Jodi Shaw and Christopher Ruffo are warriors in a very uncomfortable space, and that is the critical race theory that is being shoved down our throats collectively as a people in our universities, in our K-12 schools, in corporate America and elsewhere. And it isn t easy to stand up and say, no, no, this is itself racist . But both of them have been doing it. And now he is organizing a real response, a real fight back.
01:04:39.780So enroll in minutes and see how many points you can add to your credit score.
01:04:42.660And now before we get to Chris, we are going to do a feature that we call Asked and Answered here in the Megan Kelly Show where our executive producer, Steve Krakauer, swings by with some questions that the viewers or the listeners want to know.
01:05:05.940Yeah, this one came to us from questions at devilmaycaremedia.com.
01:05:10.500We're getting a lot of great ones in there so everyone can keep them coming or just send it to our social media accounts at Megan Kelly Show.
01:05:18.520This one comes from Lynette Kelly, and she wants to know what was absolutely required of you when you were growing up and also what are the non-negotiable expectations you have for your children?
01:05:29.700We might be related and she's, you know, she's seeing if my my roles were the same as hers.
01:05:35.700They probably were because all Kellys have a certain sensibility in my experience.
01:05:39.840So there were certain that number one, non-negotiable in my family of origin and my current family, my nuclear family now is a sense of humor, like the ability to laugh at yourself and definitely at others, too.
01:05:52.800It's fun to laugh at others, you know, when they're not around.
01:05:55.280You don't want to laugh right in their face.
01:05:56.800But like if one of us tripped, oh, my God, we'd be merciless with one another.
01:06:00.680I saw that I can't like if I'm walking down the street now and I trip, I'm like, oh, God, did they see it?
01:06:26.780You know, you got to like build in a little bit of a thick skin on your kids because life's going to throw a lot harder things at them than that.
01:06:32.300And if you can practice laughing at yourself on small matters or, you know, long spidery toe matters, I think it sets you up well for life.
01:06:40.800The other thing is my mom, she was always there with emotional support.
01:06:44.040My mom is she's a psychiatric nurse, so she understands emotional support.
01:06:48.120But she shored us up so that we could do it for ourselves.
01:06:51.420And she never swooped in to save us when we screwed something up.
01:06:54.280You know, she let us fall and get ourselves back up.
01:06:56.980She used to have a sign on our kitchen cupboard that read, lack of planning on your part does not justify an emergency on my part.
01:08:40.780Since many of our listeners won't know what your background is, can you just tell us, like, because you're you've become this sort of warrior against this critical race theory and this crazy racist teaching that's getting shoved down the throats of our American school kids, of corporate America employees.
01:08:57.780Sort of everywhere we look and you've been sounding the alarm on this like nobody else, you and Jody.
01:09:05.060Sort of how did you get to this point of activist on this issue?
01:09:09.400Yeah, it's it's kind of a backwards, backwards leaning story.
01:09:13.480But, you know, I spent the first 10 plus years of my career directing documentaries primarily for PBS.
01:09:18.480And I was probably a kind of center left person 10, 15 years ago and and slowly saw some of these theories creeping into the documentary world, the art world.
01:09:29.920And then as I shifted to do more politics and reporting, it kind of bit back in this really extraordinary way where all of a sudden, within kind of months of the death of George Floyd, it seemed like these critical race theory based programs and were everywhere in every institution and every corporation and every workplace.
01:09:51.880And I stumbled into reporting on it really through chance, a source at the city of Seattle sent me some documents and said, hey, you should really look at what the Seattle Office of Civil Rights is doing.
01:10:20.340They were telling them that they had internalized white supremacy, that they needed to denounce their own kind of inborn characteristics and and join essentially a kind of cult of anti-racism.
01:10:31.980And as soon as I broke that story, the floodgates opened and I started getting first tens and dozens and then hundreds of people all across the country telling me exactly what was happening in their institutions.
01:10:44.900Right. It was their own me to me to me to me to.
01:10:51.780But it reminds me of a couple of years ago when there was this one school in particular that made the news because they were doing this when it came to gender.
01:11:00.400They were separating the little boys and the little girls and having the girls write down the list of grievances that not they, but women have against men and then shouting, shouting at the boys for perpetuating this unequal system.
01:11:15.560And like even at that far left school, parents were pulling their kids after that, like, hell no.
01:11:38.300And what we're seeing is a really interesting political realignment where old line liberals or kind of New Deal liberals or kind of Clinton style liberals are really caught in this place where they're trying to figure out where they find a home.
01:11:52.640And, you know, I'm at this point firmly in the kind of conservative camp, but, you know, I've really tried to open my arms and welcome in people on the center and center left who are really kind of revolted by this people who, you know, believed in the civil rights laws, believed in equality under the law, believed in individual protection of individual rights.
01:12:13.000Those are really all under assault by the very far left that have taken identity issues and tried to really look at the foundations of our society and really try to shift them.
01:12:27.400I broke a story recently in Cupertino, California, very similarly to what you're talking about, where the teacher basically said every student, you have to break down and deconstruct your identity.
01:12:37.680Now, these are eight and nine year olds, third graders, deconstruct your racial identity or sexual identity, create an identity map, and then we're going to divide you on a kind of ranking of power and privilege.
01:12:50.980So separating a classroom full of eight and nine year olds into the oppressors and the oppressed.
01:13:00.200And unfortunately, we're in a cultural moment where it's actually scary for a lot of people to call out something that is really just blatantly wrong, totally inappropriate.
01:13:11.600But people are so scared of being denounced on these racial and cultural issues.
01:13:16.300In a lot of cases, they remain silent.
01:13:33.160And if you push back, it's, you know, you're transphobe.
01:13:36.640And so parents are having this shoved on their kids.
01:13:38.740And many departments we're going to get into critical race theory with you because you've taken a hard look at that and gotten a lot of reporting on it.
01:13:45.440But just keep in mind for the audience at home, this is happening on many different cultural fronts, all of which are deeply problematic.
01:13:51.840This is social experimentation on, as you point out, kids who are eight.
01:13:57.880And the Cupertino article that you wrote, I saw that.
01:14:01.340And you had written that students were told these are little ones told that they live in a dominant culture of white, middle class, cisgender, educated, able bodied, Christian, English speakers who created and maintained this culture in order to hold power and stay in power.
01:14:14.960And you point out, this is a well-off school district.
01:14:28.140And the kind of wrinkle in this story and really the kind of wrinkle in our identity politics that's emerging, especially here on the West Coast, is that the parents who mobilized against this program were Chinese-American.
01:14:40.700It was a group of about a half dozen Chinese-American parents.
01:14:45.180They demanded a meeting with the principal and they shut it down.
01:14:48.020And I think this is really significant for two reasons.
01:14:50.920One is that, you know, Asian-Americans, it's very difficult to call them white supremacists.
01:14:56.840I mean, it really doesn't make any sense.
01:14:58.580So they don't have that kind of fear of being denounced on those terms.
01:15:03.440So they can act kind of more directly, more bluntly.
01:15:07.000But two, you look at the kind of racial composition of our institutions, of universities, of kind of testing.
01:15:17.360And Asian-Americans are going to be the biggest losers of this kind of new race-based apportionment of power and privilege.
01:15:26.400So we're moving away from a kind of system of individual merit determines your opportunities, individual achievement towards a kind of group-based and identity-based distribution of power and resources.
01:15:38.560And Asian-Americans are looking at the numbers and they're saying, we are right now an overrepresented in college admissions and in certain high prestige fields, especially in the math and sciences.
01:15:51.680And they're looking at this not only for their own self-interest, but some of the Chinese-American parents at that school and frankly, in other places or in the Seattle area where I live, they say, hey, we've seen this playbook before.
01:16:05.240When you try to deconstruct identity, pit group against group, come up with these kind of really aggressive kind of strategies of cultural change, this is straight out of the cultural revolution.
01:16:19.920And some of these parents told me, we fled China to get away from this.
01:16:25.280And now we're finding ourselves seeing it here in America.
01:16:28.640And that's why they're standing up against it.
01:16:30.480Right. And the Chinese education experience has been studied and discussed by a lot of scholars.
01:16:37.460But it is interesting because there is a culture of academic achievement and it doesn't matter whether you come from a very rich family or a very poor family.
01:16:46.620There is a culture of working hard and getting good grades and that that's prized.
01:16:51.400And so they're not in favor of, as you wrote about the San Diego Unified School District, abolishing homework deadlines.
01:16:59.300And some other schools are getting rid of grades, getting rid of the SATs, getting rid of anything that would reward that kind of hard work and hours and hours of grit that they they would like to be rewarded for the amount of effort they are willing to put into their academic careers.
01:17:15.800Yeah, that's exactly right. And I mean, ultimately, right, no matter what systems that we create, there's really no substitute for hard work, for achievement, for excellence.
01:17:26.020And, you know, even in my own household, you know, my wife is Thai American.
01:17:29.220She grew up in a slum in Thailand, very poor.
01:17:32.620Her mother was able to flee, come to the United States and had a difficult time really growing up in poverty.
01:17:38.540But her mother drilled into her head, study hard, work hard, learn English, you know, go to college, do all of these steps, because this is a place of enormous opportunity.
01:17:50.560And, you know, you escaped some system that was really rigged against all people into this new system.
01:17:58.000And, you know, my wife was able to excel.
01:17:59.940And I see it even at home with our kids, you know, our our oldest child, who's 10, came home with a B plus.
01:18:05.860And my wife was furious. She's like, B plus is not good enough.
01:18:09.520We're going to have to do an extra hour of homework every night with mom.
01:18:12.860We're going to have to push, push, push. We know that you can do better.
01:18:16.320And I think that, you know, that small experience is indicative of even the academic literature that shows that Asian Americans consistently put in more hours of studying than any other group and consequently have really good outcomes.
01:18:31.540And I think the solution isn't really to do what we're doing now, which is basically saying, get rid of homework, get rid of the requirement to show up on time, get rid of standardized tests, really try to basically eliminate anything that could distinguish people based on academic achievement.
01:18:48.280And just lump people into these really kind of kind of crude, chromatized kind of skin color based groupings, but actually figure out, hey, what are the students that are doing most successful doing?
01:19:01.180And this goes for all categories. What are successful white and black and Asian and Native American students doing?
01:19:07.160And how can we replicate what's happening with those students more broadly to try to rather than lower the bar?
01:19:13.920We want to lift the floor. But that's really hard to do. And a lot of these ideologues have no interest in doing it.
01:19:21.020Just to pick up on a point you just made, you talked about some of the quote training, diversity training that was being done at the Department of Homeland Security.
01:19:28.420And one of the terms you were just basically discussing, which is merit, right, meritocracy and working hard, right, and believing that this is a land of opportunity that was specifically derided by the DHS diversity trainers as as racist as they say.
01:19:46.200I took notes from your article that whites have been fed a racial curriculum based on falsehoods, unwarranted fears, and they believe in their own white superiority, that they've been socialized into oppressor roles and that there is a myth of meritocracy and statements like anyone can succeed here if they work hard enough and the most qualified person should get the job.
01:20:08.860Those statements are racist and they're harmful. They're code for people of color are lazy or incompetent, need to work harder.
01:20:15.140Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty common meme or a pretty common idea in the social justice circles and in trainings all over the country, this idea that meritocracy is a form of white supremacy, this idea that punctuality is a form of white supremacy, objectivity even.
01:20:32.120So any kind of abstract noun that we think of as a kind of value or a virtue, the critical race theorists argue that that's merely a camouflage for racial domination and oppression.
01:20:45.140So all of these things that you think are neutral or in some cases good are actually under the surface bad because they enable a system of white supremacy, et cetera.
01:20:56.240Another one is colorblindness. Colorblindness, the critical race theorists tell us, is actually racist because it, again, enables a system of discrimination and oppression under a kind of false pretense of equal protection.
01:21:10.440So it's really a upside down world in a lot of ways. And I think the big problem is even people who mouth this stuff, right, the people in the training sessions and the diversity trainers themselves, they say in kind of their language, oh, these things are all kind of white supremacist values.
01:21:30.060They should be deconstructed. They should be deconstructed and denounced. But how many of them show up to work on time?
01:21:35.440How many of them try to gain achievements and credentials and academic awards or prizes or publications?
01:21:44.360How many of them function in a day to day basis as if objectivity is a kind of basis for rational decision making?
01:21:53.880The answer is all of them. I mean, the thing that is so infuriating is that they will browbeat their opponents in the most vicious terms when their actual behavior reflects that they have internalized, adopted and even value those same structures.
01:22:12.100And I think it's really up to us to call them out.
01:22:15.060But at least they feel bad about it, right? They've got guilt over it.
01:22:18.300Yeah. And it's just it's just a performance. That's the thing. It's like, you know, I've had a number of trainings, actually, even one that came into my email email box today.
01:22:27.160The new thing now is to introduce yourself in a meeting, not only by your name, but actually introduce yourself by your race, your gender and your name.
01:22:37.500So you're now basically in meetings and in in school districts and in government agencies where you say, hey, I'm I'm Chris.
01:22:45.620I am. I'm a I'm a I'm a white male and my pronouns are he and him.
01:22:49.860And it's like we do this kind of unconscious dance where we try to check all the boxes of what's polite and what you're supposed to do and what's expected to avoid, you know, the kind of blowback.
01:23:02.560But, you know, does anyone really believe it? I'm not convinced that my God, it's it's absurd.
01:23:07.680I this is this is what I'm going to say. Megyn Kelly, figure it out.
01:23:14.860I know transgender people. I have transgender family members and they don't want to have to say pronouns.
01:23:20.480The whole point in switching over and sort of living in the in the body and in the gender that they felt they were meant to be born with is to live in that gender.
01:23:30.340And if they wanted more attention called to the fact that, you know, they had transitioned, then maybe they'd be in for they'd be in favor of this.
01:23:38.480But if they're living life as a woman and they were born as a, you know, in the body identified as male, they don't want to have to run around saying pronouns all the time.
01:23:47.140They just want you to call her her or she.
01:23:49.120It's like there's a real split within the transgender community about this pronoun thing.
01:23:53.080So there's you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
01:23:55.560And I mean, like saying your race, I can open your eyes.
01:24:00.680It's absurd where we're going, prioritizing all the wrong things.
01:24:04.680Yeah. Yeah. And I think like, you know, the answer is actually much more simple.
01:24:09.020You know, they the the kind of social justice crowd is basically saying all of these things are kind of kind of kind of irredeemable evil.
01:24:18.920We need to overthrow the very basic foundations of our society or in order to rectify them.
01:24:24.780But the solution actually, in so many cases, is really simple.
01:24:32.400And if you come across someone, I don't know, this is what my practice is saying.
01:24:36.580OK, this person is maybe transgender identifying as a woman.
01:24:41.160And I just I just use that thing and then be very open to any feedback that's different.
01:24:46.420Try to respect and honor people's choices.
01:24:49.420And you don't necessarily need this kind of cultural revolution underneath.
01:24:53.060But I'm pretty convinced at this point that a lot of these kind of games that are set up.
01:25:00.080Right. These are really games that we're required to play.
01:25:02.640These kind of loyalty tests or litmus tests to the cause are really just mechanisms.
01:25:08.300They're not actually important in themselves to a lot of these people, but they're mechanisms for a broader pattern of cultural revolution.
01:25:16.520And the old ideas that kind of failed, you know, century after century, kind of from, you know, the 1840s onward with with kind of Marxism and then centralized planning in the 20th century.
01:25:34.980And they come back in these reformulated ways.
01:25:37.220And I think that in a small way, these little games that we play as a society are reflective of deeper currents of a political movement that wants, you know, revolution, that wants fundamental change.
01:25:50.840So let's go back and just talk about what critical race theory is.
01:25:53.460I think a lot of people think they have a general idea, but don't really understand what is critical race theory.
01:25:58.740Yeah, and critical race theory is a kind of academic movement that started really to kind of blossom in the 1990s and was really relegated to academia.
01:26:08.560And the idea is that is to kind of use race as a lens through which to analyze society and basically saying analysis up to this point has discounted the importance of race.
01:26:21.040We should really look at race, racial discrimination, racial oppression, and as at that point, I agree.
01:26:31.100But they take another step, which is to say that they make a kind of historical judgment and then a legal judgment and a cultural judgment that the United States is fundamentally and irredeemably racist and white supremacist.
01:26:47.200And that all of our institutions, from the founding of the country to the current day, are merely kind of cover or smokescreens for racist oppression.
01:26:59.180And the critical race theory is actually started out of law schools.
01:27:03.080And their idea was that the fundamental rights that we have as Americans enshrined in the Constitution, articulated in the Declaration, are actually kind of perpetuators of evil.
01:27:15.840And that we should essentially overthrow the constitutional order and end the kind of unfettered protection of speech, end individual rights as individuals, end private property, which is another form of discrimination, and then end kind of 14th Amendment protections that you're all treated equally under the law.
01:27:38.640For the critical race theorists, these aren't actually signs of progress.
01:27:41.580Even the Civil Rights Act, even the Civil Rights Act, even desegregating schools, they were very skeptical of this because they say it gives the appearance of progress, but actually doesn't change the fact that racism is as bad in 2021 as it was in 1814.
01:28:20.580And people have been using the term cultural Marxism since the 1960s and 70s.
01:28:26.040So it has a kind of lineage, but I would best describe it in this way.
01:28:30.640In kind of old style Marxism from, you know, Karl Marx, based on kind of coming out of the work of Hegel, the idea was that there's a kind of dichotomy in society between the oppressor and the oppressed.
01:28:45.120And in Marxist time, he thought that class analysis was really the most fundamentally important dynamic in society.
01:28:52.840So there was a kind of bourgeoisie, so the owners of capital, the owners of factories, the owners of financial institutions.
01:28:59.860And then there was the proletariat, the kind of downtrodden workers and laborers at the bottom.
01:29:06.540And I mean, there's a certain truth to that, right?
01:29:09.660But what they tried to do from Marxist time through the 20th century was we need to have a kind of communistic central planning system that overthrows the kind of capitalist domination.
01:29:31.940And even in the states that are nominally communist, like China, they've abandoned that kind of economic system.
01:29:38.820So in the 1960s, a group of philosophers and scholars called the Frankfurt School that eventually actually came, many came to the United States, said, hey, we know that the kind of Marxist revolution has failed.
01:29:54.640So we have to find a new strategy to get to that revolutionary goal, to get to that goal of overthrowing the kind of European capitalist society.
01:30:04.280And they said, what we need to do is now focus on identity and on race and to create a coalition of the dispossessed.
01:30:14.260And they got to work kind of putting together that ideology.
01:30:18.080It was picked up and then modified and changed and adapted by the critical race theorists in the 1990s.
01:30:24.160And then with an almost astonishing speed, after the death of George Floyd, these ideas that had been brewing for a half century were all of a sudden perpetuated in every corporate office and every government agency and in every school in the country.
01:30:38.820It's something, you know, to their credit, they patiently developed and built and perpetuated this in academia until the time was right where it was just caught fire.
01:31:39.620It always functions in what kind of philosophers call negation.
01:31:44.880So denying, dismantling, deconstructing, interrupting all of those verbs that you hear in the language of social justice are all really fundamentally negative.
01:31:54.660And from Marx onward, even Marx had this problem where Marx never really said, what does the great kind of socialist communist society look like?
01:32:04.680It basically said, well, we can't even understand how glorious this utopian future will be until we destroy the nightmare that we have today.
01:32:12.460And the social justice folks, in many cases, operate on the same framework where they say, we have to destroy racism, patriarchy, capitalism, et cetera, et cetera.
01:32:24.740And then out of the ashes, a kind of beautiful new world will emerge.
01:32:35.180He wrote a piece for Politico that said, we need to have a department of anti-racism that is permanently funded, staffed by unelected experts, theoretically appointed by people like Ibram Kendi.
01:32:48.040And this department of anti-racism should be essentially a fourth branch of government that has the power, and this is in the article, anyone can read it, that has the power to nullify or void any law at any level of government in the United States, and also has the power to monitor the speech of policymakers, which would include, you know, you would assume journalists and think tanks, et cetera.
01:33:11.380And essentially to shut down any speech that is not anti-racist.
01:33:17.240So in this world, it would have a kind of omnipotent fourth branch of government that has total power to regulate speech and total power to control the law in every level of government in the United States.
01:33:32.120I mean, if that's not a kind of authoritarian and totalitarian regime, and he publishes it in the pages of Politico and then wins the kind of praise of all of the kind of technocratic class from Twitter to academia to the media.
01:33:47.240And it just it blows my mind that if you could get away, you know, get away with outlining something like that very bluntly and face not only no pushback, but get the kind of universal praise of America's elites.
01:34:03.340Oh, I mean, Politico just had to melt down the staffers there because Ben Shapiro for one day edited the playbook like basically the website and its editorial for one day.
01:34:12.780I didn't I don't remember any pushback when Ibram X. Kendi published these ideas on the site.
01:34:45.600And if you don't, you you get called anti-black, anti-person of color and a white supremacist.
01:34:53.080Yeah, I mean, you know, I would say, though, like I get that a lot of people saying, oh, aren't you scared of being called this or that?
01:34:59.740And it's like, well, you know, I've been called this and that.
01:35:02.580And, you know, you survive, you move on.
01:35:04.720And and people who actually can read your work and know your character, you know, will make a better judgment.
01:35:10.380But we also live in this weird moment that I've seen pieces in academic articles and popular press where they're saying that logic is white supremacist, math is white supremacist, square dancing is white supremacist.
01:35:26.040I've seen even that from a very well-known Black Lives Matter activist in Seattle that Barack Obama is a white supremacist.
01:35:32.760I mean, we've defined white supremacy as essentially anything in this moment that people on the left don't like.
01:35:39.440And I think it's doing, hopefully, over the kind of short and medium term, people will say, well, wait a minute.
01:35:46.400If logic and objectivity are white supremacist, I mean, we've reached kind of beyond the point of absurd.
01:35:52.680And this this epithet, which is really the worst thing that someone can call you in modern day America.
01:36:32.560The other piece of it is I talked about this with Douglas Murray not long ago last week, which was what what a lot of these folks seem to want is not equality.
01:36:41.560As they say, they want whites to be cowed and self-flagellating and in a permanent apologetic stance for sins that were committed hundreds of years ago.
01:36:55.500And that like I've been saying all along, that is no way forward for the country.
01:37:00.920It's the same thing these sort of radical feminists were doing to men when the Me Too movement exploded and then imploded.
01:37:10.280They they they just started to sweep up any man with any small transgression in their Hoover.
01:37:16.600And then the movement lost all power because people just became afraid of them, started rolling their eyes at them and started to avoid them.
01:37:25.760And I think that it's really cynical in a lot of ways where they're using race as this kind of emotional battering ram because they know that it's extremely effective at eliciting a response and getting results as far as practical political power.
01:37:42.280But if you look at actually what does the world look like, I don't think it's saying, hey, we're going to voluntarily renounce our positions in the universities, step down from our positions on corporate boards and elevate elevate people in our place that reflect the kind of demographic preferences of our policy statements.
01:38:02.500I think it's a political move and it's the left that is a multiracial left elite that is using the kind of, frankly, using black pain and suffering and historical trauma in order to advance their own agenda.
01:38:19.500Again, that actually isn't isn't a kind of predominantly African-American agenda.
01:38:26.960It's really a kind of predominantly left agenda that is.
01:38:30.780Oh, yeah. I've said many times this isn't about white versus black.
01:38:34.940This is about left versus right and not even because I think most of the left are with the right on this.
01:38:40.820It's this crazy faction on the hard left, hard sort of radical left.
01:38:46.120Right. I don't mean people who like Bernie Sanders economic policies.
01:38:49.980I mean the radical left that's pursuing this crazy woke world that's unattainable and dangerous.
01:38:56.740Those are the it and and they tend to be upper west side white women.
01:39:01.760I mean, it's like, yes, there are some black people saying, but like they're the ones pushing this.
01:39:06.020They're the ones doing the self-flagellating and making the rest of us feel.
01:39:09.440I mean, their messaging actually is that if a black person makes any allegation, not believing them is racist, that that calling the police on a black person suspected of a crime that has been witnessed by a store manager in CBS is racist.
01:39:27.660Right. Like it's it's getting to that point where upholding the law, pursuing due process is considered racist.
01:39:38.720Yeah. And if you if you look at it, that's really the battlefield right now.
01:39:44.080They're really going after criminal justice.
01:39:45.900And I think they're going after criminal justice primarily because, you know, they already have kind of what you might call cultural hegemony over blue cities.
01:39:55.300Right. This kind of far left ideology is really running the show in New York and San Francisco and Seattle and and D.C. and Boston.
01:40:04.160But in these cities where they have pretty much total domination, there's one sector of society that they don't.
01:40:17.840And you notice their rhetoric is, you know, abolish courts, abolish prisons, you know, abolish the police.
01:40:25.520And they sense that that is really in their kind of apocalyptic worldview.
01:40:30.940That is the final impediment to their revolution.
01:40:34.160The criminal justice apparatus is really the last vestige of historical oppression in these cities.
01:40:41.980And it just you can just feel all of the energy just converging on that point.
01:40:47.840And what they're doing in New York and other cities is now being reflected because as cities are depolicing or decriminalizing or even defunding in some cases,
01:41:02.620And it's almost like we forgot the lessons of the 1990s in New York, where we actually had to take proactive measures to to to make society more peaceful and safer, especially for minority communities.
01:41:16.440It's almost as if we've forgotten all those lessons and we've been swept up in this mania.
01:41:21.340And the latest numbers from the FBI show, you know, double digit increases in homicides in dozens of cities.
01:41:27.060In some in some cases, 50, 60, 70 percent, the biggest one year increase in recorded history.
01:41:34.140And at what point does that evidence and that true suffering and that kind of horrific violence start to make those, you know, upper west side wine moms start to reevaluate their, you know, their candy fanship?
01:43:31.280I know it's like it's straight out of a Tom Wolfe novel.
01:43:35.220It really is like it's really amazing.
01:43:37.200And I think on one hand, it's so absurd that it's almost like funny in a kind of dark way.
01:43:41.420But the more serious point is is is this is that the the great kind of moral crime of critical race theory and its related political movements is that it serves to kind of establish and strengthen elite status.
01:43:56.440So if you are a professor or a pundit or a media personality on the far left, this stuff is great for business.
01:44:04.780But actually, it does nothing to help the people that are most vulnerable, that are most kind of dispossessed, that are living in the poorest neighborhoods.
01:44:13.580And, you know, I spent actually five years directing a film for PBS about America's poorest cities.
01:44:19.280And I spent, you know, months and months and months in some of the poorest places on Earth or in the country, rather, including a housing project in Memphis.
01:44:28.420It was 100 percent African-American, nearly 100 percent rate of poverty.
01:44:32.400And I spent so much time talking to people, listening to people.
01:44:37.680And it struck me that from that experience to then thinking about the rhetoric from critical race theory, these are people that live in two completely different worlds.
01:44:47.660The actual concerns of people who are living in poverty, living in housing projects have nothing to do with the concerns that are coming out of the mouths of the kind of academics and journalists who profess the kind of new racial orthodoxy.
01:45:04.400Those solutions that come from the top actually would do nothing to help people at the bottom.
01:45:09.700And as I'm going to be arguing in an upcoming paper, actually, in a lot of ways, actually make things worse, both through crime and also through how institutions are refigured.
01:45:20.220It actually undermines those institutions like strong families, like strong communities, like strong churches that are actually the foundation of these places.
01:45:30.520And I think that, you know, we shouldn't be afraid to oppose this movement, because I think it's intellectually bankrupt, but it's also morally bankrupt.
01:45:41.860And I think both of those are tremendously important.
01:45:45.260Just to follow up on my stat from Coleman Hughes's article, one of the many in City Journal in 2018, the NYPD killed five people down from 93 people in 1971.
01:45:55.780Can you just talk for a minute? Because I your articles are always so good, Chris, and they go through like the craziness of this critical race theory.
01:46:04.820And I'm just going to tick off a couple of things, but I want to pivot to God and family after this.
01:46:12.220But like these are just a couple that you've you've publicly outlined at the Treasury Department.
01:46:16.280They were being told America was built on the backs of the enslaved.
01:46:19.580All white Americans are complicit in a system of white supremacy.
01:46:22.000Whites share an inborn racist and oppressive streak.
01:46:26.700OK, whiteness, whiteness includes white privilege and white supremacy.
01:46:32.580All whites struggle to own their own racism, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:46:36.940Oh, and and by the way, they say, as you have to sit in the discomfort of your own racism as a white person, as black employees tell you about their pain.
01:46:44.860Again, they warn the black employees that that they, quote, have no obligation to like you, thank you or feel sorry for you or forgive you.
01:46:53.460So it's a sowing division. I read it and I have a note here.
01:47:01.760And then I got on to an article you wrote about the San Diego Unified School District having been radicalized.
01:47:09.280They're getting rid of the homework deadlines and they did.
01:47:12.240They bring in Bettina Love or were they just talking about something?
01:47:15.960They hired her to speak at two separate events.
01:47:18.020OK, so Bettina Love, according to what I read in your piece, starts by telling the teachers that they're colonizers and they're sitting on stolen, stolen native land and that they're racist, that American schools are guilty of the spirit murder of black children, that racism runs deep in the U.S.
01:47:35.100and blacks alone know who America really is, that public schools don't see blacks as human.
01:47:40.520Again, public schools don't see blacks as human and are guilty of systemic anti-blackness and the spirit murder of babies and that whites are directly responsible for the plight of, quote, dark children.
01:47:54.560Whiteness reproduces poverty, failing schools, high unemployment, school closings and trauma for persons of color and that white attendees must undergo anti-racist therapy in order to overcome their racism, ignorance and history of harm.
01:48:08.400I cannot imagine how a white teacher hearing that would feel.
01:48:15.980I can guess it's not more unified and not not less colorblind, right?
01:48:23.140Not not more colorblind, but shamed, disempowered, loathed, divided.
01:48:47.320Yeah, I mean, this is this is they held one of these speeches for all the principals of schools in the San Diego School District, which teaches more than 100000 kids.
01:48:55.960And then on the kind of teacher training over the summer and people sat there and took it and didn't protest, didn't stand up, didn't object, didn't file a kind of complaint.
01:49:09.520Luckily, one of the teachers sent me all of the documents and said, this is outrageous.
01:49:57.540And I think if you if you take the language and you if you if you kind of flip the kind of racial categories, this is some of like the most toxic and awful stuff from 100 years ago from eugenicists and white supremacists and Klansmen.
01:50:13.580I mean, the language, the categorizations and even intellectually, what they're doing is they're reviving three key concepts, in my view.
01:50:21.020One is race essentialism, this idea of whiteness, that every white person is not an individual, but can be reduced to a racial essence.
01:50:30.580That's what people argued again 100 years ago.
01:50:33.560The second one is kind of collective guilt.
01:50:37.120That's a strategy that totalitarian regimes have used to manipulate people where you're saying you are in this category and someone, you know, did something bad in your category.
01:50:48.400Therefore, you also are responsible or guilty for that bad thing.
01:50:52.780And third, in a lot of cases and a lot of institutions now, they're reviving neo segregationism.
01:50:58.840They're reviving segregation by saying they're calling them affinity groups or or or kind of other kind of euphemisms for it.
01:51:06.540But they're actually holding training sessions and meetings explicitly.
01:51:57.520It's happening kind of in a profound way.
01:52:00.860And I think that as a as a reporter, as someone covering this, it's it's it's kind of darkly fascinating to watch society get consumed by this mania.
01:52:11.200Yeah. And I'm, you know, frankly, scary if you have children, as I know you do and I do and Jody Shaw does.
01:52:18.980I don't want to pass this baton to them.
01:52:21.360You know, I've joked before that it's I can get targeted, of course, because I'm a white woman and that's power adjacent in the in the language of these critical race theorists.
01:52:29.800I'm a woman. So I got that going for me.
01:52:38.440But then I did the worst thing you could possibly do, which is I created I have three children, but I created two, two little white future men.
01:53:36.780She just talked to her and her words were stop reducing my personhood to a racial category.
01:53:44.100Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on skin color.
01:53:51.680OK, and now Jodi Shaw has been placed on administrative leave for some BS pretext of a you forwarded one email that may have had a student's information to your personal account.
01:54:02.600Obviously pretextual that they got rid of her because of or trying to because of her video because of her speaking out.
01:54:08.740So my question to you is, let's let's talk micro before we go macro.
01:54:14.900What do you think the teacher in the moment should do?
01:54:17.640What do you think the Jodi Shaw should do in the moment?
01:54:23.120And there was another whistleblower at the Sandia National Nuclear Labs that emailed all of his colleagues a kind of painstaking rebuttal of some of these programs.
01:55:15.460And it violates these core values that I have and we have as a society.
01:55:20.880And I think that people are so scared that they can get away with this right now because they've bullied people into submission.
01:55:29.660But as more people stand up and say no, it's going to encourage others and then hopefully others after that until you have enough people where you just can't fire all of them.
01:55:41.000They can actually stand tall together and I'm seeing very encouraging small scale stories all across the country of people standing up in schools and the workplace and have been successful.
01:55:52.560And I think that as these stories replicate, we're going to get two things.
01:55:55.200We're either going to get success stories that can be kind of models for future action or in some cases, we're going to get martyrs, people who have been canceled.
01:56:05.720And those are tragedies, obviously, but they also kind of serve as a kind of rallying point and and also as a kind of a point for condemnation of these systems that are willing to sacrifice individuals to uphold this ideology.
01:56:23.160That's funny because I can relate on a couple of those fronts.
01:56:25.620I feel like I've definitely been attacked, in my view, unfairly for, you know, statements about race that were factually correct.
01:56:36.040Anytime I see you trending on Twitter, I'm always like, oh, boy, what's going on now?
01:56:56.600All you do is is is increase my name recognition and keep me in the news.
01:57:01.420And then they tell you you're irrelevant.
01:57:03.380That's weird how you follow me and tweet about me and make me trend then anyway.
01:57:07.500But obviously, I can relate on a personal level.
01:57:09.640But and I've talked publicly about having to pull my kids from their schools.
01:57:12.800You know, I mean, at my boys school, they actually circulated a memo, which which they wanted to be mandated reading for all faculty that said in every children where I'm sorry,
01:57:23.020there is a future killer cop that white children are being indoctrinated into black death.
01:57:34.860I mean, I'm sorry, but it took something that egregious for us to say and goodbye because things had been ramping up there at a slow but steady pace for for months and months and months.
01:57:48.760Not every school will be that explicit and that offensive.
01:57:51.680But parents, if you won't do it for yourself, you have to do it for your kid.
01:57:55.740Who who would let a teacher who'd been indoctrinated in that kind of thinking have access to their little one?
01:58:38.460And I'm working on some research right now in Portland, Oregon, which is really kind of ground zero for the madness.
01:58:44.220And they're implementing a curriculum and teacher training and kind of kind of administrative positions to I'm saying this.
01:58:54.180It's it's a kind of hyperbolic, but it's actually not.
01:58:57.200They're training child soldiers to fight this kind of race conscious revolution.
01:59:02.840And I say that because the actual materials that I've had leaked to me outline very clearly.
01:59:08.860We need to reform white identity into becoming a kind of member of this anti-racist movement.
01:59:15.080We need to train our kids how to protest, how to host demonstrations, how to get on the streets.
01:59:20.660And then the results of this kind of political education in predominantly public schools in Portland is that you have now dozens of minors being arrested as as kind of members of Antifa rioting.
01:59:34.660Waving guns at crowds, throwing bricks and bottles and rocks at police, lighting buildings on fire.
01:59:43.500All of these crimes and kind of rioting are being, in some cases, led by and then executed by children.
01:59:52.260And what happens when you get those kind of underlying ideologies that lead to these outcomes cemented in school curriculums throughout the state of Oregon?
02:00:04.160And especially in an egregious way in the city of Portland, you are training kids to be born angry, fearful, entitled, this kind of toxic mix of all of these attributes that's going to lead to, you know, chaos and destruction.
02:00:20.760Whether it's self-destruction, whether it's actually just collapsing people's sense of value internally, or, and sometimes as a result of, external destruction.
02:00:46.660And, and then, by the way, so before I move off of this, I did want to ask you, it's not, it's not all about alienating people by race, by gender, and so on.
02:00:55.600More and more, it's alienating children of faith from God and their families.
02:01:03.400Like, we're seeing more and more of that creep up in some of the literature that's getting leaked and talked about publicly.
02:01:08.620And I can say, I mean, I know that, uh, I'm personally familiar with a book that was shared, um, at the kindergarten level that, um, in talking about the Harvey Milk case, put God says no on the page of what's wrong.
02:01:29.660And, you know, you can talk about, um, sexual identity and sexual preference, and, and you can talk about gay marriage, which I support and always have in a way that brings your political view forward, but you should not be telling six-year-olds that God is wrong.
02:01:47.580And I think this is what really upsets in my experience.
02:01:50.660I have a lot of black friends who that, that's, that was the last line for them when it comes to this stuff, like that, uh, my friends don't like this critical race theory either, but.
02:01:59.660But pushing God as like the purveyor of wrongness, it goes, it's a bridge too far.
02:02:07.980And I think what you're talking about illustrates the really kind of two separate lineages, the two separate genealogies of, of activism, let's say.
02:02:18.960And there's one that is in the kind of Martin Luther King vein, the civil rights movement.
02:02:23.260Now, a lot of people forget that the civil rights movement was emanated from black churches.
02:02:27.620It was deeply rooted in Christianity and then also deeply rooted.
02:02:32.440And, and Martin Luther King wrote about this and spoke about this in the principles of the declaration and the constitution, um, that they, that he felt, and many people felt correctly, weren't being fulfilled, weren't being honored by society.
02:02:45.060So you have that kind of one lineage, right?
02:02:48.920The origins of the civil rights movement, again, uh, in the kind of, uh, constitutional principles and the declaration and in Christian churches, predominantly Southern, uh, black churches.
02:02:59.420And Black Lives Matter, um, they like to claim that they are the new civil rights movement or the extension of the civil rights movement, the natural successor to the civil rights movement.
02:03:09.820But they don't believe in either of those things that were the fundamental structures of the civil rights movement.
02:03:46.620We want to, we want to reformulate it.
02:03:48.660It actually is a structure of systemic racism, et cetera.
02:03:51.880So you have this thing that I think we need to separate.
02:03:55.820The civil rights movement is not Black Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter is not the civil rights movement.
02:04:01.340And I think what we're finding in the black community and then in the wider, you know, community of all Americans is that we're being faced with a choice.
02:04:10.100Which value and vision do we want to pursue and uphold and strengthen?
02:04:15.100Um, and, you know, I think, I think pretty clearly, um, uh, the, the value and vision that is based on the constitution and on a kind of, uh, the kind of Christian principle of equality, uh, under God is far superior than the, the, the position of a kind of Marxist revolution and kind of vicious identity-based politics that we see in our streets today.
02:04:40.920So that, that leads me to the macro, which is larger solutions.
02:04:45.700And you are one of the few people working on real solutions to this, to this problem.
02:04:53.040Now I retweet all your stuff because it's always so spot on, but I've been saying for a long time that I feel like the law is the answer to this.
02:05:03.000And a lot of the cultural craziness we're seeing the, the law, I'm not saying it's perfect.
02:05:08.640I'm not saying you don't have judges who are, you know, political one way or the other and let that creep into their rulings.
02:05:13.380But my overall experience of the law is judges follow it.
02:05:18.100It's the very nature of being a judge and it doesn't actually allow for that much identity politics to creep in.
02:05:26.080It's not to say it never does, but it doesn't really allow for it in the way it could in an academic institution.
02:05:30.600And we talked about this with Jody, but people may not understand the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Constitution and its equal protection law do not allow for racial discrimination against white people.
02:05:46.380That is illegal. You may not treat a white person as less than or give them a lower job or what have you, discriminate against them because they have the immutable characteristic of white skin, something over which they have no control.
02:06:04.820So you're trying to organize a group of lawyers, Chris, because I saw you say the other day it's up to over 100 lawyers who have now volunteered to help you do what?
02:06:14.000Yeah, well, you know, the context is that, you know, last year, as many of the listeners might remember, some of my investigative reporting caught the eye of President Trump, who passed an executive order banning these critical race theory trainings from the government.
02:06:29.660And when Joe Biden won the election, I realized that that executive order probably wasn't going to last.
02:06:37.380And sure enough, one of the first 15 things that he did was get rid of that executive order banning critical race theory.
02:06:44.000And but in that kind of intervening period, I said, all right, well, rather than just, you know, throw in my hat, we need to get activated.
02:06:52.060We need to figure out what's the next strategy.
02:06:54.940And I took a series of calls with a lot of the conservative think tanks and legal foundations, people who are, you know, kind of expert lawyers, very experienced.
02:07:04.500And I said, hey, I think that we could, you know, take some of my whistleblowers.
02:07:09.220I now have probably more than a thousand different whistleblowers with documents and evidence.
02:07:13.720We can pick some of these cases and then all, you know, hand them off.
02:07:18.060And you guys can start suing these institutions in federal court, you know, making the argument that these are violations of civil rights because they traffic in racial stereotypes.
02:07:28.620They constitute a kind of race, race based harassment.
02:07:56.140We think it's important, but we're just not there yet.
02:07:58.820And as you know, you know, a lot of the conservative legal foundations have been more focused on economic issues, on regulatory issues, licensing, etc.
02:08:08.040And are not really ready for this culture fight that we're in the middle of.
02:08:16.280And then I said, you know, I'm going to take one more of these calls.
02:08:19.540And then in that final call before I was going to throw in the towel, I talked to a small group of private attorneys and they said, hey, we don't have bureaucracy.
02:08:29.660We don't have any decision making tree.
02:08:34.200And then I realized, OK, I can't just hand this off.
02:08:37.680I'm going to have to actually organize this myself.
02:08:39.940So I found a kind of a network of advisors from some of the some of the institutions, but then also cobbled together a network of private attorneys and smaller legal foundations.
02:08:52.260Our coalition has already filed three cases.
02:08:54.980We're going to be filing another one in the coming weeks.
02:08:57.100And then, you know, all of a sudden I get now more than 100 other attorneys that are volunteering to file lawsuits in dozens of states around the country.
02:09:04.980So what I'm viewing this as the strategy on this piece is relentless, decentralized legal warfare with the ultimate objective of getting a case before the United States Supreme Court.
02:09:18.000And if we win there, it will have an immediate ripple effect in every school, every government agency and every corporation in the country.
02:09:26.580What's the ideal Supreme Court ruling?
02:09:28.140That would say critical race theory based programs, these programs that traffic in the concepts of race essentialism, conspelled speech, racial harassment, racial stereotypes are violations of the Civil Rights Act and and violations of the U.S. Constitution.
02:09:44.160And then we would have the precedent so that any employee that is going through these programs could say, hey, the Supreme Court very clearly ruled that what we're doing here is illegal.
02:09:53.720They can reach out to to me and our network of lawyers to send a cease and desist.
02:09:58.660And then, again, I think a lot of people who are in risk management, who are in kind of corporate legal departments are going to say this is a liability.
02:10:11.760And the kind of proof of that is that after we got the executive order, every Fortune 500 company in the United States that does business with the federal government that the president banned from conducting critical race theory trainings, we saw them immediately cease all of these programs.
02:10:29.540So we know that they can press a button and knock it off and stop it.
02:10:34.120But we have to have the legal leverage to force them to do so.
02:11:29.840And a Supreme Court decision or a legal decision, which would be 100 percent on the money, as far as I'm concerned, lawfully, legally saying this is not lawful, would do it.
02:12:07.780I'm optimistic because I think that what we're seeing right now is a kind of fad.
02:12:12.660And I think I look at figures like Ibram Kendi as kind of like gurus, you know, in the 1960s and in the 90s, it's like you have the kind of yoga kind of fads and health food fads and kind of other cults, you know, that you can watch like a part Netflix series about.
02:12:31.860And I think we're going through a similar moment.
02:12:44.060But ultimately, I think our country and our institutions and our people in the United States are going to come to their senses at a certain point and recognize that we can be, you know, supportive of reducing racial inequalities and care about racial inequalities.
02:13:02.040But actually, at the same time, oppose this method, oppose this philosophy, oppose this program.
02:13:07.580And I think once we get to that reasonable point and we have a kind of silent majority that turns into a maybe a little bit more vocal majority, we can kind of, you know, crush this at its roots.
02:13:21.640We can kind of excavate some of the most kind of bankrupt ideas from this movement, expose them to the light, and then Americans will simply move on.
02:13:34.580Okay, and to those who say you are misreading the national mood when it comes to race in America, what say you?
02:13:50.460Well, I mean, it's right there in the language, right?
02:13:55.860Moods are kind of fleeting and transitory emotional states.
02:13:59.320And I think that you can't be, just like in personal life, right?
02:14:02.340If you and I just reacted 100% according to our moods, I think we would have major problems.
02:14:09.920And I think as courageous people and as kind of intellectuals with integrity, we have to say we recognize the national mood is here.
02:14:20.040And we're actually going to stand against the national mood, even if temporarily it causes us problems.
02:14:25.460It gets us flack, it gets us, you know, insulted in the New York Times, because we know that after this mood passes, the country is going to be here.
02:14:34.880These are the structures and values we care about.
02:14:36.760And, you know, I'm happy to stand against the current mood.
02:14:40.320And I think that we have to remember, too, and I think this is an important thing I've been thinking about a lot, is that you look at how they're using incidents, right?
02:14:51.840You look at how they are notching up these victories.
02:14:54.000It's almost always predicated on an emotional moment, right, where it was George Floyd that gets replicated billions of times in the media.
02:15:03.080It's, you know, whatever kind of story that is the emotional anchor to a lot of these movements is that, you know, obviously you can lament the tragic death of George Floyd.
02:15:15.280But what they do is they create this emotional premise where if you don't agree with all of our solutions, therefore you, you know, you don't care about George Floyd.
02:15:27.760And I think that we need to break that logic.
02:15:29.920We need to say we need to separate out premises from conclusions and say, you know, not let people essentially manipulate the country by using emotionally charged kind of affectively loaded incidents or images or experiences to justify these huge political programs.
02:15:50.920That once you really look at it and think about it and step back from that emotional overload, aren't actually connected by any kind of rationality or logic.
02:16:00.560Well, especially when the incidents that they are using are dishonestly represented, you know, I'm not saying the tape wasn't the tape on George Floyd.
02:16:09.860But again, as Coleman's pointed out, you could find the exact same story with a white victim every time.
02:16:18.060And especially the George Floyd case, a guy named Tony Timpa had exactly the same thing done to him, 13 minutes under the knee, begging for his life.
02:16:26.920And after he expired, the cops made jokes about him and they were not prosecuted.
02:16:32.040The charges against them were dropped.
02:16:34.300Breonna Taylor, same thing had happened earlier, I think that same year to a white person inside of his home.
02:16:41.860No, not warrant the same like the the knee jerk resort to race is not always supported and no one will go back and be honest about that, nor is it always police brutality that's unjustified.
02:16:55.480We've been talking about the Jacob Blake case and it was very clear early on that there were reports he was, in fact, armed and that's why he got shot.
02:17:02.040But I've seen almost no coverage of that piece of the story after the same media went over and over and over telling us he was unarmed.
02:17:09.140So people need to be aware that we're being manipulated by people with an agenda.
02:17:16.100Again, it's hard leftists versus the rest of us.
02:17:20.080They're trying to manipulate us to advance their own agenda and in some instances make themselves feel good as virtue signalers.
02:17:27.680But as you point out, we're not there to service the mood in particular of one small activist group.
02:17:33.000If we were, we never would have had the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because of the loud majority or the loud minority in the in the country at that point didn't.
02:18:10.080I kind of have kind of conflicting kind of conflicting thoughts about it.
02:18:15.100But I think Joe Biden, I mean, let's face it, Joe Biden is a kind of back slapping New Deal Democrat who, you know, he isn't a social justice warrior.
02:18:28.900But I think what you've seen is that, well, I don't think Biden's instincts are there.
02:18:34.660What does concern me is that certainly the vice president's instincts are there.
02:18:38.640Certainly his social media team's instincts are there.
02:18:40.780And then all of the different kind of cabinet members and subcabinet officials are there.
02:18:47.680And, you know, I think, you know, I thought of Joe Biden as kind of, you know, as like a carapace, like a kind of armor that was kind of battering through the election.
02:18:59.280But within kind of protected by that armor was the kind of modern Democratic left, the kind of identity politics base, the equity instead of equality based folks.
02:19:09.800And we're seeing that in some of his cabinet choices.
02:19:13.460Actually, the superintendent of San Diego schools who hosted the spirit murder sessions and lavished praise on the speaker.
02:19:21.760She's actually been nominated for deputy secretary of education.
02:19:24.720So I'm not so much worried about, you know, Grandpa Joe, but I'm I'm very much worried at the kind of administrative level where these programs and ideologies are being implemented in the federal government.
02:19:39.760So I don't know. I'm kind of, you know, I'm kind of torn, but but, you know, ultimately optimistic.
02:19:46.860I think that, you know, one silver lining I voted for Donald Trump, you know, didn't vote for him in 2016, voted for him in 2020.
02:19:55.340But one silver lining for him being out of office and and even again, I oppose banning the president from Twitter.
02:20:05.340But given that that's the factual reality, one one thing of him being gone from our kind of national Twitter timeline is that the left cannot say simply orange man bad.
02:20:17.640They actually have to now defend the ideas, defend the policies.
02:20:22.000So we have an opportunity in the next four years to actually make this a substantive debate and not give them the excuse.
02:20:39.040Yeah. You know, you know, the best thing that we can do is we're establishing a coalition that is three parts investigative reporting.
02:20:47.160So if you have any critical race theory trainings that are happening in any institutions in your area, send me an email at Chris Rufo at ProtonMail dot com.
02:21:33.400Like I I actually, you know, in January or last January, a year ago, I moved out of Seattle for a lot of these reasons.
02:21:39.820I mean, the political culture in Seattle is extreme.
02:21:42.580They were harassing me, harassing my wife, started harassing my kids and it just became untenable.
02:21:50.640So we we moved to a small town in Washington state.
02:21:55.180And it's it's awesome because I went from, you know, walking home from the office in Seattle and having random strangers flip me off to, you know, having now, you know, driving home and having my neighbors and say, oh, man, I saw you on Tucker.
02:22:13.380So it's been quite a culture shift and and, you know, it's been just a huge blessing for us to, you know, to flee the city.
02:22:22.940And then given all the covid stuff, it was just lucky timing.
02:22:27.740Well, I don't mean to sound like Dan rather, but to to reiterate what you said and what Jody Shaw said to courage is the word of the moment.
02:22:39.540I hope our listeners will as well in whatever ways they feel comfortable or can muster up because now it is not a time for the meek.
02:22:47.300It's a time to stand up and fight for for true equality, for love, for support, for wellness, for our communities, not for divisiveness and shaming and awful presumptions about people thanks to immutable characteristics.
02:23:02.400We were trying to get away from that as a as a country for the better part of five, six decades.