Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 839 ｜ How Christian Women Got Played by Progressivism ｜ Guest： Chris Rufo

00:00:00.260 Summer of 2020, how could any of us forget the black squares, the violent riots?

00:00:08.040 Riots are the voice of the unheard, is what we were told by corporations, by government officials, by activists,

00:00:16.940 even your pastor and some of your favorite Bible study leaders were promoting things like white fragility,

00:00:23.800 Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist. How did all of this happen? The DEI, the ESG, the programs

00:00:35.600 based on racial essentialism and this idea that systemic racism and white supremacy are the biggest

00:00:45.360 problems that America is facing today. Well, none of this stuff happened in a vacuum. It actually

00:00:53.780 has an extremely long and complex history going back at least half a century. Today, we've got

00:01:02.360 Christopher Ruffo. He is the author of the new book, America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical

00:01:09.040 Left Conquered Everything. And specifically today, we talk about things like how the ideas of critical

00:01:16.780 race theory have infiltrated our public school system, our academia, our corporations, almost

00:01:22.920 every single institution and industry. But this really goes for almost every progressive idea.

00:01:30.660 He's going to tell us where all of this stuff comes from, help us wrap our heads around it,

00:01:35.740 so we can courageously push back against the destruction that we have seen it bring over the

00:01:43.200 past several years. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to

00:01:48.400 GoodRanchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. That's GoodRanchers.com, code Allie.

00:02:01.200 All right, guys. Happy Monday. Before we get into that conversation, just a couple things. First,

00:02:07.020 it's Monday, so just a reminder to do the next right thing in faith with excellence and for the glory of

00:02:12.620 God. No matter what that is, big or small, no matter what you're feeling, whether you are scared or you

00:02:17.740 feel alone or you feel intimidated or you just feel like everything is mundane and nothing matters,

00:02:25.500 do the next right thing. Do the next right thing in faith with excellence and for the glory of God.

00:02:31.940 All right, that's one thing I wanted to say. Then I just wanted to give you a preview of some of the

00:02:36.420 things that we'll be talking about this week. Tomorrow, we are going to be talking about something

00:02:40.460 that I've been saying that I wanted to talk about for a long time. We're going to be talking about

00:02:44.100 two things. One of the things that I've said that I've wanted to talk about for a while

00:02:47.260 is romance novels and the toxicity of female romance novels and how I personally think that

00:02:54.080 that is helping destroy marriages and actually destroy people's perception of themselves, 1.00

00:02:59.820 perception of reality, what life should look like, but also really damaging relationships because

00:03:05.520 it's setting up such awful expectations and also how it's kind of a form of pornography.

00:03:10.800 So we're going to go through some examples of that and why I think that this is really destructive

00:03:15.280 specifically for the women that it's targeting. But on the flip side of that, I also want to talk

00:03:20.540 about a toxic message that men are being fed from the likes of people like Andrew Tate. We referenced

00:03:26.720 this a little bit last week, but we're going to get into it because I think some people on the right

00:03:32.300 may be well-intentioned or confused about Andrew Tate, the kind of person that he is, and even the

00:03:37.660 message that he conveys. So I've got a message for both men and women, masculinity and femininity

00:03:43.760 tomorrow that I think that y'all are really, really going to like and want to share. And then today

00:03:48.780 you'll notice that when we talk to Chris Rufo, we mostly talk about how this kind of idea of critical

00:03:54.700 race theory and racism, you know, white supremacy, all of this stuff infiltrated the mainstream

00:04:01.100 through academia, but we don't really touch as much on things like ESG and corporations,

00:04:08.280 CEI, as we've talked about several times before, but we are going to get into that even more in some

00:04:13.920 recent revelations about these things with one of your favorite guests, one of my favorite guests,

00:04:19.080 and that's Justin Haskins. So that will be on Wednesday. So if you notice that that part of this

00:04:23.300 conversation was missing, we only had so much time and so much to talk about, but I just wanted to

00:04:28.680 note that. So we have a lot of great episodes coming out this week. As you can tell, I'm still

00:04:34.380 remote, so it sounds a little bit different, looks a little bit different. Thanks for bearing with us.

00:04:39.560 Next week we will be back in studio. Everything will look normal. All right, I think that's all I

00:04:46.620 have to say. If you love this podcast, leave us a five-star review wherever you listen. That would

00:04:51.660 mean a whole lot to us. Chris Ruffo, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Tell us about

00:05:08.800 your book, which is coming out tomorrow, right? Yeah, that's right. My book, America's Cultural

00:05:14.300 Revolution, is officially released tomorrow, but we just heard this morning it's already the number

00:05:18.820 one bestseller across all categories on Amazon. And the premise of the book is quite simple.

00:05:24.000 I take the chaos that was unleashed in the summer of 2020 with the George Floyd riots,

00:05:29.660 critical race theory, then gender ideology in schools, and I peel back the onion to just say,

00:05:34.820 where did this come from? How did this happen? How did all of a sudden all of our institutions seem to be

00:05:40.740 in very quick order captured by these radical left ideologies? So I did the deep dive, went into the

00:05:47.320 archives, and I really peel back 50 years of history, showing how the left conducted their

00:05:53.500 long march to the institutions, and what ideologies, what ideas, what concepts, and specifically what

00:05:59.220 people are responsible for the mass institutional derangement we've seen over the last few years.

00:06:06.880 So for the average person, it has seemed really quick. Maybe if you're not paying attention to

00:06:11.920 politics at all, it seems like since 2015, like Trump was the impetus for all of this. Maybe for

00:06:18.600 those who have been paying attention a little bit longer, perhaps they would say 2008, maybe some

00:06:23.220 people would say 9-11. But a lot of people would say the past, somewhere in between the past 5 to 20

00:06:29.140 years, things have gotten increasingly crazy with an acceleration in the past few years. But it sounds

00:06:35.200 like what you're saying is that this goes back a lot further than most people realize, right?

00:06:42.740 Yeah, that's right. So what we have in the late 1960s in the United States were mass urban rioting.

00:06:50.620 You had left-wing revolutionaries that were promising to overthrow the state through violence.

00:06:55.660 They were planting bombs in places like the U.S. Capitol Building and detonating them.

00:06:59.740 They were assassinating police officers in cities like New York to make political statements.

00:07:05.320 They were kidnapping innocent Americans and holding them hostage to achieve political goals.

00:07:10.840 And the revolutionary ideology of that time failed in the 60s and early 70s. The American public really

00:07:19.120 just was revolted by these displays of violence. But the same people, the same ideologies, the same

00:07:26.300 principles that were driving that movement then went underground. They started first to get into

00:07:32.300 the academic system and higher education, universities, and then slowly started conquering

00:07:37.620 institution after institution, masking themselves in critical race theory, masking themselves in so-called

00:07:43.780 diversity, equity, and inclusion. But what I found by going back into the history is that

00:07:48.940 the lessons that I uncovered in my investigative reporting about critical race theory in schools were almost

00:07:54.400 identical, minus some euphemistic language, to the revolutionary pamphlets of the 1960s.

00:08:00.400 So the question is, how did the left-wing radicals get their ideas from the furthest fringes of society

00:08:06.300 into the kindergarten classroom of your kids? That's a question worth asking. And if we want to get it

00:08:12.840 out of our classrooms, if we don't want our kids to be indoctrinated into CRT and other ideologies,

00:08:18.080 I think it's important to understand how these things work.

00:08:22.980 Yeah. So going back to the 60s and 70s and some of these riots that you're talking about, again,

00:08:28.360 someone who has been paying attention to politics or history for a while would know that. But I would

00:08:33.260 say the average person doesn't. For the average person, the summer of 2020 is the worst that America

00:08:41.340 has ever been, the most divided it's ever been, the most scared people have been for the future of the

00:08:46.380 country for the safety and future of their children. But you're saying the 1960s kind of mirrored that

00:08:54.980 division and that violence and that chaos that we saw today. So tell us specifically, what are some

00:09:01.500 of the similar ideas and why do they always have the same result of violence and anarchy?

00:09:09.860 Well, it's a great question. And the answer is pretty interesting. If you look at all of the

00:09:15.160 buzzwords that were in the New York Times, that were in all of the left-wing press, that was

00:09:19.540 repeated ad nauseum on MSNBC, systemic racism, police brutality, white supremacy, et cetera, et cetera.

00:09:28.940 These were all terms that were developed by left-wing radicals such as Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis,

00:09:35.400 the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, and the Weather Underground in the 1960s.

00:09:40.920 They had the idea that if there's any disproportionate outcome between different racial groups,

00:09:45.920 that means that the whole system is racist and operates to oppress people. And that critical

00:09:51.940 race theory style idea of dividing people into oppressor and oppressed based on their skin color

00:09:56.220 comes from the neo-Marxist revolutionaries of that time. And so it's a really fascinating thing.

00:10:02.640 As I was watching 2020 unfold, and then I did the research for the book,

00:10:06.380 I realized that this was just really a repetition. It was almost as if the left-wing activists and

00:10:12.420 Antifa and Black Lives Matter were reenacting the late 1960s. And so digging into it, you realize that

00:10:19.980 there's, in some sense, nothing new under the sun. But in another sense, you see how these ideas gained

00:10:25.860 power. And that's the difference. In the late 1960s, the major corporations, the major media,

00:10:31.860 even the New York Times, rejected the violent radicals and revolutionaries at the time.

00:10:37.340 But in 2020, all of the Fortune 100 companies, all the K-12 schools, all the universities,

00:10:43.300 all of the other prestige institutions and the federal government, they all supported,

00:10:48.700 they literally bent the knee to BLM. And the BLM activists themselves say that Black Lives Matter,

00:10:54.200 BLM, is a reincarnation of the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s that sought to overthrow the 0.92

00:11:01.720 government of the United States to squash the Constitution and install a Marxist-Leninist

00:11:07.240 revolutionary vanguard into power. And so we're dealing with something that is not spontaneous.

00:11:14.220 It's not random. It's part of a 50-year plan that's been executed patiently and then suddenly

00:11:21.200 exploded into American life.

00:11:23.180 So it just didn't stick in the 1960s, really. And I think, I mean, I'm sure you explore this

00:11:31.000 further in your book, but there are a variety of reasons for that, I think. I think the country

00:11:36.880 was more Christian, was more conservative, was more patriotic, was more cohesive. So it was kind

00:11:42.600 of easy to push back against what was seen as kind of these radical fringes. And it wasn't

00:11:48.580 politically expedient at the time either. And it wasn't lucrative at the time to support people

00:11:54.160 like Angela Davis or people on the side. So what was it about academia then? Because you said that

00:12:00.280 this stuff started infiltrating the colleges. Why was it academia that welcomed these radical

00:12:06.700 fringes with open arms instead of joining the rest of society, which said, you know what?

00:12:12.220 No, we don't want to be for your racist essentialism and your radicalism.

00:12:16.320 Why did academia accept it and then teach it?

00:12:20.780 I think that it's really a psychological question or a social psychological question. If you look at

00:12:26.260 academics as a whole, they're utopian. They believe in the possibilities of the mind,

00:12:31.860 of reshaping society according to their ideas. And they've always had a weak spot for revolutionary

00:12:38.040 and utopian ideologies like Marxism, socialism, far-left radicalism, critical race theory, etc.

00:12:45.840 And so it was already a welcoming environment for some of those ideas. But the second point,

00:12:51.700 and I think this is really important, is that academics by temperament and academic administrators

00:12:56.740 also by temperament are fundamentally weak people. And that sounds harsh, but I think in my analysis

00:13:05.160 of the history and then my own experience working in higher ed reform, I think it's true.

00:13:08.460 So that the average academic administrator, even one who says, you know what? Bombing buildings,

00:13:15.740 assassinating police officers, threatening to violently overthrow the government is wrong.

00:13:20.500 They know that morally. They know that intellectually. But temperamentally, they're unable to resist the

00:13:25.820 people within their ranks who push those ideas. And so what happens in academia is a dynamic of the most

00:13:32.000 intolerant, the most aggressive, the most dominant personalities, even if they represent a small

00:13:37.220 percentage, were able to dominate the intellectual and the administrative environment. In the late 1960s,

00:13:43.640 in the early 1970s, they made their coup. And then over the course of the next 50 years, what they did was

00:13:49.280 consolidate their power, hire more people who shared their beliefs, push out any conservatives,

00:13:55.720 any moderates, any classical liberals, silence, intimidate, choke off the supply of academic

00:14:02.020 jobs for those kind of people to the point where now you have in many academic departments, even in

00:14:07.300 large public universities, 25 to 1, 50 to 1, even 100 to 1 liberals to conservative. And among those,

00:14:15.080 let's say, 100 liberals, you have approximately a quarter of those in the humanities that are out and

00:14:20.600 out self-declared Marxists and radicals. And they set the tone, they dominate the discourse. And they've

00:14:28.100 really achieved that in academia first. And then once they consolidated their power there, they started

00:14:33.880 moving out into the other institutions of society.

00:14:35.900 And now we see, I mean, every day I get a message that says, I'm in X industry. And as you know,

00:14:54.780 it's progressive. I'm a social worker. I work in some kind of government office. I am a therapist.

00:15:01.120 I'm a doctor. And it's just kind of like a given at this point that all of these institutions have

00:15:07.320 become captured. And to be conservative or to just be heterodox and have different opinions about

00:15:13.740 gender or whatever or race is seen as something that you kind of have to suppress or that you have

00:15:21.520 to be ashamed of. And even like your HR manager will tell you, hey, I know you don't agree with

00:15:26.960 what's being said, but you just kind of need to be quiet if you want to keep your job. And so what

00:15:33.620 are some things over the past 50 years that have accelerated the infiltration of these radical ideas

00:15:39.700 from the streets to academia and then to the rest of these industries that are now totally

00:15:45.340 dominated by this stuff?

00:15:48.480 It's a brilliant question. And, you know, a couple of years ago when I first started doing this

00:15:52.580 investigative reporting, I looked at companies like Bank of America, Target, Verizon, you know,

00:15:59.740 Wall Street firms, all of these large corporations that were, you know, the essence of capitalism,

00:16:05.520 literally the Bank of America. And Bank of America, for example, was teaching that the United States

00:16:10.140 is systemically racist, that white people should bear historical guilt for crimes committed by people

00:16:16.060 who share their ancestry, that, you know, America was irredeemable, that they should start having 1.00

00:16:21.740 separate loan schemes, separate interest rates for people of different racial categories

00:16:27.060 at other banks. We're contemplating this type of type of thing. And you think like, wait a minute,

00:16:32.900 this is radical left race-based Marxist ideology that is now inside the Bank of America and other

00:16:40.000 large corporations, you know, credit card companies even. This is crazy. What's happening? But

00:16:45.820 what I looked into, and I found, I think really for the first time it's been exposed in the book,

00:16:52.140 is that the origin of these so-called racial sensitivity programs, racial consciousness

00:16:58.480 programs, now called diversity, equity, inclusion programs, the actual origins, the woman who developed 0.98

00:17:04.940 these programs at a large scale in the beginning, in the 1970s and into the 1980s, was the third wife of

00:17:12.700 the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the godfather of this revolutionary left. And she did

00:17:19.520 her thesis on Marxist ideology as a graduate student. And her idea was, we're going to take

00:17:25.320 the core Marxist ideas, filter them through the lens of race, and then take them into corporations to

00:17:33.080 start re-engineering consciousness, re-engineering manners and mores and cultural habits to create a

00:17:40.440 fertile ground for then overthrowing the existing capitalist order. And so, you know, when you

00:17:46.960 actually look into the history, it starts to say, wait a minute, this idea that we're just promoting

00:17:51.440 diversity and inclusion is totally false. The origins of these programs betray a totally different world.

00:17:58.780 And they also betray this really insidious and sophisticated campaign that I trace decade by decade by

00:18:07.160 decade to take these core ideologies and then push them into the institutions using euphemism, using

00:18:15.300 misdirection, using obfuscation, to try to change the consciousness of you in the workplace, to try to change

00:18:21.160 the consciousness of your kids in the classroom, and even kind of very, very kind of surprisingly to

00:18:28.160 me, even trying to change your consciousness in your place of worship. There's no institutions that's safe,

00:18:34.560 that are safe. And that's really what I try to demonstrate using the historical record.

00:18:39.840 So they tried to change the consciousness of America by using these euphemisms, changing the language,

00:18:45.200 but it sounds like they were also changing the conscience of America. So it's moral manipulation,

00:18:51.740 it's kind of emotional extortion, playing upon, I think, the natural goodness of a lot of Americans

00:18:57.040 to want to, you know, fight for equality and to fight for people who seem vulnerable, who don't have

00:19:03.400 the same rights as they do. And so I could see how you find fertile soil, not just in the open minds of

00:19:10.600 academics, but in maybe the truly empathetic hearts of the American people, people in institutions,

00:19:16.900 corporations, whatever. And in churches, especially, as you said, but then, and because I do want to get

00:19:24.360 to the church part, but then for the corporations like Bank of America, for the rest of these institutions

00:19:29.620 like academia, it becomes not only acceptable, but actually like politically necessary, and financially

00:19:38.380 extremely lucrative. So it went from something that was French to something that, okay, maybe you

00:19:44.920 can accept these kind of radical concepts of race and equality and Marxism and stuff, to now you

00:19:50.500 absolutely have to, or your business will fail, or you won't be able to survive as a university, or else

00:19:56.680 that's what they think anyway. I mean, you saw that with the outcry from the Supreme Court decision about

00:20:02.220 affirmative action. So how did that happen? How did it go from, okay, we're kind of ruminating on these

00:20:07.600 ideas to, oh my gosh, if you think anything else besides the Marxist view of race and equity,

00:20:13.820 then you are completely outside of what is normal and right.

00:20:19.140 It's a really interesting progression and really a political technique that they've mastered.

00:20:25.260 And even conservatives seem to be powerless to resist it, I think in some sense, because they don't

00:20:30.960 know that it's happening. But the technique is a two-part technique. The first part is to get into an

00:20:36.200 institution, gain a beachhead, get a few people in there, and then plead for tolerance, openness,

00:20:43.580 pluralism, acceptance, inclusivity. So they preach these very open, tolerant, empathetic values to gain

00:20:51.820 entry or access into the institution. And in a sense that they're right. I mean, these are good

00:20:58.420 values to have in and of themselves. You want to be tolerant and empathetic and understanding of other

00:21:03.040 people, all things being equal. But that's really just the first part, because once they get in

00:21:09.340 preaching relativism, tolerance, et cetera, the second step is to start then, once they have power,

00:21:15.720 once they've gained a critical mass, then to start enforcing, start to requiring, start to

00:21:21.960 really mandate these values in the workplace, where if there's any deviation from these values,

00:21:28.640 now that is unacceptable. And so it's really a strategy of seeking tolerance from their enemies,

00:21:35.860 and then imposing coercion on those same people when the time comes. And so conservatives have to

00:21:42.260 get much smarter with this. Well, yeah, diversity and inclusion, that sounds great. They just want to

00:21:48.540 teach tolerance. I mean, if that were truly the case, there's an argument for it. But then

00:21:54.820 conservatives find themselves, oh, wow, now I'm in racial re-education camp, and I have to write a

00:21:59.280 privilege letter and apologize to my colleagues. And I pay now a different interest rate on my credit

00:22:04.520 card because of my ancestry. I mean, things can go in that direction quite quickly. And so we have to

00:22:12.600 be on guard. And I think that Americans are particularly susceptible to idealistic thinking,

00:22:18.180 to the guilt emotions. American Protestants, certainly their guilt can be played like a fiddle

00:22:25.100 sometimes. And then also, especially among, frankly, among bureaucracies that have large

00:22:33.480 numbers of female employees, you see empathy as a good virtue being hijacked for bad ends. So in a sense, 1.00

00:22:42.760 it's exploiting the natural feminine empathy, that good quality. And so with those emotions, 1.00

00:22:50.020 with those vulnerabilities, they can do a lot of damage. They can really hijack institutions quickly.

00:22:57.580 Yes, that's what my next book is on, is the danger of the empathy extortion that we kind of see,

00:23:03.340 especially among women. And I saw that especially in the summer of 2020. And you mentioned the church.

00:23:09.480 I'm talking mostly like Christian women who would say that they are conservative, like they would say 1.00

00:23:15.960 that they're pro-life, they would certainly not call themselves a Marxist. And if they read, for

00:23:21.520 example, like Angela Davis's ideas, they would say, Oh, my gosh, no, I don't believe that that's too

00:23:27.140 radical. And yet they were the ones posting the black squares, they were the ones tying your morality to,

00:23:33.220 you know, reading white fragility, and admitting that systemic racism and prolonged white supremacy

00:23:40.800 are, you know, central problems in American life, and that we have to do the work, and we have to 0.99

00:23:49.620 educate ourselves and sit down and shut up if you're white, basically. It was particularly white 1.00

00:23:57.280 Christian women that I saw spearheading what, quite frankly, is like Marxist propaganda that has been 0.99

00:24:04.480 like, washed over with Christian language in the summer of 2020. I mean, when you were researching

00:24:10.380 this, did you see that that was part of the acceleration over the past few years, that the

00:24:15.080 evangelical church, or just, I guess, the church in general, has now played a big part in kind of

00:24:20.040 pushing this stuff?

00:24:20.860 Yeah, yeah. And you're exactly right in your analysis. I think that's very well said. And I

00:24:28.320 think that it's, look, all of these movements, they have a vanguard, and they have a mass. And so

00:24:34.240 the vanguard of this movement, the BLM activists are radical atheists, they're, you know, kind of

00:24:40.980 Marxist theoreticians, they're, you know, really street fighters, they encourage street violence in

00:24:47.780 order to achieve their political ends. And all of these, you would think, you know, Marxist,

00:24:52.500 atheists, you know, violent revolutionaries would not be able to gain a foothold in, you know, a kind

00:24:58.900 of suburban, middle class, you know, evangelical, or Protestant, or even some Catholic churches. But

00:25:06.380 they did something, I think, really interesting. They had sophisticated marketing. And so it was almost

00:25:11.620 like a, a product or a lifestyle brand for a brief moment in 2020. There was the sense that everyone

00:25:18.300 was copying each other in order to be more pure, to be more good, to be more idealistic, to be more

00:25:22.900 supportive. You see the proliferation of the different symbols of the ideology that were really

00:25:28.800 rapidly shifting. And so there's a natural inclination to jump on trend. Certainly in a place like

00:25:34.500 Instagram is built on these trend cycles, they were able to hijack the aesthetic sense, so that it

00:25:40.100 actually, it felt and appeared that they were for good, for justice, for equality. And I think

00:25:46.940 they, you know, frankly tricked a lot of people. The good news, though, is that many of the people

00:25:52.580 who were swept up in the fervor of 2020 have since re-evaluated. And I saw even a news clip the other

00:25:59.220 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

00:26:12.540 that's saying, I love the police. We need to fully fund the police. I've always supported the police.

00:26:18.820 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 0.58

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 1.00

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.

00:40:56.100 Thanks so much, Chris. I really appreciate it.

00:40:59.300 Thank you.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - July 17, 2023

Ep 839 ｜ How Christian Women Got Played by Progressivism ｜ Guest： Chris Rufo

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