In this episode, I speak with Florida Governor DeSantis supporter Chris Ruffo about education reform in the state. Chris has been a long-time member of the Florida Democratic Party and has been involved in many efforts to reform the state's higher education system. In this episode we discuss how Chris came to be involved in the education reform movement in Florida and why he thinks it's important to take a hard look at what's happening on the education front in the Sunshine State. We also talk about Chris' background and how he became involved in education reform efforts in Florida, and what he thinks needs to be done to improve education in America's largest and most important state. This episode is sponsored by Daily Wire Plus, where you get 20% off your first month with discount code: DEEDWORD14 at checkout. Let s take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a pediatrician who specializes in treating depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. He provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywireplus now and start watching Jordan's new series, "Dr. Jordan Peterson on Depression and Anxiety: A Path to Feeling Better" on Dailywire Plus now! and let s help you feel better! Thank you for listening to this episode. - Dr. B.B. Dr. P.P. . - Jordan Peterson Chris R. R.R. is a friend and supporter of conservative causes and causes that help make a difference in the world. Thank you so much, and I m looking forward to hearing from you! -Jon Sorrentino Jon Taffer, Jon Rocha John Singleton J. Rochter, J. M. Jon Soto Jordan Peterson, Jr. & Chris Raffaele, Jr., J. S. , J. C. & J. K. ( ) & John R. (J. MURCHER, JOSH MILLER, D. L. (JORDY M. LYNNE)
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone. I have the opportunity today to speak with one of Florida's leading troublemakers, you might say, Christopher Ruffo.
00:01:17.360And he's been working on the education front in Florida, and I want to play the role of friendly enemy today.
00:01:25.700Because 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.
00:01:36.540And also, more specifically, with regard to higher education.
00:01:41.140And so I've been watching the goings-on in Florida with a great amount of interest, and I have a lot of questions.
00:01:45.440And I'm going to try to push Mr. Ruffo, Chris, as hard as I can today in a friendly manner,
00:01:52.080because I want to get to the bottom of all of this to the degree that that's possible.
00:01:57.020And I'm certainly seeing excesses on the leftist radical side with regards to the reformulation of the education system.
00:02:04.240And as far as I'm concerned, something needs to be done about that.
00:02:07.300But 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.
00:02:16.220So we're going to hash that out today. At least that's my plan.
00:02:18.640So welcome, Chris. It's good of you to agree to talk to me today, and I'm really looking forward to this.
00:02:23.720Yeah, likewise. It's a pleasure and an honor to be with you, and look forward to the conversation.
00:02:28.580So let's start out by giving some people information about your background.
00:02:32.960And you kind of sprang onto the scene, at least insofar as I was concerned, just a couple of years ago,
00:02:39.920when you started really, what would you say, pushing back against the DEI activists on the education front.
00:02:48.340And now you seem to be pretty integrally involved in Governor DeSantis of Florida's, what would you say,
00:02:56.400strategic moves forward on the education reform front.
00:03:01.800And 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.
00:03:09.740Yeah, well, you know, I think my background is pretty different than a lot of the folks in the conservative world or the conservative movement.
00:03:16.140You know, I grew up as a kind of a young man of the left.
00:03:20.660That was my politics, kind of hard left politics as a teenager.
00:03:24.920My family members were kind of in a long tradition of kind of left wing and even kind of Marxist and communist activism.
00:03:33.900And 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,
00:03:43.800sold a film to Netflix and other international TV stations.
00:03:46.520And that left wing worldview totally fell apart.
00:03:50.800I started working in the conservative world, started doing journalism.
00:03:54.280And 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.
00:04:02.640And 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.
00:04:12.040And I don't think that's true for my opponents.
00:04:15.500I don't think that they know how the right thinks.
00:04:17.160I don't think they know how conservatives think.
00:04:18.760They don't think the right does think.
00:04:51.100And 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.
00:05:22.320If you're an adult with a brain, you're traditionalist or conservative leading.
00:05:25.460And I think there's some real truth in that.
00:05:27.700But also partly, and this has to do with, you know, your characterization of conservatism as a series of irritable gestures,
00:05:34.260one 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.
00:05:42.860And it's really up to the community to provide that vision, which is part of their enculturation.
00:05:48.460And conservatives have done a dreadful job of that, I would say.
00:05:51.720And liberals as well, like the true liberals, not the leftist type.
00:05:54.720So 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?
00:06:07.200Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is just a sense of heroism, a sense of drama, a sense of the romantic.
00:06:14.320You get all of the mythology of the left.
00:06:16.540You know, an aunt of mine gifted me a Che Guevara flag that I hung in my bedroom.
00:06:21.080And you have this kind of heroic image of the swashbuckling reformer pursuing social justice, holding the rich accountable, providing for the poor.
00:06:30.520And it is a very attractive narrative.
00:06:33.040I mean, there's no getting around that.
00:06:35.980And the conservative narrative is really one of restraint, duty, obligation.
00:06:41.840And when you're 13, that's not exactly something that is going to inspire you.
00:06:45.920And 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.
00:07:00.260I 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.
00:07:12.260And then, of course, my family members in Italy were kind of old-school, European, working-class Marxists.
00:07:18.520And so they would provide, you know, kind of long lectures when we would go back and visit.
00:07:23.200You know, the thought of Lenin, the thought of Marx, the thought of Gramsci.
00:07:27.140They approached it from a theoretical basis that was, to me at the time, very attractive because it was putting an intellectual frame to politics.
00:07:38.580And so it engaged me mentally as well.
00:07:55.740So the first issue is the pervasive reality of the unequal distribution of both talent and wealth.
00:08:04.560And so Marx famously noted that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people as time went on.
00:08:12.900Now, the cataclysmic mistake that Marx made, one of many, was to assume that there was something unique about capitalism in the production of inequality.
00:08:25.740And 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.
00:08:44.680And so, for example, it is the case that most of the world's capital is in the hands of a relatively few people.
00:08:52.260But 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.
00:09:03.040And that most, very few planets have almost all the planetary mass, and that also applies to stars.
00:09:10.620It applies to your blood vessels as well.
00:09:13.720A very small proportion of your blood vessels have the largest volume of flow.
00:09:18.240That's called a Pareto distribution, and Pareto distributions tend to characterize a certain proportion of natural systems.
00:09:27.100And 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.
00:09:37.020But, number one, it can't be attributed to capitalism, because every economic system that humans have ever employed produces a Pareto distribution.
00:09:50.060Now, 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,
00:09:59.700because 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,
00:10:11.940but, you know, what do you say about poverty-stricken children, especially when they're poverty-stricken in the face of wealth?
00:10:18.520And 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?
00:10:29.880And 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.
00:10:42.700And the truth of the matter is we don't know, we really don't know what to do about it.
00:10:46.940It's a very difficult problem to solve, and it's a complex—the solutions are complex.
00:10:53.420But 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.
00:11:01.540And, like, that is a lot more attractive emotionally than, as you pointed out, the message of restraint, duty, and obligation,
00:11:09.840which 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.
00:11:18.700Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:11:25.400Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:11:33.220In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:11:38.200Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with the technical know-how to intercept it.
00:11:47.560And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:11:50.880With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:11:58.260Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:12:56.480Yeah, 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.
00:13:12.900I 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.
00:13:21.880Over the course of a few years, and really trying to understand this question, what is driving inequality?
00:13:28.600What does the phenomenon reveal about itself?
00:13:31.520And the answer was actually really my political turning point, the completion of my political education.
00:13:37.500And it's looking at it and saying, hey, wait a minute.
00:13:40.580It's not just a simple economic story.
00:13:43.240It's not a story of elites kind of greed.
00:13:46.240It's not a story of that kind of left-wing ideology.
00:13:48.980And 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.
00:14:00.860In one of the neighborhoods, for example, 92% of the families were single-parent homes.
00:14:05.580So there were no fathers in the home almost anywhere in the whole zip code.
00:14:10.360But you look at the social pathologies, you know, from depression, anxiety, to drug addiction, alcoholism.
00:14:20.020And then you look at the collapse of community and institutions.
00:14:22.680So 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.
00:14:32.860And all you get is the individual and the state.
00:14:35.080And 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.
00:14:50.700So enough to have a median standard of living.
00:14:53.640And yet you have a complete social disaster through and through.
00:14:58.380And 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.
00:15:08.460The United States spends more than a trillion dollars a year on its welfare programs.
00:15:12.620It cannot solve problems that are human, cultural, spiritual in nature.
00:15:17.300And 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.
00:15:31.300Well, 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.
00:15:50.540And 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.
00:16:00.740But all you have to do to address social problems is redistribute money.
00:16:06.700And that is an absolutely, it's such a primordial, it's such a primitive and unsophisticated theory.
00:16:12.840Because, 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.
00:16:33.100Like, 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.
00:16:44.160But 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.
00:17:03.280And I'd have clients that would find themselves face down in a ditch, you know, the next Tuesday morning.
00:17:08.500And 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.
00:17:31.180Yeah, 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.
00:17:39.480But in fact, production is the miracle. For almost all of human history, we produced very little per capita.
00:17:45.960And so with capitalist production, which is presupposed in the Marxist economic analysis, I mean, this is a miracle.
00:17:52.680The 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.
00:18:09.200I mean, it's a miracle of human invention.
00:18:10.920And 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.
00:18:22.700But the question of how to solve that is very complex. It's very difficult.
00:18:26.320And 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.
00:18:38.380You'd see spikes in violence on a monthly cadence.
00:18:41.540And I remember talking to someone and saying, hey, why is everyone out today?
00:18:46.360And 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.
00:18:55.800And then you kind of start to understand, okay, money alone is not the solution.
00:19:00.700It has to be obviously resources money that is, I think, earned.
00:19:03.560And then also that is in the context of a culture that has a set of values that can hold it together.
00:19:09.520And look, all over, and I think especially in the United States, that cultural net has really been shredded.
00:19:18.700And 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.
00:19:27.320You know, the war on poverty, spending trillions of dollars now, has not solved it.
00:19:32.860I 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.
00:19:46.660And 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.
00:19:57.560And 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?
00:20:10.020Which, in many cases, it's like a hellscape, you know, violence, addiction, mental illness, kind of shredded social net.
00:20:19.560And these aren't easy questions, and they certainly don't have easy answers.
00:20:25.480Well, you know, part of the appalling hypersimplicity of the woke moralist claim is that poverty is reducible to lack of money.
00:20:34.880And in fact, true poverty is a multidimensional problem.
00:20:39.060And the multidimensional problem is essentially something like lack of proper placement within a functioning social hierarchy and lack of forward vision.
00:20:49.780And then what happens, if people don't have anything they regard as useful, productive, and generous to do, that they're committed to,
00:21:00.640then what happens is, because they can't find meaning or surcease from anxiety in the pursuit of a well-constituted life,
00:21:09.960they default to impulsive pleasure-seeking.
00:21:12.540And 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?
00:21:23.680And so it's definitely the case that, well, it's a hell of a good time for four or five days in the bar.
00:21:29.240And 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.
00:21:39.980And 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.
00:21:49.300This 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.
00:22:02.440It'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,
00:22:16.780might 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.
00:22:27.340But it does nothing for the people who you are attempting to hypothetically help, except make their lives a hell of a lot more miserable.
00:22:36.700But, you know, you get to feel good about it.
00:22:38.440So that's a small price to pay, all things considered.
00:22:48.760So now, did you actually start moving in more, say, classic liberals, liberal or conservative circles at that point?
00:22:57.100I 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.
00:24:52.540I think maybe it has to do with the association in personality between agreeableness and leftist proclivity.
00:25:02.020So the socialist types, the lefties, are technically more agreeable.
00:25:06.400And 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.
00:25:15.880And I think it's also partly an institutional question.
00:25:19.600So something like PBS, something like the art world, something like the cultural world, certainly also the academic world, these are artificial economies, right?
00:25:42.820Whereas 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.
00:26:17.720I think that's good and fine and true.
00:26:20.080But 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,
00:26:31.580to a metaphysical basis on identity, and that's very unstable.
00:26:38.020And then you have games that are not played on, hey, let's kind of advocate for wages or working conditions or cash redistribution.
00:26:47.140You're actually then jockeying on the position of identity.
00:26:49.420And so you have an economically artificial institution, limited positions, highly ambitious people that are then jockeying for position based on identity.
00:26:59.040I mean, it's like that is a recipe for a toxic environment.
00:27:01.560Right, so it's a real derivative game in some sense, right?
00:27:04.120So it's already a derivative of reality when you're talking about money.
00:27:09.200But when you're talking about identity, you've moved one step further up the abstraction hierarchy, like a financial derivative.
00:27:16.600And so things get very unstable and vacillated a tremendous amount.
00:27:23.320I mean, because the Marxist game, as you pointed out, for the longest time, and then even the valid socialist game was essentially economic.
00:27:30.320Like the fundamental playing, the fundamental battlefield was, you know, what slice of the pie does the working class get?
00:27:38.760And 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.
00:27:51.180And 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.
00:28:15.240And so, all right, so now we've got some reasons for exclusion laid down.
00:28:20.140So now, okay, so you announce yourself, you come out of the closet, so to speak, as a more conservative thinker, 2016 and 2017.
00:28:28.520That pretty much devastates your social community, and I presume your livelihood, at least as an NPR documentarist, that's for sure.
00:28:38.260Well, you know, then I kind of had to scramble, right?
00:28:40.480And, 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.
00:28:53.840And then I said, all right, well, what can I do?
00:29:05.400And then, you know, they really welcomed me with open arms.
00:29:07.920They said, oh, you're a kind of, you know, a defector from the other side.
00:29:11.920And in the conservative world, this is a long tradition.
00:29:14.120One 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.
00:29:26.260Worked with Richard Nixon, worked with McCarthy, and, you know, he was formerly Trotsky's personal secretary in the United States.
00:29:36.100And so we have this long tradition of defectors from the left moving rightward.
00:30:05.460Well, 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.
00:30:14.740And 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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00:31:37.760Well, mostly that, to draw a line, you know, and with very little success.
00:31:44.440But 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,
00:31:51.840was that whenever I was talking to even relatively moderate people on the left, I had to watch what I was saying all the time.
00:31:59.180And, 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,
00:32:09.280especially among hypothetical peers that are hypothetically working to solve a problem.
00:32:15.660It's like, I just want to say what I think.
00:32:17.400And 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.
00:32:26.920And 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.
00:32:55.380But 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.
00:33:37.680And 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.
00:33:47.180And they just repeat the same 10 points.
00:33:49.520I've done reporting for now a few years on critical race theory, gender ideology.
00:34:08.620You know, you cannot say anything that would contradict, you know, the great party line.
00:34:13.240And 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,
00:34:26.160it's like this is where kind of actual free thinking, actual—the feeling of freedom, the feeling of intellectual possibility.
00:34:33.560And 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.
00:34:45.620And then, you know, I see all of these folks attacking me.
00:34:51.740The Atlantic wrote a piece recently that said a qualified endorsement of Christopher Rufo.
00:34:57.340But 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.
00:35:07.900And really, that's because I'm much more free than they are.
00:35:13.780I love fighting these fights with a sense of doing things that others cannot even contemplate doing because they risk their academic sinecures or whatever.
00:35:22.680Yeah, well, that's the joy of having a free tongue, man.
00:35:26.020Well, you know, it's also very perverse temperamentally, eh?
00:35:30.080Because I looked a lot at what predicted political viewpoints from the temperamental and cognitive front.
00:35:37.300Because 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.
00:35:46.200Those are very good, powerful, reliable, valid predictors of individual difference in such things as opinion.
00:35:52.600And the biggest predictor of liberal left belief is trait openness, which is the creativity dimension.
00:36:00.900And what you would, which is why, for example, leftist ideas are rife in places like Hollywood.
00:36:05.500But 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.
00:36:15.160That freedom of movement, that's especially true with regards to artists, that's all they have.
00:36:20.560And then what you see on the left is this stifling orthodoxy that makes art dull and predictable.
00:36:27.220It reduces everything to these 10 axioms.
00:36:29.920And it seems to fly completely in the face of what open people, creative people, would truly want.
00:36:35.900And so I'm still puzzling through that.
00:36:40.100See, it's partly that the open people don't want barriers to information flow.
00:36:46.680And so when they see conservatives putting up barriers of any type, even barriers of category, that destabilizes them.
00:36:54.300Because the open types capitalize on free information flow.
00:36:57.640But perversely, that rejection of the boundaries that conservatives put up has led to a situation where, well, you didn't want any boundaries.
00:37:09.520And now all you've got are boundaries around what you can say and think and do.
00:37:14.120And I can't see how that can sustain itself for any length of time on the artistic front.
00:37:18.360Because, well, it'll do the whole enterprise in.
00:37:21.260But it's got to just stifle the hell out of creative producers.
00:37:24.340Yeah, and I felt that in my time working in the documentary film world.
00:39:58.200And because the conservative mantra, in some sense, is rely on what's implicit.
00:40:04.000Rely on what everyone already accepts as self-evident and of value.
00:40:09.460The 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.
00:40:17.240And so it means the conservatives have to make their ethos explicit and they have to start putting it forward as a vision.
00:40:23.960And that's very hard for conservatives because, by and large, they're not visionary.
00:40:29.220Because the visionary types are the open types.
00:40:31.180Now, you've seen this weird, transgressive reversal on that front.
00:40:35.940Like, one of the first things that really struck me as indicative of how upside down everything was, was, well, first of all, Rush Limbaugh.
00:40:44.000When I first encountered him, like, 25 years ago, I thought, this guy is a comedian.
00:41:43.680And 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.
00:42:19.020Freedom can only be a left-wing value.
00:42:21.600But it's really not the case historically.
00:42:25.380And I think it's certainly not the case now, actually.
00:42:27.780They've taken all of those values and they've folded them in on themselves.
00:42:31.340And 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.
00:42:39.560You can go on down the line and you say, hey, wait a minute.
00:42:42.620You're not actually meaning what you say you mean.
00:42:45.380All of these things have to be lampooned.
00:42:54.480Actually, 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.
00:43:01.620And so we're seeing the shift now, and it's because the left has institutional control.
00:43:10.340Look, you know, government agencies, universities, K-12 schools, prestige media organizations.
00:43:17.100If 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.
00:45:42.160And this will get us more into the political discussion I want to have with you, too.
00:45:46.240Critical race theory is a very difficult, what would you say, set of concepts to nail down.
00:45:52.040And I've kind of characterized that whole general domain, me and others, obviously, as a pastiche of postmodernism and Marxism.
00:46:02.860And out of that comes an identity politics, which is the Marxist experiment failed on the economic front.
00:46:09.800And 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.
00:46:21.600And as far as I can tell, CRT is just an offshoot of that, just.
00:46:25.960But you've delved into it with a fair bit of effort, let's say, and over a fairly long period of time.
00:46:32.980So let's start by just talking about what constitutes critical race theory as far as you're concerned.
00:46:44.920It's that the United States is a white supremacist country that promotes the concepts of freedom and equality.
00:46:51.700But this is merely a smokescreen for naked racial domination.
00:46:55.360Second, the doctrine of intersectionality says that the world can be divided between oppressor and oppressed.
00:47:01.300But 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.
00:47:10.420And then the third key component or idea is, well, what do you do to fix it?
00:47:13.940They argue that the constitutional protections of the First Amendment, the 14th Amendment, private property should be overridden, should be suspended.
00:47:23.340And then society should engage in large-scale wealth, seizure and redistribution along the axis of race until you have equal outcomes.
00:48:00.180And 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.
00:48:16.240And 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.
00:48:32.380UCLA law schools have been at the forefront of this too.
00:48:35.700And that damn intersectional theory, to me, as someone who's somewhat versed in statistics, that's just a miracle of ignorant stupidity.
00:48:44.440Because all it is is the rediscovery of the interaction term.
00:48:47.800So 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.
00:48:57.500But then you can also multiply them together now and then.
00:49:15.040And 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.
00:49:26.760It's like, well, Jesus, could you come up with something more obvious than that?
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00:50:39.980And 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?
00:50:56.580Like, that's supposed to be the intellectual contribution.
00:50:59.280Well, you know, if you're black, you're oppressed, or Hispanic, or whatever the hell it is, Irish.
00:51:04.340But man, if you're a woman, you're also oppressed.
00:51:06.880And then, well, if you're an Irish woman, I mean, look at how oppressed you are, multiplied by endless demented categories of identity.
00:51:15.860It's such an intellectual—it's so shallow intellectually.
00:51:19.600It's such an appalling Marxist sleight of hand that its crookedness and malevolence can hardly be overstated.
00:51:27.360But I think it's important that—maybe I'll disagree slightly.
00:51:32.220I think it was—you know, they base their legitimacy not on the objective value of their ideas, which they reject, but on their positionality.
00:51:40.900So intersectionality, for example, is promoted by Kimberly Crenshaw, a black woman.
00:51:45.760And so she has authority not based on the idea, but based on her positionality.
00:51:50.160And then she gives it a complex Latinate term, intersectionality, which makes it seem maybe more sophisticated than it is.
00:51:57.380But I think it's important, the question of roots, and I'd like to maybe push back.
00:52:01.040As 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.
00:52:10.620I think if you look at queer theory, that's 100% true.
00:52:13.600The queer theorists themselves, the founding generation in the 80s and 90s, said explicitly, Foucault is our lodestar.
00:52:19.100His history of sexuality, his idea of sexual transgression is our founding principle.
00:52:24.600But the critical race theory, kind of scholars, are a homegrown in the United States phenomenon.
00:52:33.000They actually lay out their intellectual lineage.
00:52:34.820They take it from Gramsci, the kind of Marx on the axis of culture.
00:52:40.180But really what it is, it's repackaging the ideas of Angela Davis, repackaging the ideas of the Black Panther Party, Black nationalist ideology.
00:52:48.080And then repackaging identity politics based on the Combahee River Statement and other kind of Black feminist literature.
00:52:56.760And so it's coming from Marxism, Marxist-Leninism, Black nationalism.
00:53:02.880And 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.
00:53:13.640The 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.
00:53:24.800We 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.
00:53:38.700And then we have to seek legitimacy through the academy.
00:53:43.140They 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.
00:54:04.620And we're going to legitimize our ideas through elite institutions, use the kind of manipulative strategies within the institution pioneered by Derrick Bell.
00:54:13.160And that's how we're going to gain power.
00:54:14.680And 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.
00:54:30.740I mean, they did it, and that's how the kind of power maneuvering worked.
00:54:37.660So 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.
00:54:54.900And 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.
00:55:03.240I still think that what we're facing on the culture war front is a pastiche of post-modernism and Marxism.
00:55:44.120He worked with the NABCP Legal Defense Fund.
00:55:47.920He ran, I think, something like 300 anti-segregation cases in the Deep South.
00:55:52.660And, you know, I mean, really compelling guy who I think fought the good fight at that time.
00:55:57.380He 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.
00:56:11.020But then something in his psychology shifted.
00:56:13.980And 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.
00:56:55.560And 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.
00:57:12.420The 14th Amendment, the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act, the Emancipation Proclamation.
00:57:17.480All of that talks a good game, but it's really a myth to uphold, you know, white supremacy.
00:57:23.680And 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.
00:57:31.600And so you see this really tragic figure.
00:57:35.560Transgeneration into kind of a unidimensional paranoia.
00:57:38.660Yeah, 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.
00:57:47.520And so you see this kind of really heroic figure just descend into this pessimism, cynicism, fatalism.
00:57:57.420And then he's rewarded by society and really predominantly white liberal society.
00:58:02.900And 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.
00:58:22.960They 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.
00:58:38.480Right, which they also then decry as, like, the markers for that creative, competent output just as part of the white patriarchal power game.
00:58:48.500Like, 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.
00:59:00.680And I read through those traits, and I think this is so interesting, because I know that low conscientiousness predicts leftist liberal view.
00:59:10.480So it's high openness, low conscientiousness.
00:59:13.040And all the traits that are attributed to white patriarchy are the traits of conscientiousness.
00:59:19.500It's so amusing, and that conscientiousness, by the way, is the best temperamental predictor of life success.
00:59:25.140It's second only to general cognitive ability.
00:59:28.440And so, but what's also interesting is there are absolutely no racial differences in the distribution of trait conscientiousness.
00:59:35.840And 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.
00:59:53.480So, and it's deeply condescending to people who are racial men.
00:59:57.820I 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.
01:00:19.320These people have never seen and traveled around the world.
01:00:23.220It'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.
01:00:40.300I mean, I would get slapped, and rightfully so, because, you know, this is actually racist.
01:00:52.260These 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.
01:01:03.440Look, 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.
01:01:16.020It isn't obvious to me at all that the racism in those charts is inadvertent.
01:01:20.560It might not be conscious, but it's definitely compensatory.
01:01:48.680And so let's talk about Kimberly Crenshaw.
01:01:52.180I 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.
01:02:06.640And, you know, as far as I'm concerned, that could easily be the case.
01:02:10.440But 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.
01:02:22.280And 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.
01:02:32.440Now, 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.
01:02:42.380She says, well, it's all systemic racism.
01:02:45.020And I think, well, wait a second here.
01:02:47.360First of all, it's probably not all anything.
01:02:50.960It's probably quite a few different complicated things.
01:23:44.480You know, look, with Manhattan Institute, I worked with a team of very smart lawyers from Harvard and Yale and other places.
01:23:50.820We put together a model policy that does exactly that.
01:23:53.820Part of it is actually delineating what it is.
01:23:56.380But really what it is is saying these are the behaviors that we do not permit.
01:24:00.060The government can no longer spend money on diversity statements, which function as left-wing loyalty oaths.
01:24:05.420The government can no longer spend money on mandatory diversity training, which functions as ideological indoctrination.
01:24:11.740The government can no longer tip the scales on the basis of identity.
01:24:15.220So it can't discriminate for or against individuals on the basis of their group identity.
01:24:20.820And then the government can no longer spend money on these specific principles, behaviors, and actions that constitute diversity, equity, and inclusion.
01:24:30.900And so the lawyers spent a lot of time figuring out specifically what the transgression is.
01:36:58.160It's not easy to put constraints around a set of ideas.
01:37:01.280And I tried to torture you today as best I could on that front.
01:37:04.320And I think you responded, you know, with exceptional detail and clarity.
01:37:08.760And so I'm feeling a hell of a lot better about the situation.
01:37:12.160I don't have any questions left that I haven't asked you and that you didn't answer sufficiently.
01:37:19.520So, and I didn't start this conversation as an opponent to what's been happening in Florida.
01:37:25.780I started this conversation as a concerned person who has seen the cataclysmic effects of this radical leftist ideology,
01:37:35.420especially in higher education, but now increasingly in K through 12,
01:37:39.120and is hoping on all fronts that something can be done about it.
01:37:42.920And 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.
01:37:59.380So, and if I have other questions that pop up, and no doubt there will be some,
01:38:04.700then I'll be more than happy to, you know, let those be known.
01:38:09.020I'd like to think about what I'm doing in this conversation as a benevolent critic, you know,
01:38:14.520because this is so important to get this right, that I don't want to see anybody slip up.
01:38:21.160And you guys are taking very forthright action.
01:38:25.060And hopefully there aren't any snakes lurking under the carpet, right?
01:38:29.580Because I'm always looking for snakes lurking under the carpet.
01:38:32.740And so far in this conversation today, you haven't revealed any new snakes.
01:38:38.160So that's pretty much how I look at that situation.