The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 280. Critical Racists

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. I'm very pleased today to be talking with Mr. Christopher Ruffo, who's emerged as a national and international class troublemaker, I would say,

00:01:19.140 and policy advisor on the culture war front, especially in relationship to issues of public education and critical race theory, whatever that means, and both philosophically and politically, that's what we're going to delve into today.

00:01:34.340 Christopher is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute.

00:01:41.740 He's also a contributing editor at City Journal, where his writing explores a range of issues, including critical race theory, homelessness, addiction, crime, and the decline of cities on America's West Coast.

00:01:56.760 Mr. Ruffo also, as I said, became a focal point of attention on the culture war front for reasons we will discuss in this podcast.

00:02:04.100 He recently launched a YouTube channel called Christopher Ruffo Theory, concentrating on all these philosophical, political, and practical issues.

00:02:14.480 Thank you very much, Mr. Ruffo, Christopher, for agreeing to talk to me today.

00:02:19.120 It's a pleasure to be with you.

00:02:20.840 So let's start with a broad question.

00:02:23.360 Three, I suppose.

00:02:24.660 Who are you?

00:02:25.620 What in the world are you up to?

00:02:27.760 And why have people so suddenly, in some real sense, become interested?

00:02:32.280 Why have you become a focal point of attention on these issues?

00:02:35.820 Sure.

00:02:36.260 I think it's because I was really the first person to do the reporting, to actually substantiate the feeling that many people had, that our institutions had been captured by left-wing ideologies.

00:02:48.780 And this has obviously been a kind of concern for many people for a long time.

00:02:53.920 But for many years, it felt like it was relegated to the university setting.

00:02:57.260 And so conservatives could say, well, you know, there's something crazy going on at Vassar College.

00:03:02.400 It doesn't affect me.

00:03:03.920 Then after the death of George Floyd in 2020, it seemed like all of our institutions suddenly shifted overnight.

00:03:10.660 So I did a series of reports on diversity training programs in the federal government that got the attention of then-President Trump.

00:03:19.280 Then I shifted to looking at critical race theory implemented as a pedagogical approach in K-12 schools, which set off this massive response or really revolt amongst parents nationwide.

00:03:32.720 And now I'm focusing on gender ideology as well, looking at K-12 schools, government agencies, and even the Fortune 100 companies.

00:03:42.620 And so what I think I've been able to do that's been able to galvanize attention is take these issues, establish a factual basis, saying this is what's happening.

00:03:52.340 These are the documents, and then describing the origins, whether it's critical race theory or queer theory, in a way that the average person, a parent in a public school district, for example, can start to then push back.

00:04:04.900 And that's really been my goal.

00:04:05.940 I'm kind of an accidental activist, never set out to be an activist.

00:04:09.840 But as it turns out, I'm kind of leading this fight in many ways here in the United States.

00:04:15.840 Right. So you think you were able to make these issues, to take them out of the purely academic realm while they were moving out of the purely academic realm, to articulate what they are, to articulate people's concerns about that, parental concerns specifically, and also to act as an advisor, let's say, and an educator on the political front.

00:04:36.980 Does that seem about right?

00:04:38.000 Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think what I've been able to do, and it's actually been just a really fascinating and rewarding process, is to kind of take my very small team, and we run the whole gamut.

00:04:49.540 So we start at the very beginning, which is always creating new information, in the sense that we're fielding reports, we're talking to whistleblowers, we're authenticating documents, we're putting them on television, we're putting them on social media, so people are aware of what's happening.

00:05:03.640 And then all of a sudden people said, well, how do we talk about this? Whether it's people, congressmen, or state legislators, or governors, hey, what's going on with critical race theory? What's the language I should be using? What can we do about it?

00:05:17.540 And then I started putting together those kind of memos in an advisory capacity saying, hey, this is what's actually happening. This is what's going on beneath the surface, and this is what you can do about it.

00:05:27.420 Right. Okay. So you're also detailing the way that this system of ideas, let's say, you're also detailing the way that this system of ideas is manifesting itself concretely in the educational establishment and in actual institutions.

00:05:41.420 So it's not merely a theoretical discussion.

00:05:44.980 Yeah, that's exactly right. And there's a really important point on that distinction that I think is really critical.

00:05:51.940 A lot of the debates that we've had in recent years kind of restrict themselves to that theoretical basis.

00:05:59.840 It's almost like people who are playing politics, intellectuals, journalists, are having an Oxford-style debate, and there's this really, I think, an illusion that if you win the debate in the kind of marketplace of ideas, then your ideas will win.

00:06:14.500 And what I've done is I've done is I've exposed that that's actually not true.

00:06:18.080 It's not how it works. It's really actually a harmful illusion.

00:06:21.160 Because when you have bureaucrats who have a very specific ideology that control public resources, they control the curriculum, they control human resources departments or diversity, equity, and inclusion departments, even if you have the better ideas, they have the political power.

00:06:38.500 And so my big takeaway and my big call really to conservatives is to say, sure, having a stimulating intellectual discussion is important.

00:06:47.820 I enjoy it. Many people enjoy it.

00:06:49.980 But we actually have to get down to that structural level of bureaucratic and political power.

00:06:55.480 And I was able to show through the reporting, hey, this is what they're implementing in schools.

00:07:00.440 These are the people who are doing it.

00:07:02.140 And these are people who have captured, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in public resources.

00:07:07.680 And we should really focus the debate there if we want to have a chance to changing this cultural pattern.

00:07:12.820 Okay, well, I want to return to that because one of the—I'm going to play devil's advocate on the Kimberly Crenshaw intersectionality CRT front.

00:07:21.500 And I also want to have a discussion with you about the place of this war, let's say, the proper place of the war.

00:07:28.720 Because one of the concerns I have about attempts to fight critical race theory at the practical and pragmatic level is that attempts to regulate or ban it—and I'm not saying this is happening.

00:07:39.980 I'm saying it's a potential danger. Attempts to regulate or ban it run into the potential problem of expanding the sensorial capacity of governments in relationship to educational institutions and the free flow of ideas.

00:07:52.800 And that, especially when you're dealing with something that's as difficult to pin down and define, let's say, as critical race theory because where's its boundaries, that poses a potential danger for the future.

00:08:04.300 We don't want to establish government institutions that are heavy-handed in their sensorial capacity.

00:08:08.660 So we'll go back to that. We'll go back to that. Let's start, though. Maybe we could start for the audience, and I'd like you to talk about definitions.

00:08:17.260 So let's talk about four domains, okay? Perhaps we can try to intertangle all of them.

00:08:24.240 What specifically is critical race theory? That's a very difficult thing to define.

00:08:30.340 How is that related to queer theory, which is something that people know even less about, and why should we care?

00:08:35.700 And then how do you think these are related to these broader issues of, say, postmodern philosophy and the Marxism that comes tagging along in its wake?

00:08:45.160 So let's start with CRT. What is CRT? How did you become aware of it? How should people understand it?

00:08:50.500 So I first became aware of critical race theory really working backwards.

00:08:55.220 As I mentioned, I was doing this series of reports on these diversity training programs in the federal government.

00:09:00.860 And once you look at enough of these documents, they're all the same.

00:09:04.020 They recycle the same 10 set of concepts or so.

00:09:07.200 And so I said, where does this come from?

00:09:09.580 What is the origin of this theory?

00:09:12.180 And so I started working backwards, looking at the footnotes, looking at the suggested readings, and then really discovered over time the common intellectual framework is critical race theory.

00:09:21.440 The definition is pretty simple.

00:09:22.900 Critical race theory maintains that the United States is a fundamentally racist country and that all of its institutions, from the Constitution to the law to the nuclear family to the social institutions, manners and mores,

00:09:37.260 preach the values of liberty and equality, but these are really just smokescreens for naked racial domination.

00:09:45.600 And so they look at the entirety of American history, from the Declaration to the Constitution, even to Abraham Lincoln, and then to the Civil Rights Act.

00:09:54.140 And they say, it appears that there's racial progress.

00:09:57.120 It appears that there's reconciliation.

00:09:59.500 But that's an illusion.

00:10:01.060 Actually, it's just that power has become more sophisticated, more subtle, and more insidious.

00:10:05.720 And so you're starting from that point, and then you're analyzing any social phenomenon, and you're, surprise, surprise, discovering not only that it's a manifestation of racism, but they try to say, we're going to give you tools to show exactly how that's true.

00:10:22.520 Okay, so who would you identify as, let's do this in two tiers.

00:10:26.300 Who are the main thinkers on the critical race theory front, per se, and then who would you identify as the more fundamental sources of the ideas that are driving these 10 common concepts, let's say, that are running through such phenomena as diversity training?

00:10:44.440 So who are the main critical race theorists?

00:10:46.560 Sure. So the critical race theory, the godfather of critical race theory, was a black Harvard law professor named Derek Bell, who was hired as the first full-time black law professor at Harvard in the late 1960s.

00:11:00.480 And Bell is a really fascinating person.

00:11:02.380 He set the tone of critical race theory.

00:11:04.940 It's an ideology of extreme cynicism, a kind of negative philosophy, a kind of negation-based philosophy.

00:11:12.980 And he cultivated a network of young students.

00:11:16.200 He was a very charismatic figure, wrote a series of books, kind of allegorical books, talking about how racism was the permanent, indestructible, and overwhelming feature of the United States.

00:11:27.240 And this message had a lot of students, both at Harvard Law School and other law schools, other legal academies around the country.

00:11:34.980 And some of those students came together in the late 1980s.

00:11:37.840 Kimberly Crenshaw is one, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, a number of other figures at that time, came together really under his tutelage and then established critical race theory in the late 1980s.

00:11:49.960 And then you see the kind of remarkable documentation that they've actually made themselves, talking about how they started in law schools, and then they went to public health and sociology and other academic departments, and then finally trickled into diversity trainings and K-12 pedagogy.

00:12:07.280 And so that's the basic kind of 10-second lineage of where this comes from.

00:12:11.040 Okay, excellent. So now, in terms of the intellectual influences, so look, for everyone listening, when you try to analyze the operation of a set of ideas, you want to find out first who the current proponents are in the conversation that's going on now.

00:12:26.500 But then you need to trace it back to deeper ideas and the philosophers and sometimes the theologians, even depending on how deep you go, from whom those ideas flow.

00:12:36.780 And in order to understand the entire structure of the system of ideas and its interrelationships, so that you can understand its motivation and its nature, you have to delve deeper into the underlying history of the ideas.

00:12:48.900 So we have Crenshaw, Matsuda, and Lawrence. Matsuda, have I got that pronunciation right?

00:12:54.260 Yeah, Matsuda.

00:12:55.600 Matsuda, okay. And who would you say they're intellectual, who are their intellectual inspirations?

00:13:02.440 I would say there are really two key inspirations. One is Derrick Bell. And Derrick Bell's innovation was bringing this really acidic, this really kind of solvent political philosophy.

00:13:17.380 He was the first person to really weaponize identity politics in the elite institution.

00:13:22.880 He was famous not for his legal scholarship, but actually famous for his political and campus activism.

00:13:31.160 You know, he would do things like write law review papers where he would fantasize about about black law professors and the president of his university getting assassinated.

00:13:40.700 And then he would conduct these protests outside their office to kind of raise the pressure to hire specific left-wing radicals in the legal academy.

00:13:49.580 And so his students saw him not only as an intellectual inspiration, but also they said he's really tapping into the pragmatic politics.

00:13:57.980 And so you have Derrick Bell in the legal tradition. The other person that I think is really essential for them, someone that they cite over and over in their big red book of critical race theory, is Antonio Gramsci.

00:14:09.960 And because what they wanted was not just Derrick Bell, who had this kind of cynical and pessimistic philosophy that didn't seem to have much practical application beyond the campus.

00:14:19.620 And so they bring in Gramsci, of course, who talks about how in order to win the battle of ideas, in order to have influence over the kind of economic and political base of a society, you want to infiltrate and then shift those mechanisms and institutions of cultural production and cultural patterning.

00:14:39.060 And so they take Derrick Bell, kind of radical racialist philosophy, they take his identity politics and office politics, and then they graft onto it this kind of Marxian or Gramscian anthropology, and then also the Gramscian tactic of trying to then gain influence by getting into corporations, into schools, into other parts of the academy.

00:15:05.080 And on that front, I think they've been remarkably successful.

00:15:07.840 Okay, so that's when it starts to sound conspiratorial.

00:15:11.140 So now I want to do two things.

00:15:12.480 I want to talk a little bit more about Gramsci, and I also want to talk about the relationship between, let's say, Derrick Bell, Antonio Gramsci, the left wing, because you make the case, well, not only you, obviously, but the case is made quite continually, that this is a left wing movement.

00:15:29.960 So why left?

00:15:31.560 And who are the influences on that front, the left wing influences?

00:15:36.300 And how do you see all this developing in relationship to the ideas that people like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and Karl Marx have developed and put forward as well?

00:15:45.380 That would bring us, in principle, somewhat deeper.

00:15:48.660 Can we start with Gramsci?

00:15:50.820 Yeah, we can start with Gramsci.

00:15:52.280 See, I think Gramsci is very useful for, let's say, post-World War II left wing intellectuals.

00:16:00.920 And specifically, if you look at the history of the United States, you had a really boom in radical left wing politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

00:16:10.680 One of the greatest representations and something from which the critical race theorists explicitly draw from is the Black nationalist movement.

00:16:18.320 So these were explicit Marxist, Leninist, Maoist revolutionaries.

00:16:22.740 They believed that they could change the entire structure of the United States through armed guerrilla warfare, specifically looking at urban centers on the West Coast and the East Coast.

00:16:31.780 And this, of course, spectacularly crashed and burned.

00:16:35.680 And so the critical race theorists, they say we're inspired by the Black nationalist movements because we share, in some sense, the same goals.

00:16:44.540 We want to have a kind of total overturning of society.

00:16:47.940 We want to move away from capitalism.

00:16:50.080 We want to move away from individual rights.

00:16:52.560 We want to move away from a kind of unfettered First Amendment free speech.

00:16:57.000 That's Mari Matsuda's argument.

00:16:58.380 And we want to have a kind of collectivist and racially egalitarian society in which the scales are balanced based on group identity.

00:17:08.100 But what they found and discovered is that the, you know, throwing hand grenades at the police in Oakland, California, is not going to overturn an advanced industrial society like the United States.

00:17:20.040 And, of course, these are people who are embedded in the most elite institutions in the United States, places most notably like Harvard Law School.

00:17:27.320 And so, you know, a Harvard Law School student and then professor is unlikely to be winning in that way.

00:17:35.300 So they said, what do we have?

00:17:36.920 Well, we have access to elite institutions.

00:17:39.280 We have a way of playing institutional politics that we learned from Derrick Bell.

00:17:43.540 You can essentially bully, shame, and pressure people using all of those tactics of identity politics to really get what you want.

00:17:52.020 So why don't we just do that at scale?

00:17:55.020 Why don't we use our position, our prestige, our institutional power within these places to then bring forth and legitimize some of those more radical ideas that you might get from, let's say, Eldridge Cleaver or Angela Davis in the 1960s.

00:18:11.440 But we're going to take away the epithets and the profanities and the, you know, the calls to execute police officers.

00:18:18.720 We're going to make them respectable.

00:18:20.900 We're going to give them a gloss of academic language.

00:18:23.500 So taking those Latinate words, those multisyllabic words, making it sound very, very, very fancy, very respectable, very intellectually intimidating.

00:18:32.380 And then we're going to feed it through the system, through these transmission belts.

00:18:35.640 And the critical race theorists themselves talk about this as they have their 10-year reunions.

00:18:40.080 They actually interview each other and talk about the progress of their ideas so you can actually mark it decade by decade.

00:18:45.820 And they say, you know, we started as a legal discipline, but actually our greatest strength is in education.

00:18:52.060 And so they built up this entire pedagogy.

00:18:54.160 And they said to change the world, again, like any left-wing revolutionary has said for the last hundred and odd years, you have to change how children are taught.

00:19:02.540 And so the critical race theorists were very focused on building a pedagogy.

00:19:06.540 And so these are the ideas, systemic racism, whiteness, white privilege, intersectionality, et cetera.

00:19:14.080 These kind of core set of ideas that are now ubiquitous.

00:19:17.680 At one time were really marginal academic ideas limited to just very few of these scholars and intellectuals.

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00:21:04.940 Okay, so now let's go under that again a bit, and then we'll return to Gramsci, I think.

00:21:12.040 So, my understanding, please correct me, okay, my understanding of the relationship between such ideas and the broader intellectual tradition focuses for me on Foucault, Derrida, and Marx.

00:21:25.420 And so, Derrida, in particular, based his philosophy, his postmodern philosophy, on the idea that there's no uniting grand narrative, and if there is, that grand narrative has been harnessed in the service of the kind of power and oppression that you described.

00:21:43.720 And Derrida described the West as phall, P-H-A-L-L-O, phallogocentric, male-dominated, centered on the idea of logic from the Greeks, let's say, in the Enlightenment tradition, and the idea of logos from the Judeo-Christian tradition, and centering and privileging those concepts, and hypothetically, the people those concepts represented, which would have been males, particularly, and then secondarily, in some sense, white males.

00:22:11.140 And part of what Derrida wanted to do, and Foucault as well, who had a similar theoretical framework, was to bring those ideas and people he regarded as unfairly and inappropriately marginalized by tyrannical systems of power to the center.

00:22:28.300 And that aligned, as far as I can tell, with the Marxist presupposition, and Derrida makes this explicit, and it's not like it is common knowledge that Foucault was also radically leftist, as were so many French intellectuals of the time.

00:22:40.780 Is the Marxists had a doctrine that was very similar, because they regarded the entire battleground of human history, let's say, and all the relations between individuals as characterized fundamentally by the expression of nothing but arbitrary power, including institutions like marriage, all economic institutions, and even friendship.

00:22:58.860 And Marx decried the oppressive relationship between the upper ruling class, let's say, and the proletariat, the working class, and believed that when the revolution came, that those who were unjustly oppressed in the name of power would take center stage.

00:23:14.580 And so the postmodern and the Marxist ideas could just collapse on top of each other.

00:23:21.020 I think the French intellectuals of the 1970s did that in some sense, and turned to ideas like the ones you're discussing, consciously and purposefully, because they also realized, as did the 1960s radicals, especially in the aftermath of Solzhenitsyn's revolutions about the brutality of the Stalinist era,

00:23:40.100 that a pure movement forward on the communist revolutionary front, let's say, just wasn't going to fly, was no longer ethically tenable, but was also practically unachievable.

00:23:51.420 Now, is there anything in my derivation of the sources of these ideas to those sources that you think is incomplete or erroneous, that needs to be expanded?

00:24:03.400 Critical, if you look at the lineage, this is a fascinating question on critical race theory, it's almost like an intellectual stew.

00:24:10.500 If you read their Big Red book and some of the other minor books, they appeal to almost everyone.

00:24:16.280 It's almost like they're agnostic.

00:24:18.020 Whatever left-wing, revolutionary, or deconstructionist thinkers, they're going to grab bits and pieces from all of them.

00:24:23.860 So they specifically appeal to postmodernism.

00:24:26.800 They specifically appeal to Gramsci.

00:24:30.200 They specifically appeal to black nationalism.

00:24:32.240 They specifically appeal to all these concepts.

00:24:33.900 And in the early work, you sense that when they're kind of grasping for the postmodernist techniques, they're doing so almost out of a kind of fashionable pose or a posture.

00:24:47.420 I don't think that it's really essential to what they're doing, though.

00:24:50.760 Because I think if you look at queer theory, obviously, Foucault, Derrida, postmodernism, it's essential.

00:24:56.480 It's 100% of the intellectual lineage on the kind of axis of sex and gender.

00:25:02.820 But on the axis of race, and specifically looking at the critical race theorists, I don't think that it's the essential or defining set of ideas.

00:25:12.020 They may appeal to them because I think during the 90s, that was really fashionable among intellectuals.

00:25:16.980 You had to cite Foucault.

00:25:17.980 You had to cite postmodernism.

00:25:19.540 You had to call into question the existence of an objective or absolute truth or a grand narrative.

00:25:24.660 There is a bit of that.

00:25:26.920 But I think when critical race theory kind of brass tacks when it comes down to it, it's much more a direct Marxist revolutionary, even almost a materialistic philosophy.

00:25:36.880 Because they take as the basis what they really want is a total leveling of society.

00:25:41.880 And when they're grasping around for solutions, that's where I think you can really get to the crux of what critical race theory is.

00:25:48.480 You take that old Marxist framework of oppressor and oppressed, a kind of war between the classes.

00:25:53.960 You substitute racial categories for economic categories.

00:25:57.560 So they say the history of the United States is not the history of the rich oppressing the poor, although it is in part.

00:26:03.640 But it's really a history of whiteness and blackness, this almost metaphysical struggle between these two racial forces.

00:26:13.700 And so what do they want?

00:26:14.860 What is, well, you kind of read, you say, okay, you know, let's say we even buy into your premise.

00:26:18.700 What would you want?

00:26:19.440 They want to overturn capitalism.

00:26:22.780 They think that that, they really think of whiteness and property as synonymous and mutually reinforcing.

00:26:28.540 So unless you have the equality of property, the equality of wealth, you're always going to have a kind of racially based inequality.

00:26:36.220 Because into our system of rights, into our system of private property, into our system of free exchange is embedded a racialist and really racially oppressive notion of whiteness.

00:26:49.020 They're inseparable.

00:26:49.560 They also think that some of those key constitutional pillars or the key pillars of the Bill of Rights, such as free speech, encourages or allows racial domination.

00:27:01.600 So you need to have really a regulator or a state power to suppress the speech of people who would use it to reinforce that system of racial domination.

00:27:11.900 And even the 14th Amendment, and then to a lesser extent, the Civil Rights Act in 1964, they say, no, no, no, a lot of hand-waving.

00:27:20.320 You know, Derrick Bell famously said that, you know, Lincoln didn't free the slaves in order to advance racial justice.

00:27:25.740 And the 14th Amendment was really a kind of fake expression of equality, all the way leading up even to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to desegregation.

00:27:37.440 And so what do they want?

00:27:38.320 They really want a focused state power.

00:27:42.000 They look to, for example, the decolonial, postcolonial regimes in Africa that seized land and wealth and then redistributed along racial lines.

00:27:50.560 That was one of their inspirations in the 1990s.

00:27:52.720 And so when you put all these elements together, you're really getting the end of the constitutional system.

00:27:57.960 Because, look, if you don't have free speech, you don't have individual rights, you don't have equal protection under the law.

00:28:03.840 Those are just all masks for power, as you pointed out.

00:28:06.820 Okay, so let me make the counterclaim here for a minute, okay?

00:28:10.020 And then we'll get into this in more detail.

00:28:12.640 So I've read a fair bit of the 1619 Project book, a book actually I liked, and I was reviewing a fair bit of Kimberly Crenshaw's work on intersectionality.

00:28:22.720 Before I interviewed you today.

00:28:24.260 And so let me push back as hard as I can on this.

00:28:27.440 So the basic claim is that all of these institutions that are, in some sense, central to what has been described as the Western Enlightenment and also Judeo-Christian tradition,

00:28:39.660 and put forth as a moral virtue, a set of truly moral guidelines, is actually nothing but a front for the domination of a small number of individuals who you can usually characterize by both race and gender.

00:28:52.440 Race, gender, and sexual preference, let's say.

00:28:54.960 So white, heterosexual males.

00:28:56.520 Now, it is the case that white, heterosexual males occupy a disproportionate number of the most influential positions in society.

00:29:07.420 It is also the case that racial minorities, and you could put sex minorities and sexual minorities in that same category, do tend to be overrepresented, let's say, at the bottom of the heap.

00:29:19.740 And it is also the case that people who have positions of authority and power are likely to harness whatever they can philosophically and theologically, let's say,

00:29:31.000 to buttress their claim that their occupation of those positions of power, authority, and privilege are justified not only on pragmatic grounds,

00:29:42.360 because they fought, let's say, unfairly for what they have, but also on moral grounds.

00:29:48.260 And so why isn't it acceptable to swallow the radical leftist critique wholeheartedly and say,

00:29:57.120 look, if you're not naive and you do know that power can corrupt and that power does corrupt and that many of our institutions are corrupt

00:30:06.780 and that merit isn't the only basis upon which people progress, that it's reasonable to view the entire history,

00:30:13.760 let's say, of Western civilization as the attempt to merely dominate and to use very elaborate structures of rationalization

00:30:21.640 to provide a moral framework for nothing but that dominance.

00:30:25.520 That's basically the argument.

00:30:26.760 So what's wrong with that argument?

00:30:29.720 Sure.

00:30:30.040 Well, I mean, if we kind of take a step back, in some ways I'm somewhat sympathetic to it.

00:30:35.060 If you look at the history of civilizations, obviously, a lot of the principles, you know, proposed or espoused by leading figures are rationalizations.

00:30:45.500 There's a certain truth to that.

00:30:47.140 This stuff is not totally bogus or totally out of left field.

00:30:51.440 But the question is, okay, let's actually get down to the implementation.

00:30:54.400 Let's get down into the practical unfolding of this historical experience.

00:30:58.580 You start from a position, a starting point, let's say, around the American founding,

00:31:02.400 where human slavery, for example, was a universal throughout space and time up until that point.

00:31:09.520 And the Declaration of Independence was a radical egalitarian document,

00:31:15.180 an attempt to raise human civilization up from a kind of morass, up from a kind of world of where this kind of domination was accepted.

00:31:25.560 Did they transform every element in society in a single generation?

00:31:29.520 No.

00:31:30.200 But did they make significant progress towards those Republican values that they espoused?

00:31:35.900 Absolutely they did.

00:31:37.440 And so if you look at American history from that perspective, where you have the tragic nature of man, the tragic nature of society,

00:31:44.660 you have these people entering into a historical moment in which the world looked very bleak in a lot of ways,

00:31:53.800 they're bringing that level of civilization, I think, undoubtedly upward.

00:31:59.320 And so you start from that premise where they see nothing but domination.

00:32:02.880 They see nothing but negativity, nothing but a kind of parade of horrors.

00:32:07.000 I think any honest looking at American history could say, absolutely, we've had a real history of racial injustice,

00:32:14.700 a real history that has to be grappled with.

00:32:17.960 But if you put it in the context of the highest ideals from the Declaration to the Constitution to the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and the actions of Lincoln,

00:32:27.120 you can see this kind of rising level of always moving towards the completion of or the realization of those highest ideals.

00:32:35.140 So that's one thing.

00:32:36.900 You look at it from a historical context.

00:32:39.260 And then the second thing is you look at it in a comparative way where you say, OK, let's let's even grant you.

00:32:45.140 Let's say your argument is true.

00:32:46.280 These are rationalizations used for domination.

00:32:49.820 What other system would you suggest?

00:32:52.080 What other country would you would you proffer as a as a better alternative?

00:32:56.440 You know, I started my career as a documentary filmmaker.

00:32:58.500 And so over that, you know, 10, 15 years of my first part of my career, I traveled to somewhere between 70, 75 different countries around the world.

00:33:07.240 And so I got to see how pretty much all of the major population groups live, all of the major governing systems.

00:33:13.460 And so I think we should be very careful when we say we're going to throw out the entire Western tradition.

00:33:19.720 We're going to throw out the entire American tradition.

00:33:21.860 We're going to throw out the entire system of capitalism, the entire system of constitutional government in pursuit of some vague and fuzzy utopia where we can really level society completely.

00:33:33.040 And I think you ask them, well, what countries do it better?

00:33:35.820 What countries would you rather model your society on?

00:33:38.240 And then you start to actually have a practical view.

00:33:41.920 So let me push back against that a little bit.

00:33:44.480 So because I'm trying to do what I can to argue for the other side, let's say.

00:33:50.540 Sure.

00:33:50.740 So I might say, well, these Western countries that you point to as pillars of freedom and and democracy and and wealth in terms of, let's say, the remediation of of of of of absolute privation.

00:34:04.120 And the reason that they're the reason that a small minority of people within them are hyper successful is because they oppress and dominate the others in that society and siphon off excess resources from them in a manner that's akin to theft.

00:34:16.840 That's a Marxist perspective.

00:34:18.480 And then the reason that the United States and Canada and Great Britain, let's say, are wealthy in the manner that they are, that has nothing to do with the essential virtues of capitalism and the free market and everything with to do with the fact that they took all the land from the Native Americans, that they've been colonial nations, that they've exploited the third world and that and that they've devote they've diverted resources that should have been more equitably distributed across the world and within their own societies for the benefit of a very small number of people.

00:34:47.640 So that would be the counter position to the to the to the case that you were making.

00:34:53.080 That would. Yeah. And it's it kind of it falls apart on really a basic scrutiny.

00:34:59.000 So the idea, you know, Marxists talk a lot about the distribution of resources.

00:35:03.740 They never quite talk about the production of resources.

00:35:06.660 And in fact, all of the Marxist systems throughout history, they're great at distribution because when you have all of the guns, you can take things from one person, give them to another.

00:35:15.600 They're they're really bad at production. And so you have a kind of failure of production throughout the 20th century that was really catastrophic for tens of millions of people.

00:35:26.460 The United States actually has created a system of production that has raised the basic level of standard of living beyond the wildest expectations of almost anyone a century ago.

00:35:38.160 And it's not out of exploitation. It's actually out of cooperation.

00:35:42.380 It's out of the division of labor. It's out of having a price mechanism where you can exchange your labor.

00:35:48.340 You can exchange your time. You can exchange your cash.

00:35:50.860 You can exchange other goods in a way that everyone is winning.

00:35:54.700 And so if you look at even, for example, to say, well, comparing it to the third world, if you look at the ancestry of all of the different populations in the United States, European Americans, African Americans, Latin Americans, et cetera, even down to the ethnic level.

00:36:10.740 You know, being a European in the United States, you are much wealthier on average than being a European in Europe.

00:36:18.440 And the same holds true from all the other populations.

00:36:21.400 And then this is the reason why people vote with their feet to come to the United States from all over the world.

00:36:26.840 But it's also why when you ask people and survey data, and even anecdotally, I think this is true, you know, across the board, people believe in the United States.

00:36:36.500 And in fact, the only people who don't believe in the United States are left wing whites that have high levels of education.

00:36:43.540 And so when you ask African Americans, when you ask Latinos, for example, you know, is the United States the greatest country in the world, people still say yes to a great extent.

00:36:55.960 When you ask people, if you work hard, can you still get ahead, that basic bedrock principle of the United States, they still say yes.

00:37:03.220 Everyone except for people in the kind of upper crust of our elite institutions.

00:37:07.320 And the same thing holds true when you talk about critical race theory.

00:37:10.060 Manhattan Institute did a poll, for example, asking parents, white parents, black parents, Asian parents, Latino parents.

00:37:18.540 Do you think public schools should be teaching that the United States is systemically racist?

00:37:22.860 Do you think public schools should be teaching the doctrine of white privilege?

00:37:26.560 Every group, black, white, Asian and Latino, they all said, no, we don't want this in our schools.

00:37:32.400 And so the Marxists and then the critical race theorists have to develop this really sophisticated and almost absurd idea of false consciousness.

00:37:40.980 Yeah, they've internalized their oppression, all those groups.

00:37:43.420 Exactly.

00:37:44.200 And they're saying, you know, the working class in the United States, the racial minority in the United States, all of the people who we know are oppressed,

00:37:52.680 just as oppressed as they were under Jim Crow, just as oppressed as they were under slavery.

00:37:58.980 They actually make this argument, which is just so absurd.

00:38:02.840 They're really, truly oppressed.

00:38:04.480 They just don't know it.

00:38:05.480 And it's up to us to explain it to them.

00:38:07.580 And even if they don't agree with us, we're going to change the entire society on their behalf.

00:38:11.580 And so the really interesting thing, and I think the fatal kind of hypocrisy of critical race theory,

00:38:17.960 is that these are the most privileged people in the world, the most privileged people in human history to a great extent,

00:38:24.960 regardless of racial background, trying to impose their ideology on working class people of all different racial backgrounds who reject it.

00:38:33.520 It's the same Marxist kind of jam that they get into.

00:38:38.660 The proletariat, the working class, the racial minority doesn't want what they're selling.

00:38:45.620 So they're just going to do it for them.

00:38:47.540 I think it's kind of a reversal of their entire philosophy.

00:38:51.240 It's a kind of intellectual imperialism that they use the kind of coded language of racial category that's really been totally disconnected from the reality of even race in this country.

00:39:06.240 Yeah, well, it's so annoying when the working class doesn't know what's best for them.

00:39:10.000 And so let's take that apart in two ways.

00:39:12.660 So one question might be, well, why is it the educated white upper class, so to speak?

00:39:18.020 And I know this is more characteristic of white upper class women, by the way, than of men.

00:39:22.300 Why is it that they are the ones most likely to espouse these theories?

00:39:26.160 And I would say, and correct me if I'm wrong, there are perhaps two reasons for that.

00:39:29.980 One is they will be the last people affected by the detrimental consequences of these theories because they're shielded from their effects.

00:39:36.940 And number two, this is a deeper problem.

00:39:39.520 You know, every system, every economic system that human beings has ever invented, every system of trade, which allows for cooperation, let's say, and for us to benefit from the different abilities of other people, has also simultaneously produced inequality.

00:39:56.420 And inequality, although necessary, and I would say for some reasons desirable, because there's no real difference, by the way, between inequality and diversity,

00:40:04.800 it also does put a heavy load on the conscience of people.

00:40:09.620 You know, if you're a San Francisco upper middle class housewife, let's say, and you're walking down the street and you see it littered with homeless people, so to speak,

00:40:19.320 who are suffering and who clearly are suffering and who clearly are marginalized and haven't been brought within the confines of the economic system

00:40:27.180 for reasons that may be partly due to their own misbehavior, let's say, and inadequacies, but also partly because of sociological circumstances that were beyond their control,

00:40:37.400 it's very, very difficult not to feel that your privilege and status is in some sense undeserved and also a moral burden,

00:40:46.500 and very tempting, therefore, to cheaply counterbalance that set of guilt with the proposition that not only are you in a dominant position,

00:40:56.880 but you're also firmly and 100% on the side of the oppressed, which is something you see happening in Ivy League schools all the time.

00:41:04.600 And Rob Henderson, as you no doubt know, has described this proclivity as luxury beliefs, right?

00:41:11.620 It's that you get to have your status, and then instead of doing what you should do to remediate the problems of the world with that status and privilege,

00:41:19.320 you jump on the bandwagon of cheaply compassionate theories, and then you can have your cake, your moral cake, and eat it, too.

00:41:27.060 I've been trying to parse out the psychological reasons why it is precisely those who are in these positions of vaunted privilege, let's say,

00:41:34.360 who are most likely to have these revolutionary ideas. Do you have any further thoughts on that?

00:41:39.080 A couple things. I mean, A, this is kind of a stock character in American history.

00:41:43.920 If you look at the weather underground movement in the late 60s, early 1970s,

00:41:48.300 which is really a kind of prototype for all the things we're seeing today,

00:41:51.960 if you read their Manifesto Prairie Fire, and I highly recommend you read it,

00:41:56.480 I read it last year and kind of my eyes popped out of my head because it's all of the things that K-12 students are learning today.

00:42:05.040 You know, white privilege, anti-colonialism, kind of Marxist economics, etc.

00:42:12.760 That was, at that time, a radical fringe idea that has now moved into the mainstream.

00:42:17.540 But you look at the backgrounds of all these people. They're all elites.

00:42:21.060 They're all people who are the sons and daughters of bankers and politicians and wealthy people in New York City,

00:42:26.300 wealthy people in San Francisco.

00:42:27.420 They were living on, you know, houseboats in Marin while they were, you know, planting bombs in police stations.

00:42:33.260 And so you kind of say, well, what is the psychology here? What's happening?

00:42:36.240 I think it's a couple things.

00:42:37.600 Certainly it functions as a luxury belief to the extent that they're insulated from the consequences of those beliefs.

00:42:43.540 I think we can't underestimate two things, however.

00:42:46.320 One is that a lot of these people are just true believers, the people who are most fervent.

00:42:51.180 If you're going to pick up a gun, for example, like Eric Mann did, and shoot it into the window of a police station in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

00:43:00.380 you have to be deeply committed.

00:43:03.140 And I think you see that same spirit among people who are members of Antifa, people who are members of BLM.

00:43:09.200 They are really just possessed by this idea.

00:43:11.960 And I think there's a certain amount of attractiveness for people who are maybe bored, people who maybe feel resentful.

00:43:18.980 They can fuel that resentment and that boredom into revolutionary action.

00:43:23.380 And then they can take the mantle of romanticism.

00:43:26.700 You know, they can be Che Guevara.

00:43:28.440 I mean, that's a very attractive figure.

00:43:30.640 Yeah, unless you know anything about him.

00:43:32.700 You don't even have to because you see the cool beret, you see the cool beard,

00:43:36.340 you see the cool kind of high contrast print.

00:43:38.860 And there's a sense of fulfillment, I think, stemming from anger, resentment, a sense of guilt.

00:43:47.900 You have this complex web of emotions that are then manipulated by media, manipulated by activists,

00:43:54.740 manipulated by other leadership.

00:43:56.580 And so there's that latent.

00:43:58.640 I think there's also a sense among people, look, these are my peers.

00:44:01.460 You know, I have a lead education.

00:44:03.380 I've traveled in those circles.

00:44:04.800 I've lived in those cities.

00:44:06.680 There's a sense, I think, among many of my peers in a way, especially the ones who are left,

00:44:11.820 and I was on the left for many years, kind of graduated rightward over time.

00:44:17.180 There's a sense that they don't deserve it.

00:44:21.560 There's a deep sense of inferiority.

00:44:24.080 Yeah.

00:44:24.280 Well, maybe they don't, you know, because one open question.

00:44:28.200 Well, there's an open question here on the guilt front, you know.

00:44:31.620 So there's a gospel discussion of the unequal distribution of talents, right, because it's

00:44:37.720 pretty clear that if you look at the world as it's presently constituted and always has

00:44:42.040 been, that, you know, some people are more beautiful than others and some people are

00:44:46.200 healthier and some people are more intelligent and some people are more hardworking by nature

00:44:50.360 and sometimes some people are more creative and some people are more compassionate.

00:44:54.240 There's this massively unequal distribution of a priori resources, right?

00:44:59.520 What you come into the world with, not what you deserve by a dent of hard work.

00:45:05.700 And then you might ask yourself, well, if you happen to be born, we'll use all the tropes,

00:45:11.980 white, rich, heterosexual, healthy, attractive, and you have all these benefits and privileges

00:45:19.040 and the luxury of this, let's say, immense wealth that was gathered by your parents,

00:45:23.320 why shouldn't you be guilty about that?

00:45:25.600 And then what, because look at all the people who don't have that and it was just handed

00:45:30.560 to you, it was just laid at your feet.

00:45:32.140 And the answer that's put forward in the New Testament, and I don't like to refer to religious

00:45:36.860 matters unless it's necessary, is that to those to whom much has been given, much will

00:45:43.100 be asked.

00:45:44.000 And so then you might say, well, if you have all this remarkable technological and economic

00:45:48.560 privilege, much of which was unearned, and even much of which, or some of which, was purchased

00:45:54.340 at the cost of historical atrocity, what should you do?

00:45:59.240 And the answer is, you should put yourself together so you're as good ethically as you

00:46:03.760 are rich financially.

00:46:05.820 But that's a heavy moral burden and a heavy burden of responsibility.

00:46:09.780 And then I think you can take these cheap and uninformed roots out, and some of that's just

00:46:14.540 based in miseducation and pure ignorance, so that you can accrue to yourself the moral

00:46:19.940 virtue that's necessary to solve your conscience without having to do any of the real difficult

00:46:25.240 work that making a full accounting of your talents and atoning for your privilege would

00:46:30.300 actually require.

00:46:32.040 Yeah, I think that's 100% right.

00:46:34.040 And I think that you have then a group of people, people, I mean, people who look like

00:46:40.080 me, people who are my age, that are struggling to find an identity, struggling to find a structure,

00:46:48.440 struggling to have a standard of living maybe better than their parents.

00:46:52.260 And then even people who come from wealthy backgrounds, there's a tremendous pressure,

00:46:55.820 right?

00:46:56.340 If you're born to that level of privilege, it's very high to, very difficult to maybe exceed

00:47:00.500 your family.

00:47:01.880 In the past, though, we had a kind of paternal structure where you're saying, hey, even you're

00:47:06.940 kind of a kind of wayward son of a wealthy family, you have to come into the fold, you

00:47:12.820 have to be a good steward of these resources, you have to, you know, build libraries, you

00:47:17.220 have to build the opera house, you have to do great works that show that you can assume

00:47:22.280 the responsibility of this wealth and prestige, and then really provide it back to the community

00:47:27.180 in a substantial way.

00:47:28.240 Right, right, right.

00:47:28.820 That's very difficult.

00:47:29.940 It's much easier to, you know, put on the keffia, march at a BLM protest, and then, you

00:47:36.900 know, run a family foundation writing checks to a bunch of useless nonprofits.

00:47:40.980 You get the status, you get the prestige, you get the love, you get the identity as a kind

00:47:46.400 of class traitor, but it's an adolescent posture of rebellion from a generation that refuses to

00:47:52.640 grow up and become a father, let's say, or become a mother, become a kind of matriarch

00:47:58.600 figure.

00:47:59.480 And so you have these permanent children that are in eternal revolution against their

00:48:04.880 parents that for them are symbolically represented in this society.

00:48:09.300 And they feel like they can stuff that feeling or satisfy that feeling with these kind of

00:48:14.800 the sugar high of revolution by play acting.

00:48:18.960 But it deals tremendous damage to real people.

00:48:22.940 And, you know, the reason I'm a conservative, as opposed to where I started 10, 15 years ago

00:48:27.680 as a kind of on the far left, is that I saw in the international context, in many places,

00:48:34.480 what happens when these ideas take hold.

00:48:37.020 But I also saw, I even spent five years in three of America's poorest cities observing

00:48:40.880 these communities.

00:48:42.060 The theory of systemic racism, white privilege, intersectionality, et cetera, all the solutions

00:48:48.060 that they proffer are very good if you want to achieve social status and position in an

00:48:53.200 Ivy League university, they're disastrous once they trickle down or are imposed on poor people

00:48:58.240 of any racial background.

00:48:59.900 And so this feeling, this psychological profile, I think is one of the most important things

00:49:06.080 of our time.

00:49:06.640 I think that's why your work has been so successful and why people on the left have furiously

00:49:11.340 kind of rejected it and furiously, like in a deranged way, lashed out against it because

00:49:18.200 you're calling them to responsibility.

00:49:19.960 Yeah, I got a funny story for that, man.

00:49:22.480 So, you know, I've had the misfortune to be invited to speak at universities.

00:49:27.700 And I say misfortune because although some of the time that goes quite well, the most disastrous

00:49:33.740 public events of my life have been on university campuses where I'm harassed by student radicals

00:49:40.440 or literally accosted by them, yelled at by unbelievably narcissistic brats, generally harassed a lot by the

00:49:48.600 administration for even daring to go to the damn university, having all sorts of obstacles put in

00:49:53.960 my path when I agree to do so.

00:49:56.860 And then, and spending a lot of time and resources to speak to people who are often extremely narcissistic

00:50:04.040 for very little effect.

00:50:05.900 Now, that's not always the case.

00:50:07.160 I've had good experiences at Cambridge and at MIT and at Stanford most recently.

00:50:11.920 And so it can work, but it often doesn't.

00:50:15.180 And so the, the.

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00:51:27.900 I figured out a way to go to a university and have it work.

00:51:31.400 And this is really quite funny.

00:51:32.700 I figured this out about five years ago.

00:51:35.020 So imagine I'm invited to a university and I'm worried that there's going to be protests.

00:51:38.920 And I worry because sometimes there are murderous people at those protests.

00:51:42.700 It's no joke.

00:51:43.500 And people get in my face and they threaten me and physically as well as psychologically.

00:51:48.020 And I'm not afraid of that, but it makes me so angry that I'm afraid of my own anger

00:51:52.280 in situations like that.

00:51:53.560 I joke with my security people that half of the reason they're there is to stop me from

00:51:58.040 attacking other people.

00:51:59.160 And I mean that, you know, it's a joke, but it's also not a joke.

00:52:03.120 Anyways, I figured out very early that if I had a meeting at a university at eight o'clock

00:52:07.500 in the morning, I'd never have a protester in sight.

00:52:10.520 Because none of them had the bloody discipline to stick to their principles with enough, what

00:52:16.660 would you say, assiduousness so that they would sacrifice their late night drinking session

00:52:21.300 the night before.

00:52:21.920 So they wouldn't be too hungover and bleary eyed to come out and confront the, you know,

00:52:25.840 the evil professor who is going to go out there and warp their compatriots.

00:52:30.520 And so the fact that I could circumvent the bloody activists by merely showing up early

00:52:35.000 in the morning is a pretty fundamental indictment of their, the fundamental maturity of their

00:52:40.120 motivation.

00:52:40.760 And also something that's blackly comical in the deepest possible sense.

00:52:44.600 And the fact that these idiot professors on these left-wing campuses take the messianic

00:52:50.320 delusions of these overgrown adolescents with some degree of seriousness, overlay that with

00:52:55.460 compassion, and then invite them to become useless activists and thereby fulfill their moral,

00:53:02.000 the moral demands that their own conscience puts on them is an unbelievably deep indication

00:53:07.620 of the absolute moral bankruptcy of the modern university.

00:53:11.900 So I love it.

00:53:14.660 And, and, and weak parents create narcissistic children.

00:53:18.000 And so the administrator is the weak parent and the children are, are quite narcissistic.

00:53:23.120 And, you know, this reminds me, your, your, your, your story reminds me of two things.

00:53:26.160 One, you know, my, my dad was an immigrant from Italy, uh, came over as a teenager with his

00:53:30.700 family, very poor, had nothing.

00:53:33.200 Uh, his father immediately died when they came over.

00:53:36.240 My dad, uh, uh, became the man of the household and, uh, he was a great athlete, a good student,

00:53:41.320 got a scholarship, was living at home.

00:53:43.580 And this was during the kind of 1960s, 1970s, Vietnam war protests, all of the kind of hippies

00:53:48.720 and, and, uh, that kind of counterculture.

00:53:51.460 And, uh, you know, my dad got a scholarship to go to, to go to college, was working the

00:53:56.060 whole time to support his mother, support his sister, kind of help the family.

00:53:59.420 Um, and, and, and he would tell, he says, you know, uh, I see all these hippies, all

00:54:04.200 the rich kids were the, were the hippies and the protesters and the counterculture.

00:54:07.520 He says the working class kids, you know, we had to get a job.

00:54:10.540 We had to take things seriously.

00:54:11.600 We had to, you know, show up to work.

00:54:14.120 And, uh, you know, it, it really is this kind of class inversion.

00:54:18.560 It's this, this inversion of Marxism where our elites are the Marxist revolutionaries and

00:54:24.120 our working class people are our conservatives because they need that set of structures and

00:54:28.860 values in order for them to have a dignified and meaningful life.

00:54:33.440 And so we have an elite class that wants to dissolve all of the social and economic structures

00:54:38.600 that are providing the basis for stable lives at the bottom.

00:54:42.760 The second story I'm going to tell you is very interesting.

00:54:45.300 Uh, my wife and I, uh, uh, went to see you, uh, in Seattle, Washington, a number of years

00:54:50.460 ago at one of your speeches next to us was this, uh, kid.

00:54:54.120 Young kid, maybe 25.

00:54:56.220 We got to talking to him before the show, before you and Dave came on and he said, you

00:55:00.260 know, I drove, you know, an hour and a half.

00:55:01.780 I drove from the kind of more rural area here in Washington state.

00:55:05.020 And, uh, you know, my life was a mess a few years ago.

00:55:08.320 Um, I was doing drugs.

00:55:09.920 I was not showing up to work.

00:55:11.440 I was waking up late.

00:55:12.580 I was, you know, just couldn't quite get things together.

00:55:15.140 I was anxious all the time.

00:55:17.060 Um, and I, I was on YouTube.

00:55:18.660 I'm not much of a reader, you know, barely finished high school.

00:55:21.340 And I listened to Jordan Peterson.

00:55:22.920 I don't know how, and then piece by piece, I started following those basic building blocks

00:55:27.980 of, of his advice.

00:55:29.340 Now I'm working full time.

00:55:30.940 I've got a great job on a construction crew.

00:55:33.160 I'm getting paid over time.

00:55:34.380 I wanted to hear him speak.

00:55:35.520 And so I, for me, it was a kind of remarkable, uh, uh, uh, example of this phenomenon where

00:55:41.700 you have people in the country, especially younger people, especially people from a middle

00:55:46.720 class or working class for whom the stakes are high.

00:55:49.580 If you screw up and you're from a working class family, your life can be a disaster very

00:55:54.220 quickly.

00:55:54.600 And you're giving this kind of time-tested advice about how to grow up, how to take responsibility.

00:56:00.660 Um, and it makes a difference in people's lives.

00:56:03.620 And I think the reason why the left is so upset with you, maybe the reason they're so

00:56:08.060 upset with me in the same token is that they're trying to give advice to the working class that

00:56:14.140 will end up destroying their lives.

00:56:16.540 Um, and it exposes the fraudulence of their ideas.

00:56:24.780 It exposes the hypocrisy of their position, and it really exposes, uh, the kind of vengeful

00:56:30.780 heart of their ideology.

00:56:32.040 Um, and, and to me, that's really what, what, what converted me out of the left.

00:56:37.220 I can't spend any more time with these phony people, uh, with these people who are the sons

00:56:43.220 and daughters of immense privilege that are acting, playing revolutionary, trying to impose

00:56:48.880 a set of ideas that I know out of my own observation in all the countries around the world, as well

00:56:54.660 as spending significant time in the poorest places in the United States, lead to nothing

00:56:58.820 but disaster.

00:57:00.260 Well, don't forget death.

00:57:01.640 It's not just disaster.

00:57:03.140 It's torture and death, right?

00:57:04.760 Widescale economic failure, utter catastrophe.

00:57:07.760 Okay.

00:57:08.000 So let's, let's do this.

00:57:09.320 Let's, let's, um, first of all, throw out a compassionate rope to the narcissistic messianic

00:57:16.900 young people who are entranced by the universities.

00:57:19.060 Because one of the things that I have learned as a university professor is if you take people

00:57:24.140 who have some vengeful motivation and some resentment, let's say to their parents and

00:57:28.200 to broader society, and you say, well, look, things are corrupted by power and you're going

00:57:33.260 to feel oppressed.

00:57:34.040 And that's the constant lot of mankind since the beginning of day one, because history is,

00:57:38.540 is, is, is anachronistic and out of date.

00:57:42.660 And there is an element of atrocity in it.

00:57:44.800 So you're going to have an antagonistic relationship to some degree with your past.

00:57:48.440 But the appropriate thing to do that is to do with that is to put everything in its proper

00:57:52.820 place and to realize that as an active moral agent, you can remediate the sins of the past

00:57:57.540 as a consequence of your ethical striving.

00:57:59.740 And if you introduce young people to that idea and show them a pathway forward that doesn't

00:58:05.320 allow them to merely mask their new and hard won cynicism, you know, they're no longer

00:58:12.540 naive.

00:58:13.140 They can see that the world has some problems and that can easily send them into a tailspin.

00:58:17.640 You say, yeah, yeah, the problems are there, but they don't constitute the core, um, central

00:58:23.620 spirit, let's say of mankind that the desire to dominate, then you can set them on a more

00:58:28.640 appropriate path.

00:58:29.560 And so these narcissistic young people bear some of the responsibility for their idiot

00:58:34.520 revolutionary presumptions, but the fools and mountebanks and revengeful dimwits who

00:58:41.100 educate them bear at least as much responsibility, who miseducate them, who anti-educate them, who

00:58:47.080 make them stupider and worse than they would have been had they not attended the institution

00:58:51.420 at all, as well as picking $160,000 out of the pockets of their future earnings for the

00:58:58.420 privilege of doing so, even while they didn't attend university, say, during the COVID period,

00:59:03.880 as we might point out.

00:59:05.140 And so having said that and putting the, uh, responsibility on the educators, especially

00:59:12.520 the faculties of education, which are damned right to their core, I would also like to take

00:59:17.460 some issue with this notion that power is the fundamental motivation that governs social

00:59:24.720 interaction.

00:59:25.280 So I want to just mention three facts and then we can discuss them.

00:59:29.820 So first of all, there are a percentage of people who use power as their fundamental ethos

00:59:37.480 in the governance of their social relations.

00:59:40.400 And so psychopaths do that.

00:59:42.340 And so do the dark triad types, Machiavellians and narcissists.

00:59:47.080 And so, so the three of those make up the dark triad.

00:59:49.520 And then you might ask yourself, well, if psychopaths wield power and that's their fundamental motivation

00:59:55.400 and their ethos, how successful are they?

00:59:58.340 If our societies are basically dominated by power and power structures, then you'd expect

01:00:03.500 the psychopathic types to thrive.

01:00:05.780 And the data on that anthropologically and psychologically is quite clear.

01:00:09.900 You get the cynics who say, well, all those who occupy the upper echelons of power and authority

01:00:14.600 are psychopaths, but that's simply not true.

01:00:17.220 And the reason it's not true is because psychopathy is actually a very, um, ineffective, adaptive

01:00:23.100 strategy, even biologically speaking.

01:00:25.520 So being a psychopath means if you're a male, that you can fool some of the girls, some of

01:00:30.840 the time with your pretensions to competence and power that are false.

01:00:34.660 And now and then as a consequence, you can reproduce.

01:00:37.500 And that's how psychopathy propagates itself biologically.

01:00:41.840 It's not an effective reproductive strategy, but it doesn't have zero utility in some situations.

01:00:47.240 So it can be exploited.

01:00:48.420 But the anthropological and cross-cultural data show quite clearly that psychopathy rates

01:00:54.700 vary between one and 5%, stabilize around 3%, so that if it falls to 1%, there's too few

01:01:02.340 psychopaths and everybody falls asleep.

01:01:04.260 And then the psychopaths can, can have full sway and they increase.

01:01:08.260 But if it hits 5%, all the, and I would say tough men and women with an eye for deceit and

01:01:15.100 malevolence wake up and think, oh my God, look at all the psychopaths.

01:01:18.520 We better do something about this.

01:01:19.920 And they knock them back to 3%.

01:01:21.820 I should also point out that psychopaths, despite the common notion, cynical notion, again, that

01:01:27.760 they're hyper successful, let's say in big business, are not successful at all because

01:01:31.980 the clinical data shows very clearly that psychopaths betray their future selves just as badly as they

01:01:38.780 betray other people.

01:01:39.740 And so it's a counterproductive, adaptive strategy in iterative games.

01:01:44.640 And it might be better than laying inert, castrated, so to speak, in your mother's basement

01:01:49.600 till you're 50, but it isn't a good pathway through life.

01:01:52.940 So that's number one.

01:01:54.100 Power does not work as a motivation for mediating social relations.

01:01:59.280 Just try using it on your wife constantly and see how far that gets you.

01:02:02.800 Number two, let's make the case that it's power that propels animals upward in their social

01:02:09.680 hierarchies, right?

01:02:10.720 And so it's a dominant animal that achieves reproductive success.

01:02:15.220 And maybe the cardinal example of that is among chimpanzees, where the alpha chimp, who's

01:02:20.480 the roughest, toughest, dominating, oppressive, patriarchal male, gets access to all the females

01:02:26.060 and rules with an iron fist.

01:02:27.680 And that, by the way, is complete bloody rubbish.

01:02:31.480 It's not true.

01:02:32.280 And Frans de Waal, the famous Dutch primatologist who's been studying chimpanzees with incredible

01:02:39.600 perspicacity over the last 30 years, has demonstrated very clearly that sometimes even the alpha

01:02:45.860 chimp, so to speak, is the smallest male in the troop, who allies himself with powerful

01:02:50.880 females and who is an exceptional peacemaker and extremely reciprocal, tit for tat, love

01:02:56.120 thy neighbor as thyself in his relationships with his male friends.

01:03:00.660 And they have friendships that can span decades.

01:03:03.040 And so the primate alpha is a coalition builder and a peacemaker, not dominant.

01:03:09.400 And the ones who try to use dominance and sometimes succeed for short periods of time, destabilize

01:03:15.700 their whole societies and are likely to meet a brutal, vicious end at the hand of two or

01:03:20.700 more chimps who they've unfortunately and dangerously subordinated.

01:03:25.680 So, and then next, if that's not enough, I did some work on the anthropology of the doctrine

01:03:33.520 of the elders.

01:03:34.220 So in many tribal and agricultural societies, there's this, what would you call, proclivity

01:03:41.460 for governance to devolve towards so-called elders.

01:03:45.080 And they're often male, but not always, because the wise females can play a role too.

01:03:49.300 And so then the question is, in these societies, cross-culturally, who's elevated to the status

01:03:54.440 of elder?

01:03:55.020 And you might say, well, it's the roughest, toughest, most dominant, chimp-like, oppressive,

01:03:59.240 patriarchal male.

01:04:00.300 And that actually happens to not be the case at all.

01:04:03.520 And so what you do see is that productive males who are older, so they have to be productive,

01:04:08.800 who are simultaneously generous and reciprocal and are recognized as such in their communities,

01:04:15.080 hold the status of authority and help govern properly.

01:04:19.580 And so we could say that there's no evidence whatsoever on the scientific or anthropological

01:04:24.580 front that the doctrine, that the prime human motivation for the construction of social

01:04:29.940 relations is power.

01:04:31.500 And I would add to that further that if you think that power is the fundamental motivation

01:04:36.300 of humankind, that is a confession, not an observation.

01:04:40.860 And so look out for people who make that claim because they're making that claim to justify

01:04:44.900 to themselves their own use of psychopathic and narcissistic social mediation strategies.

01:04:51.800 And so I don't see that the leftists who make the claim that power is the fundamental motivation

01:04:57.440 have a shred of evidence on their side sociologically, scientifically, anthropologically, politically,

01:05:03.960 economically, theologically, or ethically.

01:05:06.200 And then we might add to that, just in closing, an observation that you already made, which

01:05:10.440 is, okay, guys, if it's not capitalism, which, to be admitted, produces inequality, just like

01:05:18.680 every other bloody economic system we've ever created, then what is it?

01:05:22.880 And then the idea would be, well, it's the socialist utopia where everybody has what they need

01:05:28.100 and does for others what they can, to paraphrase Marx's famous dicta.

01:05:33.580 And you might say, well, when has that actually worked successfully and not resulted in absolute

01:05:39.620 economic catastrophe and mass murder?

01:05:42.260 And the answer is, well, pretty much never.

01:05:44.800 And then you say, well, doesn't that constitute evidence to invalidate your claim?

01:05:50.380 And they say, well, you know, really, the reason that the Marxist doctrines haven't

01:05:54.780 worked is because they've never been implemented properly.

01:05:58.160 And so what do you think about that claim?

01:05:59.960 Is that fundamentally the doctrine is sound, but for whatever reason, maybe it's the machinations

01:06:06.000 of evil capitalists and the, you know, the reactionary tendency of oppressive patriarchs

01:06:12.460 to scuttle the socialist enterprise like we did by refusing to trade with Venezuela.

01:06:18.720 And the actual reason why these egalitarian states never work isn't because of the doctrine,

01:06:23.000 but because of reaction from those who are putting forward traditional liberal and conservative

01:06:28.380 views.

01:06:29.340 So what do you do about that claim?

01:06:31.720 I mean, it's so absurd.

01:06:34.140 You try something, you know, a thousand times, it never works.

01:06:38.040 The evidence is in on Marxist economics.

01:06:40.760 You look at even the theoretically Marxist states in the world today, specifically China,

01:06:47.500 even India, which had a kind of socialistic economy until 1990.

01:06:53.080 All of these emerging economies that tried the socialist or even the kind of state Marxist

01:06:57.700 systems, they've abandoned them to the point where actually, let's say China or Vietnam that

01:07:03.420 are still officially communist countries have actually a lower rate of state expenditure

01:07:08.680 as a percentage of GDP than the United States.

01:07:11.220 The United States is actually, in some measurements, more socialistic than the Marxist, Leninist or communist

01:07:16.780 countries in the world.

01:07:18.240 And so the evidence is in, among anyone who's experienced a communist economy, they're all

01:07:23.900 fleeing that system as fast as possible.

01:07:26.620 Well, and let's elaborate on that for a moment, because that's really accelerated since 1989

01:07:32.800 when the wall fell.

01:07:34.660 And the reason it's accelerated is because the communists aren't actively intermediating,

01:07:39.220 let's say, in African economies to the degree that they were, and dementing people into adopting

01:07:44.100 absurd economic policies to impoverish their people.

01:07:47.060 And so what's been the consequence of that since the 1980s?

01:07:50.720 And the answer is that as these great economies, China and India included, but also with Africa

01:07:55.820 increasingly, have adapted themselves to free market policies and rule of law and respect

01:08:03.160 for the integrity and dignity of the individual, what's happened is that we've seen an unprecedented

01:08:09.280 expansion of general wealth all around the world, and we've lifted more people out of poverty

01:08:15.720 merely in the last 12 years than had been lifted out of poverty in the entire history of humankind

01:08:21.000 before that, at any given moment.

01:08:23.380 And that's all a consequence.

01:08:25.240 And then we can say, as to elaborate on your point, is that you look at China.

01:08:30.000 So China is, was, and is a communist country.

01:08:33.220 But the reason that China has leapt forward and is now becoming twice as rich, by the way,

01:08:38.660 in terms of purchasing parity, power parity, every seven years, twice as rich, is because

01:08:44.380 they set up special economic zones that were basically predicated on the Hong Kong model,

01:08:48.980 where they could leave the free enterprise types alone within the broader confines of the

01:08:53.720 ethically appropriate communism.

01:08:55.400 And those places took off like mad, which meant that as soon as you got the mad men and

01:09:00.060 resentful sons of bitches out of the way, that the essential conscientious striving and

01:09:06.640 native intelligence of the Chinese population was able to manifest itself and turn that country

01:09:12.220 from an impoverished and starving country, in many ways, into one of the world's industrial

01:09:19.620 powerhouses.

01:09:20.360 And that only took a couple of decades.

01:09:22.540 And so I've always thought when I hear these, the Marxist types claim that, you know, real

01:09:27.720 Marxism has never been tried, that they think narcissistically something along the following

01:09:32.020 lines, which is, well, you know, Stalin didn't do a very good job and Lenin didn't do a very

01:09:36.900 good job and neither did Mao and neither did Pol Pot.

01:09:40.660 And those are quite a few different cultures and situations, boys and girls.

01:09:44.500 But if I would have been the tyrant in charge then with all my wisdom and my deep knowledge

01:09:49.980 of Marxist doctrine, then the socialist utopia certainly would have come to fruition.

01:09:54.380 And so there's a Luciferian narcissism driving this activism that's almost, well, it's certainly

01:10:01.340 ungodly in its magnitude and it pretty much goes all the way to the bottom.

01:10:05.720 And even if that's not true of the individual holders of these Luciferian vengeful ideas,

01:10:11.600 it's definitely true of the pretensions of the system of ideas itself.

01:10:16.820 I think the China idea, the China example is very important and we have a rough analog here

01:10:24.440 in the United States.

01:10:25.080 So the question is, you've laid it out, I think everyone knows this, even in the 1950s

01:10:30.160 and 1960s, the sophisticated and honest Marxist intellectuals in the West, for example, Herbert

01:10:36.460 Marcuse in his book on Soviet Marxism, they admitted this.

01:10:40.400 They said that this system does not work.

01:10:42.280 It can't solve the production problem.

01:10:44.660 It can't, it's devolved into bureaucratic tyranny and repression.

01:10:49.080 Then you have Solzhenitsyn.

01:10:50.440 Everyone knows this.

01:10:51.600 Then you have the fall of communism, where it was kind of the definitive and kind of explosion

01:10:57.300 of this system.

01:10:58.460 So the question then becomes, if everyone knows that this is how it works, everyone can observe

01:11:03.780 it, everyone who's smart knows this already, why are they still promoting it?

01:11:07.500 And I think the reason is not because of some genuine conviction that, well, if only Trotsky

01:11:13.280 had gained power, it would have worked out better.

01:11:16.080 If only we can try it again, it would work out great this time.

01:11:20.220 I don't think they believe that.

01:11:21.640 And I actually don't think that deeply, and they're kind of heart of hearts, they actually

01:11:26.260 want to have a socialist or a communist economy because that would require them managing and

01:11:31.200 running physical production, which for intellectuals is like, oh my gosh, get me out of a factory.

01:11:36.340 I can't change a tire, just forget it.

01:11:39.340 And so what the actual kind of Gramscian adaptation is in a post-Soviet historical period is we don't

01:11:48.220 really want to take over the die-cut tool factory in rural Michigan to create auto parts.

01:11:57.240 We're not interested in that.

01:11:58.860 We want to redistribute prestige and social status.

01:12:02.260 And so it's a real cynical game where they speak the language of Marxism.

01:12:06.540 They speak the language of empowering the working class.

01:12:08.940 They speak the language of material redistribution.

01:12:11.180 But when it comes down to it, they don't really care.

01:12:14.460 They know it wouldn't really work.

01:12:15.940 And I think secretly, they hope that it doesn't happen because they benefit from this incredible

01:12:21.760 economic production.

01:12:23.100 Because again, they have those high status positions.

01:12:25.460 They're entrenched in their economic fortunes.

01:12:28.440 They have economic security through the bureaucracy, through the tenure system, etc.

01:12:32.920 So they're cynically pushing this narrative as a way to redistribute status and prestige,

01:12:38.560 which is really what they crave.

01:12:40.460 That's the real currency.

01:12:41.960 That's the real redistribution.

01:12:43.760 Well, everyone craves that.

01:12:46.080 Everyone craves that, Christopher, I would say, because there isn't anything that you have

01:12:50.900 that's more valuable than your reputation.

01:12:53.000 You trade on your reputation.

01:12:55.300 And if you're known by people as an honest and reciprocal player whose word is his bond

01:13:02.640 and who will do what he says he will do, then everyone lines up to play with you and

01:13:07.560 your economic viability is guaranteed.

01:13:12.420 And so what we're tempted by constantly is the strategy of accruing to ourselves false reputation.

01:13:23.000 And it is a form of narcissism and Machiavellianism and psychopathy because what it means is

01:13:28.060 that people who have stored up genuine value in their reputation and who have been honest

01:13:33.320 players and who know how to work and know how to share are much more likely to be rewarded

01:13:39.980 with a deserved prestige.

01:13:41.540 But the narcissists and the psychopaths and the intellectual Machiavellians can parasitize that

01:13:46.980 by making unwarranted moral claims and then saying about themselves that they are as good

01:13:52.260 or better than the people they're criticizing.

01:13:55.100 And because they have intellectual prowess, they're often able to out-argue the people

01:14:00.760 who have accrued genuine moral virtue.

01:14:02.700 That might be like the self-made working class types who know what's right and who act out

01:14:08.780 what's right, but who aren't as able to articulate it, which is a challenge on the conservative

01:14:13.680 side.

01:14:15.020 So let's, if you don't mind, let's turn to a minute, well, in our remaining time for a

01:14:20.580 minute, to what you've been doing more practically.

01:14:23.900 And so a lot of this discussion has in fact been intellectual.

01:14:27.040 And so let's nail it back down to the ground.

01:14:29.440 You've been working on the policy front in a variety of different states, most notably

01:14:33.480 Florida.

01:14:34.600 And so, and to push back practically against the inroads of the system of ideas that we've

01:14:41.320 been discussing.

01:14:41.900 And so tell me how that's come about, what it is, and what you think the advantages and

01:14:46.740 pitfalls are.

01:14:48.320 Sure.

01:14:48.760 Well, I think first of all, as I said at the outset, what we have to understand is that

01:14:55.460 if you want to take the metaphor of production, there's kind of intellectual production right

01:15:01.260 now that is now being dominated by a specific ideology and then using the transmission belt

01:15:06.820 of the institutions in order to corrupt them, in order to achieve dominance over them.

01:15:11.480 That was their strategy that they laid out in the early 1990s in critical race theory and

01:15:15.880 queer theory, for example.

01:15:17.060 I think the two most prominent theories that we're grappling with today.

01:15:20.940 And they've achieved this.

01:15:22.960 And I think that there's a need and a genuine necessity for people to understand the theories

01:15:29.900 at an intellectual or abstract level.

01:15:32.020 A lot of the power, just as you've said, of these ideas is because they're intimidating

01:15:37.180 for people who don't have a background in academia, a background to understand the terminology

01:15:43.540 or the concepts behind these ideas.

01:15:46.260 And so they'll be kind of bullied into submission in a way.

01:15:50.960 But the key takeaway and the key thing I've been working on, I'm really trying to explain is

01:15:56.600 that when ideas, when ideology becomes attached to administrative power in a permanent and meaningful

01:16:05.340 way, you have a revolution.

01:16:07.260 That is the definition of a revolution.

01:16:09.840 A kind of disruptive ideology achieves administrative and bureaucratic power.

01:16:13.720 So we're in actually those conditions today.

01:16:15.860 We're in the midst of a soft, superstructural, cultural revolution.

01:16:21.240 And the goal for conservatives should be to sever that connection between those ideologies

01:16:26.960 and bureaucratic power.

01:16:28.800 You can't do that through mere persuasion.

01:16:31.840 You can't do that through mere intellectual discussion or debate.

01:16:34.800 You can't do that even by convincing a majority of the public, which in these cases we've already

01:16:40.260 done, to agree with you, to share your point of view.

01:16:43.700 You actually have to say, hey, wait a minute.

01:16:45.860 These ideas are wholly subsidized by public dollars, whether it's at universities, which

01:16:51.220 are directly financed by the public, or private universities, which are subsidized through

01:16:55.220 student loan guarantees by the public, or whether it's the K-12 school system or government

01:16:59.520 agencies.

01:17:00.700 The critical theories, critical race theory, critical gender theory, queer theory, whatever

01:17:04.180 you want to call them, are a creature of the state.

01:17:08.260 They're a creature of the bureaucracy.

01:17:10.080 They cannot survive without public subsidy, which means they cannot survive without the continued

01:17:15.040 support of legislators at the state level and at the federal level.

01:17:19.440 And so what should we do about this?

01:17:21.300 Well, we should say, hey, wait a minute.

01:17:22.840 These ideas violate the basic values, the basic beliefs of the majority of the citizens in the

01:17:31.260 republic who should then vote for legislators and encourage their legislators to use the democratic

01:17:36.820 process in order to reform those systems and bureaucracies, to align them more closely with the values and

01:17:44.320 the true telos of the public, whom they represent.

01:17:49.760 And so what I want to do is really start to outline specifically how we can do that, to say,

01:17:54.720 hey, wait a minute.

01:17:55.280 If you're in a red state, let's say, or even if you're in a supposedly purple state, trending

01:17:59.920 red like Florida, you don't have to be permanently subsidizing left-wing ideologies at every level

01:18:06.720 of your government.

01:18:07.580 If you're a Republican president, for example, I've worked with President Trump on this.

01:18:12.340 Hey, wait a minute.

01:18:12.920 Why is the federal government, not through legislative necessity or kind of a specific

01:18:20.500 legislative priority or requirement, but through the executive function, spending hundreds of

01:18:27.780 millions of dollars per year subsidizing critical race theory, subsidizing programs that promote

01:18:32.700 those ideas, subsidizing grants and other funding mechanisms?

01:18:37.000 How do you know?

01:18:38.680 Okay, so I'm listening to you and understanding your point.

01:18:42.920 I worked as an academic and a researcher for many years, and one of the things that

01:18:47.720 always disturbed me was when my research became subordinate to government demand.

01:18:51.840 So, for example, I was working on assessing the onset of alcoholism in young men who didn't

01:18:58.920 have alcoholic fathers or mothers, by the way, and I concentrated on young men because they're

01:19:03.640 much more likely to become alcoholic, and because if your mother was alcoholic, you might have

01:19:07.840 fetal alcohol syndrome, and that would be an additional complicating factor in the research.

01:19:12.620 And what happened was that, partly because of diversity requirements, which the Clintons

01:19:17.560 brought in, I was forced to include females in equal number in my studies, and I just simply

01:19:23.200 couldn't do that because I couldn't include female alcoholics, and so I just stopped doing

01:19:27.000 it altogether.

01:19:28.260 And my research lab, along with that of my mentor, Robert Peel, had done some of the fundamental

01:19:32.840 work in outlining the biological basis of the propensity for alcoholism.

01:19:36.660 So that was just scuttled.

01:19:37.720 So I'm very afraid when I hear policymakers, including you, despite the wide grounds for

01:19:44.140 our agreement, talk about how legislatures can now intervene, and I know they're doing

01:19:50.820 that anyway, right?

01:19:52.060 And that's part of your point.

01:19:53.440 How they can intervene in terms of funding to stop subsidizing ideas that are deemed undesirable.

01:20:00.560 But, you know, that brings up, I don't say I have a solution to this, by the way, but it

01:20:06.200 brings up the specter of producing a government bureaucracy who regards it as its mission to

01:20:13.600 police intellectual content.

01:20:15.680 So how do we thread that needle, do you think?

01:20:19.460 A couple different ways.

01:20:20.800 First, I think you have to take a step back and really assess the status quo.

01:20:24.640 There's this kind of, again, what I think of as a myth or a delusion among many of my

01:20:29.920 friends, even on the center right or maybe the libertarian right, where they say, no,

01:20:33.920 no, no, we don't meddle with the government.

01:20:37.120 We don't meddle with the bureaucracy.

01:20:38.480 We don't meddle with public universities.

01:20:40.520 That's an infringement on what's so-called academic freedom.

01:20:43.820 That's an infringement on the free market, et cetera.

01:20:46.360 But when you say we're going to take a kind of non-interventionist approach in a government

01:20:51.920 agency, that government agency will be filled by people who have vastly different values

01:20:57.500 than you do, and they have no qualms about intervening.

01:21:00.420 So you cede the playing field.

01:21:02.720 You cede the territory to your enemies.

01:21:05.440 But even more broadly, at a very abstract level, at a general level, these are public

01:21:09.580 institutions.

01:21:10.820 These are institutions that are already chartered, governed, funded, and then administered by

01:21:17.640 the government, by the people, by legislation.

01:21:20.880 And so the question is not, do we want legislation and meddling or do we not want it?

01:21:25.380 That's an impossibility.

01:21:26.480 The question is, what are the ground rules?

01:21:29.200 What are the guidelines and what are the principles by which our public institutions should be governed?

01:21:34.220 And my argument is to abdicate on that question, which is difficult.

01:21:39.360 I agree with you.

01:21:40.340 It's difficult.

01:21:41.160 There can be overreach.

01:21:42.320 There can be problems.

01:21:43.360 It's very complicated.

01:21:44.300 But to abdicate and to pretend that you don't have to answer that question is a recipe for

01:21:49.820 guaranteed failure and the continued corruption of what we see in our institutions today.

01:21:54.920 And so the conservative or someone who wants to change these institutions has to recognize

01:22:00.640 that these are fundamentally political questions.

01:22:02.620 There's no abstract and totally disconnected intellectual freedom in the public university.

01:22:09.420 You have intellectual freedom under the First Amendment as an individual citizen.

01:22:13.260 But you don't have license to do whatever you want with a permanent taxpayer subsidy, even

01:22:18.660 if you're violating the spirit of the law, violating the letter of the law, violating the

01:22:23.240 will of the voters through their state representatives.

01:22:25.720 And so while it is a difficult question, it's a question that we cannot refuse to answer.

01:22:31.500 And in fact, we have to recognize that there will be a set of rules governing our public

01:22:35.880 institutions.

01:22:36.740 The question is, who sets them and what will those rules be?

01:22:40.080 Oh, well, OK.

01:22:40.860 So here's a counterexample, let's say.

01:22:44.180 It's rather radical.

01:22:45.880 So I've been speaking at some length recently with the president of Hillsdale College in Michigan.

01:22:52.200 And Hillsdale is a conservative institution.

01:22:55.060 I would say a traditional educational institution and one that's thriving and also offering,

01:23:01.300 from what I can tell, a genuine education to its students in the deepest sense.

01:23:05.700 And Larry Arnn, who's the president, is a very respectable man in all the positive ways.

01:23:10.460 And they decided a long time ago, 50 years, I believe, I think it was in the 1960s, that

01:23:17.600 they would not take a cent of government funding.

01:23:20.860 And the consequence of that is that they haven't.

01:23:23.580 And the secondary consequence is because the place is unbelievably well managed and governed,

01:23:28.780 that they attract way more students than they can possibly take.

01:23:32.080 They're growing like mad and they have a 1% dropout rate.

01:23:36.260 1%, not 40 or 50%, 1%.

01:23:40.040 And also the academic performance margin between males and females at Hillsdale is actually quite small by comparative standards,

01:23:48.100 which is also an indication of the positive quality of their efforts on the educational front.

01:23:53.480 And so maybe, I don't know, man, maybe part of the issue here is,

01:23:57.060 is it possible that if we set up public education institutions, per se,

01:24:03.160 that we end up in a situation where they're going to be dominated by parasitic bureaucrats

01:24:07.560 who are pushing an ideological agenda,

01:24:09.520 and that that's an equal danger right now?

01:24:12.220 It's a real danger on the left, clearly, because they dominate the educational establishment.

01:24:16.260 But maybe merely setting our systems up so they are publicly funded to such a great degree

01:24:22.000 makes the probability that they will become ideologically dominated approach 100%.

01:24:28.760 That's probably right for the same reason that it's kind of the Marxist economic problem.

01:24:34.300 They're insulated from consequences.

01:24:36.100 They're subsidized.

01:24:37.600 They don't have to have productivity.

01:24:39.080 They can raise their prices in perpetuity to extreme levels

01:24:42.060 because there's those government subsidies coming in on the student loan front.

01:24:45.800 Yeah, definitely.

01:24:46.880 I think you want to have a more competitive environment.

01:24:49.340 I love Hillsdale.

01:24:50.380 I was a visiting lecturer there earlier this year, got to know Dr. Arnn.

01:24:54.580 And while I would say they've really created a model of extreme integrity,

01:25:01.100 extreme accountability, extreme responsibility towards those students,

01:25:05.100 and I think a pedagogy that works, that has stood the test of time,

01:25:09.080 that is in some ways a progressive in the good sense of the word.

01:25:14.040 Hillsdale, of course, was famously one of the first colleges in the country to accept African-Americans,

01:25:19.740 to accept black students in the kind of mid-1800s.

01:25:24.060 In its initial class, in its initial class, right off the bat.

01:25:27.680 That's right.

01:25:28.800 Regardless of race, color, creed, nationality, et cetera.

01:25:34.280 But something else that's happening with Hillsdale that I think is very exciting

01:25:38.000 and I think is worth the risk, Dr. Arnn and the governor of Tennessee have recently struck a deal

01:25:44.900 where Hillsdale is going to found and operate 50 charter schools.

01:25:50.620 So publicly funded charter schools following the Hillsdale classical education pedagogical approach

01:25:57.580 in partnership with the government of Tennessee.

01:26:01.560 And sure, there are risks to this approach.

01:26:03.840 But I think that, again, if you compare it to the status quo, it's an improvement.

01:26:08.780 Will there be other problems and questions that we have to resolve in three years, five years, ten years?

01:26:13.340 Of course.

01:26:14.600 Yeah, well, how do you know, for example, how do you know that your attempts aren't going to degenerate rapidly,

01:26:19.200 let's say in ten years, into something that's indistinguishable from a persecution of those who hold,

01:26:26.920 for temperamental reasons, let's say, political views that tilt them towards the left?

01:26:31.140 I'm not saying that you would do that, although I would say it's hard to resist the temptation, you know,

01:26:36.580 especially given that the playing field right now is so bloody lopsided.

01:26:40.840 You know, that does set up the desire to level the playing field.

01:26:45.040 The problem with leveling the damn playing field is you tend to level the players, you know?

01:26:49.640 And so I don't—so, well, so, yeah, go ahead.

01:26:54.900 Here's what I think the ideal is.

01:26:56.480 I think it's important for us to kind of reflect on, okay, well, let's solve these practical problems.

01:27:01.320 Sure, there's no guarantee, right?

01:27:03.640 There's no guarantee.

01:27:04.700 I think it's—the only guarantee is that it's an experiment that could be better than the status quo

01:27:09.620 and likely would be better.

01:27:11.260 But I think the question is, well, what system do we want?

01:27:13.700 What is that end vision?

01:27:15.000 And the end vision that I have, one I'm working towards, is a system of greater pluralism,

01:27:21.880 a system of greater independence, and a system of greater self-governance.

01:27:26.360 And so another good example is in Arizona, they recently passed legislation,

01:27:30.280 the great governor down there, Doug Ducey, saying if you want to opt out of the public school system,

01:27:35.400 if it's violating your conscience, if it's not serving your needs,

01:27:39.620 if it's not ideal for your kids, we'll give you, as a family, $7,000 a year per child

01:27:46.380 to take to any educational institution of your choice.

01:27:49.060 Right, right, right.

01:27:49.620 Charter school, private school, religious school, homeschool.

01:27:52.980 And so these different models saying, hey, we're going to have Hillsdale charter schools,

01:27:56.920 we're going to have educational funding, follow the family, giving them greater choice,

01:28:00.880 can create in the same way of a capitalist economic system, a more competitive educational

01:28:06.940 environment where people can go to an institution that reflects their values, that serves their

01:28:11.860 needs, where they can have self-governance or local governance.

01:28:15.500 And then you can have, you know, if, hey, look, I'm personally, if you want to have critical

01:28:18.980 race theory as your K-12 pedagogy, you love it, all power to you.

01:28:24.240 You should have a school that serves your needs, that reflects your values.

01:28:27.260 I'll respect that.

01:28:29.260 But we want to have a system of greater pluralism.

01:28:31.500 So communities can really come together around a set of shared values.

01:28:34.780 They can take responsibility for those institutions.

01:28:37.520 And so we want to have this patchwork republic, this system where people can find something

01:28:44.280 that really speaks to them.

01:28:45.800 And then you have a greater overall system at the general level of competition.

01:28:50.000 So they can say, hey, wait a minute, the CRT schools are crashing and burning.

01:28:54.200 They're a total disaster.

01:28:55.320 They're run by pathological people and their outcomes are poor.

01:28:59.760 And we have other options that are actually performing better.

01:29:02.720 Right now, there's no competition.

01:29:04.620 There's no alternatives.

01:29:06.140 You are stuck in a residential assigned public school that is a zero sum game for the competition

01:29:12.680 of values and competition of ideologies.

01:29:14.720 They're set at the state level.

01:29:16.520 OK, so let me ask you about that, too.

01:29:18.620 Have you talked to any political types at the governorship level, let's say, about the

01:29:23.920 fact that the faculties of education have a stronghold on certifying teachers?

01:29:27.780 Because that's part of the problem, because those institutions are 100% captured.

01:29:32.440 I think I could say safely that there are no more corrupt institutions in Western society

01:29:38.620 in general than faculties of education.

01:29:41.300 And so why is it the case that states everywhere only require a teaching certificate, let's say,

01:29:50.040 teaching certification from faculties of education?

01:29:52.380 Why not open that up to holders of bachelor's degrees more generally and remove the stranglehold

01:29:57.760 of these centralized institutions?

01:29:59.460 Is there anything happening on that front?

01:30:01.740 There is.

01:30:02.360 I've talked to a number of governors and then many, many state legislators.

01:30:05.560 They're aware of this problem.

01:30:07.580 They're aware that it functions as an ideological cartel that is permanently subsidized by taxpayers

01:30:13.020 and then controls the key transmission belt of ideology to the K-12 system.

01:30:18.360 It also attracts the wrong people.

01:30:21.040 It weeds out the right people.

01:30:23.420 And so this is the phenomenon where you have the kind of proverbial pink hair elementary school

01:30:28.520 teacher talking about pansexuality with their second graders.

01:30:33.300 Those come from the graduate schools of education.

01:30:36.000 Legislators know this is a problem.

01:30:37.940 And there's model legislation that is working through the system right now that I think has

01:30:41.600 a good chance of passing in the coming years where they're going to do a couple things.

01:30:45.100 They're going to say no more requirement for these teacher training certificates or master's

01:30:51.080 degrees from graduate schools of education.

01:30:53.360 If you have a bachelor's degree in the subject area, for example, let's say you have a bachelor's

01:30:58.520 in math, you can automatically be qualified to teach high school math.

01:31:02.500 If you have a bachelor's degree at the elementary school level, you have an automatic qualification

01:31:07.160 to enter the teaching force.

01:31:09.420 And then there's even people saying, hey, look, we want to have a kind of merit-based system.

01:31:13.640 They take a competency test.

01:31:15.100 They take a subject matter expertise test, similar to the old SAT IIs.

01:31:20.620 Do you know American history?

01:31:21.860 Do you know math?

01:31:22.760 Can you perform?

01:31:23.920 I think that's coming.

01:31:25.220 I think this is something that is absolutely going to happen.

01:31:28.980 And then what will happen is, by attrition, we'll bleed out those non-competitive and really

01:31:33.700 captured institutions like the graduate schools of education.

01:31:36.360 And the graduate schools of education are very aware of this.

01:31:39.080 They're very aware of this.

01:31:40.060 They're very scared.

01:31:41.080 They're fighting very hard.

01:31:42.460 Well, I'm so pleased to hear that.

01:31:44.100 So look, everybody, our time is coming to an end here.

01:31:46.900 I've been talking today with Christopher Ruffo, who's proved himself to be quite an ideological,

01:31:53.280 intellectual, philosophical, and practical thorn in the side of those who wish to push

01:31:57.540 revolutionary Marxist doctrines to elevate their own reputation in an unearned manner.

01:32:03.020 And it was a pleasure talking to you today.

01:32:05.520 And I'm very happy that we were able to walk through the complexities of these things to outline

01:32:10.800 the history of these ideas to discuss their virtues, let's say, in relationship to critiques

01:32:17.600 of power and their shortcomings, philosophically and practically.

01:32:21.100 I would have liked to delve more into the ideas of intersectionality to get into the weeds

01:32:25.840 a bit on that front.

01:32:27.340 But we'll save that for another discussion.

01:32:30.180 Everyone, I'm going to talk to Christopher a little bit more behind the Daily Wire Plus

01:32:34.440 paywall.

01:32:35.680 I've parsed out my time now on the YouTube interview front into two sections, one where I

01:32:40.720 discuss broad ideas with a bit of an emphasis on the personal with my guests, and then to

01:32:45.780 spend an additional half an hour, which is a plus, hence Daily Wire Plus, let's say, for

01:32:52.340 those who are interested in subscribing.

01:32:54.440 I'm going to talk to Christopher today about his intellectual journey personally.

01:32:58.160 I'm interested, for example, he mentioned that he was quite radically on the left side

01:33:02.160 for a while, and I want to find out why that was and how that changed.

01:33:06.180 Hello, everyone.

01:33:06.880 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on dailywireplus.com.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 18, 2022

280. Critical Racists ｜ Christopher Rufo

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