandate. Now, that's not being covered by the media, so we're kind of relying, including myself,
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I'm relying on people who work for this airline to tell me what's going on. There are many
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conservative journalists who are kind of in the same boat. Southwest is saying it had something
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to do with weather. That's why a bunch of flights got canceled going in and out of Florida, but
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other airlines did not have to cancel their flights going in and out of Florida, and people in Florida
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are like, what the heck, our weather is fine. It turns out that at least from voices on the inside,
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they are saying that people are protesting this vaccine mandate. We're hearing rumblings of other
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airlines who have mandated the vaccine, like American Airlines, that this is going to happen
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as well. Thankfully, the unions, which I'm not a big fan of what unions have become. I understand and
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appreciate the original need for labor unions, but they have become these very left-wing bureaucratic
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bodies that mostly exist for themselves and their own power and not actually representing
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workers' needs and speaking truth to power and all of that. But in this case, it seems like the airline
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unions, the pilots' unions and just the airline unions in general are actually pushing back against
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these mandates. And from what I have learned, there are just a few thousand pilots at Southwest Air that
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are saying, no, either, no, they're not getting the vaccine or they have gotten the vaccine and
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they're simply pushing back against what they see as an unjust and tyrannical mandate. And you know
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what? Good for you. Good for you. Good for you, pilots. Good for you, flight attendants. I truly,
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sincerely feel for everyone whose plans were disrupted over the weekend. Like there truly are few things
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more stressful than being stranded at an airport and getting a flight canceled. I had to fly over
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this weekend. Um, I don't travel that much, but I had to go to places this weekend and I actually had
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to fly three different airlines, which is very unique to me. I'm typically, uh, an American airlines
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girl. It's just what I've always flown. Um, but I didn't fly Southwest at all this weekend. And I'm like,
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Oh, thank you Lord for your providence and helping me get home because I would really hate to be
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stranded in Detroit where I was or stranded anywhere. But, uh, that's where I was on, uh, on
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Saturday. And so I'm very thankful, very thankful for that because I really feel for the people who
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are stranded at airports, even as I am fully supportive. I'm fully supportive of everyone who is
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pushing back, um, in this way, like to pilots, to teachers, to flight attendants, to nurses that are
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pushing back against this in a peaceful and effective way, hold the freaking line. Like this
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fight matters. It absolutely matters. This is not an anti-vaccine stance. Although there are people who
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are, uh, against, uh, the vaccine. Okay. That's fine. But more than anything, like the mass protests
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that you are seeing around the world, the protests that you are seeing here that very often aren't
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covered by the media, the boycotts that you're seeing, the walking off of jobs that you, um, are
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seeing. It's a big, massive pushback against these mandates, against these passports that are a huge,
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uh, infringement upon people's liberty and their ability to provide for their families. And honestly,
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I just have so little understanding at this point of Christians who don't see what's happening,
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who don't see this as a huge infringement upon people's liberty, who don't see this as an
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injustice, who don't see why, uh, all of these different restrictions, regulations and mandates
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and passports have a cumulative effect of oppression and totalitarianism. How do you not see that that's
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where we're headed? Like if you are someone over the past year who has talked about police brutality,
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and yet you're looking at what's going on in Australia, where people are being beaten in the streets
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because of, because they're peacefully protesting, you don't have anything to say about that. Or maybe
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you think that's good. Or maybe you think the police should be enforcing these vaccine mandates and
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vaccine passports and mask wearing and all of that. You're a giant hypocrite and you don't see what's
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going on. Like too many people did not pay attention in history class when it, when it came to the history
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of the 20th century and the patterns that we see leading up to totalitarianism. So many people are
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just so dedicated to believing that everything is well and good, that the right is always blowing
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things out of proportion, that everything is fine. It's okay that Australia, parts of Australia have
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become a police state. It's okay that pastors are getting arrested in places like Canada. Oh, maybe they
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deserve it. Maybe it's really for our public health. It's fine that there's a mandate that is causing
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thousands of nurses to quit, apparently in the midst of a pandemic that's putting a strain on our
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hospitals. Oh, it's fine that military servicemen and women who signed up to pay the ultimate
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sacrifice are now being booted out of the military because they won't get a vaccine that for a disease
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that they probably have natural immunity for. Or if they don't, they simply don't want to get the
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vaccine and that choice should be honored. Oh, that's all fine. It's just a mask. It's just another
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restriction. It's just a mandate. It's, you know, just the Biden administration saying that they are
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going to cut antibody supply to these certain Southern states that won't go along with his
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authoritarian mandates. It's fine. It's all for public health. You're asleep. You're asleep. And I
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just have so little patience for that anymore. How do you not see what's going on? How do you not see it?
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I don't know. I don't know. And then what we're talking about today, we're talking about Merrick
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Garland mobilizing the FBI against concerned public school parents. We're going to talk to Chris Rufo.
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He is a journalist who has been one of the loudest and most persistent voices against critical theory
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in both the government and in schools. I don't see how anyone could look at this story that we're
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going to talk about today. The other stories that I just mentioned, and gosh, I haven't even talked
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about the supply chain issues. The fact that there are shipping containers all around outside of the
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United States that can't actually unload all of their supplies because we have a worker shortage.
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The fact that the Biden administration claimed that they were going to add, you know, half a million
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jobs last month. It was less than 200 million or two. Sorry. Yeah. Half a million jobs. 200,000 jobs
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were only added last month. The economic crisis that we are going through and are about to go through.
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I haven't even talked about all of that. How do you not see what's going on that we are being
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destroyed from the inside? How do you not see it? Anyway, we only have time to talk about one of
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these things today. We'll talk about the rest of them, uh, for the rest of the week, but we're going
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to talk about this. Uh, we're going to talk about this memo from the attorney general today and what it
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all means. And then I'll have, um, just a couple words of encouragement at the end for you.
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Chris, thank you so much for joining us again. So I noticed in the memo that it doesn't actually
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say anything about critical race theory. Um, in your tweet, you talk about how this seems to be,
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um, a referendum on the parents who are pushing back against critical race theory. So can you tell
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us how you kind of got there? Yeah, well, you know, at first it was, uh, kind of a hypothesis,
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but now we've actually confirmed it. So America first legal led by Stephen Miller, uh, has uncovered
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evidence that he's now sent, uh, to the department of justice, that this was really a kind of inside
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job. This was a request that originated within the department of justice and the FBI. Uh, they farmed it
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out to the national school boards association, uh, asking them to request it, to give them a
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pretext. And then the national schools boards association, original letter, which came out just
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a few days before the attorney general's announcement, uh, requested that not only the attorney general
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unleashed the FBI on parents, uh, but that he classified some parent protesters as domestic terrorists
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and prosecute them under the Patriot Act. Um, and then what we're seeing now, and I have a document,
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uh, request a FOIA request that I will confirm this. And we're also getting this from reports from
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America first legal is that this is a really a collusion between the teachers unions, the national
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school board association, the Biden administration to take the heat off of these school administrators
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that have been under tremendous pressure from parents and then unleash the state against them.
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Uh, it's something extraordinary, uh, that I think we haven't seen in a long time.
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And to those who say, and I know that you've talked about this many times, I've talked about
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it as well to, to those who still say, because I'm still seeing this a lot, not just from elected
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officials, but, um, just from people in the public sphere saying, look, critical race theory is not
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being taught in schools. These parents who are pushing back or just believing some grand conspiracy
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theory, or maybe they're even racist as one candidate for governor said in Virginia, Terry McAuliffe.
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Um, can you give us just some examples of what it might look like for critical race theory, which was
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once kind of an obscure collegiate legal theory being taught in grade school?
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Yeah. Well, I mean, it, what I think is happening is that they're playing what I call a linguistic shell
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game. They're using the definition of words. They're changing them. They're hiding them. They're moving
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them in order to confuse parents in order to shift the blame in order to avoid responsibility. But, uh, you have to
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know the principles of critical race theory to know whether critical race theory is being taught.
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So if you see something like white privilege, uh, white fragility, internalized, uh, white supremacy,
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uh, if you see unconscious bias, which is derives from critical race theory, all of these key terms,
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often diversity, equity, and inclusion, not always, but I think more often than not adopts the principles
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of critical race theory into its pedagogy. So if you're seeing any of these key terms or buzzwords,
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uh, you are finding whether they label it critical race theory or not, the key tenets of critical race
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theory, which divides the world into oppressor oppressed by racial categories, uh, which advocates
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for, you know, really, uh, uh, uh, uh, crushing, uh, existing, uh, liberties, freedoms, constitutional
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guarantees in order to liberate the country in their word, uh, from racism and oppression.
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Yep. And this is not just some kind of random deduction that you're doing or labeling every,
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um, you know, social justice, racial justice phrase is critical race theory, or especially any,
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um, teaching about racism as critical race theory. Like you can read, for example, Richard Delgado's
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introduction to critical race theory as I have, and you see where all of those ideas originated.
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This is not an attempt to call everything that we don't like or every controversial teaching
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critical race theory. It truly does originate from the ideas of the original, uh, critical race
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theorists. Part of the problem is that this is actually supposed to be an obscure legal theory,
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obviously one that I don't agree with, but that's where it's supposed to live. And yet these elementary
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school, middle school, high school teachers who are not at all even trained in this legal theory
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are trying to boil it down in its most crudest, in its crudest forms and, uh, teaching them to kids.
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What's going to be the effect of this? Do you think if they are continued to be allowed to do so?
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Well, there's two ways of looking at it. One is that, uh, American public schools in many cases
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are so incompetent. Uh, they have trouble teaching anything. Hopefully they will have trouble teaching
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this, but I think more likely is that this seeps into the background knowledge of kids. And I think
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what I've heard from parents over and over is that when they're teaching intersectionality,
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privilege, oppression studies, et cetera, um, it, it, it creates a kind of guilt and shame complex among
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majority race kids, but also creates a kind of fatalism and fear complex within minority kids.
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You know, I had a father who was a interracial couple in Arizona. Uh, he actually ended up speaking
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out at the school board meeting, you know, black father, white mother. And he said, this is ripping
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my family apart. It's filling my kids with fear. Uh, you know, they, my, my 10 year old is now asking
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to sleep in, in, in, in the bed with mom and dad again, because he's, he was terrified by what the
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lessons that they learned during black history month, which should be a celebration of black
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achievement and black resilience in the United States. Uh, but this father said it, it, it filled
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him with fear that he would be hunted down and murdered by the police at any moment, uh, that he couldn't
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ever succeed in life. And I think we're seeing now enough of these examples where they're saying
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not just that there has been historical groups of people in the United States with power and
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privilege, which is absolutely true and should be taught extensively, honestly, sometimes even
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brutally, but it's saying that you five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old by virtue of your
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skin color are inherently oppressive. You are responsible for the collective crimes of the
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past committed by people who look like you. It's one thing to teach honest history.
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It's a quite another thing to teach critical race theory.
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Exactly. And that's the accusation that, um, people, teachers, parents are getting from the left
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that, um, people who are pushing back on this just don't want anyone to talk about racism or they don't
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want anyone to talk about, um, you know, the history of white supremacy or slavery or Jim Crow in the
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United States. And that's not true at all. And not only do I believe that those things should be
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taught at the right time in the right way, but I actually think that critical race theory
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gets in the way of, of teaching those ugly points in American history accurately. Because if you are
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only looking at history through the lens of black oppressed and white oppressor, then you're missing
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a lot of, uh, nuance. You're missing a lot of, uh, nuance. You're missing a lot of in between. You are
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missing the other reasons that other kinds of injustice happen. Like you are teaching a form of
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morality that is based on skin color and not based on actual character, not based on motive, not based on
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intention, not based on things that actually happened in the outcomes that were actually, uh, that were
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actually exacted. Uh, you unfortunately are giving kids not only an inaccurate look at history, but also
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I think an inaccurate look of what it means to be good, what it means to be evil, because you're actually
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reducing it down to people's skin color and these very, um, often inaccurate categories of bad versus
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good as white versus black. And so I just imagine it's not only oppressive to kids' minds, but it's
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very confusing and it actually inhibits them from being able to learn things accurately and well.
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I think that's right. And what you see throughout the critical race theory literature, I've read,
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you know, thousands and thousands of pages of this stuff over the last year is that, uh, it's at
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heart, a philosophy of racial pessimism. Uh, and the founder of critical race theory, Harvard law
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professor, Derek Bell says very explicitly that racism is a permanent and indestructible force in
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the United States. It was the foundation of this country and it will always be the foundation of this
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country. It will always be essentially the most important thing. You can boil down anything in the
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United States to racism, racism, racism. And again, I think as, as you're saying, as I'm saying,
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obviously the United States has a history of racial injustice, sometimes really brutal, evil,
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and horrific injustice, uh, which we should reckon with, which we should explain to people,
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which we should teach in schools. Uh, absolutely. Uh, but you also have to not have a one dimensional
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story of the United States as evil only and evil always. You also have to teach the story of the
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United States's highest ideals first declared in the founding fought over and consecrated in blood
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during the civil war, uh, codified into law in the 1960s. Uh, and then now I think now seeping into the
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culture. I think most people in the United States, uh, today are probably the most tolerant people, uh,
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in the history of the world. I mean, we have people from every country on the planet, uh, and we have
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a peaceful, productive, cooperative society. Uh, and how did that happen? If the United States is
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a permanently, essentially, uh, just a kind of racist oppressor nation, how have we built the good
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things that we've built over the centuries? Critical race theory doesn't have an answer to that. And
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therefore it's a one dimensional philosophy. It's a philosophy of racial pessimism. It's a philosophy
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that will kill, that will fill kids, not with a sense of hope and optimism and possibility,
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but a sense of despair. That's not, I think what we should be teaching our kids. And, and importantly,
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I think this is a crucial point. According to polling data, uh, recent polling data in the 20
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fastest growing cities. So places that are diversifying quickly, parents from every racial category,
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white, black, Asian, Latino, all oppose critical race theory in the classroom. And together,
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as a whole, they oppose it by a 42 point margin. I mean, it's just overwhelming people of all racial
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backgrounds do not want this in the classroom. Yeah. No one wants their kid to learn to hate
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themselves or to hate someone of a different skin color. I mean, that's supposed, that's the exact
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opposite direction that we are supposed to be going. And that I think that we were going for a long
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time. It seems like over the past 10 or so, but especially the past six or so years, I mean,
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we have turned a very dark corner. I was actually looking at, um, a Gallup poll recently that asked
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people what they think the, you know, black Americans, white Americans, how they feel about
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race relations in the United States. It's the worst that it's been at least in 30 years, black and white
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Americans feel that we are very divided among race. Now, how can that be possible? If as the critical
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race theorists say that critical race theory is supposed to make us reckon with our history,
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that it's supposed to bring us together, we're supposed to find some kind of restoration and
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reconciliation by, you know, reckoning with that we really started in 1619 on slavery and not on all
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of these very good founding ideals that are found in our founding documents. It's obvious that these
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kinds of principles, which really became more popularized and mainstream while Barack Obama was
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president, um, it's obvious that it has torn us apart, which is in its nature. That is what critical
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race theory is and does. Like you said, it believes that America essentially has to, we have to start
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back at zero and rebuild something different in order for, you know, people to be liberated and equal
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and equitable and, and all of that. But it has no, um, it doesn't have in its nature and it has no
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suggestion for how we build from zero. It only has plans for destruction and division. It doesn't
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have any plans to actually bring us together and build. Do you agree with that? Yeah, that's right.
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And that's one of the most striking things when you actually read the literature of critical race
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theory, you go through, you read the books and you say, okay, you know, point, point, point diagnosis
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of the problem, problem, problem. And what should we do about it? And on this point, the critical race
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theories are more or less silent. They have very little to offer in the way of practical solutions,
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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
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of these books is that they default to the old leftist ideology that has always animated that political
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movement. Uh, they want to seize and redistribute property. They want to severely limit or restrict the
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first amendment. They want to, in essence, abolish the spirit of the 14th amendment, replacing equal
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protection with group identity-based protection. Uh, and then they want to, uh, subvert and destroy
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the system of free enterprise and capitalism, uh, and want to install a bureaucracy with an almost
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totalitarian reach, uh, in order to enforce their ideology of quote unquote anti-racism. And then you
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get, uh, the kind of outlines of a system that looks not much different than the kind of bureaucratic
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socialist regimes of the 20th century, which all ended in disaster. So, uh, if you're looking for
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hope, if you're looking for solutions, you're not going to find it with CRT.
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No, you're not. And what's interesting to me is that, you know, they've been saying the same things
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for a very long time. I picked up a book by Thomas Sowell that was read, uh, that was written in 1984
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and it was called civil rights, rhetoric or reality. I think it's rhetoric or reality. And he addresses
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all of the things that we're talking about because they've been around for a few decades now. I assume
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that that is the reason why the media doesn't elevate Thomas Sowell as an influential black
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voice that we should be listening to because he has destroyed all of these arguments with basic
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economic data for a very long time. And what it comes down to really for critical race theorists,
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as you just said, is power. It's about power. It's as you know, all communists, uh, are they,
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they're always about power. And I think we see this even today in something like the push for
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vaccine passports, Ibram X. Kendi, who kind of, you know, he draws a lot of inspiration from
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critical race theorists, even though he would say maybe he doesn't, um, his whole shtick is that
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any law that has the impact or the outcome of a disparate impact on black and brown Americans
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is racist. It is the impact, not the intent. Um, and so considering that the majority of black
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Americans, there's the highest percentage of, um, uh, of people in, in black Americans that are
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unvaccinated things like vaccine passports will disproportionately affect black Americans.
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And according to Ibram X. Kendi and other critical race theorists, that is then by their definition
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racist. And yet I see maybe a few black lives matter people talking up, uh, talking or standing
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up about the, uh, for that, uh, against that, pushing back against that in places like New York
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city. But for the most part, I don't see Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi and a bunch of Democrats
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on the left who call themselves anti-racist pushing back against things like vaccine passports,
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even though they will disparately disproportionately affect black Americans. Why do you think that
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is? Well, it's actually, there's a twist to the story. Ibram Kendi spoke, uh, in Minneapolis,
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I believe a few weeks ago and, uh, the Twitter account, uh, myth informed, uh, went to the event,
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asked him, do you think vaccine passports are racist? Kendi, because he knows where his bread
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is buttered. He knows, uh, that he doesn't want to offend the greater project of the left said, well,
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no vaccine passports aren't racist. Healthcare is racist and society is racist and history is racist,
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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.
00:48:47.280
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.