The StoneZONE with Roger Stone - April 26, 2025


Chris Rufo ｜ 04-25-25

Topics
America's Cultural Revolution Trump's economic theory
Hosted by
Roger Stone Troy Smith Jake Novak
Mentioned
Richard Nixon Donald Trump Chris Pine Ronald Reagan Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Christopher Ruffo Richard Milhouse Rod Blagojevich Jerome Powell Paul Manafort Hillary Clinton Jimmy Carter Barack Obama Desjardins Trumpism Trudeau Klieg Ryan
The Stone Zone ｜ 04-24-25 Mike Crispi ｜ 04-28-25

Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

140.83

Word count

2,262

Sentence count

155

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of The Stone Zone, I sit down with American writer, filmmaker, and conservative activist Christopher Ruffo to discuss his new piece, Bringing on the Counter Revolution, a piece exploring the impact of Richard Nixon s presidency on American culture and politics.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.960 At Desjardins, we speak business.
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00:00:25.520 We'd love to talk business.
00:00:30.000 Joining me now is Christopher Ruffo.
00:00:32.620 He is a prominent American writer, filmmaker, and conservative activist.
00:00:37.700 Renowned for his influential role in shaping contemporary debates on culture, education, and public policies.
00:00:44.740 The author of America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered America.
00:00:49.880 A best-selling book that traces the intellectual roots of progressive ideologies and their impact on American institutions.
00:00:58.580 Chris, welcome into the Stone Zone.
00:01:03.200 Thank you for having me.
00:01:05.140 I have wanted to have you for a long time.
00:01:07.500 I'm glad we were able to finally get this set up.
00:01:10.120 You wrote a piece entitled Bring on the Counter-Revolution.
00:01:14.580 This is, I think, one of the most important things written in the last 10 years in terms of understanding how the past is prologue and how what America is going through today is what America has gone through in the past.
00:01:32.240 And as the subhead of your piece says, conservatives need a national agenda that reclaims America's institutions from the left.
00:01:42.960 A blueprint exists, but from a surprising source.
00:01:47.400 That source, according to your piece, is one President Richard Milhouse Nixon.
00:01:54.140 I'm just going to read the first sentence and let you kind of take it away.
00:01:57.380 America is trapped in the roop of 1968.
00:02:01.680 The politics of that fateful year have set patterns and bounds of our current national life and national life for decades.
00:02:09.760 Chris, take it away.
00:02:12.600 That's exactly right.
00:02:14.080 And, you know, growing up, I bought into what was and unfortunately continues to be the conventional wisdom about Richard Nixon's presidency.
00:02:22.400 But as I dug deeper and read the history, and this is, of course, something that, you know, from your own firsthand experience and relationship with the former president, it was very different.
00:02:33.120 The reality was very different than the narrative.
00:02:36.240 And one thing I learned studying Nixon is that all of the great political questions and dramas and archetypes that we're grappling with today really first emerged in the first and, you know, the first part of the second term of President Nixon.
00:02:53.880 And in fact, he anticipated many of these questions, he had some wisdom on how to potentially address some of these questions.
00:03:01.740 And I think that he really is the kind of skeleton key to modern politics and should be, you know, reappraised for those of us, especially on the right.
00:03:11.000 Yeah, I obviously agree with that.
00:03:13.980 I think one of the great tragedies, of course, is that many of his great accomplishments, strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviets, the desegregation of the public school system without bloodshed or incident, the saving of Israel.
00:03:31.720 You know, unilaterally in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, federal revenue sharing where public monies are best spent at the local level, the war on cancer, bringing China in out of the cold at a time that China was a dirt poor, agrarian society with little technology without a strong military.
00:03:58.500 Most of the Chinese did not have indoor plumbing.
00:04:01.720 The rural areas had no electricity.
00:04:03.860 There was no way for Richard Nixon to know that 30 years later, President Bill Clinton would give the Chinese most favored nation trading status.
00:04:15.340 And he would also sell the Chinese some of our top military secrets, including our missile targeting technology in the Loral strategy.
00:04:26.660 Those two things playing a major role in making China the great danger it is to the country today. 1.00
00:04:34.640 You make an excellent point about the fact that the Black Panther Party of the 1970s now reappears as Black Lives Matter.
00:04:44.800 And the weather underground reemerges as Antifa.
00:04:51.640 Past really is prolonged.
00:04:54.560 As you say, the cultural revolution began a half century ago is now reflected in the, as you put it, deadening sequence of acronyms, CRT, DEI, ESG, and more.
00:05:07.320 So I think what you say is absolutely true, that Nixon anticipated these things, and frankly, he dealt very effectively with them.
00:05:19.280 It is, it's a terrific piece entitled Bring on the Cultural Revolution.
00:05:24.560 I highly recommend it to you.
00:05:27.000 But in your new book called America's Cultural Revolution, you talk more about the parallels between how the Chinese and American institutions have been conquered by communists.
00:05:40.800 Talk to us about that.
00:05:41.680 Yeah, I mean, that's right.
00:05:45.780 And I think, look, President Trump has really outlined this in his very unique and colorful way.
00:05:51.520 He talks about the radical left lunatics at Harvard and Columbia and Princeton and other elite universities.
00:05:58.240 And the ideologies that are really manufactured within those universities have now extended outwards.
00:06:04.880 And, you know, what I found particularly fascinating is that the Black Panther ideology, the Weather Underground ideology, the new left ideologies that were really at the fringes of that time, suddenly after 2020 became proliferating throughout our institutions, universities, corporations, schools, government agencies.
00:06:26.860 And really what Nixon feared came to pass, and the tactics and techniques that he had contemplated then, unfortunately, were not implemented at that time.
00:06:41.460 And now we're going to have to take much more dramatic action.
00:06:44.420 That's why I think we've seen in the first almost 100 days of the Trump presidency, this really brutal, you know, drag out, knock down fight with the Ivy Leagues.
00:06:54.940 And I think that is targeting exactly the heart of the problem.
00:06:59.540 He's kind of lifted up the rock and finding all of the, you know, the critters that are hiding under these, in the dirt.
00:07:07.840 And it's really time to take these ideologies, these ideas that have baked in these places for so long, and to actually try to mount a proper and true defense.
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00:07:41.120 He's certainly unique.
00:07:44.500 I watched him the other day talking about Canada.
00:07:47.460 It was, I'd never seen him so crisp, but he was, basically said, look, we buy virtually nothing from them.
00:07:53.860 They really have nothing that we really need.
00:07:56.120 They buy a lot from us.
00:07:58.300 As I like to tell Governor Trudeau, I mean, who else would say that?
00:08:02.420 Can you picture Ronald Reagan calling the prime minister of a foreign country governor, a governor as if they were governor of U.S. state?
00:08:10.880 I mean, the guy is, he's part stand-up comedian.
00:08:14.400 He's part statesman.
00:08:16.380 He's part salesman.
00:08:17.980 But he's also part stand-up comedian.
00:08:20.620 The guy is hysterical.
00:08:21.900 But it was one of his most crisp deliveries in terms of messaging that I have seen.
00:08:28.680 I mean, look, we saw yesterday that tariff revenue is up to $15 billion, which is an all-time high.
00:08:40.720 That was in April.
00:08:42.100 Yet inflation remains relatively low, unless you're Jerome Powell and you can't read.
00:08:49.240 So that, to me, tells us that Trump's underlying economic theory is correct.
00:08:55.740 Well, yeah, it's a good question.
00:09:00.680 And I think that, look, his economic theory is really at odds with, again, the conventional wisdom.
00:09:06.860 And I'm not an economist.
00:09:08.180 I won't hazard any predictions.
00:09:09.740 But we're going to see if the conventional wisdom holds or whether Trump, who arrives at these questions intuitively rather than purely intellectually, is actually right.
00:09:20.680 So we're going to see that.
00:09:21.740 But on the point of his humor, I'll admit, in 2015 and 2016, I was turned off by the way the president spoke.
00:09:29.960 I didn't quite click in with it.
00:09:32.580 I thought that it was outrageous.
00:09:34.500 But then there was a moment in his first term when I was watching him at length, and it suddenly clicked with me.
00:09:42.680 I said, he is hilarious.
00:09:46.000 I mean, he knows exactly what he's doing.
00:09:48.200 It's this dry sense of humor.
00:09:50.560 It's this New York attitude.
00:09:52.600 And from that moment, when I really understood the president's humor and wit, was really when I really understood him as a president, as a public figure.
00:10:05.920 And I mean, I'll tell you my favorite line of his.
00:10:09.120 You know, during the 2020 debates, they were questioning him, you know, say, basically saying, oh, you're racist.
00:10:16.020 And he's in this big debate hall and he shields his eyes from the from the Klieg lights.
00:10:21.480 And he says, you know, I can't see all the way in the back, but I'm pretty sure I am the least racist person in this room right now.
00:10:29.480 And it's just the outrageous, you know, totally off the wall.
00:10:34.080 I mean, it's it's it's an inborn talent.
00:10:37.020 You can't teach that.
00:10:38.320 You can't develop that.
00:10:39.280 You can't practice that.
00:10:40.980 He's just a kind of creature that is totally unique in American life.
00:10:46.160 Well, something that President Nixon once told me is that the only thing wrong in American politics than being wrong is being boring.
00:10:55.640 And Donald Trump completely understands that he is never boring.
00:11:01.120 He's always interesting.
00:11:03.120 And he's also entertaining.
00:11:05.400 I think he I think he also recognizes that that if you if you're not interesting, well, the voters begin to look elsewhere.
00:11:17.100 But the other thing is that he is I can tell you he's completely unscripted.
00:11:24.160 I mean, what you see is what you get.
00:11:25.800 And we couldn't get him to even think about using a teleprompter until the after he had won the nomination in 2016.
00:11:35.840 He flatly refused to do it because he thought it was phony.
00:11:40.120 I don't want to look like a politician, he would say.
00:11:43.440 It was hard enough to get him to speak from just notes.
00:11:46.700 He spoke, you know, contemporaneously off the cuff almost all the time.
00:11:52.240 Now, after the first time that I think it was Paul Manafort persuaded him, please once, just once try the teleprompter.
00:12:02.560 Well, once he tried it, he loved it.
00:12:05.400 However, when he's using the teleprompter, you can always tell when he goes off the teleprompter into one of his rhetorical cul-de-sacs that are always pretty funny.
00:12:18.380 And then he'll come back to his main topic.
00:12:20.520 He calls it weaving.
00:12:22.640 He will say, you see how I weave that?
00:12:25.520 The guy is very, he's very funny.
00:12:29.160 Which American institutions that have been captured by the hard left are most crucial for the American people to reclaim in order to preserve the country?
00:12:39.360 Well, look, I think you have to start with the universities.
00:12:45.920 You have to then continue to the schools.
00:12:49.440 And then you have to burrow into, you know, the civil rights regime.
00:12:54.340 So, HR, legal, and other professional class institutions.
00:13:00.700 And I think that that will go a long ways.
00:13:03.520 And, you know, what President Nixon saw the beginning of, and we're really arriving to this in mature form.
00:13:10.220 You know, he talked about what was known then as the Eastern Establishment.
00:13:13.840 But I think now it's really a nationwide, kind of bi-coastal, professional managerial establishment.
00:13:20.760 And as much as we may disagree with the popular ideologies within that establishment, that really is where policy gets made, how the narratives that circulate through the country get made, and where politics is shaped and formed.
00:13:37.100 And I think conservatives are going to really have to think in the next, you know, three and a half years, how can we influence that sector of society?
00:13:46.460 Because what I see right now in President Trump's second term is that you have a charismatic leader at the top who really is a force of nature.
00:13:55.560 And you have the MAGA base at the bottom, kind of working class, middle class, you know, a lot of especially working class men, massive support across racial demographics.
00:14:08.220 But what we need is a middle layer of professionals, institutions, and administrators that can take the raw democratic power of the base and the charismatic leadership of the president, and then translate it through these captured institutions so that we can start to arrive at significant reforms.
00:14:28.720 Yeah, I think, I guess the answer to my question is kind of obvious.
00:14:31.680 We have to take back the schools.
00:14:33.760 If we don't take back the schools, then we lose the youth.
00:14:38.760 And if we lose the youth, well, we lose the country.
00:14:43.760 I also think people don't understand that Trumpism is far, far broader and far, far deeper than the Republican Party.
00:14:53.920 There are people who voted for Donald Trump, who voted for Jimmy Carter, and voted for Barack Obama.
00:14:59.840 The appeal of the MAGA movement, the America First movement, far more, far broader than the Republican Party.
00:15:11.080 And now when you add to it what I call the common sense Democrats, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., like Tulsi Gabbard, who's now a former Democrat, like Rod Blagojevich, like the mayor of Dallas, for example.
00:15:27.140 You have a realignment, very similar to the realignment that was fashioned by Richard Nixon in 1968, in which white Southern conservatives, working class blue collar Catholics in the Northeast, combined with traditional Republicans in the country to form a new majority.
00:15:47.440 That coalition may have been frozen temporarily by Watergate, but by 1979, it was flowing again.
00:15:55.280 It elected Ronald Reagan.
00:15:57.380 It is fundamentally the same coalition that would go on to elect Donald J. Trump.