The Charlie Kirk Show - March 13, 2021


Exposing the Woke Industrial Complex with Christopher Rufo


Episode Stats


Length

40 minutes

Words per minute

182.81482

Word count

7,404

Sentence count

446

Harmful content

Toxicity

17

sentences flagged

Hate speech

21

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Chris Ruffo is a leading expert in critical race theory and the founder of the Discovery Institute, where he calls out what he calls "Woke Nonsense" in American education. In this episode, Chris talks about what it means to be a woke teacher and how this ideology is infiltrating every level of education in America.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 With us today, Christopher Ruffo, who is the leading expert on critical race theory, maybe alongside James Lindsay.
00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:06.000 We have him here.
00:00:07.000 He's smart.
00:00:08.000 His answers are full of wisdom.
00:00:10.000 And every single parent in the country needs to listen to what he has to say.
00:00:15.000 So text this to your other parents.
00:00:17.000 Text this to your students.
00:00:19.000 Every single young person in America is being made aware of these ideas on social media in the classroom or from their friends.
00:00:25.000 And we must push back against this sinister ideology right here, Christopher Ruffo.
00:00:31.000 If you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
00:00:34.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:38.000 If you want to get involved at Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.
00:00:41.000 Christopher Ruffo is here.
00:00:43.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:44.000 Here we go.
00:00:45.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:47.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:00:49.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:52.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:00:56.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:00:57.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:00:58.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:06.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:15.000 That's why we are here.
00:01:18.000 Hey, everybody.
00:01:19.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:21.000 With us today is Christopher Ruffo, who is such an important voice right now and someone I really enjoy.
00:01:29.000 And we've talked about his work quite a lot here on our program.
00:01:32.000 Christopher, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:34.000 It's great to be with you.
00:01:36.000 So your expertise with the Discovery Institute seems to be around education and most importantly, calling out this woke nonsense that is now infiltrating every single level of education in our country.
00:01:52.000 Let's just take a big picture view first.
00:01:54.000 Tell us about your work and tell us about what you are focusing on the most when it comes to critical race theory and kind of the woke industrial complex.
00:02:04.000 Yeah, I've been looking really over the past year at critical race theory in American institutions.
00:02:09.000 I started last summer with an investigative reporting series about diversity trainings in the federal government that ended up as an executive order, one of the best actions from the Trump administration.
00:02:19.000 And since then, I switched gears to looking at education and really looking at how does this new racial orthodoxy, how does this new ideology based on critical race theory translate into the classroom, both for teachers who are put through some horrific training sessions and indoctrination sessions, and then also for kids.
00:02:37.000 So what does the curriculum look like?
00:02:40.000 What do lesson plans look like?
00:02:41.000 And I've been uncovering these stories from districts all over the country.
00:02:45.000 So let's get specific.
00:02:48.000 A couple weeks ago, or maybe a week and a half ago, you came out with the Arizona Babies Are Racist story, Arizona Department of Education.
00:02:56.000 Walk us through that one.
00:02:57.000 Yeah, the Arizona Department of Education put out an equity toolkit to teachers and school administrators, including a lot of outrageous stuff.
00:03:06.000 But I think the one that was most disturbing and troubling was they put out this graphic, this resource that suggested that babies show the first signs of racism by three months old.
00:03:17.000 And by the age of four or five, babies become full-blown racists who have absorbed their racist culture.
00:03:24.000 And they actually made one even distinction there that was kind of an extraordinary thing.
00:03:27.000 They said, well, actually, babies of color at four and five years old are not racist.
00:03:32.000 Only the white babies at four and five years old are racist.
00:03:36.000 And Charlie, this is amazing, not only because it's absurd.
00:03:39.000 We've seen so many absurd things the last few years, but because Arizona has a Republican governor and a Republican state legislature.
00:03:46.000 And even with political power being in the hands of conservatives who I think would denounce this, it still makes its way into the bureaucracy.
00:03:53.000 So let's take a step back.
00:03:55.000 I should have asked you this first.
00:03:57.000 And we talk about this quite a lot in our program, but we have listeners that come in and out, and this episode is going to do very well.
00:04:03.000 What is critical race theory?
00:04:04.000 Where is it from?
00:04:05.000 Where did it originate?
00:04:06.000 We've talked about Jacques Derrida.
00:04:08.000 We've talked about Marcuse.
00:04:10.000 We've talked about kind of the postmodern ideas that have spread.
00:04:15.000 But let's just get as basic as we can.
00:04:17.000 What is critical theory?
00:04:19.000 And then why is it all of a sudden so unbelievably popular?
00:04:22.000 Yeah, critical race theory takes those ideas that you're talking about from Marcuse and others from the 1960s and updates them in the 1990s.
00:04:30.000 It first started at law schools as critical legal theory, then became critical race theory as it applied to other disciplines.
00:04:36.000 But the basic idea is that all human interactions and societies and social power can be reduced to racial conflict.
00:04:44.000 So they take the old Marxist idea that the world can be divided into oppressor and oppressed based on social class.
00:04:51.000 They update it and say, well, the world can be divided into oppressor and oppressed, but really it's on the basis of race.
00:04:57.000 And the United States preaches the values of equality and freedom.
00:05:01.000 But if you deconstruct those institutions and look under the surface of things like the Constitution, the Declaration, even the Civil Rights Act, the United States is a fundamentally racist country that maintains a white supremacist hierarchy.
00:05:14.000 And critical race theorists basically say, we're the people that are uncovering the real truth about racial power in the United States.
00:05:20.000 And we're offering this solution on how to turn kind of critical consciousness, turn on critical consciousness among people, academics, even students, and then subvert that system of kind of racist authority in the United States.
00:05:36.000 So there's a lot there I want to unpack.
00:05:38.000 And so before I ask you a question, let me play devil's advocate.
00:05:42.000 So Christopher, let's say that I'm a campus activist with no wisdom, of course, and I'm asking you and screaming at you, saying basically, don't you see how racist America is? 0.97
00:05:52.000 Whites do better than blacks. 0.96
00:05:54.000 We are founded on colonialism. 1.00
00:05:55.000 We are founded on the oppression of black people and black bodies. 0.71
00:05:59.000 And racism never went away. 0.80
00:06:00.000 It just manifested itself differently.
00:06:02.000 What is the factual, reasonable response to that?
00:06:05.000 Well, I think the most important thing is to separate the premise from the conclusion.
00:06:09.000 And this is really important when you think about critical race theory, because they always make their argument on historical injustice, which is a fact.
00:06:16.000 I mean, there was historical injustice in every society in the world, including the United States, obviously.
00:06:22.000 But what you have to say is, look, I acknowledge historical injustice.
00:06:25.000 I acknowledge the existence of racism in present day United States.
00:06:29.000 But your conclusions that you're drawing from critical race theory, that all forms of racial disparity are de facto forms of racism.
00:06:37.000 The idea that every institution in the United States is plagued in the current day with systemic racism, and that every kind of narrative in the media, like the death of George Floyd, for example, is indicative of massive patterns of society.
00:06:52.000 And you can say, I accept the premise, but I reject your conclusion.
00:06:56.000 So what you don't want to do is let them bully you by saying, well, if you don't accept our ideas, that means you support slavery.
00:07:02.000 I mean, that's like the kind of most basic argument that you hear in popular culture.
00:07:07.000 And you could say, no, I reject and acknowledge historical injustice, but I also reject the conclusions that you draw about society today.
00:07:15.000 Well, but it's also important to talk about how there's a lot more nuance to the idea that America was founded on slavery, where Thomas Jefferson in the original draft of the Declaration denounced slavery and actually blamed King George for it, how he banned the import of new slaves into the U.S., that we abolished slavery year after declaration.
00:07:34.000 There's a lot more there than just this idea that the founding fathers were flag-waving slave owners.
00:07:40.000 Yeah, absolutely. 1.00
00:07:41.000 And I think that that's exactly right.
00:07:42.000 And the way I look at it is really this.
00:07:44.000 It's very easy for us to look back at historical injustice and say, oh, those people were really bad.
00:07:49.000 I would have done it totally differently.
00:07:51.000 I think that the real test is, let's say the founding fathers, did they leave the world better off?
00:07:57.000 Did they move the entire planet and the entire history of the world towards freedom and equality or away from it?
00:08:03.000 And any rational look at history would say, actually, they made a massive leap forward.
00:08:08.000 And even Abraham Lincoln, who I think was the most anti-racist president in American history, said that Jefferson created the kind of silver frame and we were going for that golden apple or kind of metaphor along those lines.
00:08:22.000 And they moved the world forward.
00:08:25.000 No.
00:08:25.000 Were they perfect?
00:08:26.000 Did they eliminate all injustice?
00:08:27.000 No.
00:08:28.000 But I think that there's a good argument to be made that the founding fathers and then Lincoln and then the civil rights movement in the 1960s all were part of this fundamental American story of moving the world towards freedom and towards equality.
00:08:41.000 And we should celebrate progress, not just dismiss it as an illusion.
00:08:47.000 And it used to be an unquestioned truth that you could say in the American public school system, which is a question I want to talk to you about: regression.
00:08:54.000 Why does it feel as if we're actually moving backwards, that there are deliberate attempts now to make us re-segregate ourselves to care more about skin color?
00:09:02.000 Is it because we've actually reached a place where generally we have a meritocracy where good choices are rewarded, and the people that desire to have power, they have no other strategy or tactic left to go back?
00:09:15.000 Or is it something more, is it something more complicated than that?
00:09:18.000 Why does it feel as if now we're all of a sudden going backwards to how things once were?
00:09:23.000 There's a couple of reasons.
00:09:24.000 I think one of them is that the left became deeply disillusioned with the civil rights movement.
00:09:30.000 And you see this in the literature of the critical race theorists.
00:09:32.000 They say civil rights guarantees a colorblind society, guarantees equal protection under the law, guarantees anti-discrimination in the workplace and in college admissions, et cetera.
00:09:42.000 But they haven't got the results that they had hoped for.
00:09:45.000 And they've become disillusioned.
00:09:46.000 They've become pessimistic and they've reverted to a kind of older, more radical ideology.
00:09:51.000 They said, well, the Great Society, for example, was Lyndon Johnson's program to eradicate poverty.
00:09:57.000 That didn't work either.
00:09:58.000 So they're searching in their own intellectual history for even more radical solutions because they're very impatient with the pace of progress.
00:10:06.000 And they said, well, you know what?
00:10:07.000 The Martin Luther King vision of treating people equally, whatever their skin color didn't work.
00:10:13.000 So we need to go back and revive the kind of Malcolm X tradition, which is radical, which is the Angela Davis tradition, which is the Communist Party USA tradition that was discredited in the 1960s, but now we find is being resurrected in our left politics.
00:10:30.000 So let me again play devil's advocate for the sake of our listeners.
00:10:36.000 Something that the critical race theorists will commonly say is: you, Christopher Ruffo, being a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, I don't know if you are those things, but they generalize by definition.
00:10:47.000 Let's just say to you, Charlie Kirk, okay, I'm all of those things.
00:10:50.000 I'm white, I'm Anglo-Saxon, I'm Protestant, I'm a male, all those things.
00:10:53.000 You are not even allowed to contribute thoughts to the conversation because of how you look. 1.00
00:11:00.000 Don't you understand that it's time for you to sit down and shut up and allow black people the opportunity to talk, to dominate, to have power? 1.00
00:11:08.000 Why is this wrong? 0.99
00:11:09.000 Well, there's two things.
00:11:11.000 One is, I think that if you look at history, I think that I subscribe to the idea that we're all created equal and that we all should have a voice in the debate.
00:11:20.000 It's very simple.
00:11:21.000 I acknowledge you not as a white person or a black person or an Asian person, but as a human being and as an American, and we have a kind of a robust democracy that requires everyone to have a voice.
00:11:32.000 But I also think that if you ask them very seriously this question, okay, well, what about black voices like Coleman Hughes or John McWhorter or Glenn Lurie or others?
00:11:41.000 They say, well, those people are not what we mean.
00:11:45.000 And I think that they use race in many cases as a kind of weapon to silence people, but they actually aren't consistent about it because black conservative voices, like the great Thomas Sowell, is not included, like Clarence Thomas is not included.
00:11:58.000 So I think it's a hypocrisy that is used as a weapon and as a tool to silence people. 0.64
00:12:04.000 And I just ignore it because it's like, I have my voice, you have your voice.
00:12:08.000 We're all entitled to the freedom to speak.
00:12:10.000 And people are entitled to listen or not.
00:12:12.000 That's also their freedom.
00:12:14.000 And that's our system.
00:12:15.000 And I think that silencing people on the basis of race is just so out of control.
00:12:20.000 And, you know, we're all, you know, all of us.
00:12:22.000 I don't know your history and my history.
00:12:24.000 You know, my great grandparents were feudal serfs.
00:12:26.000 My grandfather dropped out of school in fifth grade.
00:12:29.000 My father came to the United States as he lived in a one-room shack with no running water, no electricity, came to the United States with nothing and built a life for himself.
00:12:37.000 And I have privileges, of course, and I acknowledge them.
00:12:40.000 But the idea that I have privilege just because of my skin color, it's, you know, maybe a little bit yes, but it's much more complex than they would have you believe.
00:12:48.000 Yeah, my history is different.
00:12:49.000 I could trace the Kirks coming back to America in 1620.
00:12:53.000 Our specific bloodline served in every American war, including the Revolutionary War and the Civil War on the Union side.
00:13:00.000 And so we are on the right side of history, people would say, but you know what?
00:13:04.000 That doesn't make me a better person.
00:13:06.000 I get no sort of intergenerational, strange, paganistic moral high ground because of something that my ancestors did in 1850 or 60.
00:13:16.000 It doesn't make me a better person.
00:13:17.000 I have to act on my own agency and my own character.
00:13:20.000 Why does it feel like, Christopher, and maybe this is an obvious question, and I mean this completely seriously, like we've all lost our minds.
00:13:27.000 Why does it seem as if that the bearings of Aristotelian logic and reason and common sense as if is it because that we've actually we gotten to a place where things were just so stable that we now are bored and we have to blow it up and reconsider our notions?
00:13:42.000 Or is it that there is an intelligence behind the critical race theorist?
00:13:46.000 Or is it so foolish said by smart people that people believe it?
00:13:50.000 Yeah, I think it's a kind of contagious idea. 0.66
00:13:53.000 And even though it's at odds with reality as most people live it, it's really kind of actually astonishing.
00:14:00.000 Their success in taking these ideas from obscure academic journals in the 90s to now being the dominant ideology across all essentially all major American institutions, especially the public institutions, is really to their credit.
00:14:12.000 And I think part of it is that Americans are not really kind of capable of resisting this ideology because what they do is they construct it like a mousetrap.
00:14:23.000 They basically say, if you don't agree with us, that is evidence of your white fragility, evidence of your internalized white supremacy, evidence of your internalized racism.
00:14:34.000 And then these kind of words are enormously powerful because I think most Americans are good people.
00:14:39.000 They're not racist.
00:14:40.000 They want to do everything in their power to help others.
00:14:44.000 And just the accusation has such power that it silences people who would otherwise disagree.
00:14:50.000 And you see, therefore, that they've used this rhetoric as a battering ram into the institutions.
00:14:56.000 And then once they gain a foothold, they really just take them over.
00:14:59.000 And I think that this is a kind of mutation of the thought of the left that draws on and has sought out all of these weak points in American culture and has exploited them masterfully to the point where we have now large institutions that are repeating their slogans, even though you know that they don't believe in it.
00:15:21.000 But they found really no way to resist it, no way to voice opposition, no way to push back, even in institutions that have been kind of middle of the road, rational and logical places historically.
00:15:34.000 So I want to zero in on that.
00:15:36.000 How is it that they've been so successful?
00:15:38.000 You said they deserve credit for it.
00:15:39.000 I'm stunned at how successful they have been at the lack of courage and the lack of clarity from our leaders, the willingness of our corporations to embrace this, the willingness of the Pentagon to embrace this.
00:15:52.000 And I could attribute to a couple of different things, the lack of courage, but also one of my guiding hypotheses on what's happening in America is basically the entire American political system is being driven of being called a racist.
00:16:05.000 Basically, the number one reason someone votes Democrat is because they're afraid of being called the R-word. 0.96
00:16:10.000 How have they been so successful around such garbage ideas? 0.98
00:16:16.000 Well, it's power, right? 0.93
00:16:18.000 It's an extraordinarily powerful language, and they've figured out the soft spots and they exploit them, as I said.
00:16:25.000 And I think that if you look at kind of the kind of intellectual framework of critical race theory, I think most people would read it and say, you know, this isn't great.
00:16:34.000 But I think there's something else that's happening is that the left has had really the same political goal and economic goal for many years, since the kind of 1840s, 1850s.
00:16:46.000 And they shifted to this racial rhetoric because they found it much more successful, much more kind of salient within our society. 0.86
00:16:57.000 If you just said, hey, we want to have the poor Americans seize control of the factories and produce buses for the great proletariat, people would look at you like you're nuts.
00:17:08.000 But if you say, hey, this is a racial disparity that reflects systemic racism and you need to do it, it's a kind of emotional argument that actually hooks into many points in American culture.
00:17:23.000 And I think the right has also needs to take some responsibility for this because you have conservatives since really the Reagan era who have fought on economic issues almost exclusively.
00:17:34.000 And they've ceded control over our cultural institutions because they say, hey, we're going to get our tax cuts.
00:17:38.000 We're going to get our deregulation.
00:17:40.000 That's the kind of reason for our movement.
00:17:42.000 We're good.
00:17:43.000 And that's turned out to be a big mistake.
00:17:47.000 And we're fighting at a huge deficit.
00:17:49.000 And I think a lot of the people, especially in kind of the larger, more established conservative institutions, especially policymakers that are elected officials, are just absolutely bewildered by these fights.
00:18:00.000 They don't know how to orient themselves.
00:18:02.000 They want to ignore it.
00:18:03.000 They're unwilling to get out there and take the heat.
00:18:05.000 And therefore, we've ceded control of the culture.
00:18:08.000 And when you see the cultural institutions that are weaponizing these ideas in universities, in teacher training schools, in K-12 curricula, in Hollywood, in the New York Times, they take the narrative and they're just absolutely bombarding people's senses and overwhelming them until they submit.
00:18:28.000 And so how then do you believe is the best way to counter this?
00:18:32.000 We've had James Lindsay on the program, Peter Bogogian.
00:18:36.000 We've talked about a lot, the problem a lot, and I have not got a good answer yet.
00:18:41.000 The only answer I have is courage and clarity.
00:18:44.000 Those are the only two things. 0.96
00:18:45.000 And I wrote this ridiculous piece. 0.91
00:18:47.000 It's actually a phenomenal piece, but it's ridiculous in the sense of from Barry Weiss. 0.84
00:18:52.000 I don't know if you saw this thing or not in the city journal.
00:18:54.000 It said two hours.
00:18:55.000 Yeah, I did two hours of radio on it.
00:18:57.000 And I thought the title was not perfect based on just what it's really about because it's really, it's a crisis of courage amongst America's parents.
00:19:05.000 It's really the essence of the story, right?
00:19:06.000 You have a bunch of overly very successful, somewhat entitled kids and successful parents in these communities in West Hollywood and New York that are anonymously complaining about how their kids are learning that they're racist, terrible.
00:19:21.000 They're not learning U.S. history.
00:19:22.000 They're relearning physics, all this.
00:19:24.000 And yet the essence is, well, I want my kid to go to Harvard.
00:19:27.000 So I don't really, there's really not much I can do.
00:19:29.000 And so it's kind of a social status thing plus a lack of courage.
00:19:32.000 So to go back to my question, what is the roadmap?
00:19:36.000 You're in charge.
00:19:37.000 You have resources at your disposal.
00:19:39.000 What do you do?
00:19:40.000 Like, what are the specific things we need to do?
00:19:43.000 Is it a purely defensive strategy or a simultaneous defense and offensive strategy?
00:19:47.000 People are looking for what to do.
00:19:49.000 Yeah, I think courage is the key virtue.
00:19:52.000 I think that's absolutely true.
00:19:53.000 And I think there's three strategies or tactics that we can use to actually move the ball forward.
00:19:59.000 First, I think investigative reporting is really important.
00:20:01.000 I know that I've been putting out these stories and they just explode because people want the facts.
00:20:06.000 They want the information.
00:20:07.000 They need to understand what is the reality because the critical race theorists use a lot of very nice sounding words, equity, diversity, inclusion.
00:20:15.000 And if you stop there, it's really hard to resist.
00:20:17.000 Well, those are all good things.
00:20:18.000 Let's do it.
00:20:19.000 But if you actually say, well, this is what happens in particular, this is the curriculum.
00:20:22.000 This is what's happening in our institutions.
00:20:25.000 You change the narrative from abstraction to concrete.
00:20:27.000 You give people a place where they can fight back.
00:20:30.000 Second, we need to file lawsuits.
00:20:32.000 I'm working with a coalition now of attorneys and legal foundations.
00:20:36.000 We filed three lawsuits on these things.
00:20:37.000 Where a lot of these training programs, if they traffic in racial stereotypes, if they degrade people, demean people, stereotype people on the basis of race, if they tell people that they're collectively guilty because of their skin color, and then if they compel speech that violates people's conscience, that's a violation of the constitutional constitutional rights of people.
00:20:56.000 It's also a violation of Title VI and VII, depending on the institution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
00:21:02.000 I think we're going to win these cases.
00:21:04.000 Eventually, we'll get them up to the Supreme Court and knock out a lot of these programs for American institutions.
00:21:09.000 And then, third, what needs to happen is that there needs to be a grassroots movement of parents and citizens and employees standing up in their local institutions.
00:21:17.000 And they're going to have to be courageous enough to put their name out there.
00:21:21.000 They're going to have to be courageous enough to fight through the smears.
00:21:24.000 And they're going to have to have the tenacity to actually get things done.
00:21:27.000 And I'll share one last thing with you that I think is a huge bright spot.
00:21:30.000 There's one community in the United States of America that has successfully pushed back against institutional wokeness in a huge way that's totally underreported.
00:21:39.000 It's the Chinese American community.
00:21:41.000 They've pushed back in schools in the Bay Area.
00:21:43.000 They've shut down these curricula.
00:21:45.000 They've pushed back through ballot measures in Washington and California, eliminating some of these affirmative action programs that decimate Asian American admissions into colleges.
00:21:54.000 And they are fearlessly fighting this fight.
00:21:56.000 It's very hard to call them white supremacists because they're Chinese, but also they've lived through the cultural revolution in many cases in their home country of China.
00:22:05.000 They see the same signs and signifiers today in our country, and they're just absolutely just unstoppable when they get organized.
00:22:14.000 I'm pleased to hear that.
00:22:15.000 And I believe the Hispanic community is equally as able to have that sort of success against the critical race theorists because none of the studies or polls or political results most recently show that Latino or Hispanic communities have any sort of open-mindedness or willingness towards critical race theory. 0.51
00:22:35.000 It really is a strange coalition of upper middle class, spoiled brat white liberals in suburban communities and black voters. 0.67
00:22:44.000 It's basically those two. 0.80
00:22:45.000 And it's mostly white. 0.74
00:22:46.000 And I might say, there's less of a grassroots, bottom-up black push for this than a top-down white academic push for this. 0.85
00:22:53.000 Would you agree? 0.90
00:22:54.000 Yeah, oh, yeah, I would agree.
00:22:56.000 I think it's a multiracial coalition of American elites.
00:23:00.000 You know, I spent actually three years directing a documentary for PBS where I kind of lived and worked near a housing project in South Memphis.
00:23:08.000 It's 100% black neighborhood people at the lowest level of the income scale.
00:23:12.000 And I really got to understand their concerns and viewpoints and did a thousand interviews, talked to a lot of people.
00:23:19.000 And what people and that community and communities like it, again, across all racial groups want has nothing to do with the ideas that the critical race theorists are proposing.
00:23:28.000 I think in many cases it's a kind of, again, multiracial elite coalition in our institutions that is speaking on behalf of, let's say, black voters or people in the black community.
00:23:39.000 But I think if you actually talk to people and say, hey, do you think X, Y, and Z, do you agree or not?
00:23:45.000 They would disagree.
00:23:45.000 They say, no, that doesn't reflect my views.
00:23:47.000 That doesn't reflect my values.
00:23:49.000 So I think this idea that they're using vulnerable communities as kind of symbolic weapons.
00:23:57.000 But I think it's, I would contest very strongly the idea that it truly is a kind of multiracial coalition or even a kind of multi-class coalition at heart.
00:24:07.000 So I want to zero in on something you said that I get a lot of questions about.
00:24:12.000 And we have done entire episodes on this.
00:24:14.000 But can you help explain in your own words the difference between equity and equality?
00:24:20.000 Yeah, equity and equality, right?
00:24:22.000 Those are like homonyms, right?
00:24:24.000 So they sound the same.
00:24:24.000 Almost homonyms.
00:24:25.000 And that's exactly the technique because what they want to do is use a word that has a resonance that people will accept easily.
00:24:33.000 Well, equity, yeah, it's like equality, but better updated.
00:24:36.000 But equity and equality are actually very different.
00:24:38.000 Equality is the idea of the 14th Amendment, that everyone is treated equally under the law.
00:24:43.000 Equality is the idea on colorblindness, that, you know, in admissions or hiring or promotions, you should be treated on the basis of your accomplishments, not the basis of your inborn characteristics.
00:24:56.000 It's also the idea that was really finally fleshed out into law in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
00:25:01.000 It was the idea behind the civil rights movement, the kind of cliché of you should be treated according to your character, not the color of your skin.
00:25:09.000 That's equality.
00:25:10.000 And you could see it from the very first beginning in the Declaration where they put out this big new idea.
00:25:15.000 They kind of ripped open world history by saying we're founding a nation on the idea of equality.
00:25:20.000 It was fought over and won with the blood of many Americans in the Civil War, and then was finally enshrined and codified into the statutory law in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
00:25:30.000 Equity is very different.
00:25:31.000 Equity is that you're saying the people who believe in equity reject the idea of individual rights.
00:25:37.000 They reject the idea of unlimited right to private property.
00:25:41.000 In many cases, like Ibram Kendi rejects, in some cases, the right to free speech, basically saying that free speech, fibrant property, individual rights, equal protection are all merely equality, but they produce disparate outcomes.
00:25:55.000 So what we need to have is equity.
00:25:57.000 We need to have a regime that is based not on equal protection, but on equal results.
00:26:03.000 And if you look at the literature, what does it mean in practice?
00:26:07.000 If you look at Cheryl Harris, a critical race theorist, a pioneering critical race theorist at Harvard and UCLA law schools in the 1990s, or Ibram Kendi, an interview he did in Politico, they say we should suspend private property rights and then redistribute on the basis of race.
00:26:21.000 So basically seize land and wealth and power and redistribute it for equal group outcomes. 0.79
00:26:27.000 The South African model. 0.56
00:26:28.000 And the South African model.
00:26:29.000 And then Ibram Kendi said, we need a department of anti-racist that can or anti-racism that can invalidate, veto, or nullify any law at any level of government that doesn't produce the results that we think are anti-racist.
00:26:41.000 And we need to have the power to control, to limit free speech, to limit federalism, so to limit the ability of states and localities to determine laws and have a single source of bureaucrats that are unaccountable to voters or the executive, a fourth branch of government that can mandate outcomes based on the philosophy of equity.
00:27:02.000 If you can't tell the difference between those two things, I really hope that you do the homework because it is a homonym that sounds the same, but couldn't be more different.
00:27:13.000 So that was very helpful.
00:27:15.000 Thank you.
00:27:16.000 And a lot of our listeners need to hear that and re-listen to it.
00:27:19.000 So rewind it, everybody, if you didn't get that, because there was more wisdom in those four minutes than the entire university at Yale, the whole university, there was more wisdom in those four minutes.
00:27:30.000 I want to ask you about the definition of racism.
00:27:33.000 We've talked about this on our program as well.
00:27:36.000 The way I was raised, and I believe this is correct, is racism is if I discriminate against another person based on their skin color or have a prejudice against them.
00:27:45.000 That is racism, an individual against another individual.
00:27:49.000 Now, racism can collectivize itself, but it's very rare in today's America, let me say, and it's almost widely rejected.
00:28:00.000 The new definition of racism seems to be not that John might discriminate against Larry and that a white person can be racist against a black person or a black person against a white person.
00:28:12.000 Instead, it seems they have carefully, quickly, and with a lot of people noticing, substituted the definition of racism to be a power struggle.
00:28:23.000 Can you talk about how racism does not mean what people think it means?
00:28:27.000 Yeah, I mean, how we define words is incredibly important.
00:28:31.000 And I think that they've sought to expand the definition of racism to cover everything.
00:28:36.000 I mean, all the news stories are kind of funny, but it's true.
00:28:39.000 It's like square dancing and logic and objectivity and comfort and showing up on time are all elements of white supremacist culture.
00:28:47.000 So they're trying to basically extend the territory to cover anything that's convenient, but they reduce kind of imbalances of racial power as the fundamental dynamic.
00:28:57.000 And they want to basically shift those hierarchies of power.
00:29:00.000 That's what's the that's what is at the kind of root of their analysis.
00:29:04.000 And, you know, I think there's a more nuanced take that either, you know, some conservatives say there's there's no racism in the United States.
00:29:10.000 We're post race, post-racism society.
00:29:13.000 Some critical race theorists say, no, no, we're just as racist now as we were in 1812.
00:29:20.000 But in the middle, there's something that I think is a nuanced take that is probably more accurate.
00:29:25.000 We have had historical racism.
00:29:26.000 That's a fact.
00:29:27.000 I think we still have residual racism.
00:29:29.000 Like I said, I spent three years on a Memphis housing project.
00:29:33.000 The legacy of racism and the damage of policies, even kind of well-meaning and well-intentioned policies from the 1960s that were thought of as anti-racist has done enormous damage to those communities.
00:29:45.000 It has a lasting impact.
00:29:47.000 It has a lasting legacy.
00:29:48.000 It has a residual effect.
00:29:50.000 I don't think that the people running the show today are racist or having racist policies.
00:29:55.000 I think our laws, our kind of formal laws are not racist.
00:29:59.000 They've actually been changed to reflect this sense of equality.
00:30:02.000 So I think we have to be open-hearted to say, you know what, I recognize that there is historical injustice.
00:30:08.000 I recognize that there's residual effects.
00:30:10.000 What can we do to come together as Americans to help people that are disadvantaged of any racial background, especially those who have historically suffered injustice?
00:30:20.000 That's a, I think, should be a universal position.
00:30:23.000 But they're not saying that.
00:30:24.000 They're actually saying we need to weaponize historical injustice to achieve a kind of far left and in some cases, Marxist political agenda.
00:30:32.000 Again, I reject that conclusion, even if I accept some part of the premise.
00:30:37.000 So I would be remiss if I did not spend part of our time together talking about a phenomenal piece that you wrote, Revenge of the Gods.
00:30:48.000 California's proposed ethnic studies curriculum urges students to chant the Aztec deity of human sacrifice.
00:30:55.000 So I get up somewhat early and I start reading the news before our show.
00:31:00.000 And when I'm a little bit groggy, I can't tell if some of my friends have sent me onion pieces or the Babylon B pieces.
00:31:08.000 And so when I read this morning that California was saying that children should, let me make sure I get my terminology right of the pagan gods, chant to the god Tezcoct Kalapoca or whatever it is.
00:31:21.000 I'm sure you could pronounce it.
00:31:22.000 I couldn't tell.
00:31:23.000 And then I said, oh, wow, this is by Christopher Ruffo.
00:31:25.000 He doesn't do satire that I know of.
00:31:28.000 Walk us through this, Christopher.
00:31:29.000 Yeah, I mean, it's crazy, right?
00:31:31.000 So the new kind of euphemism for critical race theory in school curricula is called ethnic studies.
00:31:38.000 Ethnic studies was a movement in the 1960s that was orchestrated by a group called the Third World Liberation Front with a major assist from the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area.
00:31:46.000 They said, we need to decolonize the curriculum.
00:31:48.000 We need to have anti-racist education.
00:31:50.000 And now this kind of what was once a radical idea has become codified into law in the state of California, in the state of Oregon, pretty soon in the state of Washington, in the state of Illinois.
00:32:02.000 It's becoming a kind of part of the state sanctioned curriculum.
00:32:05.000 And then they go through this process of designing the specifics.
00:32:09.000 And that's what I'm looking at in this piece.
00:32:10.000 I actually went through and read, you know, 600 pages of curriculum documents.
00:32:14.000 I read the footnotes.
00:32:15.000 I read the original sources.
00:32:17.000 I had, you know, some kind of did a deep dive on this stuff.
00:32:20.000 And it's really kind of amazing.
00:32:22.000 They're basically saying all those same things we've heard before.
00:32:25.000 The United States is fundamentally racist.
00:32:27.000 We need to organize education on the Marxist pedagogy of the oppressed to liberate students from patriarchy and white supremacy.
00:32:34.000 Education should become, in essence, political activism.
00:32:36.000 And in the appendix, they had this amazing thing.
00:32:38.000 They said, we need to also teach California public school students, 6 million kids in 10,000 schools, these chants to the Aztec gods that are actually rats.
00:32:48.000 They're rhyming chants.
00:32:49.000 And they say, we need to worship these gods and ask them, chant to them for the power to become, quote, warriors for social justice.
00:32:58.000 Literally asking, chanting to the Aztec god of human sacrifice and cannibalism that actually led to the inspired the human sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of people in the Aztec society.
00:33:11.000 Chant to them to be given the power for liberation, for decolonization, for social justice, for becoming warriors for social justice.
00:33:20.000 And this is state-sanctioned religion. 0.79
00:33:22.000 You can't have Christian prayers in school.
00:33:24.000 That's a kind of Supreme Court precedent.
00:33:26.000 But they're going to have students in California chant to the Aztec God of human sacrifice.
00:33:31.000 It's something that like, I kind of, you know, I had my assistant, I had my editor at City Journal.
00:33:37.000 I was like, guys, read this again and again and again.
00:33:39.000 Make sure I'm getting this right because it's so crazy.
00:33:42.000 It almost is impossible.
00:33:43.000 But it's actually quite real. 0.74
00:33:45.000 And the whole curriculum, that's one kind of example, but the whole curriculum is designed around this ideology of decolonizing from white society, kind of rejecting things.
00:33:54.000 And the author of the co-chair of this program, the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum in California, in his supporting documentation that's referenced throughout the materials, even says, you know, the solution, among other things, is counter genocide against white Christians. 0.56
00:34:10.000 It's like, oh, stop the presses here.
00:34:13.000 Counter genocide is an extremely strong and extremely dangerous word.
00:34:19.000 What the hell is going on?
00:34:22.000 What is happening with our education that it's being hijacked by the most extreme political radicals and then being force-fed to 6 million school children in California?
00:34:33.000 So I want to ask you the obvious question, which a lot of people are asking.
00:34:37.000 We already did the what can you do about it?
00:34:38.000 And I thought your answers were great.
00:34:40.000 And if anyone listening right now is being actively discriminated against based on the skin color, especially in a school system, and you're white, you're black, you're Hispanic, whatever, get involved in the law fair, please.
00:34:50.000 It's what the left does so well.
00:34:52.000 And we need to get involved in law fair.
00:34:53.000 And I'm not even trying to overly politicize this conversation because I'm going to, a lot of people send this to people in the middle.
00:34:59.000 And it's not even right versus left thing.
00:35:01.000 This is just basically civilization and chaos.
00:35:03.000 It's really that simple.
00:35:04.000 But here's the question I have.
00:35:07.000 It says here in your own piece that children are going to be chanting pancha be panche be or to the god of zippe totech all this stuff they want counter genocide what is their motivation here why are they doing this christopher people are this is the one thing that our bait this is actually what stops a lot of people from action because they go to a default position of good intentions They say,
00:35:35.000 oh, well, it can't be as bad as Christopher is saying it.
00:35:38.000 I'm sure it might be there.
00:35:39.000 We'll get it ironed out, but they're probably mean well.
00:35:42.000 Why are they doing this?
00:35:44.000 Well, I think, you know, the person who developed the curriculum, the chant is a kind of very far-left activist.
00:35:53.000 And, you know, they even called it like in some of the attached literature, they said it's a rasa struggle.
00:35:58.000 Rasa, the Spanish word for race.
00:36:01.000 And I mean, they're saying it in their books, in their literature, this is a race struggle.
00:36:05.000 And the idea that underlies his theory, this guy, Toteca Cawatan, who developed this curriculum in part, was part of the committee.
00:36:13.000 He's very clear.
00:36:14.000 He says that the United States is a racist, sexist, patriarchal, heteropatriarchical, you know, kind of genocidal society that has committed and anthro-centric, anthropopical-centric, whatever this word is.
00:36:27.000 Propocentric, meaning that it privileges human beings over trees and fish and other animals.
00:36:32.000 Yes, that is exactly right.
00:36:34.000 I'm going to go ahead and I am an anthropocentrist.
00:36:36.000 By the way, I said yesterday I was a human supremacist and I got hate for it.
00:36:41.000 Yeah, I'm sure he did.
00:36:43.000 But, you know, the ideology that he lays out in his book, which I unfortunately had to read, was basically that white Christian settlers, they came, they overthrew indigenous societies, they committed theocide against indigenous gods,
00:36:58.000 and that we need to use this public education system in California to come up with a counter-revolution against the United States, against the Constitution, against kind of white settler colonial values, and then reinstate a kind of revenge of the gods,
00:37:14.000 reinstate indigeneity, reinstate Shipetotec and Quetzalcatl and all these other Aztec gods and raise them up in essence to kind of have a counter-revolution, a counter-hegemony or counter-genocide, in his words.
00:37:29.000 And this is a radical revolutionary product.
00:37:32.000 It's based in this kind of very interesting fusion between a kind of race pride, a kind of Rasa struggle, race struggle, mixed with the Marxist pedagogy of the oppressed press, mixed with a kind of Marxist analysis of economics.
00:37:47.000 And you have a kind of very explicit race supremacism mixed with a kind of Marxist political ideology.
00:37:56.000 When you get those two things together and you put them in a state curriculum, the outcomes are not going to be good.
00:38:02.000 I can guarantee you that. 0.99
00:38:05.000 Gavin Newsom should have to answer for the potential curriculum of the Tez Catlipoca God. 0.86
00:38:14.000 He's going to go through a recall, I think, very soon. 0.75
00:38:18.000 And we're in this weird place in our moment in our society where, I mean, this should be a national scandal, right?
00:38:24.000 This should be a thing that everyone obviously rejects.
00:38:27.000 And they're going to vote on this final curriculum next week.
00:38:30.000 We'll see if they have to strip any of this stuff out.
00:38:32.000 But my hunch is that, you know, this might get taken out, maybe, but the broad idea of the curriculum is going to pass.
00:38:39.000 And that's the state of affairs in this country.
00:38:42.000 And our institutions, I think, the thing that I really like to say, the kind of big point, what can you do?
00:38:49.000 The tactical solutions that I offered are important in the short term.
00:38:52.000 But in the long term, we need to radically decentralize our public institutions.
00:38:56.000 So in California, I think by some measurements, they're spending roughly $15,000 a year per child on public education.
00:39:03.000 Get that money out of the public bureaucracy, out of the public kind of system.
00:39:08.000 Give it directly to families and students.
00:39:10.000 Let parents control their destiny.
00:39:12.000 Let there be a thousand flowers blooming, a thousand different pedagogies, a thousand different school models, a thousand different venture startups to provide education that matches people's values.
00:39:22.000 And again, take money away from these corrupt public institutions and give them directly to families and kids so they can have a chance for a good education that reflects their values.
00:39:32.000 I agree completely.
00:39:33.000 It's Christopher Rufo.
00:39:35.000 Christopher, what would you like your audience to make us, what would you like to make the audience aware of?
00:39:40.000 Book, website, what do you got?
00:39:42.000 Yeah, if you want to see my reporting, I'm going to be continuing to do this series on critical racer and education.
00:39:47.000 You can join my website or follow my website at ChristopherRufo.com.
00:39:51.000 That's Christopherrufo.com.
00:39:54.000 I also have a kind of a Patreon style thing for people who want to support it further.
00:39:58.000 Very good.
00:39:59.000 Well, Christopher, thank you so much.
00:39:59.000 All right.
00:40:00.000 Keep up the great work.
00:40:01.000 Hope to have you on again.
00:40:03.000 Talk to you soon.
00:40:04.000 All right.
00:40:04.000 Thank you.
00:40:05.000 Thanks.
00:40:08.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:40:10.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:40:12.000 If you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
00:40:16.000 And thanks so much for all of you that got involved with Turning Point USA, tpusa.com.
00:40:21.000 Thank you.
00:40:22.000 Talk to you soon.
00:40:26.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.