The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 335. Imposing Limits on the Woke？｜ Christopher Rufo

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. I have the opportunity today to speak with one of Florida's leading troublemakers, you might say, Christopher Ruffo.

00:01:17.360 And he's been working on the education front in Florida, and I want to play the role of friendly enemy today.

00:01:25.700 Because I'm very interested in what's happening in Florida, concerned as I am about the state of education in general in the West, North America, Canada, U.S.

00:01:36.540 And also, more specifically, with regard to higher education.

00:01:41.140 And so I've been watching the goings-on in Florida with a great amount of interest, and I have a lot of questions.

00:01:45.440 And I'm going to try to push Mr. Ruffo, Chris, as hard as I can today in a friendly manner,

00:01:52.080 because I want to get to the bottom of all of this to the degree that that's possible.

00:01:57.020 And I'm certainly seeing excesses on the leftist radical side with regards to the reformulation of the education system.

00:02:04.240 And as far as I'm concerned, something needs to be done about that.

00:02:07.300 But that's complicated, and it's hard to do something about it without falling prey to potential excesses on the more conservative and traditionalist side.

00:02:16.220 So we're going to hash that out today. At least that's my plan.

00:02:18.640 So welcome, Chris. It's good of you to agree to talk to me today, and I'm really looking forward to this.

00:02:23.720 Yeah, likewise. It's a pleasure and an honor to be with you, and look forward to the conversation.

00:02:28.580 So let's start out by giving some people information about your background.

00:02:32.960 And you kind of sprang onto the scene, at least insofar as I was concerned, just a couple of years ago,

00:02:39.920 when you started really, what would you say, pushing back against the DEI activists on the education front.

00:02:48.340 And now you seem to be pretty integrally involved in Governor DeSantis of Florida's, what would you say,

00:02:56.400 strategic moves forward on the education reform front.

00:03:01.800 And so let's start with a bit of description about your background and how you came about doing what you are doing and what you're doing as well.

00:03:09.740 Yeah, well, you know, I think my background is pretty different than a lot of the folks in the conservative world or the conservative movement.

00:03:16.140 You know, I grew up as a kind of a young man of the left.

00:03:20.660 That was my politics, kind of hard left politics as a teenager.

00:03:24.920 My family members were kind of in a long tradition of kind of left wing and even kind of Marxist and communist activism.

00:03:33.900 And and but then over the course of my adulthood in college and then after college, I spent about 10 years directing documentaries all over the world for PBS,

00:03:43.800 sold a film to Netflix and other international TV stations.

00:03:46.520 And that left wing worldview totally fell apart.

00:03:50.800 I started working in the conservative world, started doing journalism.

00:03:54.280 And then, of course, I think sprung onto the scene, as you said it, with my work exposing critical race theory, first in government, then in K through 12 schools.

00:04:02.640 And I think part of my background that is maybe even helped make me successful in this is that I know how the left thinks intimately.

00:04:12.040 And I don't think that's true for my opponents.

00:04:15.500 I don't think that they know how the right thinks.

00:04:17.160 I don't think they know how conservatives think.

00:04:18.760 They don't think the right does think.

00:04:20.780 That's right.

00:04:21.460 Yeah, I get there was there was that great line, I think, from that conservatism is a series of irritable gestures.

00:04:27.900 You know, it's so condescending.

00:04:30.280 And I think that, you know, while you could let that bother you or you could let that annoy you,

00:04:36.240 it actually presents a strategic advantage for conservatives because we know how our opponents think.

00:04:42.060 I think, in many ways, I can make the arguments on my opponent's behalf better than they can.

00:04:46.560 And then they look at us just like we're barbarians at the gate.

00:04:49.520 And so it's fun.

00:04:51.100 And even playing that role a little bit, kind of leaning into it with a wink, playing the barbarian, for me, has been quite entertaining and quite amusing.

00:04:59.240 Yeah.

00:05:01.280 So let's go back to the first part of the biographical discussion there.

00:05:06.800 You said that you were hard left as a teenager and came from a pretty hard left family.

00:05:11.740 And it's definitely the case. 0.55

00:05:13.680 There's a famous line.

00:05:14.640 I don't remember who said it is that, you know, if you're a teenager with a heart, you're left leaning.

00:05:20.920 You're a liberal or a socialist.

00:05:22.320 If you're an adult with a brain, you're traditionalist or conservative leading.

00:05:25.460 And I think there's some real truth in that.

00:05:27.700 But also partly, and this has to do with, you know, your characterization of conservatism as a series of irritable gestures,

00:05:34.260 one of the things that young people are looking for to orient themselves in the world is a cause that's noble that they can identify with.

00:05:42.860 And it's really up to the community to provide that vision, which is part of their enculturation.

00:05:48.460 And conservatives have done a dreadful job of that, I would say.

00:05:51.720 And liberals as well, like the true liberals, not the leftist type.

00:05:54.720 So when you were a kid, teenager, what do you think was specifically attractive to you, both personally and philosophically, about what was being offered to you on the left?

00:06:07.200 Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is just a sense of heroism, a sense of drama, a sense of the romantic.

00:06:14.320 You get all of the mythology of the left.

00:06:16.540 You know, an aunt of mine gifted me a Che Guevara flag that I hung in my bedroom.

00:06:21.080 And you have this kind of heroic image of the swashbuckling reformer pursuing social justice, holding the rich accountable, providing for the poor.

00:06:30.520 And it is a very attractive narrative.

00:06:33.040 I mean, there's no getting around that.

00:06:34.460 It's a magnetic narrative.

00:06:35.980 And the conservative narrative is really one of restraint, duty, obligation.

00:06:41.840 And when you're 13, that's not exactly something that is going to inspire you.

00:06:45.920 And at the same time, I think that I grew up in California, in Sacramento, and the kind of mythology around the University of Berkeley, the free speech movement, some of those great student moments at the time was also something that I gravitated towards.

00:07:00.260 I remember as a teenager, my friends and I would go out and visit the campus at Berkeley and kind of be really kind of wide-eyed and amazed at the university culture.

00:07:09.200 And so those were some of the things.

00:07:12.260 And then, of course, my family members in Italy were kind of old-school, European, working-class Marxists.

00:07:18.520 And so they would provide, you know, kind of long lectures when we would go back and visit.

00:07:23.200 You know, the thought of Lenin, the thought of Marx, the thought of Gramsci.

00:07:27.140 They approached it from a theoretical basis that was, to me at the time, very attractive because it was putting an intellectual frame to politics.

00:07:38.580 And so it engaged me mentally as well.

00:07:40.980 And so it's an attractive package.

00:07:43.440 So it was your first introduction to political theory, really.

00:07:46.200 Well, so the other thing we could point out, too, is that there is a very real issue at stake here, a couple of very real issues.

00:07:54.300 We're going to give the left its due.

00:07:55.740 So the first issue is the pervasive reality of the unequal distribution of both talent and wealth.

00:08:04.560 And so Marx famously noted that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people as time went on.

00:08:12.900 Now, the cataclysmic mistake that Marx made, one of many, was to assume that there was something unique about capitalism in the production of inequality.

00:08:25.740 And there's much more thorough work done now on all sorts of theoretical fronts, ranging from physics to economics, demonstrating that that proclivity of resource, let's say, or even substance, for that matter, to be unequally distributed is extremely pervasive.

00:08:44.680 And so, for example, it is the case that most of the world's capital is in the hands of a relatively few people.

00:08:52.260 But it's also the case that most of the world's water flows through a very small number of rivers and that most of the world's population lives in a very small number of cities.

00:09:03.040 And that most, very few planets have almost all the planetary mass, and that also applies to stars.

00:09:10.620 It applies to your blood vessels as well.

00:09:13.720 A very small proportion of your blood vessels have the largest volume of flow.

00:09:18.240 That's called a Pareto distribution, and Pareto distributions tend to characterize a certain proportion of natural systems.

00:09:27.100 And so this proclivity for inequality to emerge is real, and the danger that capital will accumulate in the hands of a very small number of people is also real.

00:09:37.020 But, number one, it can't be attributed to capitalism, because every economic system that humans have ever employed produces a Pareto distribution.

00:09:50.060 Now, but the problem there is that if you're a young person, and maybe you're looking for a romantic adventure, and you see inequality, it's going to grate on you emotionally,

00:09:59.700 because who the hell is happy about the fact that there are disenfranchised street people, and then also people who are even perhaps, you know, with a street person, you might say, well, you've made some bad life choices,

00:10:11.940 but, you know, what do you say about poverty-stricken children, especially when they're poverty-stricken in the face of wealth?

00:10:18.520 And so the idea that you're fighting on behalf of the oppressed is a pretty attractive proposition for a young person, even if they're not ideologically addled, right?

00:10:29.880 And it's also a reality that makes conservatives guilty when they're faced with the moral onslaught of leftist activists, because, well, inequality is a painful reality.

00:10:42.700 And the truth of the matter is we don't know, we really don't know what to do about it.

00:10:46.940 It's a very difficult problem to solve, and it's a complex—the solutions are complex.

00:10:53.420 But then, you know, you can be Che Guevara, and you can have a nice flag in your bedroom, and your relatives can tell you that you are a young hero in training.

00:11:01.540 And, like, that is a lot more attractive emotionally than, as you pointed out, the message of restraint, duty, and obligation,

00:11:09.840 which is kind of the last thing a 13-year-old wants to hear when he's trying to make his adventurous way out in the world.

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00:12:56.480 Yeah, and I'll tell you kind of how my views changed, and really my views changed significantly when I spent five years actually working on a documentary for PBS looking at three forgotten American cities, Youngstown, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee, and Stockton, California.

00:13:12.900 I followed these families in some of the poorest zip codes in the country, a white neighborhood, a predominantly black neighborhood, and a predominantly Latino and mixed-race neighborhood.

00:13:21.880 Over the course of a few years, and really trying to understand this question, what is driving inequality?

00:13:27.320 What does inequality look like?

00:13:28.600 What does the phenomenon reveal about itself?

00:13:31.520 And the answer was actually really my political turning point, the completion of my political education.

00:13:37.500 And it's looking at it and saying, hey, wait a minute.

00:13:40.580 It's not just a simple economic story.

00:13:43.240 It's not a story of elites kind of greed.

00:13:46.240 It's not a story of that kind of left-wing ideology.

00:13:48.980 And in fact, the fundamental human experience of inequality in America, in a kind of advanced industrial country, is one that actually is a complex social story.

00:13:59.040 You have broken families.

00:14:00.860 In one of the neighborhoods, for example, 92% of the families were single-parent homes.

00:14:05.580 So there were no fathers in the home almost anywhere in the whole zip code.

00:14:10.360 But you look at the social pathologies, you know, from depression, anxiety, to drug addiction, alcoholism.

00:14:20.020 And then you look at the collapse of community and institutions.

00:14:22.680 So those mediating social institutions that once provided a structure, a sense of meaning, a sense of restraint, a sense of direction, they've all been evaporated.

00:14:32.860 And all you get is the individual and the state.

00:14:35.080 And the ultimate irony that I discovered was that in a place like Memphis, they're spending, I believe, something like $3 billion a year on means-tested anti-poverty programs for a small population, something around $30,000 per family per year.

00:14:50.700 So enough to have a median standard of living.

00:14:53.640 And yet you have a complete social disaster through and through.

00:14:58.380 And so what that taught me was you have to look at the society, you have to look at cultural factors, and kind of economic redistribution, which we already have in this country.

00:15:08.460 The United States spends more than a trillion dollars a year on its welfare programs.

00:15:12.620 It cannot solve problems that are human, cultural, spiritual in nature.

00:15:17.300 And so at that point, the left-wing narrative on inequality, those simple stories, I mean, just could not meet the standard of reality that I saw and lived with for three, four years.

00:15:31.300 Well, one of the things that's perverse about the leftist philosophy, and I would say this particularly about Marx, is that all those socialists, even the labor union socialist types who are much more forgivable, one of the things they presume is that, well, capitalism is bad.

00:15:50.540 And there's an implicit presumption there that there's actually something wrong with the entire monetary exchange system, and perhaps something wrong with the idea of money, per se.

00:16:00.740 But all you have to do to address social problems is redistribute money.

00:16:06.700 And that is an absolutely, it's such a primordial, it's such a primitive and unsophisticated theory.

00:16:12.840 Because, as you pointed out, if you do delve into these situations in depth, one of the things you find is that things are so broken and damaged at the bottom end of the socioeconomic pyramid, let's say, that the provision of money is not going to help in the least.

00:16:33.100 Like, I had clients, for example, who were part of the excluded class, let's say, and they actually didn't do too badly when they didn't have much money.

00:16:44.160 But as soon as their unemployment or disability checks showed up, their narcissistic and psychopathic friends would descend like a plague of vultures, and they'd be off to the bar for like a three-day cocaine and alcohol party to the point of unconsciousness.

00:17:03.280 And I'd have clients that would find themselves face down in a ditch, you know, the next Tuesday morning.

00:17:08.500 And the idea that you can just dump excess resources into a structure that has no structure is the sort of thing that a deluded Che Guevara-worshipping 13-year-old could assume, but that bears absolutely no relationship whatsoever to how much trouble real trouble is and how little mere money can do about it.

00:17:31.180 Yeah, that's right. And I think that they also make the fundamental mistake that they look at redistribution as the miracle, right, the miracle solution.

00:17:39.480 But in fact, production is the miracle. For almost all of human history, we produced very little per capita.

00:17:45.960 And so with capitalist production, which is presupposed in the Marxist economic analysis, I mean, this is a miracle.

00:17:52.680 The fact that we have the standard of living that we have, the fact that we've been able to reduce extreme poverty globally by such a large extent in the last, you know, 30, 40, 50 years as India and China moved away from a more socialist and centrally planned system, I mean, that is a miracle.

00:18:09.200 I mean, it's a miracle of human invention.

00:18:10.920 And so, and I think that at the same time, you feel a sense of guilt almost naturally because you see this great abundance and then you see its distribution.

00:18:22.700 But the question of how to solve that is very complex. It's very difficult.

00:18:26.320 And to dovetail on what you were saying, it's like I've spent times in these poor neighborhoods and then I found like, you know, you'd see people at like 1 a.m., just like huge groups of people partying, fighting.

00:18:38.380 You'd see spikes in violence on a monthly cadence.

00:18:41.540 And I remember talking to someone and saying, hey, why is everyone out today?

00:18:43.860 It's like, well, the EBT money hit.

00:18:46.360 And so when you have an infusion of cash into these communities, for example, you can even just see the social patterns, you know, arrests, violence, et cetera.

00:18:55.800 And then you kind of start to understand, okay, money alone is not the solution.

00:19:00.700 It has to be obviously resources money that is, I think, earned.

00:19:03.560 And then also that is in the context of a culture that has a set of values that can hold it together.

00:19:09.520 And look, all over, and I think especially in the United States, that cultural net has really been shredded.

00:19:18.700 And it cannot be solved like the way we've been doing it since 1964, 65, really the late 1960s by the time it got off the ground.

00:19:27.320 You know, the war on poverty, spending trillions of dollars now, has not solved it.

00:19:32.860 I think, if anything, what I've observed in studying the historical record and then studying it kind of empirically, looking at it face-to-face, poverty is much worse now, even though you have a higher median income.

00:19:46.660 And so we have this paradox where we have actual material wealth, poor people in the United States are richer than almost every other group globally, and yet the experience is much worse.

00:19:57.560 And I think that in my travels abroad, it's like almost if you have to choose from a cultural standpoint, would you rather be poor in maybe a developing country, buffeted from some of these things, or poor in the United States?

00:20:10.020 Which, in many cases, it's like a hellscape, you know, violence, addiction, mental illness, kind of shredded social net.

00:20:19.560 And these aren't easy questions, and they certainly don't have easy answers.

00:20:25.480 Well, you know, part of the appalling hypersimplicity of the woke moralist claim is that poverty is reducible to lack of money.

00:20:34.880 And in fact, true poverty is a multidimensional problem.

00:20:39.060 And the multidimensional problem is essentially something like lack of proper placement within a functioning social hierarchy and lack of forward vision.

00:20:49.780 And then what happens, if people don't have anything they regard as useful, productive, and generous to do, that they're committed to,

00:21:00.640 then what happens is, because they can't find meaning or surcease from anxiety in the pursuit of a well-constituted life,

00:21:09.960 they default to impulsive pleasure-seeking.

00:21:12.540 And then if you add money into that situation, it makes it worse, because there's nothing that facilitates impulsive pleasure-seeking than money, like money, right?

00:21:23.680 And so it's definitely the case that, well, it's a hell of a good time for four or five days in the bar.

00:21:29.240 And I'm not saying that poor people drink more, although I am saying that people who drink more and act in that impulsive manner are far more likely to be poor.

00:21:39.980 And so there's also causal, bidirectional causality constantly at work in a manner that, this is also what makes me, a manner that belies the leftist claims.

00:21:49.300 This is also one of the things that makes me very skeptical about the moral certainty that the leftists, who are hypothetically on the side of the poor, bring to the table with regard to arguments all the time.

00:22:02.440 It's like, well, this unidimensional sympathy you have, and this insistence that all of this complex problem can be reduced to, let's say, the greed of the capitalist overlords,

00:22:16.780 might do wonders for you and your ego, allowing you to parade as, you know, this year's incarnation of the spirit of Che Guevara, who is a murderous punk, by the way.

00:22:27.340 But it does nothing for the people who you are attempting to hypothetically help, except make their lives a hell of a lot more miserable.

00:22:36.700 But, you know, you get to feel good about it.

00:22:38.440 So that's a small price to pay, all things considered.

00:22:42.500 All right.

00:22:42.780 So that all broke for you when you were working for NPR.

00:22:46.760 Yeah, yeah.

00:22:47.140 You started to see.

00:22:48.760 So now, did you actually start moving in more, say, classic liberals, liberal or conservative circles at that point?

00:22:57.100 I mean, you must have kind of been at a loss for a while, given that your, you know, your worldview had come under assault under the brutal lessons of reality.

00:23:08.060 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:23:09.600 And, you know, these are documentaries for PBS.

00:23:11.980 And I was kind of moving to the center, moving to the right.

00:23:15.560 I went through kind of a libertarian phase, even, to my own embarrassment now.

00:23:20.760 And my politics shifted.

00:23:22.480 And I could just feel it, that my relationships with colleagues were starting to fray.

00:23:27.100 People were whispering, you know, I think Rufus may be a conservative now, you know, very concerned about me.

00:23:32.860 And then there was a kind of moment where I had to make a decision.

00:23:36.180 Am I going to engage in politics?

00:23:38.100 Am I going to say what I think is true?

00:23:39.980 Am I going to face the consequences?

00:23:41.500 And, you know, ultimately I said, look, I was kind of turning 30.

00:23:44.940 And I said, it's either now or never.

00:23:46.520 I'm going to kind of come out.

00:23:47.820 I'm going to stake my claim.

00:23:49.240 I burned all of my relationships in the documentary world.

00:23:51.700 I lost funders.

00:23:52.680 I had people who had worked for me as contractors for years tell me that they couldn't work with me anymore.

00:23:58.320 And so the documentary world was just a total dead end.

00:24:01.580 I mean, it's like—

00:24:02.540 That was when?

00:24:03.060 What year was that?

00:24:03.920 Oh, this was probably like 2015, 2016 when it started to change.

00:24:09.740 So right as kind of the Trump years.

00:24:11.700 Yeah, well, nobody can shun like, what would you call it, a burned leftist.

00:24:17.740 I mean, look, I've tried to maintain a relatively balanced view of the excesses on both sides of the political spectrum.

00:24:24.840 But one thing I have clearly experienced repeatedly is that the left will shun and exclude to a degree that's almost unknown on the right.

00:24:37.940 I've never had anyone on the right that I've talked to refuse to talk to a hypothetical guest, for example.

00:24:46.580 And I've had people on the left, they just do that all the time.

00:24:50.460 And I don't get that exactly.

00:24:52.540 I think maybe it has to do with the association in personality between agreeableness and leftist proclivity.

00:25:02.020 So the socialist types, the lefties, are technically more agreeable.

00:25:06.400 And I think maybe among agreeable people, if you don't go along with the agreeable game, you're much more likely to be categorized as a predator.

00:25:15.880 And I think it's also partly an institutional question.

00:25:19.600 So something like PBS, something like the art world, something like the cultural world, certainly also the academic world, these are artificial economies, right?

00:25:27.940 They're propped up by the state.

00:25:29.180 They're propped up by philanthropic funding.

00:25:31.120 There are a limited number of spots.

00:25:32.980 It's highly competitive.

00:25:34.140 It's a lot of people that are very credentialed, very intelligent.

00:25:37.320 And they have to find strategies to fight it out for these limited resources.

00:25:41.220 They see them as zero-sum games.

00:25:42.820 Whereas in corporations or entrepreneurship, which are traditionally more kind of conservative or free market, the idea is, well, we can create a company with two people and grow it to 100,000 people.

00:25:52.960 There's a sense of expansion.

00:25:54.880 There's a sense of possibility.

00:25:56.460 Okay.

00:25:56.720 Well, that's a good theory.

00:25:57.640 So you think if you view what you're doing as a zero-sum game, there's always a rationale for exclusion.

00:26:03.800 Of course, yeah.

00:26:04.580 Yeah, and you're trying to move up a hierarchy.

00:26:06.860 And it's not competence that's rewarded.

00:26:09.340 It's not economic productivity that's rewarded.

00:26:12.440 In all of these places, it's not even really an economic question anymore.

00:26:16.060 And so you can critique Marx.

00:26:17.720 I think that's good and fine and true.

00:26:20.080 But the real change on the left, and I think this plays into both what we were talking about previously and this question, is that they've moved from a unit of analysis or a basis of analysis of economics, a material basis,

00:26:31.580 to a metaphysical basis on identity, and that's very unstable.

00:26:36.760 I mean, it's so unstable.

00:26:38.020 And then you have games that are not played on, hey, let's kind of advocate for wages or working conditions or cash redistribution.

00:26:47.140 You're actually then jockeying on the position of identity.

00:26:49.420 And so you have an economically artificial institution, limited positions, highly ambitious people that are then jockeying for position based on identity.

00:26:59.040 I mean, it's like that is a recipe for a toxic environment.

00:27:01.560 Right, so it's a real derivative game in some sense, right?

00:27:04.120 So it's already a derivative of reality when you're talking about money.

00:27:09.200 But when you're talking about identity, you've moved one step further up the abstraction hierarchy, like a financial derivative.

00:27:16.600 And so things get very unstable and vacillated a tremendous amount.

00:27:23.320 I mean, because the Marxist game, as you pointed out, for the longest time, and then even the valid socialist game was essentially economic.

00:27:30.320 Like the fundamental playing, the fundamental battlefield was, you know, what slice of the pie does the working class get?

00:27:38.760 And certainly labor leaders and people like that who were genuine socialists in the English tradition rather than the Marxist tradition were doing what they could to be, some of them at least, to be an honest voice for the oppressed working class.

00:27:51.180 And also, I think, as some intelligent leftists still continue to do, and I'm thinking about people like Russell Brand, we're also pretty good voices to fight against the dangers of corporate gigantism and regulatory capture, which is something that, well, clearly needs to be addressed probably more now than it has been necessary in the last 70 years, because that's a real threat.

00:28:15.240 And so, all right, so now we've got some reasons for exclusion laid down.

00:28:20.140 So now, okay, so you announce yourself, you come out of the closet, so to speak, as a more conservative thinker, 2016 and 2017.

00:28:28.520 That pretty much devastates your social community, and I presume your livelihood, at least as an NPR documentarist, that's for sure.

00:28:36.580 And so then what happens?

00:28:38.260 Well, you know, then I kind of had to scramble, right?

00:28:40.480 And, you know, it's difficult, you know, I have a family, I'm, you know, starting to have kids, and I'm kind of at this career crossroads where I've kind of burned all of the bridges, you know, kind of of the past.

00:28:53.840 And then I said, all right, well, what can I do?

00:28:56.360 What am I good at?

00:28:57.120 What would actually excite me?

00:28:58.920 What would be kind of something that I would want to pursue?

00:29:01.020 And I fell into more conservative circles.

00:29:03.960 I started reaching out to folks.

00:29:05.400 And then, you know, they really welcomed me with open arms.

00:29:07.920 They said, oh, you're a kind of, you know, a defector from the other side.

00:29:11.920 And in the conservative world, this is a long tradition.

00:29:14.120 One of my own intellectual heroes, James Burnham, was a national review writer, professor of philosophy, kind of Cold War, one of the Cold War's most trenchant conservative critics.

00:29:26.260 Worked with Richard Nixon, worked with McCarthy, and, you know, he was formerly Trotsky's personal secretary in the United States.

00:29:36.100 And so we have this long tradition of defectors from the left moving rightward.

00:29:39.980 And so I was welcomed with open arms.

00:29:41.840 And I was provided some really great opportunities.

00:29:43.960 I said, hey, you know how to do reporting.

00:29:45.680 You know how to get on the ground.

00:29:47.020 Why don't you do some research into the homelessness crisis in West Coast cities?

00:29:50.800 I got connected with some of the magazines and publications.

00:29:53.740 And then I just my whole world opened up.

00:29:57.520 I felt like I had the freedom to think for the first time as an adult.

00:30:01.700 I felt like I didn't have to watch what I was saying.

00:30:04.740 Isn't it so?

00:30:05.460 Well, I've experienced the same thing, man, because I spend a lot of time working with Democrat backroom personnel over the last six or seven years.

00:30:14.740 And hoping to entice, persuade the reasonable Democrats to draw a line between them and the radicals, especially on the DEI front.

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00:31:37.760 Well, mostly that, to draw a line, you know, and with very little success.

00:31:44.440 But one of the things that constantly bothered me, because I was also talking to classic liberals and people more on the right at that time,

00:31:51.840 was that whenever I was talking to even relatively moderate people on the left, I had to watch what I was saying all the time.

00:31:59.060 Yeah.

00:31:59.180 And, like, look, it's good to pay attention to what you say and to be careful, but I get damn sick, damn quick of walking on eggshells when I've got something to say,

00:32:09.280 especially among hypothetical peers that are hypothetically working to solve a problem.

00:32:15.660 It's like, I just want to say what I think.

00:32:17.400 And if you find that, if that's going to disrupt our personal relationship, it's like, maybe I don't want to be around you because it's just too damn annoying.

00:32:26.920 And one of the things I have found, it's been a very big surprise to me that I've ended up as a conservative spokesperson.

00:32:35.080 I am not a conservative person.

00:32:36.920 Like, I'm very high in trade openness, although I've learned to be a traditionalist.

00:32:43.880 That was hard-won knowledge.

00:32:46.280 I partly learned that because I learned that most social science interventions go dreadfully wrong.

00:32:52.040 I really learned about the iron law of unintended consequences.

00:32:54.820 Yes.

00:32:55.380 But one of the things that has happened is that I found it way easier to talk to even fundamentalist conservative Christian traditionalists than radicals on the left.

00:33:06.320 There's no comparison.

00:33:08.020 And that's a very strange thing.

00:33:09.560 It's not what I expected at all.

00:33:11.300 And I think that that is really where we've seen the flip.

00:33:14.880 I mean, you know, for all of the excesses and problems, I'm, you know, a critic of kind of 1960s.

00:33:20.400 But, you know, they were authentic.

00:33:22.080 They were committed.

00:33:22.900 They had open expression.

00:33:24.300 They were trying to push boundaries.

00:33:26.000 And you kind of flip this on of its head.

00:33:27.760 Once the left took institutional control, I mean, it is the most restrictive, the most limited, the most restrained,

00:33:35.340 the most punishing orthodoxy.

00:33:37.680 And then you get to the point where you have now hundreds of thousands of kind of DEI agents, left-wing bureaucrats, enforcers of the orthodoxy.

00:33:47.180 And they just repeat the same 10 points.

00:33:49.520 I've done reporting for now a few years on critical race theory, gender ideology.

00:33:53.340 They inherit kind of 10 ideas.

00:33:55.860 They dumb them down.

00:33:56.860 They pass them through a bureaucratic euphemistic filter.

00:33:59.560 And, I mean, they're like the decentralized propaganda agents from Soviet times.

00:34:05.400 I mean, it's like this is the party line.

00:34:07.580 We must say this.

00:34:08.620 You know, you cannot say anything that would contradict, you know, the great party line.

00:34:13.240 And it's like once I ejected from that world, once I opened up this new terrain, and actually, frankly, once I moved out of a big urban center in Seattle and moved out to a smaller town,

00:34:26.160 it's like this is where kind of actual free thinking, actual—the feeling of freedom, the feeling of intellectual possibility.

00:34:33.560 And I think one of the reasons that my work has been successful is because I've been kind of liberated from that stifling orthodoxy, that cultural milieu, that institutional pattern.

00:34:45.620 And then, you know, I see all of these folks attacking me.

00:34:48.880 You know, you can't say this.

00:34:49.720 You can't do this.

00:34:50.600 You know, you have to observe this.

00:34:51.740 The Atlantic wrote a piece recently that said a qualified endorsement of Christopher Rufo.

00:34:57.340 But it was 90% qualifications and 10% endorsement because these folks on the center-left, they know they agree with me, but they can't behave as I behave.

00:35:07.900 And really, that's because I'm much more free than they are.

00:35:10.820 And I love that feeling.

00:35:12.420 I love that spirit.

00:35:13.780 I love fighting these fights with a sense of doing things that others cannot even contemplate doing because they risk their academic sinecures or whatever.

00:35:22.680 Yeah, well, that's the joy of having a free tongue, man.

00:35:26.020 Well, you know, it's also very perverse temperamentally, eh?

00:35:30.080 Because I looked a lot at what predicted political viewpoints from the temperamental and cognitive front.

00:35:37.300 Because if you're looking at individual differences in people's behavior at the psychological level, you look at general cognitive ability and you look at personality.

00:35:46.200 Those are very good, powerful, reliable, valid predictors of individual difference in such things as opinion.

00:35:52.600 And the biggest predictor of liberal left belief is trait openness, which is the creativity dimension.

00:36:00.900 And what you would, which is why, for example, leftist ideas are rife in places like Hollywood.

00:36:05.500 But what's so bloody perverse about this is that people who are high in openness, first of all, all they really have to offer is the fact that they can think 10 different things at the same time.

00:36:15.160 That freedom of movement, that's especially true with regards to artists, that's all they have.

00:36:20.560 And then what you see on the left is this stifling orthodoxy that makes art dull and predictable.

00:36:27.220 It reduces everything to these 10 axioms.

00:36:29.920 And it seems to fly completely in the face of what open people, creative people, would truly want.

00:36:35.900 And so I'm still puzzling through that.

00:36:37.700 I can't understand yet.

00:36:40.100 See, it's partly that the open people don't want barriers to information flow.

00:36:46.680 And so when they see conservatives putting up barriers of any type, even barriers of category, that destabilizes them.

00:36:54.300 Because the open types capitalize on free information flow.

00:36:57.640 But perversely, that rejection of the boundaries that conservatives put up has led to a situation where, well, you didn't want any boundaries.

00:37:09.520 And now all you've got are boundaries around what you can say and think and do.

00:37:14.120 And I can't see how that can sustain itself for any length of time on the artistic front.

00:37:18.360 Because, well, it'll do the whole enterprise in.

00:37:21.260 But it's got to just stifle the hell out of creative producers.

00:37:24.340 Yeah, and I felt that in my time working in the documentary film world.

00:37:29.800 I would attend the conferences.

00:37:31.100 I would go to the festivals.

00:37:32.240 I would participate in the industry.

00:37:34.500 And looking around, and it's like, these people, no one says anything new.

00:37:38.860 The festival programmers are pure ideology.

00:37:41.480 You look at the catalog of films for any kind of A-list film festival in the last 10 years.

00:37:46.340 And it looks like a social justice syllabus.

00:37:48.760 It's, you know, the kind of transgender basket weavers of Madagascar. 1.00

00:37:53.440 I mean, it's like these things that are so niche, so absurd.

00:37:56.580 And then they're only propped up because, again, these are artificial economies.

00:38:01.240 You look at these Sundance award-winning films.

00:38:04.080 They have all the prestige.

00:38:05.900 They win the institutional game.

00:38:07.440 But then you put them on the marketplace.

00:38:09.380 You look at, like, an Amazon film rentals.

00:38:12.180 They have, like, three reviews at two stars.

00:38:14.760 Nobody's watching this stuff.

00:38:15.920 Nobody cares.

00:38:16.600 It has no actual organic audience.

00:38:18.560 And then one of the big distinctions that I see is this kind of artificial culture versus a true organic culture.

00:38:26.640 And we've created an artificial culture that is high in openness, maybe, but really high in intellectualism and verbal ability.

00:38:34.700 And Machiavelli had the distinction.

00:38:36.180 He had two archetypes.

00:38:37.280 There's the lion and the fox.

00:38:38.520 The fox is highly intelligent, adaptable, open, verbally very proficient.

00:38:43.480 The lion is strong, tough, setting standards, kind of the strong, quiet type.

00:38:49.420 And I think that it's kind of a proxy, maybe, for left and right.

00:38:54.740 But the conservative movement needs people that have the more kind of fox attributes as well.

00:38:59.580 Because, look, we're in a postmodern world.

00:39:01.700 We're in an information economy.

00:39:03.400 You have to be able to do the ideological fights with a sense of skill, with a sense of sophistication, with a sense of narrative.

00:39:11.620 And so that's what I think we need.

00:39:15.280 We need folks like that that also recognize the value of the kind of the lion mindset, which is saying we want to have standards.

00:39:23.940 We want to have institutions.

00:39:24.720 We want to transmit values from one generation to the next.

00:39:27.780 We want to appeal to human universals.

00:39:30.020 We want to respect our past and our culture.

00:39:33.000 But we also have to kind of do battle in the world as it exists today.

00:39:38.320 And conservatives have been really, frankly, awful at that.

00:39:41.700 They thought for many years, oh, well, we're just going to say, you know, wave the flag and say America is great.

00:39:46.720 That's not enough.

00:39:47.700 We actually have to engage.

00:39:49.160 We have to outflank these folks.

00:39:51.040 Well, the conservatives could leave it implicit.

00:39:53.600 Right.

00:39:53.760 A lot of what conservatism is about is what's implicit.

00:39:57.940 Right?

00:39:58.200 And because the conservative mantra, in some sense, is rely on what's implicit.

00:40:04.000 Rely on what everyone already accepts as self-evident and of value.

00:40:09.460 The problem now is that all of that is up for question, including, for example, things as fundamental as what constitutes a woman and a man.

00:40:17.240 And so it means the conservatives have to make their ethos explicit and they have to start putting it forward as a vision.

00:40:23.960 And that's very hard for conservatives because, by and large, they're not visionary.

00:40:29.220 Because the visionary types are the open types.

00:40:31.180 Now, you've seen this weird, transgressive reversal on that front.

00:40:35.940 Like, one of the first things that really struck me as indicative of how upside down everything was, was, well, first of all, Rush Limbaugh.

00:40:44.000 When I first encountered him, like, 25 years ago, I thought, this guy is a comedian.

00:40:51.140 And he was a comedian.

00:40:52.500 And people took him dead seriously.

00:40:53.980 But he was a comedian.

00:40:54.980 He was a satirist.

00:40:55.900 And I thought, how the hell did the conservatives get the satirist?

00:41:00.960 That's a very strange thing.

00:41:02.760 And he was unbelievably influential.

00:41:04.320 And then in more recent years, you have these unbelievably strange occurrences like the Babylon Bee.

00:41:11.660 It's like, okay, let me get this right.

00:41:14.020 You're a conservative, traditionalist, evangelical Christian.

00:41:19.620 And you're doing satire?

00:41:22.520 It's like, where the hell are we?

00:41:24.060 Because we're not in any world, I understand.

00:41:26.420 But I think it is an indication of the need.

00:41:29.940 Well, and you see the Daily Wire Plus doing something like this, too, right?

00:41:33.000 They're starting to get interested in the cultural milieu, which is not the normal place that conservatives play.

00:41:40.440 Because that's where the artists are.

00:41:42.020 And they tend to be on the left.

00:41:43.680 And so this is calling for a real radical reshaping, even, of how we conceptualize the political landscape at its level, as fundamental as that of temperament itself.

00:41:54.920 It's true.

00:41:55.740 But at the same time, I think, you know, Aristophanes, the Greek satirist, the Greek humorist, was a conservative, right?

00:42:02.200 He was making fun of the kind of very abstract folks.

00:42:06.240 He was making fun of the philosophers of the time, kind of lampooning them.

00:42:10.600 So there is a tradition.

00:42:11.660 But I think since the 1960s, we've become so used to this idea that art can only be left-wing.

00:42:16.640 Free speech can only be left-wing.

00:42:19.020 Freedom can only be a left-wing value.

00:42:21.600 But it's really not the case historically.

00:42:25.380 And I think it's certainly not the case now, actually.

00:42:27.780 They've taken all of those values and they've folded them in on themselves.

00:42:31.340 And so we have this euphemistic culture, whether it's, you know, a kind of left-wing conception of freedom or left-wing conception of diversity and inclusion.

00:42:39.560 You can go on down the line and you say, hey, wait a minute.

00:42:42.620 You're not actually meaning what you say you mean.

00:42:45.380 All of these things have to be lampooned.

00:42:47.620 They have to be exposed.

00:42:48.660 They have to be ridiculed.

00:42:50.060 And that's why I think something like the Babylon Bee is successful.

00:42:52.940 I think you have more comedians.

00:42:54.480 Actually, the kind of most exciting and dynamic comedians of our time may not be conservatives, but they're certainly lampooning that kind of left-wing orthodoxy.

00:43:01.620 And so we're seeing the shift now, and it's because the left has institutional control.

00:43:10.340 Look, you know, government agencies, universities, K-12 schools, prestige media organizations.

00:43:17.100 If you understand the culture, and I think I've documented this in my reporting over the last few years, you know, this is pure left-wing ideology.

00:43:25.120 It's the kind of identity politics.

00:43:27.140 It's, you know, the Angela Davis style of activism. 0.62

00:43:29.740 It's kind of the critical theory style of assessing society from Marcuse and others.

00:43:37.600 This is the establishment.

00:43:39.760 And so as the anti-establishment became the establishment, really with the baby boomer generation, we live in a new world.

00:43:47.900 And conservatives, unfortunately, still act like, you know, the world is run by, you know, the guys sitting around the country club table.

00:43:55.360 That's not true at all.

00:43:56.560 The world is run by, you know, the PBS employees, the NPR employees, the New York Times employees.

00:44:02.380 Berkeley graduates.

00:44:03.420 Berkeley grads.

00:44:04.160 And look, I know these folks.

00:44:06.200 I have a good relationship with a lot of people in left-wing media, which is surprising to folks.

00:44:10.240 But I've worked with them.

00:44:11.980 You know, they've come to visit me at my home.

00:44:13.540 They've done profiles, et cetera.

00:44:15.300 I've talked to them on the phone for stories.

00:44:17.560 A lot of these folks actually agree with us.

00:44:19.800 They probably don't agree with my style.

00:44:21.560 They don't agree with my approach.

00:44:22.640 They probably think it's a little bit barbarian, my level of aggression and assertiveness.

00:44:28.880 And they'll tell me, you know, behind the scenes, behind closed doors, you know, saying, you know, I think you're right.

00:44:34.280 I think this stuff is crazy.

00:44:35.240 It's gone too far.

00:44:35.900 I certainly want my kids to be indoctrinated in this.

00:44:38.340 But I can't say anything because I have, you know, my position at the newspaper.

00:44:43.100 I have my position in academia.

00:44:44.620 I'm coward is really the fundamental issue there.

00:44:47.160 I think that's right.

00:44:48.160 I say that with all due respect.

00:44:49.760 Look, I had a lot of clients who had to reorganize their lives because they were being tyrannized.

00:44:55.560 And they had to strategize about how to regain control of their tongue and their life.

00:44:59.580 But the idea that I agree with you, but I just can't say anything.

00:45:03.080 It's like, what do you mean just can't?

00:45:04.840 It's like you're sacrificing your soul on a day-to-day basis. 0.97

00:45:08.120 And the fact that 5% of the population who's, like, truly radically activist can control the whole goddamn show on the left

00:45:16.020 because the 90% of people who have some sense won't say anything is not an excuse by any stretch of the imagination for their behavior.

00:45:23.700 And I know you're not making that excuse.

00:45:25.860 Let's segue a bit here, shall we, perhaps, and start talking about your foray into the domain of food.

00:45:34.840 Critical race theory.

00:45:36.020 The first thing we might want to do is let's play around with some definitions.

00:45:40.680 What do you think?

00:45:42.160 And this will get us more into the political discussion I want to have with you, too.

00:45:46.240 Critical race theory is a very difficult, what would you say, set of concepts to nail down.

00:45:52.040 And I've kind of characterized that whole general domain, me and others, obviously, as a pastiche of postmodernism and Marxism.

00:46:02.860 And out of that comes an identity politics, which is the Marxist experiment failed on the economic front. 0.98

00:46:09.800 And all the Marxists did was they performed a sleight of hand and transformed economic inequality and oppression into identity inequality and oppression and just went on with the same damn game.

00:46:21.600 And as far as I can tell, CRT is just an offshoot of that, just.

00:46:25.960 But you've delved into it with a fair bit of effort, let's say, and over a fairly long period of time.

00:46:32.980 So let's start by just talking about what constitutes critical race theory as far as you're concerned.

00:46:38.500 Sure.

00:46:38.780 I think it's actually pretty easy to define.

00:46:40.580 I think there are three main concepts.

00:46:42.540 You have the social analysis.

00:46:44.920 It's that the United States is a white supremacist country that promotes the concepts of freedom and equality.

00:46:51.700 But this is merely a smokescreen for naked racial domination. 0.86

00:46:55.360 Second, the doctrine of intersectionality says that the world can be divided between oppressor and oppressed.

00:47:01.300 But innovating from the Marxist economic axis, they say, no, no, no, it's actually an axis of identity, predominantly race, but also including gender and sexuality.

00:47:10.420 And then the third key component or idea is, well, what do you do to fix it?

00:47:13.940 They argue that the constitutional protections of the First Amendment, the 14th Amendment, private property should be overridden, should be suspended.

00:47:23.340 And then society should engage in large-scale wealth, seizure and redistribution along the axis of race until you have equal outcomes.

00:47:31.880 And so that's it.

00:47:33.740 It's really not that complicated.

00:47:35.800 Sure, they have citations.

00:47:38.060 It's basically Marxism repackaged using ethnic, racial and sexual identity.

00:47:44.760 Especially with regards to the notion that the entire capitalist infrastructure should be demolished and wealth redistributed.

00:47:51.460 It's like, well, it's not the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

00:47:54.180 It's whatever racial group or sexual group or ethnic group that you happen to place in the ascendancy.

00:47:59.860 That's right.

00:48:00.180 And I think this is mostly due to French intellectual theorists in the 1970s who had to abandon their appalling allegiance to Marxism under the unbearable pressure of the evidence that all that ever produced was murderous outcomes.

00:48:16.240 And instead of learning their lesson deeply, which they could have, all they did was they did a slight sidestep, shuffle, and produced all these appalling theories that the Americans, mostly through Yale University and the English department there, by the way, gravitated to like mad.

00:48:32.380 UCLA law schools have been at the forefront of this too. 1.00

00:48:35.700 And that damn intersectional theory, to me, as someone who's somewhat versed in statistics, that's just a miracle of ignorant stupidity. 1.00

00:48:44.440 Because all it is is the rediscovery of the interaction term. 0.99

00:48:47.800 So if you're trying to model a phenomenon, you can use a linear combination of variables, which just means you add them together and maybe weight them slightly differently.

00:48:57.500 But then you can also multiply them together now and then.

00:49:01.080 That's an interaction term.

00:49:02.480 And so the idea would be, well, if you're tall and big-boned, you're likely to be heavy.

00:49:09.960 And possibly tall times big-boned equals even heavier.

00:49:13.800 You can add an additional term.

00:49:15.040 And the idea, this is the radical idea of the intersectionalists, that, well, there's more than one form of oppression operating simultaneously, and the effect might be multiplicative.

00:49:26.760 It's like, well, Jesus, could you come up with something more obvious than that?

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00:50:37.820 And the answer is no.

00:50:39.980 And it's like, why do you get tenure at UCLA in the law, in the faculty of law, for developing a theory of intersectionality when it's so bloody obvious from the basic perspective of primordial statistics that it goes without saying?

00:50:56.580 Like, that's supposed to be the intellectual contribution. 0.96

00:50:59.280 Well, you know, if you're black, you're oppressed, or Hispanic, or whatever the hell it is, Irish. 1.00

00:51:04.340 But man, if you're a woman, you're also oppressed. 0.98

00:51:06.880 And then, well, if you're an Irish woman, I mean, look at how oppressed you are, multiplied by endless demented categories of identity. 1.00

00:51:15.860 It's such an intellectual—it's so shallow intellectually.

00:51:19.600 It's such an appalling Marxist sleight of hand that its crookedness and malevolence can hardly be overstated.

00:51:27.360 But I think it's important that—maybe I'll disagree slightly.

00:51:31.320 I think that is right.

00:51:32.220 I think it was—you know, they base their legitimacy not on the objective value of their ideas, which they reject, but on their positionality.

00:51:40.900 So intersectionality, for example, is promoted by Kimberly Crenshaw, a black woman. 0.90

00:51:45.760 And so she has authority not based on the idea, but based on her positionality.

00:51:50.160 And then she gives it a complex Latinate term, intersectionality, which makes it seem maybe more sophisticated than it is.

00:51:57.380 But I think it's important, the question of roots, and I'd like to maybe push back.

00:52:01.040 As much as I would like to blame the French, critical race theory is not based in any meaningful sense on the ideas of Foucault, the ideas of the French deconstructionists.

00:52:10.620 I think if you look at queer theory, that's 100% true. 0.71

00:52:13.600 The queer theorists themselves, the founding generation in the 80s and 90s, said explicitly, Foucault is our lodestar.

00:52:19.100 His history of sexuality, his idea of sexual transgression is our founding principle.

00:52:24.600 But the critical race theory, kind of scholars, are a homegrown in the United States phenomenon.

00:52:31.820 And they say it very clearly.

00:52:33.000 They actually lay out their intellectual lineage.

00:52:34.820 They take it from Gramsci, the kind of Marx on the axis of culture.

00:52:40.180 But really what it is, it's repackaging the ideas of Angela Davis, repackaging the ideas of the Black Panther Party, Black nationalist ideology.

00:52:48.080 And then repackaging identity politics based on the Combahee River Statement and other kind of Black feminist literature. 1.00

00:52:56.760 And so it's coming from Marxism, Marxist-Leninism, Black nationalism.

00:53:02.880 And so this is the ideology that then they made a decision in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union was kind of just poised to collapse.

00:53:11.700 Then it collapsed in the early 90s.

00:53:13.640 The critical race theory said, hey, we can't be putting bandoliers across our shoulders and wearing the cool hats and promoting the Black Panther Party.

00:53:24.800 We have to take those ideas and then package them in euphemisms, package them in intellectual jargon, create the idea of intersectionality, which is just a rehash of Angela Davis's women race in class from the previous generation. 1.00

00:53:38.700 And then we have to seek legitimacy through the academy.

00:53:42.040 They did this very deliberately.

00:53:43.140 They said, we need to get CRT scholars to start taking over institutions, using the politics of identity to start vanquishing our opponents within the academy, and asserting dominance for political activism.

00:53:55.740 They're very explicit about it.

00:53:56.720 They say, we don't do scholarship.

00:53:58.000 We don't do objective research.

00:53:59.440 That is the kind of the white male toolkit. 0.92

00:54:02.900 We do left-wing activism.

00:54:04.620 And we're going to legitimize our ideas through elite institutions, use the kind of manipulative strategies within the institution pioneered by Derrick Bell.

00:54:13.160 And that's how we're going to gain power.

00:54:14.680 And that's how we can then filter our ideas from those elite institutions down to K-12 schools to the point where, you know, you have first graders in Cupertino, California, for example, getting the teachers—third graders, rather—dividing the class on the basis of intersectionality into oppressor and oppressed.

00:54:30.740 I mean, they did it, and that's how the kind of power maneuvering worked.

00:54:37.660 So I would say, in relationship to your intellectual history, so we could put Marx at the bottom in some ways, although not only Marx, and we could have the French deconstructionists emerge out of that, and then the Gramsci tradition emerge out of that, too, as somewhat separate streams.

00:54:54.900 And the case you're making is that the CRT stream is more properly identified with the Gramsci sort of theorists, and that seems to me perfectly reasonable.

00:55:03.240 I still think that what we're facing on the culture war front is a pastiche of post-modernism and Marxism.

00:55:10.420 Yes.

00:55:10.940 But there's certainly no reason for us to, you know, either further that conversation or to disagree.

00:55:18.260 So let's talk about Derrick Bell for a minute.

00:55:20.820 Now, do you want to point out some of his signal contributions to this entire mess?

00:55:25.800 Yeah, you know, Derrick Bell is a fascinating guy.

00:55:28.820 I did an entire section in a book that I'm writing that's going to come out this summer with HarperCollins on Derrick Bell.

00:55:34.020 And, you know, he's actually a pretty compelling biographical figure.

00:55:38.660 He was, you know, the first in his family to go to college.

00:55:42.140 He got a degree, a law degree.

00:55:44.120 He worked with the NABCP Legal Defense Fund.

00:55:47.920 He ran, I think, something like 300 anti-segregation cases in the Deep South.

00:55:52.660 And, you know, I mean, really compelling guy who I think fought the good fight at that time.

00:55:57.380 He went down into Mississippi, organized, you know, black families, got their kids across the color barrier, really shut down the segregation policies of the time in the Deep South, you know, and really courageous person.

00:56:11.020 But then something in his psychology shifted.

00:56:13.980 And the great black economist Thomas Sowell describes it as, you know, he really abandoned those principles and then fought not for an equal society, but for a revenge society. 0.76

00:56:24.380 That was Thomas Sowell's words.

00:56:25.780 And then he became famous by promoting not a vision of racial progress, racial integration, kind of moving past the racism of the past.

00:56:37.340 But he came up with this theory of racial pessimism, saying that racism was the permanent and indestructible feature of American life.

00:56:45.680 He spread these kind of conspiracy theories that the United States might be on the verge of what he called black genocide in the 1990s.

00:56:53.140 And then he became famous from this.

00:56:55.560 And so the incentive structure that fed Derrick Bell's, you know, academic career, really from the 90s to his death and in the around 2010, 2012, was that he was the kind of doomsayer.

00:57:09.720 He said there could be no progress.

00:57:11.240 It was all an illusion.

00:57:12.420 The 14th Amendment, the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act, the Emancipation Proclamation.

00:57:17.480 All of that talks a good game, but it's really a myth to uphold, you know, white supremacy.

00:57:23.680 And even the election of Barack Obama, as he was an elderly man, he said, you know, Barack Obama is the president of a white supremacist country, nothing more.

00:57:31.600 And so you see this really tragic figure.

00:57:35.560 Transgeneration into kind of a unidimensional paranoia. 1.00

00:57:38.660 Yeah, and he had a verbal tick towards the end of his life where he would say on interviews, I might be racially paranoid, but, and then finish his sentence.

00:57:47.520 And so you see this kind of really heroic figure just descend into this pessimism, cynicism, fatalism.

00:57:57.420 And then he's rewarded by society and really predominantly white liberal society.

00:58:02.900 And so he's this tragic figure in my book, not an evil man, not even a bad man, but I think a man who succumbed to kind of, to succumb to this temptation of fatalism that I think then characterizes the second generation of scholars that came beneath him.

00:58:22.960 They play cynical political games, they're cynical about the United States, and they cynically use their own identity as a substitute for their, for kind of creative and confident intellectual output.

00:58:38.480 Right, which they also then decry as, like, the markers for that creative, competent output just as part of the white patriarchal power game.

00:58:48.500 Like, I've seen these charts recently laying out the attributes of a white supremacist society, more or less on the temperamental front, like punctuality, for example.

00:59:00.680 And I read through those traits, and I think this is so interesting, because I know that low conscientiousness predicts leftist liberal view.

00:59:10.480 So it's high openness, low conscientiousness.

00:59:13.040 And all the traits that are attributed to white patriarchy are the traits of conscientiousness.

00:59:19.500 It's so amusing, and that conscientiousness, by the way, is the best temperamental predictor of life success.

00:59:25.140 It's second only to general cognitive ability.

00:59:28.440 And so, but what's also interesting is there are absolutely no racial differences in the distribution of trait conscientiousness.

00:59:35.840 And so the claim that conscientious temperamental virtues are somehow white or supremacist or patriarchal is only the claim that conscientious temperamental traits are characteristic of success.

00:59:51.180 It's so interesting to see.

00:59:53.480 So, and it's deeply condescending to people who are racial men.

00:59:57.820 I mean, it's like, it's insane, and I think what the actual, the essence of this point, and the essence of that chart, is that these people who are kind of left liberal elites, let's say, they imagine themselves as the great kind of cosmopolitan figures who have a wide understanding that surpasses the backwards, you know, traditional American way of life.

01:00:17.620 These people are deeply parochial.

01:00:19.320 These people have never seen and traveled around the world.

01:00:23.220 It's like, if I took that chart and went to Asia, went to Latin America, went to, you know, Lagos, Nigeria, where I've spent a significant amount of time, and say, hey, look, you know, these are really white traits of showing up on time, doing hard work, self-efficacy. 0.69

01:00:40.300 I mean, I would get slapped, and rightfully so, because, you know, this is actually racist.

01:00:47.020 It's kind of inadvertently racist.

01:00:49.320 And it takes traits that are virtues.

01:00:52.260 These are virtues that everyone can participate in, and reduces them to a kind of race essentialism that I think betrays a total lack of curiosity and a lack of experience with the real world.

01:01:03.440 Look, I think if you're constantly harping about how anti-racist you are, there's going to be a vicious internal reaction formation, which is the development of an opposing viewpoint.

01:01:16.020 It isn't obvious to me at all that the racism in those charts is inadvertent.

01:01:20.560 It might not be conscious, but it's definitely compensatory.

01:01:24.600 It's like, well, I'm so anti-racist.

01:01:27.700 Well, God, I might as well be Mother Teresa.

01:01:29.860 It's like, well, yeah, you're probably not.

01:01:31.540 And so all that unacknowledged pathology that's still part and parcel of your worldview is going to make itself manifest somewhere.

01:01:39.640 And how about in your accidental supposition that all traits of conscientiousness don't characterize black people? 0.99

01:01:46.840 How about that, you dimwits? 0.99

01:01:48.680 And so let's talk about Kimberly Crenshaw. 0.97

01:01:52.180 I read about the third of her, I don't remember which book it was now, and she had a very interesting discussion in there about the fact that there is evidence, for example, that black teenage girls get disciplined more harshly than white teenage girls.

01:02:06.640 And, you know, as far as I'm concerned, that could easily be the case.

01:02:10.440 But I read this as an epidemiologist, let's say, I'm a psychologist, I'm very interested in the multiplicity of causal pathways leading towards a given outcome, whatever it might be.

01:02:22.280 And it might be a differential school failure, let's say, among adolescents, we could say adolescent girls, say one subset of that is more stringently disciplined black girls. 0.92

01:02:32.440 Now, she puts her finger on a real problem, but then she does what all these bloody radicals do, is she attributes it to the same single cause.

01:02:42.380 She says, well, it's all systemic racism.

01:02:45.020 And I think, well, wait a second here.

01:02:47.360 First of all, it's probably not all anything.

01:02:50.960 It's probably quite a few different complicated things.

01:02:53.920 Here's one, for example.

01:02:57.800 So black girls tend to hit puberty earlier than white girls. 0.99

01:03:01.020 It's a reliable finding.

01:03:03.500 And then fatherless girls tend to hit puberty earlier than girls with fathers.

01:03:08.320 And the difference there is about a year.

01:03:10.600 And no one knows why.

01:03:12.580 It's a very complicated problem. 0.94

01:03:14.420 And what that means is, so imagine that you're a black girl without a father.

01:03:18.360 Now you're going to hit puberty, say, around the age of 9 or 10, something like that.

01:03:22.420 And that might mean that by the time you're 11, you look 17.

01:03:26.580 Now, one of the consequences, there's two consequences of that.

01:03:29.180 One is, you're a lot more physically intimidating if you get upset.

01:03:34.040 And number two, you're a lot more likely to be held to a high standard of behavior.

01:03:38.660 Like, imagine an 11-year-old who looks 9 compared to an 11-year-old who looks 17.

01:03:43.560 Like, at first glance, who are you going to demand more of?

01:03:47.840 And also be more intimidated by, by the way.

01:03:50.540 And so, but Crenshaw, she has no interest in that at all.

01:03:52.880 She does a perfectly good job of pointing out the problem. 0.98

01:03:55.820 And there's all sorts of problems in racial disparity with regards to outcome that permeate,

01:04:00.120 like, every culture.

01:04:01.580 That's a real problem.

01:04:03.000 But then to reduce that to the same old trite formula, to me, indicates, well,

01:04:07.740 the absolute shallowness of her scholarship, which is really quite appalling, all things considered.

01:04:12.580 But also this insistence on the radical side that you only need five explanatory principles

01:04:18.400 to account for everything that's gone wrong with the entire world.

01:04:22.220 Five, they only need one.

01:04:23.920 I mean, they found their magic wand, and that's it.

01:04:27.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:04:28.020 It's basically the assumption that power governs every human relationship.

01:04:31.820 And the question is not, you know, even the language, overrepresented and underrepresented,

01:04:36.880 is so misleading because it assumes that every distribution is going to be proportionate

01:04:41.760 to the percentage in the population.

01:04:44.500 But the question is not, you know, okay, we have, say, a statistical reality that black 0.63

01:04:50.920 students have more disciplinary proceedings against them in K through 12.

01:04:54.800 Great.

01:04:55.480 But the real question is not, is it proportionate to the number of the population?

01:04:58.840 The question is, well, is it proportionate to the behavior?

01:05:02.360 And then once you start asking those questions, you may get a different set of equations, a different

01:05:08.000 set of assumptions.

01:05:09.140 And then you can say, hey, is there discrimination?

01:05:11.260 That's certainly a question worth asking.

01:05:12.840 You can control for other statistical variables and try to figure out what percentage of or

01:05:18.480 what proportion that has to do with it.

01:05:20.360 But it's like a kind of statistical blindness, an unwillingness to say, is there, does behavior

01:05:29.160 and consequences line up?

01:05:30.580 Which is really the number one thing and also the thing that you can control.

01:05:34.400 Because you can actually say, you know, if I believe that my behavior will be met with

01:05:39.580 consequences, and I also believe that I have agency over my own behavior, not perfect agency,

01:05:45.220 not 100%, but at least some control, you're giving people a sense of what they can do.

01:05:50.120 But if you're outsourcing it to say whatever happens that is bad in your life, it's the problem

01:05:54.300 of the oppressor, it's the problem of the white male superstructure, you're creating also a 0.62

01:06:02.400 sense of fatalism for people.

01:06:04.220 And I saw that so much in my reporting.

01:06:06.300 It's like, you're not doing anyone any favors by saying, you know, whatever you do, Derek

01:06:11.800 Bell says this, you know, whatever you do, you're always going to be, you know, you're

01:06:16.720 always going to be disadvantaged.

01:06:18.000 You're always going to be punished.

01:06:19.100 You can never make it.

01:06:20.060 You can never be treated fairly.

01:06:21.140 Tell that to the Nigerians, it doesn't seem to work very well on them. 0.99

01:06:25.400 They do perfectly well in the United States.

01:06:27.420 That's right.

01:06:29.140 Yeah.

01:06:29.520 A whole host of racial groups.

01:06:30.900 I mean, all of the top performing ethnic groups in the United States are racial minorities.

01:06:35.700 And I think the question is, well, you know, let's see what they're doing.

01:06:40.300 Let's figure out what cultural traits, what behavior, what patterns, what values that they

01:06:45.060 promote.

01:06:46.540 And let's copy them.

01:06:48.000 You know, I see that all the time.

01:06:49.400 I always try to look at different people and say, hmm, this person seems to be doing,

01:06:53.620 you know, better than I am in this pursuit.

01:06:57.320 Why?

01:06:58.500 You know, and how can I emulate that?

01:07:00.380 How can I copy that?

01:07:01.300 How can I learn from this?

01:07:03.400 But we have a kind of culture that says, no, no, we don't want to learn at all.

01:07:07.200 We just want to offload.

01:07:08.700 We want to scapegoat.

01:07:09.860 We want to create theories to excuse any kind of sense of possibility for people.

01:07:16.820 And to promote that to kids is really what pisses me off.

01:07:22.600 And look, you're promoting kids into a worldview that hates the United States, that says you're

01:07:29.580 going to be either an oppressor who should feel guilt and shame, or a victim who should

01:07:33.340 feel a sense of hopelessness and fatalism.

01:07:36.840 And then you're giving kids no pathway to achieve their potential.

01:07:42.360 And it's like, this is left wing?

01:07:44.620 This is progressive?

01:07:45.660 No, no, no.

01:07:46.340 This is not anything of the sort.

01:07:47.900 And I think that's why we have to push back to the maximum extent possible to say, get this

01:07:52.860 out of the classroom.

01:07:54.060 Okay, now there.

01:07:55.240 Now we can move into the more political realm.

01:07:57.260 Now you've been working with the Florida government, fairly closely with DeSantis, as I understand.

01:08:03.480 And you guys have started to legislate moves against, well, let's say, critical race theory.

01:08:09.700 Do you want to walk us through that first?

01:08:11.360 Tell me exactly what's going on.

01:08:12.800 I'd like to know what exactly is being done on the legislative and practical front in Florida.

01:08:17.740 And we've already outlined some of the thinking behind that.

01:08:20.260 And then let's delve into that a little bit.

01:08:21.980 Yeah, it's Florida, but it's also actually now 22 states who've adopted policies to restrict

01:08:28.640 not critical race theory.

01:08:31.440 Most of the, almost all the legislation doesn't mention critical race theory by name, but it's

01:08:35.560 restricting racial scapegoating, race essentialism and race-based harassment.

01:08:40.580 So it's protecting students from really a violation of their civil rights.

01:08:45.720 And the legislation in Florida and in many other states says, look, you can't promote the idea that

01:08:52.960 one race is inherently superior to another. 1.00

01:08:55.200 You can't promote the idea that a student should feel a sense of historical blood guilt because of

01:08:59.920 his or her ancestry.

01:09:02.020 You can't say that one racial group is essentially oppressive in nature.

01:09:06.660 And so in essence, it is recapitulating or really making more concrete and more specific

01:09:14.280 prohibitions that are already in civil rights law from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

01:09:20.620 And it's responding to this specific problem because we have, it's rather, it's offering

01:09:26.300 this specific solution in response to a specific problem.

01:09:29.340 You have schools that are promoting racial scapegoating to kids.

01:09:33.640 And look, these are public schools.

01:09:36.060 These are kids that are, in many cases, compelled to be there by the law.

01:09:39.280 And then they're teaching other people's children without their consent, without the consent of

01:09:44.500 the governed, that they are somehow evil or oppressive because of their skin color, because of their 0.84

01:09:49.840 ancestors.

01:09:50.900 And so I've worked hard to just say, you know what?

01:09:54.420 The first step in this reform initiative is just to say, no, you can't do that.

01:09:59.980 The people have an absolute right.

01:10:01.760 What does that legislation look like?

01:10:04.240 And is it aimed specifically at the K-12 system, or does it also include higher ed and other

01:10:10.180 institutions?

01:10:11.120 It depends on the state.

01:10:13.380 But my point of view and what I've worked on at Manhattan Institute with my colleagues on

01:10:18.080 model policies is to say that in the K-12 environment, the state, the government, the

01:10:23.140 people, have an absolute right to create the curriculum, to create prohibitions, to create

01:10:29.600 a core of ideas and values that are transmitted through the state from one generation to the

01:10:35.880 next, right?

01:10:36.340 From voters to children.

01:10:39.120 And so I think that there is really—and the Supreme Court has agreed—you know, public school

01:10:43.560 teachers are state employees, and they do not have First Amendment rights in the classroom.

01:10:49.200 That's established Supreme Court precedent.

01:10:51.700 And the state already, and every state, sets the curriculum.

01:10:54.980 They say, these are the values of the state.

01:10:57.760 These are the specific pedagogies that we're going to use.

01:11:00.740 These are the actual lessons and materials that we'll be promoting.

01:11:03.820 And so we know that we have a really absolute authority to design a curriculum that reflects

01:11:10.540 the sentiments and reflects the will of the voters through their elected representatives

01:11:16.140 in the legislature.

01:11:18.080 In higher ed, it's a different story.

01:11:19.820 There is a bit more autonomy.

01:11:21.200 There's a bit more freedom in the classroom.

01:11:23.440 The jurisprudence, the Supreme Court precedent—precedence is a little bit more complicated.

01:11:28.900 So my view is saying, hey, we have an absolute right, because these are kids, these are not

01:11:34.040 adults, to kind of shape what is transmitted in the classroom with very clear principles.

01:11:40.420 I think it's less so in the higher education space.

01:11:44.180 My own preference is to say autonomy in the classroom, but we have an absolute right to

01:11:49.300 reshape the bureaucracy.

01:11:51.240 So those academic departments, the DEI departments, the diversity statements, the kind of left-wing

01:11:57.860 loyalty oaths, and what have you.

01:11:59.520 And so it's different, in my view, K-12 and the university.

01:12:02.940 But the fundamental bottom line is this.

01:12:06.220 The education system in the United States is not a free market.

01:12:09.900 The state controls 90% of K-12 and approximately 75% of the higher education market.

01:12:15.560 It is a oligopoly.

01:12:17.000 It is a kind of quasi-monopoly.

01:12:18.740 And the public, which pays for it, which charters it, has an absolute right to regulate, restrain,

01:12:26.900 and limit their government.

01:12:29.280 And so I think we're on strong philosophical grounds.

01:12:32.920 We're on strong practical grounds and pragmatic grounds.

01:12:35.300 And we're on strong on the grounds of public opinion.

01:12:37.480 And I think that the question is, you have left-wing ideological hegemony in our public institutions.

01:12:44.460 Even in conservative states, what can we do about it?

01:12:48.400 How can we actually push back?

01:12:49.580 How can we get some of these pseudoscientific and really divisive ideologies out of our institutions

01:12:56.340 before they really harm or really do a kind of educational damage to our kids?

01:13:05.120 Okay, so let me ask you a couple of questions on that front.

01:13:10.200 So the first is, here's a mystery.

01:13:14.780 So people on the centrist liberal front and on the classic conservative front,

01:13:22.400 the traditionalist conservative front,

01:13:23.980 are concerned about institutional capture.

01:13:30.860 So I've thought this through.

01:13:33.660 Where's the fulcrum point for institutional capture?

01:13:37.680 And as far as I can tell,

01:13:40.140 given that 50% of the typical state's budget

01:13:43.760 is spent on education,

01:13:46.940 the leverage point is capture of the education system.

01:13:50.120 And then you might ask, well, because that's 50% of all the money that's spent at the state level.

01:13:55.220 Then you might ask, well, who's captured the education spending?

01:13:58.920 And the answer is, well,

01:14:00.520 teachers and administrators that are associated with the public education system.

01:14:04.300 Then you might ask, well, who's captured them?

01:14:07.900 And the answer to that is, well, the faculties of education.

01:14:11.660 How?

01:14:12.600 Well, they have a monopolistic hammerlock on teacher certification.

01:14:16.100 And then the question is, well, why?

01:14:20.720 Like the faculties of education, they produce,

01:14:23.620 the research literature produced by the faculties of education in the last 50 years

01:14:28.580 has had a devastating negative effect on public education in the U.S.

01:14:33.320 Time and time again, whole word reading, learning styles,

01:14:38.080 the self-esteem movement, multiple intelligences, like you name it.

01:14:42.380 If the faculties of education put it forward, it was wrong scientifically and disastrous socially.

01:14:48.360 They attract terrible students, unconscientious students, most particularly,

01:14:54.800 who are attracted by the blandishments of being able to get a sinecure position

01:15:00.360 with plenty of vacation and a well-established pension

01:15:04.940 without any academic excellence whatsoever.

01:15:07.980 And they're woke to the hilt.

01:15:10.500 So why the hell have conservatives gone along with the game of allowing the faculties of

01:15:17.060 education to maintain a monopolistic hammerlock on teacher certification?

01:15:21.980 I don't understand it.

01:15:23.700 Well, you know, I mean, they had for a long time, but that's changed.

01:15:29.000 In Arizona, in Florida, in many other states, they're revamping the certification.

01:15:33.380 I've worked with folks and I've always advocated to actually just get rid of that certification

01:15:37.680 cartel altogether and saying, hey, look, if you have a bachelor's degree in physics,

01:15:42.080 you're qualified to teach physics at a high school level, for example.

01:15:47.100 And conservatives are doing that.

01:15:48.740 But the problem is that while that was the initial entry point,

01:15:51.320 and we know that from the literature of the critical pedagogists,

01:15:55.480 that was literally their plan.

01:15:56.800 They laid it out in the 80s and 90s.

01:15:58.920 They implemented it.

01:15:59.760 They have, you know, the kind of dominance over that.

01:16:01.560 But while that was the genesis or the origin, it's almost, you know, and we should fix it,

01:16:07.080 yes, but it's now a small part of the problem because you have the teaching court,

01:16:11.000 you have the teachers' unions, you have the administration, you have the DEI bureaucrats,

01:16:15.500 you have the actual pedagogical material that is created.

01:16:18.700 And so you can't simply say that was the genesis of the problem.

01:16:22.060 We can go back and solve the genesis and everything else will evaporate.

01:16:25.420 You now have a multiplicity of kind of—the locus is not singular anymore of the problem.

01:16:32.320 And so we actually have to do a lot more.

01:16:34.580 And the biggest problem, though, even worse than the capture of the ed schools,

01:16:39.200 is that these are centralized bureaucracies that are in theory accountable to the democratic

01:16:45.100 votes of the people.

01:16:47.300 Legislatures actually have oversight.

01:16:49.360 The big problem is that legislators have really done nothing,

01:16:51.740 and they've let these bureaucracies move anti-democratically.

01:16:55.420 To install this ideology.

01:16:57.500 Look, none of the legislators in red states said we want to have mandatory DEI departments

01:17:02.680 at all of our K-12 schools.

01:17:04.460 None of them voted for critical race theory in the curriculum.

01:17:07.180 None of them voted for radical gender theory in Florida, in Tennessee, in Texas.

01:17:13.760 But the activists within the state sector moved against the democratic will of the people

01:17:20.800 without the consent of the governed and installed them through a bureaucratic infiltration, let's say.

01:17:27.480 And so if that is the status quo, and I think it's undoubtedly it is—I've done the reporting.

01:17:32.000 It's been documented over and over.

01:17:34.100 That's the actual question.

01:17:35.600 Well, what do you do about that?

01:17:36.940 You have a bureaucracy that has now gone totally rogue.

01:17:40.740 It has overstepped its autonomy.

01:17:43.060 It has totally transgressed the values of the public.

01:17:46.500 It has acted without the consent of the legislature.

01:17:49.360 This is a political question.

01:17:50.860 And our friends in the center-left, really what their aversion is to, is to conflict.

01:17:55.780 They maintain this position as the enlightened centrist.

01:17:58.200 They feel like if they explain it well enough, they feel like if they go on a podcast,

01:18:01.780 they feel like if they can write a jazzy paper,

01:18:05.660 that the world will conform to their good thinking.

01:18:09.660 That's never how it works.

01:18:11.480 You have people that their livelihoods now, hundreds of thousands of people,

01:18:15.080 depends on pushing this ideology within the public institutions.

01:18:18.980 And so the question is, what do you do in that case?

01:18:21.580 And the kind of classical liberal solution is a dodge,

01:18:24.220 because what it does is it avoids the political nature of the question.

01:18:28.240 These are government institutions.

01:18:31.160 These are institutions that are created and funded by taxpayers

01:18:34.820 and that are under the regulatory power of the legislature.

01:18:38.220 And so the legislature that has abdicated is now starting to move in,

01:18:41.760 I think, you know, through my work, through Governor DeSantis,

01:18:44.060 through other state legislators.

01:18:45.620 They're now moving in to say, hey, wait a minute.

01:18:47.420 We've let this go rogue for too long.

01:18:50.200 We need to actually say these are political questions.

01:18:52.920 And they, by nature, by their very nature, by their essential nature,

01:18:56.360 will require political solutions, not merely the kind of light touch,

01:19:02.700 approach of people who think that, you know, signing a letter, an open letter,

01:19:09.800 is going to get the job done.

01:19:11.700 Okay, so let me push back as hard as I can against that.

01:19:15.460 Please.

01:19:16.040 Because I do want to get to the bottom of this as much as possible.

01:19:19.760 So, okay, it seems to me that the reason that the public education system

01:19:25.940 worked as well as it did for as long as it did, which wasn't that well,

01:19:29.620 but wasn't disastrous, let's say, was that you could make the assumption

01:19:35.000 that the bulk of teachers and administrators, first of all,

01:19:38.520 that the administrator-teacher ratio wasn't absurd the way it is now,

01:19:41.980 but also that the bulk of administrators and teachers broadly shared the same set

01:19:46.900 of values as the public that they were, whose children they were educating.

01:19:52.940 And so the reason the system worked is because that shared value system actually

01:19:57.080 was in place, not because legislatures had insisted that the teachers teach

01:20:04.120 something that was in keeping with the standards that obtained in the general public.

01:20:08.700 And now, like your claim, and I'm not disputing the claim at all,

01:20:11.700 is that the system has tilted insanely far to the left and that it's no longer

01:20:17.520 in sync with general public sentiment and that the solution to that is intervention

01:20:24.680 at the legislative level.

01:20:26.400 Now, I don't think it was legislative intervention that established the effective

01:20:30.200 axioms of the education system to begin with.

01:20:33.640 It was not convincing.

01:20:34.700 No, I totally dispute that.

01:20:37.060 Of course it was.

01:20:38.080 Okay.

01:20:38.320 I mean, look, the state government controls the curriculum.

01:20:41.580 The state government creates the institutions of public schools.

01:20:44.860 I mean, it's like the actual curricular material, yes, it was consonant with the cultural values

01:20:50.620 of the majority at the time.

01:20:52.260 Yes, it was perpetuated not through the letter of the law only, but through the kind of invisible

01:20:57.480 processes and agreements and implicit cultural assumptions.

01:21:00.380 But look, they also said, these are our schools.

01:21:04.480 We have a Pledge of Allegiance.

01:21:05.940 We do X, Y, and Z.

01:21:07.040 These are the subject matters.

01:21:08.400 These are the textbooks that we choose.

01:21:10.240 And so at all, we had a kind of agreement with the legislative and then the implicit cultural.

01:21:17.080 Yeah, right.

01:21:17.520 But you cannot deny that these were all initially legislative creations.

01:21:22.380 I mean, legislators spend a lot of their time.

01:21:25.300 School boards, again, these are elected kind of mini legislatures for school districts.

01:21:30.200 They choose the textbook.

01:21:31.500 They choose the lesson plan.

01:21:32.600 They choose the start time.

01:21:33.580 Every decision that they make politically, which is, again, the ultimate authority over

01:21:37.560 the public schools since they were created, is a political decision.

01:21:41.940 Right.

01:21:42.280 But it does rest on that concordance.

01:21:44.760 And look, again, I take very little issue with anything that you just claimed.

01:21:49.460 I think the central concern that has been bothering me is this, is the concordance issue.

01:21:56.720 Like, it isn't obvious.

01:21:58.380 And this is also why I was concerned more about eradicating the teacher certification hammerlock

01:22:04.740 by the faculties of education, is that unless, like, it's very hard to legislate morality,

01:22:11.380 even within a system.

01:22:12.540 So, for example, and maybe we can walk through exactly how you're doing that.

01:22:15.940 Like, if there are legislative means, for example, to reduce the DEI bureaucracy, how exactly is

01:22:23.900 that going to play out?

01:22:24.960 Like, how do you identify the DEI proponents?

01:22:28.880 I mean, some of them are going to have it in their name, but lots of them aren't.

01:22:31.540 I don't understand how this is going to be implemented at the level of detail.

01:22:35.500 And how do you know that the players here aren't just going to shift the terminology on you?

01:22:40.060 Sure, I can get into that.

01:22:41.420 But I think that the presupposition there is that you're saying that it's hard to legislate morality.

01:22:46.220 But that's absurd.

01:22:47.580 It has always been in the Western tradition.

01:22:49.520 The law sets the moral rules.

01:22:52.400 I mean, that's going from a kind of biblical basis to the founding fathers of the United States.

01:22:56.800 It's, you know, they said that the function of law is to establish, you know, of course,

01:23:01.640 limited government, but also to establish a moral framework in which citizens can then live out their lives.

01:23:09.680 And, you know, the founding fathers were clear.

01:23:11.520 They said that the purpose of government, the purpose of law, is to allow people to pursue happiness.

01:23:15.920 Not meaning a libertarian vision of happiness, not license to do whatever they want.

01:23:20.600 But as George Washington said, happiness and virtue, they go together.

01:23:23.900 The Aristotelian idea of virtue and happiness in the American founding was deeply united.

01:23:28.420 And so the purpose of law is to say, you know, don't kill, don't steal, don't do this.

01:23:33.240 Those interdictions are essentially moral prohibitions to establish a moral framework.

01:23:38.660 But to the specific question is really a technical question.

01:23:42.060 How do you define DEI departments?

01:23:44.480 You know, look, with Manhattan Institute, I worked with a team of very smart lawyers from Harvard and Yale and other places.

01:23:50.820 We put together a model policy that does exactly that.

01:23:53.820 Part of it is actually delineating what it is.

01:23:56.380 But really what it is is saying these are the behaviors that we do not permit.

01:24:00.060 The government can no longer spend money on diversity statements, which function as left-wing loyalty oaths.

01:24:05.420 The government can no longer spend money on mandatory diversity training, which functions as ideological indoctrination.

01:24:11.740 The government can no longer tip the scales on the basis of identity.

01:24:15.220 So it can't discriminate for or against individuals on the basis of their group identity.

01:24:20.820 And then the government can no longer spend money on these specific principles, behaviors, and actions that constitute diversity, equity, and inclusion.

01:24:30.900 And so the lawyers spent a lot of time figuring out specifically what the transgression is.

01:24:37.280 All right, well, what do we not want?

01:24:39.220 What actions are we seeing?

01:24:41.280 And yeah, they can relabel, they can move.

01:24:43.480 But ultimately, we get past that linguistic shell game.

01:24:47.940 The left loves to change the terminology at a quick rate because their ideas underneath them are unpopular.

01:24:53.040 Their actions are unpopular.

01:24:54.420 Their policies are unpopular.

01:24:55.480 So we actually don't operate at the level of just the linguistic shell.

01:25:01.100 We say, what are the specific violations?

01:25:03.920 And so this is civil rights law, right?

01:25:06.120 So the civil rights law has kind of codifies prohibitions on racial discrimination.

01:25:10.260 Well, what's racial discrimination?

01:25:11.980 Well, we've able—I mean, we're still working on it.

01:25:14.620 I don't think we defined it adequately.

01:25:15.960 But we're still working to figure out these ongoing questions.

01:25:19.620 But it should—that is a kind of a cause.

01:25:23.800 And I take your concern seriously.

01:25:25.260 But it really just means let's be very careful.

01:25:27.720 Let's be very deliberate.

01:25:28.700 Let's make sure that we're doing, in a technical manner, the right things.

01:25:32.920 But it doesn't undermine the actual fundamental principle at all.

01:25:36.980 It doesn't even touch it.

01:25:37.900 It's that these DEI programs were not created democratically.

01:25:41.480 They violate the consent of the governed.

01:25:43.760 And the legislature, the people, through their elected representatives, have an absolute right

01:25:48.620 to restrain, limit, and regulate their government.

01:25:52.820 And so, sure, we can debate the details.

01:25:56.020 We can get the lawyers in on it.

01:25:57.620 Well, you've answered one of my concerns quite effectively, I would say.

01:26:00.880 Because what I was concerned about, I think, primarily, was, well, the potential misuse of

01:26:07.160 government intervention in systems that should be granted a certain amount of autonomy.

01:26:11.260 Because you can see how that would go wrong.

01:26:12.940 But more particularly, I was concerned that the definitional framework used to address

01:26:19.340 concerns with DEI and CRT would remain at the level of abstraction, and therefore become

01:26:25.020 too amorphous and loose.

01:26:26.440 Like, if you've actually nailed it down to much more specific exemplars of behavior and

01:26:32.040 action, then you've actually differentiated the problem down to the appropriate micro level

01:26:37.080 of analysis.

01:26:37.920 Yes.

01:26:38.240 Do you have any evidence that what you've been putting forward, how are you going to measure

01:26:44.140 the success or failure of your legislative venture?

01:26:48.620 Well, you know, I think that we'll ultimately measure the success or failure on, can we get

01:26:54.820 these things through the legislature?

01:26:56.620 Can the bill that emerges and gets signed by governors around the country, is it faithful

01:27:03.100 to the vision that we've put out in our policy papers?

01:27:06.100 And then you can actually just see the cultural change that cascades down from the change in

01:27:10.720 law.

01:27:11.340 You're going to see these bureaucratic departments get shut down.

01:27:14.360 I think that you're going to be able to measure the kind of jobs and initiatives that get closed

01:27:19.200 and get removed from the university.

01:27:21.280 And then you're going to see, very simple, if you say no diversity statements, are the universities

01:27:26.020 doing diversity statements or not?

01:27:27.320 If you say no mandatory kind of race re-education training, are they doing it or not?

01:27:32.140 If you say no racial discrimination against individuals based on their identity categories,

01:27:37.620 you can then see, is the university complying?

01:27:40.640 And so the compliance question is really, if we design a law that is successful, if we restrict

01:27:48.160 not just language but actual behavior, I think it'll be fairly easy to measure on the back

01:27:54.440 end, not without problems, not without adjustments, not without going back and amending it.

01:27:59.540 Is there an assessment and measurement strategy in place?

01:28:02.520 Because one of the things I see constantly on the political front is that people put into

01:28:07.240 place policies that are designed to produce a particular end.

01:28:11.460 In your case, for example, let's say reduction in number of bureaucrats who are employed by the

01:28:16.300 DEI or DIE bureaucracy.

01:28:19.320 But that there's never any real attempt to measure that to see if the implemented policies

01:28:25.660 produce their intended action and very little else, let's say.

01:28:30.280 Yeah, yes.

01:28:31.700 I mean, for sure.

01:28:32.740 And what I've proposed at New College of Florida, where I'm now a trustee on the board of trustees,

01:28:38.920 is that we're going to—I'm moving to abolish the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office

01:28:43.340 to kind of just phase that out entirely, to adopt these principles against diversity

01:28:48.720 statements, coercive training programs, racial discrimination.

01:28:52.340 And then I'm also moving to create a very small office—doesn't need to be huge—but

01:28:57.440 a department or an office of equality, merit, and colorblindness that says these are our

01:29:02.820 positive principles.

01:29:04.100 We're going to actually have embedded in the law of the institution and the regulatory

01:29:09.100 code of the institution.

01:29:10.660 We have to promote equality, so equal treatment as individuals.

01:29:13.780 We have to promote merit, judging people not on the basis of identity but on their rigor

01:29:17.620 of scholarship or effectiveness or competence.

01:29:20.100 And we have to have colorblindness throughout the university in all of our processes.

01:29:24.080 And so by creating this small office—I think at New College as a small, it could be just

01:29:27.840 one person, maybe two people tops—we can then have reports to the board of trustees on

01:29:33.280 a regular basis.

01:29:33.920 We can have investigations as necessary.

01:29:36.040 We can have compliance and regulatory rules to say, hey, look, are we living up to our

01:29:40.880 values, not just of abolishing DEI—that's the first step—but actually presenting a

01:29:45.280 framework of equality, merit, and colorblindness, consonant with civil rights law, consonant with

01:29:49.440 the 14th Amendment, consonant with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.

01:29:53.000 And that's going to be the values by which we govern this institution.

01:29:56.360 And we're going to have, of course, because it's a bureaucracy, some level of compliance so

01:30:00.340 that I get a report at the end of every quarter, every year as a trustee, hey, this is

01:30:04.700 where we're doing a good job.

01:30:06.260 This is where we might be falling short.

01:30:07.640 This is an update on how we're complying with these principles.

01:30:10.540 So there are guidelines set forward by the American Psychological Association with regard

01:30:16.320 to the assessment of merit.

01:30:18.580 So people who are hiring are compelled by law, particularly in the U.S., to hire using measurement

01:30:25.420 techniques that are demonstrably related to the job outcome desired.

01:30:31.980 And so there's actually technical ways of going about that.

01:30:35.000 And so—and I know this literature quite well.

01:30:37.100 So you have to do a job analysis, which is, well, exactly what are the functions that are

01:30:43.280 required for someone in this position?

01:30:45.400 So, for example, for a researcher, it might be papers published per year in journals above

01:30:50.760 a certain threshold of quality, combined with number of courses taught, combined with ratings

01:30:57.440 by students and peers of the quality of those courses.

01:31:01.120 Then you can establish a set of predictors that predict that outcome.

01:31:06.020 So, for example, for researchers, it would be, well, if you want good scientific researchers,

01:31:11.120 one of the best things to analyze in a potential candidate for employment is number of publications

01:31:17.240 co-authored or authored as a graduate student during PhD training.

01:31:22.100 That would be research dossier.

01:31:23.920 Then there'd be a statistical relationship between the number of papers published in graduate

01:31:28.820 school and the eventual number of papers published as a full-fledged researcher.

01:31:33.140 And that's actually a technical definition of merit.

01:31:36.360 And so then merit-based hiring would use processes, would use measures of behavioral and perhaps

01:31:44.760 temperamental factors that were tightly tied statistically to the desired outcome.

01:31:49.160 That's a technical definition of merit.

01:31:51.500 Do you think that you have people in place who know the measurement literature well enough

01:31:56.460 to actually come up with a definition of what constitutes merit that isn't merely, that

01:32:02.620 doesn't merely fall prey, let's say, to the same semantic ambiguity that you might fall

01:32:06.580 prey to if you were trying to abolish CRT rather than these behavioral measures, behavioral

01:32:12.460 indicators that we talked about?

01:32:14.360 Yeah, of course.

01:32:17.460 I'm very confident because, look, academics are very smart.

01:32:21.660 Academics are intelligent people.

01:32:23.300 If you set the standard, hey, we need to actually work on the objective categories of merit.

01:32:27.320 This is the rubric.

01:32:28.240 This is how we judge candidates.

01:32:29.440 This is the process.

01:32:30.220 You know, it's certainly within realm of possibility.

01:32:33.280 And we know that because that's how it used to be.

01:32:35.840 But how it is now, and I just finished, I'm just finishing up doing a series of reports

01:32:39.660 on these programs in Florida's public universities.

01:32:42.700 I analyzed a document from the University of Central Florida.

01:32:46.380 It's called equity-based hiring or inclusive-based hiring.

01:32:50.400 And they say specifically merit is a, quote, myth.

01:32:53.740 They say it's a harmful heuristic.

01:32:55.880 They say you can't be measuring people on merit.

01:32:57.880 It's actually an oppressive structure.

01:32:59.260 And then in their documentation, officially, they say you have to measure people, you have

01:33:05.480 to recruit people on the basis of identity.

01:33:07.240 You have to filter people on the basis of diversity statements.

01:33:11.180 So loyalty oaths to left-wing ideology.

01:33:13.420 You have to pepper the job descriptions with social justice buzzwords like race, equity,

01:33:18.360 social justice, et cetera.

01:33:19.800 And then at the end of the process, you have to have a quota of at least one woman and one 1.00

01:33:24.480 minority on the final selection for the job.

01:33:27.840 And if you can't get that race and sex quota, you have to scrap the hiring process and start

01:33:33.500 at the beginning.

01:33:34.480 And they have then guidance on the metrics that they want to hit.

01:33:38.020 And so we have to choose as the public, as the ultimate authority over public institutions,

01:33:44.480 we have to choose.

01:33:45.760 Do you want a hiring system based on identity quotas and political litmus tests?

01:33:50.740 Or do you want to have a hiring system based on excellence of scholarship and demonstrable

01:33:56.080 merit?

01:33:57.240 And look, people are smart.

01:33:58.960 They're adaptable.

01:33:59.620 If you set the standard, they'll figure out ways to meet it.

01:34:02.700 But right now, we have the worst of both worlds.

01:34:05.580 We have officially in our law anti-discrimination.

01:34:08.360 But unofficially, the de facto law of our institutions is explicit and purposeful race and sex 0.88

01:34:16.360 discrimination in service of left-wing ideology.

01:34:19.440 And so we have a very clear problem.

01:34:23.000 We actually have what is really, at heart, a violation of the very basic social compact

01:34:28.520 that defines our democratic institutions.

01:34:31.260 I mean, John Locke, his head would explode if he saw what's happening.

01:34:36.740 You say, this is a violation of our basic constitutional structure.

01:34:40.100 And the centrist position, which is, well, we can't do anything.

01:34:43.420 Don't get the legislature involved.

01:34:45.180 The government should not interfere with the government, is such an abdication that it actually

01:34:49.620 enables tyranny.

01:34:51.200 Because if the government is acting against the people without the consent of the people

01:34:56.400 through their legislators to pursue its own ideological ends, that is the definition of

01:35:01.220 tyranny.

01:35:01.980 And yeah, it's a kind of soft, equity-based tyranny.

01:35:05.220 But it's tyranny nonetheless.

01:35:06.580 And it undermines the basic structure of our democracy.

01:35:09.800 And I think Governor DeSantis, what he's doing ultimately, is he's restoring public authority

01:35:14.900 over public institutions. 0.92

01:35:17.280 All of the BS about that this is a government overreach, that's ridiculous.

01:35:21.920 The government determines the government.

01:35:23.740 You can't, you know, it's like saying the people have no authority to regulate the government.

01:35:27.960 I mean, it's so tyrannical.

01:35:30.020 It's so totalitarian.

01:35:31.220 It's like the DeSantis move at heart, the actual substantive core of it, is reinvigorating

01:35:37.820 the democratic structures, reinvigorating legislative oversight over public institutions,

01:35:41.840 and giving the people a voice in the constitution of the institutions that teach their children.

01:35:48.180 I mean, if we cannot have that, I mean, we should give up.

01:35:54.220 Democracy has lost any kind of substantive meaning.

01:35:56.600 It's procedural and intellectual and kind of phantom democracy only.

01:36:02.140 Well, Christopher, I'm going to leave you with that last word.

01:36:05.580 That's a pretty damn good closing statement.

01:36:08.220 It was a...

01:36:09.040 Did I persuade you, though?

01:36:10.320 I mean, that's the key question for me is, are you with us?

01:36:13.100 You answered my question.

01:36:13.620 Do you support the legislation to abolish DEI, abolish diversity statements, abolish mandatory

01:36:20.220 ideological training, abolish racial discrimination in public universities?

01:36:23.740 Do I have your support?

01:36:25.740 Well, look, what I would say about our conversation today is that you addressed all the concerns

01:36:30.640 that I had.

01:36:31.280 I wasn't doubtful about the necessity for what you were doing to begin with.

01:36:36.500 You know, I was concerned about the level of analysis that was being utilized.

01:36:42.260 I was concerned that it might be too vague and that it could devolve into something like,

01:36:46.840 you know, a conservative witch hunt on the right, because it isn't necessarily the case

01:36:50.740 that it's going to be you pursuing this in 10 years.

01:36:53.080 It could easily be someone who doesn't have anywhere near your intellectual capacity.

01:36:57.140 And so that bothered me.

01:36:58.160 It's not easy to put constraints around a set of ideas.

01:37:01.280 And I tried to torture you today as best I could on that front.

01:37:04.320 And I think you responded, you know, with exceptional detail and clarity.

01:37:08.760 And so I'm feeling a hell of a lot better about the situation.

01:37:12.160 I don't have any questions left that I haven't asked you and that you didn't answer sufficiently.

01:37:19.520 So, and I didn't start this conversation as an opponent to what's been happening in Florida.

01:37:25.780 I started this conversation as a concerned person who has seen the cataclysmic effects of this radical leftist ideology,

01:37:35.420 especially in higher education, but now increasingly in K through 12,

01:37:39.120 and is hoping on all fronts that something can be done about it.

01:37:42.920 And so I'm much more, what would you say, convinced, much more reassured that you and the people who are doing this have thought this through to the proper level of detail.

01:37:59.380 So, and if I have other questions that pop up, and no doubt there will be some,

01:38:04.700 then I'll be more than happy to, you know, let those be known.

01:38:09.020 I'd like to think about what I'm doing in this conversation as a benevolent critic, you know,

01:38:14.520 because this is so important to get this right, that I don't want to see anybody slip up.

01:38:21.160 And you guys are taking very forthright action.

01:38:25.060 And hopefully there aren't any snakes lurking under the carpet, right?

01:38:29.580 Because I'm always looking for snakes lurking under the carpet.

01:38:32.740 And so far in this conversation today, you haven't revealed any new snakes.

01:38:38.160 So that's pretty much how I look at that situation.

01:38:41.380 So, look, we should wrap this up.

01:38:45.840 We've gone for a requisite 90 minutes.

01:38:47.840 And like I said, you made a pretty damn compelling closing statement there.

01:38:52.740 I appreciate very much you taking the time to walk through this with me today.

01:38:56.780 And for you to share what you've been doing, you know, so forthrightly with everybody who's listening and watching.

01:39:02.400 I'm sure there'll be plenty of people paying careful attention,

01:39:06.320 especially parents who should particularly pay attention to this conversation,

01:39:10.360 who are, you know, interested in what's happening in Florida and elsewhere, but also leery about it.

01:39:16.420 And so my suspicions are they're going to feel a lot more confident about this attempt to restructure

01:39:23.540 than they might have before the conversation.

01:39:26.120 So that's probably a success on your front.

01:39:28.700 I guess we'll see what the public commentary is like.

01:39:30.760 So I'd like to thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.

01:39:33.680 To everybody who's watching and listening on YouTube and its associated platforms,

01:39:38.980 thanks for your time and attention to the Daily Wire Plus people for facilitating this conversation.

01:39:43.460 That's much appreciated.

01:39:44.740 Film crew here in Tulsa, because that's where I am today, who made this possible without any technical flaw or screw up.

01:39:52.360 That's always much appreciated.

01:39:53.560 And Chris, we're going to move over to the Daily Wire Plus platform now,

01:39:57.040 and I'm going to spend half an hour with you talking more autobiographically.

01:40:01.020 I'm interested in getting into a little bit more detail about how your intellectual interests developed across time.

01:40:08.240 And thanks again for agreeing to talk to me.

01:40:11.820 It was a pleasure getting to know you a bit more.

01:40:14.900 Hello, everyone.

01:40:15.820 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

01:40:23.560 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 27, 2023

335. Imposing Limits on the Woke？｜ Christopher Rufo

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 27, 2023

335. Imposing Limits on the Woke？ ｜ Christopher Rufo

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

335. Imposing Limits on the Woke？｜ Christopher Rufo