The Charlie Kirk Show - America's Cultural Revolution with Chris Rufo

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk show, Christopher Ruffo has the number one book in America right now, America's Cultural Revolution, and he joins us for an in-depth conversation.

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00:01:13.000 We have a great guest for the full hour, really smart man, Christopher Ruffo, author of a very important book that you should purchase, America's Cultural Revolution by Christopher Ruffo.

00:01:24.000 Christopher, thank you for joining the program again.

00:01:26.000 The subtitle of the book is How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.

00:01:30.000 I have been encouraging our audience.

00:01:32.000 It's about Mao, it's about Mao, it's about Mao.

00:01:35.000 You know, kind of in politics, we talked about Stalin or Hitler or Mussolini, I think, too much.

00:01:39.000 Mao doesn't get as much attention.

00:01:41.000 Before we talk about America's Cultural Revolution, catch us up to speed about Mao's cultural revolution and what can we learn from it and how does it apply today?

00:01:51.000 Well, Mao understood.

00:01:53.000 You know, Mao was, of course, the great Chinese communist military hero who led the communist forces on their long march and then conquered the country, established a Marxist-Leninist state.

00:02:05.000 But what he realized by the 1960s was that leveling the economy, reshaping everything on an economic front and the political front was not enough.

00:02:14.000 And that in order to get the true communist utopia, he believed, you had to also level all attachments to the prior culture.

00:02:21.000 You had to really wipe out the connection between the people and their cultural history and replace it with left-wing Marxist ideology, which then became known as Maoism, famously made concrete in his little red book of quotations that was spread around the country at that time and still to this day.

00:02:41.000 And in America, though, what's happening is something very similar.

00:02:45.000 The radical left realized that they could not bring a socialist, Marxist, working-class revolution to the United States.

00:02:52.000 In fact, most middle-class Americans and working-class Americans were totally against that kind of movement dating back to the 60s and 70s.

00:03:00.000 And so they said, what we have to do is infiltrate the institutions of culture and turn those great institutions against the American people to change how they think about their past, their present, in order to influence their future.

00:03:13.000 And so now you're talking about America's cultural revolution.

00:03:17.000 When did it start?

00:03:19.000 And we could talk about how they've conquered everything as they throw out because your book is super smart and you make a lot of great points.

00:03:25.000 When would you say was the beginning of America's Cultural Revolution?

00:03:29.000 The beginning point is actually quite clear.

00:03:31.000 It's in the year 1968.

00:03:33.000 That was when the so-called new left came to prominence.

00:03:36.000 You had student activists and left-wing intellectuals mobilizing in the universities at the same time that you had what was thought of as the underclass mobilizing through riots in America's cities, more than 100 different cities around the country.

00:03:51.000 And this is the genesis of this coalition that has stuck around to this day.

00:03:55.000 You have the intelligentsia working ideologically, trying to reshape people's opinions, attitudes, and beliefs.

00:04:02.000 And then you have the streets, the inner cities, what was called the lumpen proletariat, the people at the fringes of society mobilizing in a physical and violent way.

00:04:13.000 And so what you saw established, that basic dynamic in 1968, all of a sudden you fast forward 50-some years to 2020 with George Floyd, and you see it emerging again.

00:04:24.000 You have the editorialists at MSNBC and the elite left-wing media working with the BLM movement that was really mobilizing people to violence in America's cities.

00:04:36.000 It's the same pattern over and over and over. 0.66

00:04:39.000 These folks have been doing it not by accident, but very deliberately.

00:04:43.000 They had a plan to get the institutions to march all the way through America's prestige economy and then to turn these ideas on using events like the death of George Floyd as a focal point in their campaign.

00:04:59.000 So in the book, I'm really glad you start chapter one, Herbert Marcuse, the father of the revolution.

00:05:06.000 This is a name that most Americans aren't familiar with.

00:05:10.000 Politically involved people would maybe know Saul Linsky, right?

00:05:14.000 Maybe Antonio Gramsci, but Marcuse, elderly philosopher, took the dialectics of liberation, you write.

00:05:23.000 What did he believe?

00:05:24.000 What is the Frankfurt School?

00:05:26.000 And I'm told, Christopher Ruffo, by the media that the Frankfurt School is a conspiracy theory.

00:05:32.000 Christopher Ruffo.

00:05:34.000 Yeah, I guess it's a conspiracy theory, but it's quite interesting because left-wing intellectuals prior to maybe 2015, 2016, you know, they celebrated what they called Western Marxism or cultural Marxism.

00:05:49.000 And they said that that was a line of thinking in the academic literature that was highly prized at the time.

00:05:55.000 And then all of a sudden, once it became well known and it became unpopular because these ideas are insane, then they said, no, no, no, we can't talk about that anymore.

00:06:05.000 That's a conspiracy theory.

00:06:06.000 And they tried to take all their own work and kind of hide it in the corner.

00:06:09.000 But Herbert Marcuse is really important.

00:06:12.000 And his name should be just as prominent as Saul Alinsky's name.

00:06:16.000 And because I think he's actually more important, because while Saul Alinsky was a master tactician, he knew how to play the game of activism at the tactical level.

00:06:25.000 Herbert Marcuse was really the intellectual godfather of the modern left.

00:06:29.000 He realized that the traditional Marxist revolution was a failure.

00:06:35.000 He looked at the Soviet Union and realized that that could not work, wasn't working in the Soviet Union and wasn't working anywhere in the West.

00:06:42.000 And so all of the ideas that Marcuse originated, the ideas of the new left, the idea of the high-low coalition, the idea of changing cultural perceptions in order to change politics, the idea of using extra-parliamentary power, meaning street activism and the threat of violence in pursuit of political activism.

00:07:01.000 The idea of repressive tolerance, meaning repressing certain ideas, all conservative ideas in places like universities and forcing left-wing ideas into the discourse.

00:07:12.000 All of those ideas that you see all around us were already written about, thought about, and originated and perpetuated by Marcuse in the late 1960s.

00:07:21.000 And so if you want to understand our current moment, you have to understand this man.

00:07:25.000 You have to understand his ideas.

00:07:27.000 And you have to understand his strategies for achieving power.

00:07:31.000 So Marcuse's most well-known work is One Dimensional Man, of course, Eros and Civilization.

00:07:37.000 He is the godfather of the American left, but more specifically, postmodernism, which really tries to deconstruct this idea of truth.

00:07:46.000 And it's funny that you say one of your lines, and it's totally correct, that he saw that it wasn't going to work in America.

00:07:53.000 That means by definition there's a standard that they're judging things by, which is not very postmodern of them.

00:07:58.000 So talk about how the truth or the idea of any truth is at odds with Marcuse's postmodern beliefs that are now being jammed through our universities and educational institutions.

00:08:12.000 Well, I would trace the lineage slightly differently.

00:08:15.000 I think Marcuse is better described as a representative of neo-Marxism.

00:08:20.000 So moving away from that orthodox Marxism that believed in class conflict, the material dialectic, that the clash of economic forces was leading towards this utopia.

00:08:31.000 Marcuse, I think, really is better described as a neo-Marxist who believed that societies were more complex, that you had to influence cultural attitudes.

00:08:42.000 I think that he actually, though, in fairness, and I actually have a grudging respect for the man after having studied him for researching this book, I think he would be a bit distraught at this idea of total relativism, of truth, of morality, and of even the language that we use.

00:08:59.000 And I think the postmodern idea becomes grafted onto Marcuse's theories later in the late 1980s, in the 80s and 1990s, certainly influencing the work on gender.

00:09:11.000 And so Marcuse, in some ways, was actually like the last honest Marxist, in my view, in my reading of him.

00:09:19.000 And I think that he really had a genuine belief.

00:09:22.000 His ideas were mistaken.

00:09:24.000 They led to disaster.

00:09:25.000 But once those ideas started to fail, you see postmodernism come in and start to fill in the gaps to say, well, the Marxist ideas aren't working, and therefore maybe truth is relative after all.

00:09:37.000 Maybe we can deconstruct the very structures of society.

00:09:40.000 That's how we'll get it to finally work.

00:09:42.000 The postmodern ideas are a nihilistic reinterpretation of Marcuse's Marxist ideas. 0.65

00:09:49.000 And so you see the progression that's leading more and more in the direction of nihilism to what you have in BLM, right? 0.67

00:09:56.000 BLM is a reborn version of the Black Panther Party.

00:10:01.000 The Black Panther Party was idealistic. 0.99

00:10:04.000 The BLM is deeply cynical.

00:10:06.000 They looted the organization.

00:10:07.000 They took all the money.

00:10:09.000 They ran.

00:10:10.000 These folks are a cynical, truthless reinterpretation of that old 70s idealism.

00:10:18.000 Yeah, ideologies decay as they fail.

00:10:21.000 It goes through multiple iterations and they get more extreme and they get lesser, uglier versions of their former self, where they become either more cynical or predatory or they even become outright unhinged, which is what we're living through.

00:10:36.000 Christopher Ruffo is the author of the very important book, America's Cultural Revolution.

00:10:40.000 Buy It Right Now, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.

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00:11:48.000 Christopher, I want to emphasize or focus on chapter three, which is from Mr. Rudy Dutchka.

00:11:54.000 I think I say that right.

00:11:56.000 The long march to the institutions.

00:11:58.000 What is the long march through the institutions?

00:12:01.000 And how do we counter it?

00:12:03.000 I don't want to get too much into the how do we counter because you have a whole part of that at the end of the book.

00:12:07.000 So let's just focus on what is the long march to the institutions.

00:12:10.000 So the long march to the institutions is the single most important concept for modern conservatives to understand because it is really the linchpin of left-wing political practice.

00:12:22.000 And so in the 1970s, the Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries had been defeated.

00:12:28.000 Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover had dismantled their organizations.

00:12:31.000 They were deeply unpopular.

00:12:33.000 They were totally scattered.

00:12:34.000 It seemed like when Nixon won 49 states in 1972 that conservatives were on a path to permanent victory.

00:12:40.000 So the left-wing activists at the time, particularly Rudy Dutchke, in conversation with Herbert Marcuse, said we have to come up with a new way of attaining power.

00:12:49.000 And so they looked to Chairman Mao, who conducted a long march in China during the Communist Revolution.

00:12:56.000 And they said we have to do the same thing, but peacefully.

00:12:58.000 We have to infiltrate all of America's existing institutions, also in European countries, but in this case, in the United States.

00:13:06.000 We have to get people that can get into the media, into the academia, into K through 12 schools, into government bureaucracies, learn how to actually administer the organs of cultural production, and then bring our ideas from the outside in and avoid the democratic process.

00:13:23.000 That's why it's an infiltration.

00:13:26.000 It's extra parliamentary.

00:13:27.000 They said, well, we'll just get into the institutions and bring our ideas.

00:13:31.000 They did this perfectly, patiently, and they did it over the course of 50 years.

00:13:37.000 And so what they did is they started in higher education, they got into K through 12, they got into HR departments. 0.75

00:13:42.000 And then all of a sudden in 2020, people looked around and they said, wait a minute, why is every institution in my life suddenly posting the black square and pushing CRT?

00:13:52.000 The answer is the long march of the institutions. 0.78

00:13:54.000 They executed it brilliantly, flawlessly, patiently, and that's why things are the way they are today. 0.67

00:14:01.000 Yeah, I mean, the Floyd death reaction was this cultural Pearl Harbor.

00:14:06.000 And don't take me out of my words, media matters, meaning it was like shock and awe.

00:14:10.000 And then the culture, it was like ready, set, go, right?

00:14:14.000 Can you build that out, Christopher?

00:14:15.000 Because all of a sudden at that moment, all these sleeper cells came out and we're looking around like, oh my gosh, like you remember like pre-Floyd, post-Floyd, basically?

00:14:25.000 And it was as if the veil was off.

00:14:27.000 And can you also just add a little bit that the only way forward is through?

00:14:31.000 Like there's no going back.

00:14:32.000 It's like full acceleration.

00:14:34.000 Now it's time.

00:14:35.000 We must press forward.

00:14:37.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:14:38.000 And really the Floyd movement, the kind of Floyd moment, rather, was basically a recapitulation or a reanimation of the principles of 1968.

00:14:48.000 They saturated the language about white supremacy, systemic racism, white privilege, starting in about 2015.

00:14:56.000 That became the discourse on the left.

00:14:58.000 I mean, it really saturated all of the thinking on the New York Times op-ed page and other places.

00:15:04.000 And then you had COVID, which increased the pressure on people psychologically.

00:15:08.000 And then you had the moment of George Floyd's death, which we've known since the Black Panther Party in the 1960s.

00:15:14.000 Images of police brutality are the number one way for left-wing radicals to recruit, to build power, and to foment violent revolution in the streets.

00:15:24.000 They said it rather very clearly in the 1960s.

00:15:28.000 Our number one recruiting method for the Black Panther Party is by baiting the police, goading them into violence, and then turning the narrative against them.

00:15:36.000 In the age of smartphones, the speed of that happened even more quickly. 0.70

00:15:41.000 But then what happened was really brilliant on their part, you know, politically to give them credit.

00:15:46.000 In the 60s and 70s, the government, the law enforcement agencies, the corporations, even the New York Times was against the left-wing radicals, was against the Black Panther Party.

00:15:58.000 But in 2020, everything had changed.

00:16:01.000 Universities, school, media, churches, New York Times hop-ed page all knelt before the ideology of BLM.

00:16:10.000 And that was the moment when they revealed this change.

00:16:13.000 They had conquered the institutions from within.

00:16:16.000 Everything had changed in that moment.

00:16:18.000 And what I try to do in the book is explain exactly how we got there.

00:16:22.000 Because as you said, we cannot defeat this movement unless we understand it.

00:16:27.000 But we also cannot go back to the status quo of the past.

00:16:30.000 Conservatives have to roll up their sleeves and get ready to fight because the only way out is through.

00:16:37.000 The only way out is through is exactly right.

00:16:39.000 I want to say there are some positives on the landscape, and you deserve a lot of credit for this, Christopher.

00:16:44.000 The Daniel Penny situation in the subway could have turned into Floyd 2.0.

00:16:49.000 They tried.

00:16:49.000 That wasn't police brutality, but that's like an angry white macho man in a subway, vigilante justice type archetype, which can work.

00:16:58.000 And it didn't.

00:16:58.000 We didn't fall for the bait.

00:16:59.000 We held the line.

00:17:00.000 A couple of days later, Wall Street Journal Opinion says, free Daniel Penny.

00:17:05.000 And they were trying their same sort of street tactics of Marxist revolutionary chatter, and it died.

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00:19:17.000 So a student from University of Chicago engaged in anti-white discrimination, according to this student.

00:19:25.000 He said that there is a course that was offered, Christopher Rufo, that said problems of whiteness at the University of Chicago.

00:19:33.000 Christopher, what is it with the focus and obsession on race connects two things together?

00:19:39.000 The Palfieri Marxification of Education deal, also with this kind of like anti-white CRT pathology, Christopher Ruffo.

00:19:52.000 Well, I mean, this has been something that has been around the academic work and around the ideological work for many decades that exploded into prominence.

00:20:00.000 But the origins of it are actually pretty simple.

00:20:02.000 You have the Brazilian Marxist educational theorist Paulo Freire, who is really the patron saint of modern American graduate schools of education.

00:20:12.000 He was an unrepentant Marxist.

00:20:14.000 This guy was going around to Marxist-Leninist-Leninist regimes and third world countries in Latin America and in Africa and reshaping their education system, creating this Marxist propaganda.

00:20:25.000 But he realized that it wasn't working in the United States.

00:20:28.000 You couldn't foment class-based revolution from workers against the factory owners, for example, in the United States.

00:20:36.000 And so, what they did was quite brilliantly say, okay, well, where are the weak spots in American society?

00:20:41.000 And they put their finger on race.

00:20:43.000 And of course, it's a weak and sensitive spot because we do have a history of racial injustice in the United States.

00:20:49.000 That's just a simple fact.

00:20:50.000 But what they did is they said that we can exploit it and we can make whiteness the problem.

00:20:55.000 We can whip up resentment, envy, hatred, destruction on behalf of certain segments of the population. 0.63

00:21:04.000 And then very crucially, they can create the intellectual apparatus to manipulate the guilt feelings of white Americans. 0.64

00:21:13.000 And so they create this idea of white privilege, white fragility, internalized white racial superiority, the problem of whiteness.

00:21:23.000 What they do is they problematize white racial identity and then use an emotional manipulation techniques to manipulate people.

00:21:31.000 They first started in the universities where they tested out these theories, and then they moved them into the K through 12 to the point where, as I've shown through my investigative reporting, as I detail in the book, they're taking white kind of problem of whiteness style theories and they're imposing them on your kids in elementary school all the way down to kindergarten. 0.61

00:21:54.000 And so this is the transmission belt. 0.75

00:21:56.000 This is how they do it.

00:21:58.000 They work on these ideas behind the scenes in academia.

00:22:01.000 They mainline them into our institutions and then they impose them on your kids without your permission, without your knowledge.

00:22:08.000 Fortunately, we've exposed it.

00:22:10.000 We're starting to push back.

00:22:11.000 We're getting this poison out of the schools.

00:22:15.000 But there's a long way to go.

00:22:19.000 Yeah, now we need the long reverse march through the Constitution, through the institutions to restore the Constitution.

00:22:27.000 So, Christopher Ruffo, your book, America's Cultural Revolution, I want to spend the most amount of time now that we've established the problem, which is seemingly endless, because I want to just remind people, I chuckled when I read it, because it's so true.

00:22:40.000 Christopher Ruffo, America's Cultural Revolution, how the radical left conquered everything. 0.51

00:22:44.000 Okay, well, now that we got that established, how do we take it back?

00:22:47.000 How do we launch a counter-cultural revolution?

00:22:51.000 And that is the conclusion at the end of your book, the counter-revolution to come.

00:22:57.000 Christopher Ruffo, how do we win?

00:22:59.000 How do we stop the cultural revolution?

00:23:01.000 How do we defeat these people?

00:23:02.000 Christopher Ruffo.

00:23:04.000 Yeah, I mean, the fundamental question boils down to this.

00:23:08.000 What do we do when all of the prestige culture-making institutions have been captured?

00:23:14.000 What levers of activism, of politics do we have available to us?

00:23:19.000 And the good news is that as conservatives, we have the most powerful lever imaginable in our control in many places, meaning the power of democratic legislation.

00:23:31.000 And so what we have to do is really revive the democratic structures of our country.

00:23:35.000 And in states like Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Idaho, some of the Carolinas, we have Democratic majorities in the legislature.

00:23:43.000 We have the governor's mansions.

00:23:44.000 We have to start a counterrevolution, retaking these institutions, recapturing institutions, and reorienting them towards our values.

00:23:55.000 And what that requires is for us to have a very simple insight.

00:23:58.000 Institutions are governed according to a single set of values.

00:24:02.000 And it's going to be their values or our values.

00:24:04.000 We should not have any hesitation to say that if we have a majority of people that vote for this set of values, we have a majority in the House and Senate and the governor's mansions and state legislatures, that we should say unapologetically, our public universities, for example, should be oriented towards the true, the good, and the beautiful, not diversity, equity, and inclusion.

00:24:25.000 And we have to govern that way as if we really mean it.

00:24:28.000 We have to install good people as university presidents.

00:24:32.000 We have to appoint great boards of directors.

00:24:34.000 We have to hire faculty to balance out the faculty ratio.

00:24:37.000 That means hiring more conservative faculty.

00:24:40.000 And then we have to give students and parents an avenue to send their kids to colleges that affirm and reflect their value as citizens.

00:24:48.000 Because look, these are taxpayer-funded institutions.

00:24:51.000 Why do they act against the taxpayers?

00:24:55.000 We have to fundamentally disrupt that.

00:24:56.000 And the good news is all it takes, at the beginning at least, is the courage to legislate, the courage to reform, the courage to transform these institutions.

00:25:07.000 And then the backbone, the strength, the courage to say no when people try to subvert them anti-democratically, and the courage, the strength, and the fortitude to say, these are the new standards.

00:25:18.000 These are how our institutions are going to be governed.

00:25:20.000 And if you don't like it, find somewhere else to go.

00:25:24.000 You write here beautifully.

00:25:25.000 If the end point of these critical theories is nihilism, the counterrevolution must begin with hope.

00:25:31.000 The principles of the society under counter-revolution are not oriented towards sweeping reversals and absolutes, but towards the protection of the humble values and institutions of the common man, faith, family, work, community, and country.

00:25:43.000 The intellectuals and activists of the counterrevolution must arm the population with a competing set of values, spoken in language that exposes and surpasses the euphemisms of the left-wing ideological regime.

00:25:56.000 Excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos. 0.58

00:26:02.000 In order for that to happen, Christopher, and you've been attacked by every major outlet, including the low IQ moron, Joy Reed, who had you on the program, I thought you did very well. 0.95

00:26:11.000 And she's like, oh, there's no CRT. 0.97

00:26:13.000 There's just a Christopher Ruffo theory.

00:26:15.000 I thought you handled it so well.

00:26:16.000 And we also must change our temperament.

00:26:19.000 Yes, we must be positive.

00:26:20.000 We must be cheerful, Christopher, but we also must not care what they call us.

00:26:24.000 Talk about that in your own personal experience because you've been attacked by everybody, as I have as well.

00:26:30.000 But you continue onward.

00:26:32.000 When you don't allow their criticisms to hurt you, you actually get stronger.

00:26:36.000 Christopher Ruffo.

00:26:38.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:26:38.000 And I think I learned something very important after I went through the fire for a number of months and then, you know, over the course of a couple of years is that you have to submit to your critics in order for your critics to have power over you.

00:26:52.000 You have to internalize their view of you, their criticism of you, their hatred of you, their image of you.

00:26:58.000 And if you have the inner strength to fundamentally reject it, to define yourself, to know yourself, to have confidence in yourself, nothing they do can touch you.

00:27:08.000 And once you get through that initial fear, that initial anxiety, that initial attempt to destroy you and to define you, and you come out on the other side stronger, more confident, more optimistic, more buoyant, more courageous, you realize that all of these people that are shooting arrows at you, they just bounce off.

00:27:28.000 They bounce off, they bounce off.

00:27:30.000 And actually, they make you stronger because you're demonstrating to people your strength in the face of your critics.

00:27:36.000 And so I tell them to bring it on, criticize me, come after me, do whatever you need to do.

00:27:43.000 Because I know that they cannot get to the most important thing, which is what I think about myself.

00:27:48.000 And so if we want to win, we have to have that same kind of attitude.

00:27:52.000 We have to know who we are, what we believe, what we're fighting for.

00:27:55.000 And you can never submit to your critics.

00:27:57.000 You can never let them define you.

00:27:59.000 And it doesn't matter what anyone else out there thinks about you, what they write about you, what they say about you.

00:28:04.000 I know what we're fighting for is good.

00:28:07.000 I know what we're fighting for is true.

00:28:09.000 I know what we're fighting for is beautiful.

00:28:11.000 And if we can communicate that with the requisite aggression that's required, I know we're going to win over the people.

00:28:19.000 And I know we're going to establish better institutions.

00:28:21.000 And I know we can dispatch our opponents from the positions of power that they currently occupy.

00:28:27.000 And when we replace those administrators of our cultural institutions with people that are aligned with our mission, I know that we're going to deliver victories for every family that's anxious about what's happening in our institutions.

00:28:41.000 We're going to protect them.

00:28:42.000 We're going to offer them a better way.

00:28:44.000 And we're going to give them something that they want, but they've been so far perhaps too scared to advocate for themselves.

00:28:54.000 And you said it great.

00:28:57.000 Submission is their life force.

00:28:59.000 They gain energy when we submit to them.

00:29:01.000 And in fact, it's very Maoist, which is public humiliation and constant every knee shall bow to their ideological intellectual regime.

00:29:10.000 I hate to use their language, but resistance really is necessary.

00:29:14.000 In the book, you also, I mean, so you talk about recapturing institutions.

00:29:18.000 Christopher, how should we think about building new ones?

00:29:20.000 How should we balance entrepreneurialism and starting new stuff with recapturing things that we used to control?

00:29:29.000 How do we think about that, Christopher Ruffo?

00:29:32.000 Yeah, I mean, I think we need to first start with the recapturing of our public institutions using democratic power.

00:29:39.000 But beyond that, you're absolutely right.

00:29:40.000 We have to start new institutions.

00:29:42.000 And one of the examples that I discuss in the book, and I think it's really the bright spot, is the classical K through 12 movement, which is the fastest growing style of education in the United States.

00:29:53.000 There are hundreds, if not now, thousands of these schools.

00:29:56.000 And the mission is pretty simple.

00:29:57.000 It says in our period of unprecedented cultural revolution, we have to go back to the founding.

00:30:03.000 We have to go back to the culture of the Greeks and Romans, the culture of the Bible, the culture of the founding fathers.

00:30:09.000 We have to unearth those eternal principles and we have to then teach them to our kids in a way that's new, fresh, relevant, and helpful to them.

00:30:18.000 And so I know that that's what I'm doing with my own kids.

00:30:21.000 I see tremendous value.

00:30:22.000 And I look at the curriculum that they're studying and I think, wow, I wish I had this as a kid.

00:30:28.000 This is a gift that we're giving them.

00:30:29.000 These are secret insights that for so many generations have been lost that we're now recapturing, reinventing, and rediscovering. 0.68

00:30:38.000 And so that's the idea of saying, you know what, if you want to go send your kid to the public school that has terrible test scores, that maybe is dangerous place, poor disciplinary record, that's pushing CRT, that's pushing radical gender theory, that might transition your child without your knowledge and your consent, go ahead.

00:30:59.000 But if you want to do something better, if you want to do something that's rooted in eternal values, if you want to do something that's going to lead your child to flourishing as a human being, this is what we've built for you.

00:31:10.000 That's the kind of competition.

00:31:12.000 That's the kind of trade-off.

00:31:14.000 That's the kind of distinctions we need to be making.

00:31:16.000 And it's not just going to happen by complaining about Bud Light or thrashing Disney, which I think is great.

00:31:23.000 We should do both of those things.

00:31:24.000 But we actually have to offer something better.

00:31:26.000 We have to build it.

00:31:28.000 And then only in that process of creation and creativity will we really have the power and the strength to overcome the institutions that we see all around us today.

00:31:39.000 So, Christopher, you do a lot of traveling, a lot of talking to groups.

00:31:42.000 If there was one either misconception and or opinion that is held by the traditional rank and file, let's just say, parents' rights activist that you seek to clear up or add clarity.

00:31:56.000 What would that be, Christopher Ruffo, in this project of trying to launch a counter revolution?

00:32:02.000 I think the most important thing that we have to move past and really understand as conservatives is the Reaganite notion that the government is the problem, therefore we have to have reduce the size of government.

00:32:16.000 We can't take an activist role within government.

00:32:18.000 We should shun government service and really just leave the state alone.

00:32:22.000 It's illegitimate to shape or influence the operation of government.

00:32:28.000 Look, I agree in principle.

00:32:29.000 I would love to have a much smaller state.

00:32:31.000 I would love to have universal school choice like you do down in Arizona in every state.

00:32:37.000 But what this has done is made conservatives complacent about governing, about leading, about statesmanship.

00:32:44.000 And we need to have leaders in our movement that are saying, hey, you know what?

00:32:48.000 If we're going to have a public school system, if we're going to have public universities, we should have not only a seat at the table, but we should have the top seat at the table.

00:32:57.000 We should have strong, principled conservatives that have the best interests of the public at heart as university presidents, university trustees, K through 12 school commissioners, K-12 school board members.

00:33:10.000 We have to get involved in governing the institutions.

00:33:13.000 And I think that we can't simply adopt a posture of libertarian complacence.

00:33:19.000 We have to get activated.

00:33:20.000 We have to revitalize the democratic structures.

00:33:22.000 We have to have people running for office, joining organizations like Moms for Liberty, turning point, getting involved in legislative campaigns.

00:33:30.000 Because look, the public schools and public universities control between 75 and 90% of our education systems between the higher education and K through 12.

00:33:42.000 And so we have to get active.

00:33:44.000 We can't just concede them to our opponents.

00:33:46.000 We have to take control.

00:33:48.000 We have to take responsibility.

00:33:50.000 We have to prioritize statesmanship and governance once again.

00:33:53.000 America's Cultural Revolution, Christopher Ruffo, is doing yeoman's work.

00:33:58.000 So Christopher, I always try to end these interviews about books the same way because you put so much work into it.

00:34:05.000 Is there anything we did not cover that you'd like to speak about or anything that you want to re-emphasize that we did not cover enough?

00:34:12.000 I think what's really important in the book and really what I try to do is speak to all of those people who after 2020 looked around them and said, you know, our country is unrecognizable.

00:34:24.000 All of a sudden, all these institutions are pushing CRT, are pushing gender theory, are pushing this orthodoxy, whether it's at school, at work, in my university, anywhere where you spend time and shape your life.

00:34:37.000 And so what I'm trying to do with this book is to not only give people a sense of the history, how things got to where they are today, but also give them the information, the language, the concepts, and the power to start fighting back in their local communities.

00:34:51.000 That's how the cultural revolution will be defeated.

00:34:54.000 That's what we're doing.

00:34:55.000 As you said, this is the number one book on Amazon right now in all categories.

00:35:01.000 It's a number one national bestseller.

00:35:03.000 So I would just say to all of the people listening, buy this book right now.

00:35:07.000 This is going to be everything you need to know to explain what's happening around you and start fighting back.

00:35:13.000 If you care about this country, if you care about the future for yourself, for your kids, this is going to be a valuable tool for you.

00:35:19.000 And that's why I wrote it.

00:35:21.000 And that's why I think people are responding so greatly.

00:35:24.000 One minute remaining, Christopher.

00:35:27.000 Are you starting to see the progress or the momentum in at least since you've started your public commentary, let's say post-Floyda Palooza?

00:35:35.000 One minute remaining?

00:35:36.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:35:37.000 President Trump banned CRT after I exposed it in the federal government.

00:35:41.000 22 states have banned CRT in K through 12 education.

00:35:45.000 And governors in Florida and Texas and other states are abolishing DEI offices and universities, starting the process of recapture.

00:35:53.000 We're developing prototypes.

00:35:55.000 for winning the culture war at a substantive level.

00:35:58.000 And we need to accelerate that process.

00:36:00.000 We need to be more bold in our prescriptions.

00:36:03.000 And then I think this war can finally be won.

00:36:06.000 Christopher Ruffo, you are one of the most important thought leaders in the country on this.

00:36:10.000 You're relentless and persuasive.

00:36:12.000 And you have earned my favorite word in the English language, the number one spot on Amazon.com for your book, America's Cultural Revolution.

00:36:20.000 It's the number one book on Amazon.

00:36:21.000 And let's keep it there and send it to your family, your friends, your independent middle people, Marxists in your life. 0.80

00:36:28.000 Send them America's Cultural Revolution. 0.65

00:36:30.000 Dive deep. 0.98

00:36:30.000 You cannot protect or save that which you don't understand. 0.98

00:36:34.000 Christopher Ruffo is helping us understand our beautiful country.

00:36:38.000 Christopher Ruffo, thank you so much.

00:36:40.000 Thank you.

00:36:42.000 Please subscribe to our podcast, everybody.

00:36:44.000 Thank you so much for listening.

00:36:45.000 Email me, freedom at charliekirk.com, and God bless.

00:36:51.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - July 18, 2023

America's Cultural Revolution with Chris Rufo

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