Ep 839 ｜ How Christian Women Got Played by Progressivism ｜ Guest： Chris Rufo
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Summary
Chris Ruffo is the author of America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. In this episode, Chris talks about how the ideas of Critical Race Theory and White Supremacy have infiltrated our public school system, our academia, our corporations, and almost every other aspect of our society.
Transcript
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Summer of 2020, how could any of us forget the black squares, the violent riots?
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Riots are the voice of the unheard, is what we were told by corporations, by government officials, by activists,
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even your pastor and some of your favorite Bible study leaders were promoting things like white fragility,
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Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist. How did all of this happen? The DEI, the ESG, the programs
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based on racial essentialism and this idea that systemic racism and white supremacy are the biggest
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problems that America is facing today. Well, none of this stuff happened in a vacuum. It actually
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has an extremely long and complex history going back at least half a century. Today, we've got
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Christopher Ruffo. He is the author of the new book, America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical
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Left Conquered Everything. And specifically today, we talk about things like how the ideas of critical
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race theory have infiltrated our public school system, our academia, our corporations, almost
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every single institution and industry. But this really goes for almost every progressive idea.
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He's going to tell us where all of this stuff comes from, help us wrap our heads around it,
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so we can courageously push back against the destruction that we have seen it bring over the
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past several years. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to
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GoodRanchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. That's GoodRanchers.com, code Allie.
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All right, guys. Happy Monday. Before we get into that conversation, just a couple things. First,
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it's Monday, so just a reminder to do the next right thing in faith with excellence and for the glory of
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God. No matter what that is, big or small, no matter what you're feeling, whether you are scared or you
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feel alone or you feel intimidated or you just feel like everything is mundane and nothing matters,
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do the next right thing. Do the next right thing in faith with excellence and for the glory of God.
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All right, that's one thing I wanted to say. Then I just wanted to give you a preview of some of the
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things that we'll be talking about this week. Tomorrow, we are going to be talking about something
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that I've been saying that I wanted to talk about for a long time. We're going to be talking about
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two things. One of the things that I've said that I've wanted to talk about for a while
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is romance novels and the toxicity of female romance novels and how I personally think that
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that is helping destroy marriages and actually destroy people's perception of themselves,
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perception of reality, what life should look like, but also really damaging relationships because
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it's setting up such awful expectations and also how it's kind of a form of pornography.
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So we're going to go through some examples of that and why I think that this is really destructive
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specifically for the women that it's targeting. But on the flip side of that, I also want to talk
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about a toxic message that men are being fed from the likes of people like Andrew Tate. We referenced
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this a little bit last week, but we're going to get into it because I think some people on the right
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may be well-intentioned or confused about Andrew Tate, the kind of person that he is, and even the
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message that he conveys. So I've got a message for both men and women, masculinity and femininity
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tomorrow that I think that y'all are really, really going to like and want to share. And then today
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you'll notice that when we talk to Chris Rufo, we mostly talk about how this kind of idea of critical
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race theory and racism, you know, white supremacy, all of this stuff infiltrated the mainstream
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through academia, but we don't really touch as much on things like ESG and corporations,
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CEI, as we've talked about several times before, but we are going to get into that even more in some
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recent revelations about these things with one of your favorite guests, one of my favorite guests,
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and that's Justin Haskins. So that will be on Wednesday. So if you notice that that part of this
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conversation was missing, we only had so much time and so much to talk about, but I just wanted to
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note that. So we have a lot of great episodes coming out this week. As you can tell, I'm still
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remote, so it sounds a little bit different, looks a little bit different. Thanks for bearing with us.
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Next week we will be back in studio. Everything will look normal. All right, I think that's all I
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have to say. If you love this podcast, leave us a five-star review wherever you listen. That would
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mean a whole lot to us. Chris Ruffo, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Tell us about
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your book, which is coming out tomorrow, right? Yeah, that's right. My book, America's Cultural
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Revolution, is officially released tomorrow, but we just heard this morning it's already the number
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one bestseller across all categories on Amazon. And the premise of the book is quite simple.
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I take the chaos that was unleashed in the summer of 2020 with the George Floyd riots,
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critical race theory, then gender ideology in schools, and I peel back the onion to just say,
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where did this come from? How did this happen? How did all of a sudden all of our institutions seem to be
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in very quick order captured by these radical left ideologies? So I did the deep dive, went into the
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archives, and I really peel back 50 years of history, showing how the left conducted their
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long march to the institutions, and what ideologies, what ideas, what concepts, and specifically what
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people are responsible for the mass institutional derangement we've seen over the last few years.
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So for the average person, it has seemed really quick. Maybe if you're not paying attention to
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politics at all, it seems like since 2015, like Trump was the impetus for all of this. Maybe for
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those who have been paying attention a little bit longer, perhaps they would say 2008, maybe some
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people would say 9-11. But a lot of people would say the past, somewhere in between the past 5 to 20
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years, things have gotten increasingly crazy with an acceleration in the past few years. But it sounds
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like what you're saying is that this goes back a lot further than most people realize, right?
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Yeah, that's right. So what we have in the late 1960s in the United States were mass urban rioting.
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You had left-wing revolutionaries that were promising to overthrow the state through violence.
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They were planting bombs in places like the U.S. Capitol Building and detonating them.
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They were assassinating police officers in cities like New York to make political statements.
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They were kidnapping innocent Americans and holding them hostage to achieve political goals.
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And the revolutionary ideology of that time failed in the 60s and early 70s. The American public really
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just was revolted by these displays of violence. But the same people, the same ideologies, the same
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principles that were driving that movement then went underground. They started first to get into
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the academic system and higher education, universities, and then slowly started conquering
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institution after institution, masking themselves in critical race theory, masking themselves in so-called
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diversity, equity, and inclusion. But what I found by going back into the history is that
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the lessons that I uncovered in my investigative reporting about critical race theory in schools were almost
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identical, minus some euphemistic language, to the revolutionary pamphlets of the 1960s.
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So the question is, how did the left-wing radicals get their ideas from the furthest fringes of society
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into the kindergarten classroom of your kids? That's a question worth asking. And if we want to get it
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out of our classrooms, if we don't want our kids to be indoctrinated into CRT and other ideologies,
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I think it's important to understand how these things work.
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Yeah. So going back to the 60s and 70s and some of these riots that you're talking about, again,
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someone who has been paying attention to politics or history for a while would know that. But I would
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say the average person doesn't. For the average person, the summer of 2020 is the worst that America
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has ever been, the most divided it's ever been, the most scared people have been for the future of the
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country for the safety and future of their children. But you're saying the 1960s kind of mirrored that
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division and that violence and that chaos that we saw today. So tell us specifically, what are some
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of the similar ideas and why do they always have the same result of violence and anarchy?
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Well, it's a great question. And the answer is pretty interesting. If you look at all of the
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buzzwords that were in the New York Times, that were in all of the left-wing press, that was
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repeated ad nauseum on MSNBC, systemic racism, police brutality, white supremacy, et cetera, et cetera.
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These were all terms that were developed by left-wing radicals such as Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis,
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the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, and the Weather Underground in the 1960s.
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They had the idea that if there's any disproportionate outcome between different racial groups,
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that means that the whole system is racist and operates to oppress people. And that critical
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race theory style idea of dividing people into oppressor and oppressed based on their skin color
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comes from the neo-Marxist revolutionaries of that time. And so it's a really fascinating thing.
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As I was watching 2020 unfold, and then I did the research for the book,
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I realized that this was just really a repetition. It was almost as if the left-wing activists and
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Antifa and Black Lives Matter were reenacting the late 1960s. And so digging into it, you realize that
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there's, in some sense, nothing new under the sun. But in another sense, you see how these ideas gained
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power. And that's the difference. In the late 1960s, the major corporations, the major media,
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even the New York Times, rejected the violent radicals and revolutionaries at the time.
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But in 2020, all of the Fortune 100 companies, all the K-12 schools, all the universities,
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all of the other prestige institutions and the federal government, they all supported,
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they literally bent the knee to BLM. And the BLM activists themselves say that Black Lives Matter,
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BLM, is a reincarnation of the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s that sought to overthrow the
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government of the United States to squash the Constitution and install a Marxist-Leninist
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revolutionary vanguard into power. And so we're dealing with something that is not spontaneous.
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It's not random. It's part of a 50-year plan that's been executed patiently and then suddenly
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So it just didn't stick in the 1960s, really. And I think, I mean, I'm sure you explore this
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further in your book, but there are a variety of reasons for that, I think. I think the country
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was more Christian, was more conservative, was more patriotic, was more cohesive. So it was kind
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of easy to push back against what was seen as kind of these radical fringes. And it wasn't
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politically expedient at the time either. And it wasn't lucrative at the time to support people
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like Angela Davis or people on the side. So what was it about academia then? Because you said that
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this stuff started infiltrating the colleges. Why was it academia that welcomed these radical
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fringes with open arms instead of joining the rest of society, which said, you know what?
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No, we don't want to be for your racist essentialism and your radicalism.
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I think that it's really a psychological question or a social psychological question. If you look at
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academics as a whole, they're utopian. They believe in the possibilities of the mind,
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of reshaping society according to their ideas. And they've always had a weak spot for revolutionary
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and utopian ideologies like Marxism, socialism, far-left radicalism, critical race theory, etc.
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And so it was already a welcoming environment for some of those ideas. But the second point,
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and I think this is really important, is that academics by temperament and academic administrators
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also by temperament are fundamentally weak people. And that sounds harsh, but I think in my analysis
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of the history and then my own experience working in higher ed reform, I think it's true.
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So that the average academic administrator, even one who says, you know what? Bombing buildings,
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assassinating police officers, threatening to violently overthrow the government is wrong.
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They know that morally. They know that intellectually. But temperamentally, they're unable to resist the
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people within their ranks who push those ideas. And so what happens in academia is a dynamic of the most
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intolerant, the most aggressive, the most dominant personalities, even if they represent a small
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percentage, were able to dominate the intellectual and the administrative environment. In the late 1960s,
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in the early 1970s, they made their coup. And then over the course of the next 50 years, what they did was
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consolidate their power, hire more people who shared their beliefs, push out any conservatives,
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any moderates, any classical liberals, silence, intimidate, choke off the supply of academic
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jobs for those kind of people to the point where now you have in many academic departments, even in
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large public universities, 25 to 1, 50 to 1, even 100 to 1 liberals to conservative. And among those,
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let's say, 100 liberals, you have approximately a quarter of those in the humanities that are out and
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out self-declared Marxists and radicals. And they set the tone, they dominate the discourse. And they've
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really achieved that in academia first. And then once they consolidated their power there, they started
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moving out into the other institutions of society.
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And now we see, I mean, every day I get a message that says, I'm in X industry. And as you know,
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it's progressive. I'm a social worker. I work in some kind of government office. I am a therapist.
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I'm a doctor. And it's just kind of like a given at this point that all of these institutions have
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become captured. And to be conservative or to just be heterodox and have different opinions about
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gender or whatever or race is seen as something that you kind of have to suppress or that you have
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to be ashamed of. And even like your HR manager will tell you, hey, I know you don't agree with
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what's being said, but you just kind of need to be quiet if you want to keep your job. And so what
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are some things over the past 50 years that have accelerated the infiltration of these radical ideas
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from the streets to academia and then to the rest of these industries that are now totally
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It's a brilliant question. And, you know, a couple of years ago when I first started doing this
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investigative reporting, I looked at companies like Bank of America, Target, Verizon, you know,
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Wall Street firms, all of these large corporations that were, you know, the essence of capitalism,
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literally the Bank of America. And Bank of America, for example, was teaching that the United States
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is systemically racist, that white people should bear historical guilt for crimes committed by people
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who share their ancestry, that, you know, America was irredeemable, that they should start having
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separate loan schemes, separate interest rates for people of different racial categories
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at other banks. We're contemplating this type of type of thing. And you think like, wait a minute,
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this is radical left race-based Marxist ideology that is now inside the Bank of America and other
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large corporations, you know, credit card companies even. This is crazy. What's happening? But
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what I looked into, and I found, I think really for the first time it's been exposed in the book,
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is that the origin of these so-called racial sensitivity programs, racial consciousness
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programs, now called diversity, equity, inclusion programs, the actual origins, the woman who developed
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these programs at a large scale in the beginning, in the 1970s and into the 1980s, was the third wife of
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the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the godfather of this revolutionary left. And she did
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her thesis on Marxist ideology as a graduate student. And her idea was, we're going to take
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the core Marxist ideas, filter them through the lens of race, and then take them into corporations to
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start re-engineering consciousness, re-engineering manners and mores and cultural habits to create a
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fertile ground for then overthrowing the existing capitalist order. And so, you know, when you
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actually look into the history, it starts to say, wait a minute, this idea that we're just promoting
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diversity and inclusion is totally false. The origins of these programs betray a totally different world.
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And they also betray this really insidious and sophisticated campaign that I trace decade by decade by
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decade to take these core ideologies and then push them into the institutions using euphemism, using
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misdirection, using obfuscation, to try to change the consciousness of you in the workplace, to try to change
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the consciousness of your kids in the classroom, and even kind of very, very kind of surprisingly to
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me, even trying to change your consciousness in your place of worship. There's no institutions that's safe,
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that are safe. And that's really what I try to demonstrate using the historical record.
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So they tried to change the consciousness of America by using these euphemisms, changing the language,
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but it sounds like they were also changing the conscience of America. So it's moral manipulation,
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it's kind of emotional extortion, playing upon, I think, the natural goodness of a lot of Americans
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to want to, you know, fight for equality and to fight for people who seem vulnerable, who don't have
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the same rights as they do. And so I could see how you find fertile soil, not just in the open minds of
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academics, but in maybe the truly empathetic hearts of the American people, people in institutions,
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corporations, whatever. And in churches, especially, as you said, but then, and because I do want to get
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to the church part, but then for the corporations like Bank of America, for the rest of these institutions
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like academia, it becomes not only acceptable, but actually like politically necessary, and financially
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extremely lucrative. So it went from something that was French to something that, okay, maybe you
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can accept these kind of radical concepts of race and equality and Marxism and stuff, to now you
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absolutely have to, or your business will fail, or you won't be able to survive as a university, or else
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that's what they think anyway. I mean, you saw that with the outcry from the Supreme Court decision about
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affirmative action. So how did that happen? How did it go from, okay, we're kind of ruminating on these
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ideas to, oh my gosh, if you think anything else besides the Marxist view of race and equity,
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then you are completely outside of what is normal and right.
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It's a really interesting progression and really a political technique that they've mastered.
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And even conservatives seem to be powerless to resist it, I think in some sense, because they don't
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know that it's happening. But the technique is a two-part technique. The first part is to get into an
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institution, gain a beachhead, get a few people in there, and then plead for tolerance, openness,
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pluralism, acceptance, inclusivity. So they preach these very open, tolerant, empathetic values to gain
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entry or access into the institution. And in a sense that they're right. I mean, these are good
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values to have in and of themselves. You want to be tolerant and empathetic and understanding of other
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people, all things being equal. But that's really just the first part, because once they get in
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preaching relativism, tolerance, et cetera, the second step is to start then, once they have power,
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once they've gained a critical mass, then to start enforcing, start to requiring, start to
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really mandate these values in the workplace, where if there's any deviation from these values,
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now that is unacceptable. And so it's really a strategy of seeking tolerance from their enemies,
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and then imposing coercion on those same people when the time comes. And so conservatives have to
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get much smarter with this. Well, yeah, diversity and inclusion, that sounds great. They just want to
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teach tolerance. I mean, if that were truly the case, there's an argument for it. But then
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conservatives find themselves, oh, wow, now I'm in racial re-education camp, and I have to write a
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privilege letter and apologize to my colleagues. And I pay now a different interest rate on my credit
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card because of my ancestry. I mean, things can go in that direction quite quickly. And so we have to
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be on guard. And I think that Americans are particularly susceptible to idealistic thinking,
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to the guilt emotions. American Protestants, certainly their guilt can be played like a fiddle
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sometimes. And then also, especially among, frankly, among bureaucracies that have large
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numbers of female employees, you see empathy as a good virtue being hijacked for bad ends. So in a sense,
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it's exploiting the natural feminine empathy, that good quality. And so with those emotions,
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with those vulnerabilities, they can do a lot of damage. They can really hijack institutions quickly.
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Yes, that's what my next book is on, is the danger of the empathy extortion that we kind of see,
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especially among women. And I saw that especially in the summer of 2020. And you mentioned the church.
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I'm talking mostly like Christian women who would say that they are conservative, like they would say
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that they're pro-life, they would certainly not call themselves a Marxist. And if they read, for
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example, like Angela Davis's ideas, they would say, Oh, my gosh, no, I don't believe that that's too
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radical. And yet they were the ones posting the black squares, they were the ones tying your morality to,
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you know, reading white fragility, and admitting that systemic racism and prolonged white supremacy
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are, you know, central problems in American life, and that we have to do the work, and we have to
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educate ourselves and sit down and shut up if you're white, basically. It was particularly white
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Christian women that I saw spearheading what, quite frankly, is like Marxist propaganda that has been
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like, washed over with Christian language in the summer of 2020. I mean, when you were researching
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this, did you see that that was part of the acceleration over the past few years, that the
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evangelical church, or just, I guess, the church in general, has now played a big part in kind of
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Yeah, yeah. And you're exactly right in your analysis. I think that's very well said. And I
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think that it's, look, all of these movements, they have a vanguard, and they have a mass. And so
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the vanguard of this movement, the BLM activists are radical atheists, they're, you know, kind of
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Marxist theoreticians, they're, you know, really street fighters, they encourage street violence in
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order to achieve their political ends. And all of these, you would think, you know, Marxist,
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atheists, you know, violent revolutionaries would not be able to gain a foothold in, you know, a kind
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of suburban, middle class, you know, evangelical, or Protestant, or even some Catholic churches. But
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they did something, I think, really interesting. They had sophisticated marketing. And so it was almost
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like a, a product or a lifestyle brand for a brief moment in 2020. There was the sense that everyone
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was copying each other in order to be more pure, to be more good, to be more idealistic, to be more
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supportive. You see the proliferation of the different symbols of the ideology that were really
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rapidly shifting. And so there's a natural inclination to jump on trend. Certainly in a place like
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Instagram is built on these trend cycles, they were able to hijack the aesthetic sense, so that it
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actually, it felt and appeared that they were for good, for justice, for equality. And I think
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they, you know, frankly tricked a lot of people. The good news, though, is that many of the people
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who were swept up in the fervor of 2020 have since re-evaluated. And I saw even a news clip the other
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day, maybe a day or two ago, the Seattle City Councilman that represents downtown Seattle, who was
00:26:06.140
all about defunding the police in 2020, is now up for re-election. And he's putting out glossy mailers
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that's saying, I love the police. We need to fully fund the police. I've always supported the police.
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A total lie. But it shows you how much public opinion has really shifted. And so the good news
00:26:25.080
that I try to get to in the book is not just doom and gloom, is not just the conquest of the institutions,
00:26:30.340
but also how to fight back, how the America's cultural revolution can be met with an equal or
00:26:36.340
greater counter-revolution. And I argue that the antidote to the revolution of 2020, to the revolution
00:26:41.980
of 1968, is the revolution of 1776. And if we go back to those founding American principles of liberty,
00:26:49.840
equality, equal protection under the law, we can actually get the country working again,
00:26:55.940
get the country on the moral high ground, and get the country successful as it should be.
00:27:01.440
And so I'm just really excited about the book's launch. I encourage all your viewers
00:27:06.800
to purchase a copy and start reading and start learning.
00:27:11.460
Certainly people have kind of shifted over the past few years as we've seen
00:27:27.740
the implementation of a lot of these radical ideas in cities. And so we've seen their tangible results.
00:27:35.040
There's not a city that is run by Democrats that has gotten better,
00:27:38.840
or even stayed the same over the past five years, or the past few years since 2020.
00:27:44.380
I mean, people are leaving those cities, no matter your ethnicity, no matter your socioeconomic class,
00:27:49.540
if you can, because no one wants to live in a society based on anarchy. No one wants to live in a
00:27:55.740
policeless, law enforcement-less society. I mean, we were told that these forms of quote-unquote
00:28:01.520
liberation would lead to equality and happiness and justice.
00:28:05.520
But I think what we're realizing is that when these leftist radicals use these words,
00:28:11.060
equality, liberation, justice, as you said, these euphemisms that people latch onto,
00:28:16.800
because who wants to be anti-equality? They mean totally different things than we do, right?
00:28:23.760
And so I think even like racism or oppression or marginalization, all of these things that you want
00:28:29.840
to be against, they mean something totally different. And I think you're right. I think
00:28:35.540
some people are waking up to, oh, what I thought was moral is actually really destructive.
00:28:41.940
That's right. And the history is really interesting. I think it's important to keep in mind that,
00:28:45.920
of course, in the United States, look, we had slavery, we had segregation. Those were both
00:28:50.800
moral evils that needed to be abolished, to be transcended. But all of these revolutionary
00:28:57.580
movements started in 1968, 1969, a few years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act
00:29:05.600
of 1965. And so by 1968, there was full legal equality for everyone in the United States.
00:29:13.740
And of course, there's still a legacy of some of those historical processes. But it's a very curious
00:29:19.920
thing that the most violent political revolutions of the modern period happened after the achievement
00:29:26.420
of equality. And even if you look at 2020, we've had equal rights in this country for more than 50
00:29:32.480
years, a half century. But those ideas of systemic racism and oppression, etc., are still vibrant. But
00:29:39.320
they've shifted a little bit. Now it's psychological, subconscious, implicit bias. So they have to keep
00:29:46.860
adapting their argument to, because I think that the ultimate paradox for these movements is that
00:29:52.280
we have a system of equal rights and protections. The government does not discriminate against anyone,
00:29:59.340
except for, in the case of admissions, hiring, etc., against whites and Asians, and especially white
00:30:05.920
and Asian men. But even if you put that aside as kind of a minor issue, affirmative action, which,
00:30:11.840
of course, I oppose. But even if you put that aside, this is a revolution at the end of the process of
00:30:18.840
political equality. And I think that there's a deep disillusionment and disappointment, which leads
00:30:23.540
them to even more radical solutions. Maybe we'll have equality if we get rid of the police. I mean,
00:30:28.500
it's like, are you people insane? You get a sense of desperation. And when people are desperate and
00:30:36.580
idealistic, that's when you get chaos. That's when you get bad ideas coming to the fore. And so we have to
00:30:42.700
be on guard against these ideas. We have to dig into the true nature of them. And we have to understand
00:30:47.240
the unintended consequences that come from policies driven by revolutionary fervor.
00:30:53.880
Yeah. And I just have one or two more questions. One thing that I think is really interesting that
00:30:58.020
you point out is how Minneapolis kind of came the epicenter of a lot of this stuff. And it's not
00:31:05.740
even the city. Like, if you look at the cities with, like, the highest concentration of Black Americans,
00:31:12.660
Minneapolis is, I mean, it's up there, but it's not one of the top. Why is it Minneapolis?
00:31:16.940
Why did Minneapolis become so central to this revolution?
00:31:21.760
Well, I mean, first, I think because it was at first a localized revolution in the aftermath of
00:31:27.100
the death of George Floyd. So that was the central focus. And then it kind of parachuted out into other
00:31:34.580
cities and you saw it spread. But the point about Minneapolis actually holds even truer if you look
00:31:40.380
at cities like Seattle and Portland. I profile both of those cities in the book. And Seattle and
00:31:45.840
Portland are quite literally the whitest big cities in America. They have the fewest African Americans,
00:31:51.980
largely because they're really far. I'm up in the Seattle area, actually between Seattle and Portland.
00:31:58.460
And and it's just far from the deep south. So as people were moving during the Great Migration and
00:32:04.660
the earlier part of the earlier part of the 20th century, you know, you'd have to cross over a
00:32:09.320
tremendous amount of territory. But and yet it was the site of the most violent and extreme protest,
00:32:16.460
riots, et cetera. You had the Chaz Chop autonomous zone in Seattle. You had more than 100 nights of
00:32:22.460
rioting, the seizure of the federal courthouse in Portland from Antifa. And so there's an interesting
00:32:27.960
dynamic that's actually a dynamic that's been there since the 1960s, is that you have kind of elite
00:32:34.020
white intelligentsia making common cause with the urban African-American underclass. And that was the
00:32:43.480
language that they used back in the 1960s. I think that's still the dynamic today so that you have
00:32:48.200
the kind of bleeding New York Times intelligentsia, you know, based in the hipster neighborhoods of
00:32:55.520
New York and San Francisco and Seattle leading the intellectual charge. And then, of course, you have
00:33:01.300
in the predominantly African-American neighborhoods where the most violent rioting was occurring.
00:33:06.740
And so you have this very interesting alliance of forces. And they believed in the 1960s that that was
00:33:14.280
a revolutionary combination. It didn't work out then. It didn't work out now. But that's the basis of
00:33:21.140
their political theory and their political action. They have the kind of intelligentsia kind of leading
00:33:27.400
the ideological fight. And then they have the threat of violence coming from the inner city
00:33:31.860
that is putting political pressure, putting physical pressure on voters. And look, I think it
00:33:38.860
actually worked to the extent in 2020 that they put so much pressure around the election. You probably
00:33:44.800
remember this, although many people have forgotten. I know you wouldn't have forgotten. They said,
00:33:50.140
and cities were gearing up for this, they were boarding up in anticipation for the election.
00:33:53.600
If Trump wins, we burn the whole country down. They played a game of extortion and moral blackmail.
00:34:00.580
And I think that actually had some impact on people's votes, where the average voter said,
00:34:05.320
you know what, this is too stressful. I'm just going to vote for Biden just to avoid the violence. And so
00:34:10.160
it's a nice interplay. Sometimes they're winning, sometimes they're losing. It's pretty fascinating.
00:34:16.840
But ultimately, I think there's nothing here. It's an empty ideology.
00:34:23.600
You know, I know people who, even though over the past couple of years, they have learned that maybe
00:34:39.560
some of the things that they believed or said in 2020 aren't exactly true, that systemic racism and
00:34:44.920
oppression may not be the reason for some of the disparities that we see between the races, or maybe
00:34:50.900
some of the things that they ascribe to racism, they're realizing, you know, shouldn't be ascribed
00:34:56.460
to racism, or they just believed that things like white fragility and Ibram X. Kendi, that these were
00:35:01.820
good, you know, works that they should be reading. They've realized it since, but they still don't
00:35:06.860
want to admit it. Because look, it's more difficult to admit that you're wrong, or to even admit to
00:35:12.960
yourself that you're wrong. I think a lot of these, especially Christian women, they don't even want to
00:35:18.300
say to themselves that, hey, maybe the reason for some of these disparities or some of the outcomes
00:35:24.060
that we see among black Americans doesn't have to do with white supremacy. That's an uncomfortable
00:35:29.760
place to go. Because then you have to explore different questions of like, why is it? What is
00:35:35.860
affecting it? And it's just not convenient for most white people to go there to ask those questions.
00:35:43.520
It's like dangerous, scary, unpopular, controversial territory. And so I think some people want to stay
00:35:52.040
in a state of denial, because it's just easier to regurgitate the propaganda about race than it is
00:35:58.920
to be someone to say, I don't know, that's not necessarily true. I mean, you have to potentially
00:36:04.880
sacrifice your job and your safety and your comfort and all of that to push back against what has become
00:36:12.540
such a ubiquitous narrative today, that white supremacy is this pervasive force that's holding
00:36:18.080
everyone down. Yeah, that's 100% right. And that's the true of the dynamic in any propaganda-based
00:36:25.800
society, whether it's the old Soviet Union nations, or whether it's here in the United States, where we
00:36:31.660
have a state-private propaganda apparatus that enforces this orthodoxy. But the good news is that I think
00:36:39.160
it's weakening. And then the other piece of good news is that we now can arm ourselves with the
00:36:45.220
arguments, the evidence, the rhetoric, the persuasion, and the language in order to make a
00:36:49.840
different case. And that starts with people like you and me. We're in the public sphere. We're in some
00:36:55.160
ways more immune than the average citizen from the dynamics of kind of mobbing or going after our jobs.
00:37:03.020
After all, we are in politics. So this is part of our job description. But we have to speak out with
00:37:09.320
a clear, deliberate, and fearless voice. We have to say, this is the truth. This is how it is. And
00:37:16.720
then that will create space for other people to start learning from us. But also, it will give them
00:37:22.760
the ammunition that they need to then go back to their local institutions and put their two cents in.
00:37:28.420
And so I would say that we have to have courage. And in politics, often, the winner is not the
00:37:34.680
person with the best idea. It's not the best human being. But the person who cares the most,
00:37:41.100
who works the hardest, who wants to achieve their goals, and is really to make a sacrifice
00:37:45.500
toward that end. And conservatives, frankly, in our local institutions and midsize institutions
00:37:52.220
have not been doing that. They've been saying, you know, I don't want to rock the boat. I don't want
00:37:56.460
to get in there. I don't want to risk this. I have, you know, this to think about. If that's our
00:38:01.240
attitude, we're going to lose. But if we have enough people standing up, enough people speaking
00:38:05.880
out, enough people that have good, persuasive, reasoned, compassionate lines of argument that
00:38:13.780
they can make, they have good people skills, they know not how to alienate their friends and
00:38:18.560
colleagues and family members. That's when the truth starts to win. That's when the story that
00:38:24.140
we're telling starts to win. And I think that it's really important for people to feel that
00:38:28.680
confidence that they need to understand the history, to understand the origins, to have the
00:38:33.760
facts, to have the lines of argument. And so that was really what I tried to do in the book is give
00:38:39.340
people that sense of confidence that once they read the book, once they know the history, they can
00:38:44.700
go out there and say, you know what? DEI is based on a lie. And this is why. And have something
00:38:51.200
powerful to say? Yes. Understanding where ideas come from really is so important and confidence
00:38:59.000
inducing, I think. And something that I say that I remember you saying a few years ago is that courage
00:39:04.480
begets courage. And like someone having the courage to stand up and say, you know what? I know DEI is
00:39:11.040
popular. I know that it's something that's being presented as tolerance and empathy and love and
00:39:16.780
compassion, but here's the truth about it. That really can have a domino effect. I think that
00:39:23.860
you've seen that in your own work, but I'm sure in your work, you've also seen that at universities,
00:39:29.240
at places of work, in different communities and churches, when someone is willing to stand up
00:39:35.100
because they are empowered by the education that you provide in this book and say, no, you're
00:39:40.460
misunderstanding what this is. You're hearing euphemisms, but here's what this really means and why it's
00:39:46.360
destructive. That can make a difference. Not everyone has to be focused on writing the next
00:39:51.700
bestseller or running for office or helping start a new university like you have, which is amazing,
00:39:58.020
but everyone can do something. And that starts with being courageous and saying what is unpopular,
00:40:02.980
but true. So thank you for giving us a handbook for how to do that and really giving us so much
00:40:08.040
confidence in all the education that you're providing in this, just to give us context to really
00:40:12.480
understand what's going on. Like you said, it's already number one, so people can get it on Amazon.
00:40:17.300
Is there anywhere else that you want to direct people to buy the book, to share about the book
00:40:22.100
or the work that you're doing? Yeah, absolutely. Go on Amazon, go on Barnes and Noble, go on any
00:40:28.520
website where books are sold, buy a copy of the book. It's officially out tomorrow, but you can pre-order
00:40:35.760
a copy today and be the first to read it. I think this is going to set the narrative for conservatives
00:40:40.860
moving forward. You're going to see the story told in this book really be the story of the
00:40:45.540
conservative presidential primaries. And so I would say right now, go to your computer,
00:40:50.940
order the book, you'll get it in a couple of days. And I appreciate your support.