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.
00:01:05.140I have wanted to have you for a long time.
00:01:07.500I'm glad we were able to finally get this set up.
00:01:10.120You wrote a piece entitled Bring on the Counter-Revolution.
00:01:14.580This 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.
00:01:32.240And as the subhead of your piece says, conservatives need a national agenda that reclaims America's institutions from the left.
00:01:42.960A blueprint exists, but from a surprising source.
00:01:47.400That source, according to your piece, is one President Richard Milhouse Nixon.
00:01:54.140I'm just going to read the first sentence and let you kind of take it away.
00:01:57.380America is trapped in the roop of 1968.
00:02:01.680The politics of that fateful year have set patterns and bounds of our current national life and national life for decades.
00:02:14.080And, you know, growing up, I bought into what was and unfortunately continues to be the conventional wisdom about Richard Nixon's presidency.
00:02:22.400But 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.
00:02:33.120The reality was very different than the narrative.
00:02:36.240And 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.
00:02:53.880And in fact, he anticipated many of these questions, he had some wisdom on how to potentially address some of these questions.
00:03:01.740And 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.
00:03:13.980I 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.
00:03:31.720You 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.
00:03:58.500Most of the Chinese did not have indoor plumbing.
00:04:03.860There was no way for Richard Nixon to know that 30 years later, President Bill Clinton would give the Chinese most favored nation trading status.
00:04:15.340And he would also sell the Chinese some of our top military secrets, including our missile targeting technology in the Loral strategy.
00:04:26.660Those two things playing a major role in making China the great danger it is to the country today.
00:04:34.640You make an excellent point about the fact that the Black Panther Party of the 1970s now reappears as Black Lives Matter.
00:04:44.800And the weather underground reemerges as Antifa.
00:04:54.560As 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.
00:05:07.320So I think what you say is absolutely true, that Nixon anticipated these things, and frankly, he dealt very effectively with them.
00:05:19.280It is, it's a terrific piece entitled Bring on the Cultural Revolution.
00:05:27.000But 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.
00:05:45.780And I think, look, President Trump has really outlined this in his very unique and colorful way.
00:05:51.520He talks about the radical left lunatics at Harvard and Columbia and Princeton and other elite universities.
00:05:58.240And the ideologies that are really manufactured within those universities have now extended outwards.
00:06:04.880And, 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.
00:06:26.860And really what Nixon feared came to pass, and the tactics and techniques that he had contemplated then, unfortunately, were not implemented at that time.
00:06:41.460And now we're going to have to take much more dramatic action.
00:06:44.420That'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.
00:06:54.940And I think that is targeting exactly the heart of the problem.
00:06:59.540He's kind of lifted up the rock and finding all of the, you know, the critters that are hiding under these, in the dirt.
00:07:07.840And 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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00:09:09.740But 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.
00:09:52.600And 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.
00:10:05.920And I mean, I'll tell you my favorite line of his.
00:10:09.120You know, during the 2020 debates, they were questioning him, you know, say, basically saying, oh, you're racist.
00:10:16.020And he's in this big debate hall and he shields his eyes from the from the Klieg lights.
00:10:21.480And 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.
00:10:29.480And it's just the outrageous, you know, totally off the wall.
00:10:34.080I mean, it's it's it's an inborn talent.
00:12:05.400However, 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.
00:12:18.380And then he'll come back to his main topic.
00:12:29.160Which 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?
00:12:39.360Well, look, I think you have to start with the universities.
00:12:45.920You have to then continue to the schools.
00:12:49.440And then you have to burrow into, you know, the civil rights regime.
00:12:54.340So, HR, legal, and other professional class institutions.
00:13:00.700And I think that that will go a long ways.
00:13:03.520And, you know, what President Nixon saw the beginning of, and we're really arriving to this in mature form.
00:13:10.220You know, he talked about what was known then as the Eastern Establishment.
00:13:13.840But I think now it's really a nationwide, kind of bi-coastal, professional managerial establishment.
00:13:20.760And 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.
00:13:37.100And 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?
00:13:46.460Because 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.
00:13:55.560And 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.
00:14:08.220But 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.
00:14:28.720Yeah, I think, I guess the answer to my question is kind of obvious.
00:14:33.760If we don't take back the schools, then we lose the youth.
00:14:38.760And if we lose the youth, well, we lose the country.
00:14:43.760I also think people don't understand that Trumpism is far, far broader and far, far deeper than the Republican Party.
00:14:53.920There are people who voted for Donald Trump, who voted for Jimmy Carter, and voted for Barack Obama.
00:14:59.840The appeal of the MAGA movement, the America First movement, far more, far broader than the Republican Party.
00:15:11.080And 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.
00:15:27.140You 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.
00:15:47.440That coalition may have been frozen temporarily by Watergate, but by 1979, it was flowing again.