TRIGGERnometry - August 18, 2021


The Ugly Truth About Critical Race Theory - Christopher Rufo

Topics
critical race theory fundamentals critical race theory effects critical race theory exposés critical race theory outcomes
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Christopher Rufo
Mentioned
Christopher Ruffo Trigger Babbel Michael Jackson Zach Goldberg Prince Andrew George Floyd Eric Kaufman Andy Ngo Joy Reid Latinos Gary
Transwomen in Women's Sport： Inclusive or Unfair？ With Judy Glenney Afghanistan Crisis Explained with Shabnam Nasimi

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 2 minutes

Words per minute

167.37

Word count

10,398

Sentence count

552

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

14

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Our brilliant guest today is Christopher Ruffa, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and one of America s most prominent critics of critical race theory. In this episode, we talk about how Christopher became a critic of Critical Race Theory, why it's dangerous, and what it means to be a woke person.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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.
00:00:00.000 Critical race theory is designed and has effectively achieved not to explain the history
00:00:06.500 of racial injustice, not to reveal the truth about racial attitudes in the United States,
00:00:11.800 but actually to perpetuate a sense of division, to instill this idea that we can be separated into
00:00:20.300 oppressor and oppressed classes, and to revive some of the ugliest tropes and ideas from the 0.97
00:00:27.440 kind of racist, race science of the 1920s, things like race essentialism, like collective guilt,
00:00:35.660 like neo-segregation, and then re-implant them in our institutions.
00:00:46.280 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin.
00:00:51.940 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:00:57.080 Our brilliant guest today is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and one of America's
00:01:01.540 most prominent critics of critical race theory, Christopher Ruffa. Welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:06.140 It's good to be with you.
00:01:07.320 It's great to have you on. Listen, before we dive into all this fascinating stuff,
00:01:11.640 just tell everybody here, particularly here in the UK, we have an international audience,
00:01:15.220 but there may be many people who are not familiar with you, first of all. Who are you? How are you
00:01:19.900 where you are? What has been the journey through life that brings you to be here talking to us?
00:01:23.680 Yeah, you know, I am born and raised in California on the West Coast of the United States.
00:01:30.380 And after I graduated from university, I worked for more than 10 years as a documentary filmmaker.
00:01:35.960 I directed four films for PBS, which is our equivalent of the BBC, roughly.
00:01:41.100 I sold the film to Netflix a number of years ago.
00:01:44.060 And then in the last few years, I've gotten kind of transitioned from pure documentary filmmaking to getting involved in more social and political issues.
00:01:52.400 And then shifted my own kind of field of my own domain, my own field of expertise from kind of the filmmaking process to a journalism writing advocacy process.
00:02:02.760 And I found myself almost exactly a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago now, kind of accidentally becoming one of the primary critics of critical race theory, as you explained.
00:02:15.040 And it really happened to me very briefly because I started reporting on these issues, reporting on training programs, reporting on critical race theory in schools, reporting on critical race theory in corporations, and became the kind of go-to source for whistleblowers all over the United States that were seeing these ugly and divisive tenets of critical race theory starting to make headway and take over their institutions.
00:02:42.280 Christopher, the one thing that I really take away from that is you've had a life which theoretically would make you super woke, right?
00:02:49.700 You grew up in California. You make documentaries. You know, you're married to a Thai American woman.
00:02:55.400 You've got mixed race kids. Like, how did you how did this become a thing for you?
00:02:59.920 I guess that's right. Yeah. I mean, like you would you would add up all those things and you would say somehow that probably equals a woke.
00:03:06.320 You know, I was to the left as a younger person and my growing up in high school for the first bit of college.
00:03:15.760 But, you know, the ideas of the left started for me to break down as I saw more of the world.
00:03:22.700 As a documentary filmmaker, I had a chance to travel to, I think, 70 plus countries around the world.
00:03:28.000 I've seen a lot. I've seen the highs, the lows, the awful, the beautiful, everything in between.
00:03:32.900 And as I actually looked at the world in a very up close and personal way, all the different systems of government, all the different cultures, I quickly realized or slowly realized, actually, that these ideas that I grew up with, these ideas that I had been stewing in, these ideas that I had been taught in a university setting just didn't hold up to reality.
00:03:57.140 And it took me a while to then, I guess, move to the right. It took me a number of years. But once I started actually kind of not just having the caricature of conservative thought or conservative politics, but actually started doing the reading, doing the homework, understanding a bit more about the kind of conservative philosophy, the conservative body of work over the last hundred years or so.
00:04:22.140 it started to me to match my experience with reality uh more closely not perfectly of course
00:04:29.420 nothing is perfect uh but but but that was kind of my own journey my own transition and i think
00:04:35.640 as things have gone into kind of hyper drive wokeness in the last four or five years uh
00:04:41.820 that that transition seemed to be more prescient and more accurate uh than ever
00:04:47.440 and what is critical race theory and why it's the second part to that question is why is it so
00:04:55.920 dangerous to our society yeah so you know critical race theory i'll try to give you a kind of succinct
00:05:01.760 summaries critical race theory is an academic discipline uh it's a neo-marxist philosophy
00:05:07.380 derived from critical theory uh which really took hold in the united states around 1965
00:05:12.720 and it holds something very simple. It says that the United States is a fundamentally racist country
00:05:19.540 founded on white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation, and that those forces
00:05:25.360 are still at the root of our society today. And even though it may seem that we've made progress,
00:05:30.300 the critical race theorists argue that in many ways we haven't made any progress. The country
00:05:34.720 is just as racist, exploitative, and patriarchal today as it was 100 years ago or 200 years ago.
00:05:40.280 those forces have merely become more subtle, more sophisticated, and more insidious.
00:05:45.880 The conclusion then that the critical race theorists arrive at is that all of our systems
00:05:50.480 must be deconstructed, dismantled, and demolished in order for a better and utopian society to
00:05:56.780 emerge. This includes capitalism. They're explicitly anti-capitalist. This includes
00:06:02.040 kind of gender relations and family structure that they want to kind of dismantle and deconstruct.
00:06:07.960 And I think it also crucially includes our system of constitutional government, where they are deeply skeptical of the First Amendment right to free speech, the 14th Amendment right to equal protection, and so on and so forth.
00:06:21.520 so when you kind of arrive at it in its totality and the early work is explicit even though they've
00:06:28.340 tried to kind of cover their tracks lately it is not a program of reform it's not an extension of
00:06:34.260 the civil rights movement it's actually a program of liberation or revolution that was outlined in
00:06:40.420 the early years in the 1960s as critical theory taking on a racial component into 1990s and now
00:06:47.280 seemingly has spread throughout our institutions. And you said it spread right the way through our
00:06:53.560 institutions. It seems to have come to prominence in the last year or so. Why is that? Do you think
00:07:00.280 it's related to what's been happening in America? Or do you think it exploded into the public
00:07:05.680 consciousness because of lockdowns, because of BLM, because of COVID? I think a bit of both. I mean,
00:07:12.380 certainly in my reporting, what I've seen is that some of the earliest school districts to adopt the
00:07:17.680 principles of critical race theory and their teacher training programs or their curricula
00:07:21.080 were doing so around 2010. I know Portland Public Schools was an early adopter. That's Portland,
00:07:26.920 Oregon, kind of the home of Antifa, one of the wokest place on earth. They were adopting it 1.00
00:07:32.780 around 2010 in a kind of tentative, kind of light way. But certainly what you've seen is that school
00:07:39.420 districts, not just in Portland or Berkeley or New York or Boston, but actually kind of middle
00:07:44.980 America school districts, suburban school districts, all started to adopt it around the same time
00:07:50.300 following the death of George Floyd, which of course followed the COVID lockdowns and then was
00:07:55.400 kind of succeeded by these large scale protests and then large scale riots. And you see the
00:08:02.600 documentation from these school districts and it's like a immediate domino effect. It's actually a
00:08:08.200 pretty profound process of spread, of contagion, where all of these school districts around the
00:08:15.520 country are adopting the same kind of board resolutions, the same kind of training programs,
00:08:19.960 the same kind of curriculum modules, things that have been in development for years and decades.
00:08:25.680 All of a sudden, in the environment of COVID lockdown, in the environment of remote school,
00:08:31.400 in the environment of ongoing racial unrest, they suddenly became adopted almost everywhere
00:08:37.980 simultaneously. And this, I think, is significant, not only in itself, but it's also significant
00:08:45.580 because what we've seen since I started really exposing it, reporting on it, others have been
00:08:50.100 working on this issue as well. We've seen a tremendous backlash and a tremendous resistance
00:08:56.400 to this, you know, not only race conscious, but really racially divisive program in schools.
00:09:05.280 Christopher, before we get into the real kind of implementation of some of this stuff, which
00:09:10.440 is very important, I know you've done a lot of work on it, let's explore just the theory itself.
00:09:16.700 And, you know, you laid out, I think, an accurate description of what I understand to be critical
00:09:22.760 race theory. And the beginning part of it, isn't it accurate to say that the United States was
00:09:28.820 founded, it was at its foundation, at least, let's say, a society that did involve elements
00:09:35.120 certainly of racism. I don't know about white supremacy, but probably white supremacy,
00:09:39.260 capitalist exploitation, patriarchy. Aren't those things all quite accurate to point out?
00:09:45.000 Yeah, well, I think that there is a subtle but very important distinction. I mean, you can
00:09:50.360 certainly say that, I mean, undoubtedly anyone would agree that when the United States was
00:09:56.080 founded. Slavery was a widespread practice, racial discrimination, injustice, exploitation,
00:10:02.800 of course. But they're not making that argument that these are historical realities that we should
00:10:07.140 grapple with, that we should seek to understand. And if they have any kind of residual effects
00:10:11.600 today, we should seek to rectify. That's an argument that I've made. That's an argument
00:10:15.540 that I believe to be true. What they're saying is that the United States is fundamentally,
00:10:20.380 in its foundation and irredeemably racist, patriarchal, and exploitative. And this is
00:10:27.400 then the premise for the conclusion, not a program of reform, but a program that it has to be
00:10:32.680 abolished. So you have things like abolitionist teaching, abolish prisons, abolish, you know,
00:10:38.720 the constitution, abolish the United States as a kind of historical entity itself in some cases.
00:10:44.540 And it lays the foundation for not a kind of responsible look at history, trying to understand the bad and the good, trying to sort it out.
00:10:54.700 They say even the Declaration, even the Civil War, even the Civil Rights Act are remnants of white supremacy, are remnants of domination, are mechanisms for racial control.
00:11:06.180 And I think that that's in some ways a subtle distinction, but I think it's very important because the story that I think is accurate and how I think that history should be taught in schools, for example, is that you should take an honest and hard look at the history of racism, slavery, segregation, injustice, etc.
00:11:25.060 But you should also place those historical injustices within the context of the country's highest ideals. First, kind of declared in the Declaration, codified in the Constitution, fought over and consecrated in blood in the Civil War, and then put into kind of specific legal practice in the Civil Rights Act.
00:11:46.340 that's always moving towards the principles of freedom and equality that were really the founding
00:11:51.420 essence of our society. You know, not racial injustice exploitation. We don't live currently
00:11:59.060 in a slaveocracy as some critical race theorists have argued. The language is very important and
00:12:07.160 it's very important to make those distinctions because now what we've seen is precisely what
00:12:11.560 you're suggesting. They're now conflating all of these things together to try to conceal
00:12:16.220 the true nature of their philosophy. And Christopher, the way you describe it,
00:12:22.300 abolishing prisons, abolishing the United States, the Civil Rights Act is a remnant of white, 1.00
00:12:28.860 all of that sounds insane, right? To a normal person, to a normal, reasonable person.
00:12:33.660 I hope that's still true. I really hope so. I have no doubt that it's true. I think the
00:12:38.480 vast majority of the public completely wouldn't buy into that so if that is the case and let's
00:12:44.360 just sit for the sake of argument say that it is insane and it's crazy how has it happened that in
00:12:50.840 a very short period of time this ideology has not only become popularized in in a small minority of
00:12:58.360 people who talk about it but is actually now bleeding into our institutions how has that
00:13:03.280 happened? Well, I think there's a key mechanism that you have to understand to explain that.
00:13:11.640 This is still very much a kind of numerical minority position. Very few people subscribe
00:13:18.880 to critical race theory. Very few people in the general public support critical race theory.
00:13:24.500 The latest polling data shows that by a 19% margin, Americans who have an opinion about this
00:13:29.720 oppose it. And this includes Latinos and Asians that oppose critical race theory in schools 0.54
00:13:36.000 by a two to one margin. So it is deeply unpopular. It is a very kind of small
00:13:44.300 numerical minority position. But the people who are true believers, the people who are 0.92
00:13:50.520 the most fierce advocates for this philosophy are in those bureaucratic positions, predominantly in
00:13:57.260 public institutions, so government jobs, where they can actually impose this without the consent
00:14:03.500 of voters, without the consent of parents, without the consent of the public. They can implement it
00:14:09.920 in many cases unilaterally through a bureaucratic process. So you have all of these kind of woke
00:14:17.440 bureaucrats in public schools, in municipal governments, in state governments, in the
00:14:23.320 federal bureaucracy everywhere, as I've documented in my investigative reporting,
00:14:27.760 that are really taking these ideas and very astutely, very shrewdly, they've then covered
00:14:36.060 them in euphemism. So instead of the revolutionary theory to abolish capitalism, they're saying
00:14:42.440 equity, inclusion, diversity, very nice, very soft sounding words that are in themselves kind
00:14:50.020 of unopposable. But then underneath, if you actually look at the documentation, even in
00:14:56.100 Fortune 100 companies of all places, they're laundering in these more kind of revolutionary
00:15:02.380 principles, these more radical ideas. And that's what we're seeing. And I think that a lot of it is
00:15:10.480 this confluence of public bureaucracies, of an apathetic citizenry, and then these ideologies
00:15:19.360 that have leaked out of the university system well maybe not leaked out actually been been
00:15:24.380 exported from very deliberately from university systems to k-12 education to you know federal
00:15:31.260 state and local bureaucracies but wouldn't you say christopher as well that in some ways the fact
00:15:37.880 that this has come to prominence shows that america there's still a problem with race there's still
00:15:43.780 anger that surrounds it. And what we see with critical race theory is people trying to explain
00:15:50.740 the injustices that they still see in America. Yeah, I would take a different and perhaps more
00:15:57.680 cynical view. I actually think that if you look at the polling data from Gallup and others, for
00:16:03.240 example, the kind of racial attitudes, the idea of kind of, is there kind of racial harmony? Is
00:16:11.160 their racial integration, is their cooperation and trust between racial groups in the United
00:16:15.400 States, was actually very high as recently as 10 years ago. It was roughly 70 percent of white
00:16:21.720 Americans, slightly less, somewhere in the high 60 percent of African Americans, believed that
00:16:27.560 race relations in the United States were good. Starting in about 2013, 2014, and continuing
00:16:33.460 today to today, those numbers have plummeted. They've been reduced by roughly half. So you have
00:16:41.900 a very paradoxical situation where you have a kind of progression of a legal regime of equality over
00:16:48.920 time that somehow peaks in the kind of 2000s and then mysteriously just absolutely plummets among
00:16:56.620 all racial groups. And I would say my hypothesis, again, it's very hard to kind of prove this in a
00:17:02.840 social science method. But I think that my hypothesis is that critical race theory is
00:17:08.280 designed and has effectively achieved not to explain the history of racial injustice, not to
00:17:15.240 reveal the truth about racial attitudes in the United States, but actually to perpetuate a sense
00:17:21.860 of division, to instill this idea that we can be separated into oppressor and oppressed classes,
00:17:29.400 and to revive some of the ugliest tropes and ideas from the kind of racist race science of
00:17:37.920 the 1920s, things like race essentialism, like collective guilt, like neo-segregation,
00:17:44.840 and then re-implant them in our institutions. Of course, under different pretexts with different
00:17:49.780 stated goals. But this is what we see. We see, for example, in classrooms where students are
00:17:54.400 being told that they are either a member of the oppressor or the oppressed class based on their
00:17:58.980 skin color. They're being told that they are guilty and responsible for historical crimes 0.62
00:18:04.020 committed by people who look like them in the past. And they're also in the process of teacher
00:18:09.520 training, for example, and employee training programs. Adults are being separated into
00:18:14.660 separate facilities, separate programs based on race. And I think that this is very ugly. It's
00:18:21.240 very much counterproductive. And if the polling data accurately reflects the kind of
00:18:25.720 the spread or the hold of this ideology. It is actually tearing people apart rather than
00:18:33.600 bringing them together. And Christopher, what would you say those people who would give you
00:18:37.580 the First Amendment argument, which is, look, we have freedom of speech in this country.
00:18:43.300 You know, this is a theory just like Marxism, just like libertarianism. It should be free to
00:18:48.840 be taught like any other theory in our public schools, in our colleges, in our universities.
00:18:54.940 Yeah, well, I'm obviously, or maybe not obviously, I should make it clear. I'm a supporter of the
00:19:01.260 First Amendment. I think it's essential. There's a reason why they put it first of all the
00:19:05.120 amendments. But I think that you have to understand that this isn't a freedom of speech issue.
00:19:11.980 Of course, if you're a critical race theorist, I support your right 100% to go on the street
00:19:17.020 corner, to publish in the newspaper, to write a book about critical race theory,
00:19:20.460 to preach it as radically as you want, as often as you want. But we're talking about a context of
00:19:27.560 publicly funded and publicly governed institutions, like, for example, K-12 schools.
00:19:33.580 K-12 schools are government entities that are beholden, that are responsible and accountable
00:19:38.800 to taxpayers. And the First Amendment in the case law and its own kind of intention
00:19:44.800 was designed to protect individuals from the government, not to protect the government
00:19:49.480 from the individuals or government from the voters. So as these institutions function,
00:19:55.200 they include and exclude certain ideas. We're not teaching kindergartners eugenics. We're not
00:20:02.160 teaching them phrenology. We're not teaching them flat earthism. You can preach all of those things
00:20:08.400 from the street corner if you want as a First Amendment right, but you're not entitled to
00:20:12.860 include them in the official state curriculum. That is a political decision. It's a political
00:20:17.980 process. It's determined by state legislatures. It's determined by local school boards and boards
00:20:24.860 of education. So they get to decide what is in the curriculum, what is out of the curriculum.
00:20:30.420 Teachers, this is kind of First Amendment, kind of jurisprudence case law for many years.
00:20:36.100 They don't have an unlimited First Amendment right in the classroom. It's restricted because
00:20:40.080 they're public employees. So this idea that somehow, you know, one group gets the exclusive
00:20:47.520 and kind of right to use taxpayer dollars to promote their private ideology within
00:20:53.480 public institutions doesn't stand up to scrutiny. And Christopher, tell us a little bit about some
00:20:58.980 of the work that you've been doing, because I said at the top of your introduction that you are
00:21:02.700 one of the most prominent critics of this. But actually, I think it's more accurate to say that
00:21:07.100 you're one of the people who's been doing the most to actively oppose all of this in the
00:21:12.400 institution. So you've had some success in that area. Tell us a little bit about that.
00:21:17.460 Yeah. So I, you know, it really all started for me with the reporting. I think that it's one
00:21:23.220 thing to criticize a theory where you can say, hey, this is critical race theory. This is what
00:21:29.540 it holds. This is why it's wrong. You engage in a very abstract argument and you can win or lose.
00:21:36.400 Sometimes it's very unclear who wins or who loses in those kind of debates, whereas my approach and my strategy and then my kind of skill set was to actually expose the most egregious and sometimes salacious examples from public schools.
00:21:50.860 So just very quickly, you have like teaching third graders in Cupertino, California to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and then rank themselves according to a hierarchy of power and privilege.
00:22:02.700 So dividing, you know, eight-year-olds into oppressor and oppressed. You have the kind of system in Buffalo, New York, teaching K-12 students that, quote, all white people perpetuate systemic racism, that all white wealth derives from slavery, that white people are, quote, unfairly rich.
00:22:21.580 and then sharing a video, a video dramatization of dead black children. This is to kindergartners,
00:22:28.220 to four and five-year-olds, speaking to them beyond the grave, warning them that, quote,
00:22:33.080 racist police could murder them at any minute, instilling this kind of race-based terror in
00:22:39.480 small children, or even a public high school in New York City that sent an email directed to 0.98
00:22:45.320 white parents that said that they need to become, quote, white traitors to betray the white race 0.73
00:22:52.120 and then to advocate for, quote, white abolition. So abolishing the white race, which is an idea 1.00
00:22:59.080 from critical race theory and critical whiteness studies. Those are just three of the examples.
00:23:03.600 And the idea was to basically cut through the gaslighting, cut through the lying, cut through
00:23:08.640 the obfuscation, cut through the euphemisms and show people, you know, these stories did about
00:23:13.300 250 million direct media impressions in the United States. They really brought this issue
00:23:18.280 to the forefront. You see the kind of Fox News numbers, mentions of critical race theory
00:23:22.260 following my kind of work and exposés just absolutely skyrockets. And then now what you've
00:23:28.760 seen is a fight on three fronts. There are legal cases, some of which I've been involved in helping
00:23:34.440 that are trying to get to the Supreme Court to show that these practices are not only morally
00:23:39.480 wrong, but actually illegal and unconstitutional. There is a legislative effort. We've now passed
00:23:47.120 state legislative bills or state board of education resolutions in nine states covering 75 million
00:23:53.600 Americans, banning critical race theory indoctrination in public K-12 schools. That's 0.76
00:24:00.020 a huge victory. And then we also see this grassroots revolt from parents all over the
00:24:05.580 country. You've probably seen many clips on Twitter. Parents going berserk at school board
00:24:09.640 meetings saying, I don't want you to teach my kid that he's an oppressor. I don't want you to
00:24:13.480 teach my kid that she is a member of the oppressed. Get this out of the classroom.
00:24:19.200 When you talk about critical race theory, which is pretty much going to be teaching kids how to
00:24:22.580 hate each other, how to dislike each other, that's pretty much what it's going to all come down to.
00:24:30.380 You're going to deliberately teach kids, this white kid right here got it better than you 1.00
00:24:34.360 because he's white? You're going to purposely tell a white kid, oh, the black people are all 0.99
00:24:38.360 down and suppressed. How do I have two medical degrees if I'm sitting here oppressed? How do I 0.97
00:24:42.240 get, first of all. This is white parents, black parents, Asian parents, Latino parents, Native
00:24:48.000 American parents, parents from across the political spectrum. It's a broad based movement. It's
00:24:53.540 grassroots. It's decentralized. And it is totally organic in its presentation and nature. And they
00:25:00.380 are really holding school boards accountable. I live outside of Seattle, Washington, one of the
00:25:05.160 bluest areas in the country, if not the world. Even to my surprise, something that I wasn't
00:25:10.660 directly involved in, I saw in the paper that my local school board had voted 5-0 to ban critical
00:25:16.520 race theory indoctrination in our local schools. This is something that is happening, honestly,
00:25:24.160 to be very frank, to a degree that astonished me. When I started this, I could not imagine
00:25:29.720 that it would snowball so quickly and rack up such incredible results at this kind of time frame.
00:25:38.660 Well, I would argue that given some of the, I mean, what you've described there is,
00:25:43.740 I mean, it's atrocious. It is horrendous what you're talking about there. So it kind of makes
00:25:50.160 sense that a lot of people would thankfully be opposed to it. But there's a question I have for
00:25:54.240 you because you talked about you yourself moving from being on the left to being more right-leaning.
00:25:59.380 You've talked about talking about these things on Fox News, etc.
00:26:03.740 Neither Francis or I are right wing or on the right.
00:26:07.540 And we both...
00:26:09.320 It depends who you ask.
00:26:10.280 Some people would probably say you are.
00:26:11.940 Some people, yeah.
00:26:13.280 A lot of people on the left would say we're on the right.
00:26:15.520 Yeah, but the thing is they don't know what they're talking about.
00:26:18.380 So I guess the interesting question for me here would be
00:26:21.920 Francis and I would obviously completely against what you're describing there,
00:26:26.160 four-year-olds and five-year-olds being taught about their racial guilt. I mean, it's just
00:26:30.560 atrocious. But what is, why is it a right-wing thing to oppose this? I don't understand. I mean,
00:26:37.320 there are plenty of reasonable, sensible, intelligent people on the left.
00:26:43.560 What's a good left-wing argument against this stuff?
00:26:47.660 Well, I mean, there's a, well, I think you have to distinguish between the kind of
00:26:52.380 hardcore racialist left, and then the kind of classical liberal or center-left liberals.
00:26:58.440 And in fact, a lot of center-left liberals oppose this. And among independents, for example,
00:27:03.440 people who kind of don't go hard one way or another, 72% of American independent voters
00:27:09.000 oppose this ideology in schools. And I hear from people who are on the center-left all the time
00:27:14.180 in places like San Francisco and places like New York City, where they say, hey, I'm a good
00:27:18.080 Democrat. I've been a lifelong kind of left leaner. But this is insane. We have to get this
00:27:23.920 stuff out of our schools. We have to get this stuff out of New York City private schools,
00:27:27.800 for example, or Los Angeles public schools. But those voices aren't amplified. And those voices,
00:27:35.740 unfortunately, are not attached to any kind of political power because the people who run the
00:27:41.680 kind of party machinery, the intellectual machinery of the left in the United States
00:27:46.120 currently are very much on that hard racialist left flank. And they really could care less.
00:27:54.160 And they actually viciously kind of undermine the people on the center left. So it's really
00:28:02.320 not a question of, well, a lot of center left people oppose it. But the only reason we're
00:28:06.880 seeing results in more conservative school boards, more conservative districts, more conservative
00:28:10.900 states is because those voters that make up a strong majority, it's 90% plus of conservative
00:28:18.480 voters oppose this, they have recourse through the political system because they can lobby their
00:28:22.940 state legislatures, which get to pass bills. They can lobby their local school boards, which are
00:28:27.200 more responsive. But I think we're seeing that even now shifting, where certainly the right has
00:28:33.420 basically shored up this side and said, nope, we're not going to do this. But we're seeing now
00:28:37.880 even swing districts, even school districts in kind of purple areas, so halfway between Democrat
00:28:45.620 and Republican, they're starting to flip. Center-left voters are coming out strong. Latino
00:28:50.180 voters are coming out strong. Asian voters are coming out strong to oppose this ideology. I think
00:28:55.180 we're seeing a shifting of the battlefield, a shifting of the landscape of power. And I think
00:29:00.540 that my, well, I hope rather, my hope is that we can continue to build this coalition that spans
00:29:07.900 from the right to the center left, that encompasses all different racial and ethnic backgrounds to
00:29:14.400 really come with a united front to say, this is not necessarily just a left-right issue. Of course
00:29:19.900 it is. But this is an issue of fundamental principles about what it means to live in a
00:29:27.800 constitutional republic in the United States of America in 2021. We have the vast majority that
00:29:32.700 opposes this. We're not going to let a very small group of committed ideologues who've embedded
00:29:40.200 themselves in the bureaucracy to override the democratic will of American voters. We're
00:29:46.260 actually going to stop this. We're going to put our foot down together. Hey, Francis, do you want
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00:31:15.720 Now, I mean Gary.
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00:31:43.900 and christopher uh disclosure i'm a former teacher so everyone and i mention it in every episode
00:31:50.920 um teaching is is it's a phenomenally difficult job you've got to look after the kids pastorally
00:31:57.660 you've got to teach them you've got to make sure that they all make progress you know there's going
00:32:02.260 to be ones who are more adept there's going to be ones who fall behind i don't understand how
00:32:07.640 they have the time to teach all this stuff and be able to make sure that kids get a rounded education
00:32:14.160 How can they do that?
00:32:15.460 Well, you know, there really is kind of a really interesting thing that's happening,
00:32:20.440 and I think it would maybe illuminate the answer to your question, is that there are
00:32:24.500 two kinds of schools that I've seen in my reporting that are pushing the critical race
00:32:28.240 theory.
00:32:28.980 There are the very elite, affluent, big city schools, including private schools.
00:32:34.240 So the kind of places where it's, you know, $50,000 a year, maybe like 30,000 pounds,
00:32:39.220 I don't know the exchange rate, a year to attend these schools.
00:32:42.280 I mean, these are, you know, the most affluent elite places in the country. They've adopted it because they, in my reading, they believe that being fluent in the language of wokeness is essential for advancing in the Ivy League institutions, is essential for advancing in elite workplaces like consulting firms and government and politics and journalism.
00:33:02.980 so they're preparing their kids not to be uh kind of uh you know throwing molotov cocktails uh
00:33:09.880 into a police car although that does sometimes happen even among this set but they're preparing
00:33:14.540 them for this kind of meritocratic system that has been really uh that wokeness has grafted itself
00:33:21.200 onto but you also see it and i think and like whatever who cares i really don't care personally
00:33:26.040 what they do in elite private schools i think they shouldn't do it but it's really up to them
00:33:29.320 those kids are going to be fine. But where it really concerns me and frankly enrages me
00:33:36.160 is in the big city, poor school districts with high rates of educational failure. So for example,
00:33:44.340 like Buffalo, which I talked about, also Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. These are big
00:33:50.400 urban school districts, high number of black students in those two courses. They're teaching
00:33:55.640 a very aggressive kind of critical race theory-based curriculum. In the case of Buffalo,
00:34:02.320 from pre-K through grade 12, they've overhauled their curriculum. And the tragedy and the thing
00:34:10.420 that I think should infuriate voters and parents and families is that these are school districts
00:34:17.020 where in some schools, their literacy rates are less than 20%, sometimes less than 10%.
00:34:22.960 10%. So kids who are unable to reach basic proficiency in reading and writing, you have
00:34:28.860 sometimes 80% of students that are functionally illiterate by the time they graduate from their
00:34:35.020 primary school or middle school education. So you have an educational crisis. You have kids in fifth,
00:34:44.060 sixth grade that are illiterate, that have been in school for 6,000 hours of classroom time,
00:34:49.860 that can't read, can't write at a basic level, and yet they're pumping them full of ideology.
00:34:56.340 And the cynical read on this, which I think unfortunately has a lot of truth, is that this
00:35:02.780 is used as a diversion tactic to shift the focus away from the failures of these institutions,
00:35:10.300 the failures of teachers unions, the failures of the school districts, the failures of
00:35:14.780 principals and classroom teachers in these districts, and then shift the blame onto the
00:35:20.820 abstract forces that are the kind of, is almost a kind of a safety valve mechanism, a scapegoating
00:35:28.200 mechanism. Well, it's not that our schools are crumbling and dysfunctional and failing to teach
00:35:33.640 you how to read. It's actually the fault of white supremacy, the fault of anthropocentrism, 0.72
00:35:40.580 the fault of, you know, whatever kind of evil villain of the day is. 0.93
00:35:46.880 And I think that to me is just unconscionable.
00:35:50.340 And those stories for me were really the most tragic, the most difficult, the most heartbreaking to report.
00:35:57.640 I can imagine so.
00:35:58.820 And what is the effect of this type of teaching on the kids?
00:36:02.580 Do they respond to it?
00:36:03.720 I mean, look, because like I said, there's a lot of time where I taught kids stuff and they went out.
00:36:08.160 You could have asked them a question for a million dollars
00:36:11.020 and they wouldn't have been able to answer it.
00:36:13.040 That's just more your teaching style.
00:36:14.760 Yeah, it could have been you.
00:36:17.280 That's why he's no longer a teacher, mate.
00:36:19.200 Yeah, right, right.
00:36:20.760 Now you have a kind of a voluntary audience,
00:36:23.400 so this is better.
00:36:24.280 So you don't have the captive audience.
00:36:26.020 But in some ways, it's too early to tell long-term what happens.
00:36:30.680 But I can share with you some anecdotes
00:36:34.100 that could suggest maybe where it's going.
00:36:35.980 I spoke recently to a father actually who kind of a clip who went viral on YouTube I met him in
00:36:41.000 Arizona when I was giving a speech a black father actually met a number of interracial couples
00:36:46.120 black white couples and and he said hey you know this year after black history month where they
00:36:51.940 were doing the black lives matter curriculum they're doing the critical race theory style
00:36:55.240 curriculum my kids who are you know half half black half white I kind of present as black I
00:37:01.240 guess is the way they would say it. Um, they came home and even my 10 year old was terrified. Uh,
00:37:08.240 he couldn't eat, he couldn't sleep. He would come back into the bed with, with his mother and me,
00:37:14.020 uh, you know, which he hadn't done in years. And I finally talked to him and asked him what
00:37:19.220 happened. He's like, I'm terrified. I'm scared. I feel like I'm going to be hunted down by society.
00:37:24.220 I feel like police can murder me at any moment. I feel like I should hate, uh, you know, uh, you
00:37:30.820 know, people who look like mom. And the father was just kind of horrified. He's like, what are
00:37:36.640 they teaching in black history? And then started going to the school board to advocate. And he said,
00:37:40.860 you know, they're trying to fill my kids with fear, with my kids, with a sense that they can't
00:37:46.500 accomplish anything in life, a sense that they'll be forever oppressed. But this gentleman said,
00:37:51.420 look, I grew up in the hood and in Watts or Compton, California. I know what it's like to
00:37:57.920 struggle. We live in a good neighborhood now. We've moved up. I want to fill my kids with a
00:38:01.120 sense of possibility, a sense of inspiration, a sense of potential. And this is actually in the
00:38:06.200 name of doing good. They're actually doing harm to my kids. Another couple said that this curriculum,
00:38:11.720 an interracial couple, said that this was ripping their own family apart, that it was
00:38:18.780 having their kids coming home saying, you know, should we hate our grandfather, who's a white
00:38:24.920 person. Is he an oppressor? Is he a bad person? Is he one of the people that wants to harm us or 0.98
00:38:32.940 hurt us? And really just kind of could, had their parents not intervened and explained them the
00:38:39.940 truth, ripped these families apart. So I think that on that side, I've seen damage done. And
00:38:48.340 then also, you know, I reported on a story in Portland, Oregon, a long kind of reported feature
00:38:52.600 where I think that there's a direct line from the kind of ideology that's being promoted in schools
00:38:58.060 to the rioting, disruption, Antifa, attacks against property and people.
00:39:06.600 And you had, for example, in Portland, this was documented by Andy Ngo,
00:39:09.860 who's a great reporter on this, that actually I think four or three or four Portland public school teachers,
00:39:18.120 People in elementary schools and middle schools and high schools were arrested for crimes,
00:39:23.140 including felony crimes of rioting, including violent crimes during these political protests.
00:39:28.440 So this is, again, it's early.
00:39:31.660 This stuff in many places is still very early, but the early signs are very bad.
00:39:35.540 They should be a kind of red, spinning warning light for any administrator or teacher that's considering this kind of curriculum.
00:39:44.900 And the stuff you're talking about there, Christopher,
00:39:47.020 I mean, I have to say I find it terrifying
00:39:49.060 because this is really the question I want to ask you is,
00:39:52.760 are you optimistic and are you positive?
00:39:54.720 Because when I think and I play the movie forward,
00:39:57.160 if you teach a generation of young people this racial animus
00:40:01.660 that maps so neatly onto our hardwired tribal prejudices
00:40:06.600 that exist within all human beings,
00:40:08.960 I wonder whether there is a positive outcome here.
00:40:13.480 Do you know what I mean?
00:40:13.980 It sounds really scary. Yeah, it does. It sounds very scary. It is. It is very scary in some
00:40:20.820 regards. But ultimately, I am optimistic. And I'm optimistic because what we've seen
00:40:26.140 in the US and hopefully elsewhere, I don't really know. But at least since kind of February, March
00:40:35.400 of this year, the last three months, I mean, we've seen an incredible awakening of parents,
00:40:41.120 of voters, of school board members, of politicians, of state legislatures. People are taking this
00:40:47.420 issue very seriously. And what I would like to see, I think what is a hopeful vision,
00:40:54.380 but also a very realistic vision, something that is kind of already happening, if you will,
00:41:01.940 is that we'll see in our federal system, our kind of federalist system of government,
00:41:07.020 we'll see states pursuing very different courses of action. The curriculum in California and Oregon
00:41:12.520 and Washington state, very liberal states, will look very different from Texas, Oklahoma, and
00:41:18.080 Florida, which are more conservative states. And they will embark on this experiment. Do you want
00:41:23.660 woke politics as the founding ideology of your education system, or do you not? And over time,
00:41:30.420 what results do those yield? And I think that eventually people will see that this is not the
00:41:35.920 way, but this doesn't lead to better outcomes. And I think crucially, and one thing that I find
00:41:41.500 important to say is that in the US, despite how the MSNBC or the New York Times would like to
00:41:48.860 present it, this is not a really white-black issue. As I already said, Latinos and Asians
00:41:54.700 oppose this style of curriculum by two-to-one margins in the polling data. African-Americans
00:42:00.060 support it, but by just, I believe, a five-point margin very narrowly, almost 50-50. I think that
00:42:07.840 will shift over time in our favor as people understand what this is really about. It's really
00:42:13.460 a question of what is going to create better outcomes for kids. I think most Americans now
00:42:20.820 understand it won't create better outcomes for kids. But I think if you take a step back and
00:42:24.660 you look at critical race theory. You know, critical race theory, if we implemented the
00:42:29.600 policy, the radical and extreme policies that critical race theory has formulated, my argument,
00:42:35.700 and I wrote a policy paper about this for Heritage Foundation, which is a think tank here in the
00:42:39.360 United States, my argument is that it would create negative outcomes. You know, the critical race 1.00
00:42:45.620 theorists oppose merit-based education. They oppose kind of, in some cases, even assigning
00:42:52.200 grades, which are a racist, a racist practice. So they oppose kind of merit-based achievement
00:42:57.980 in education. They oppose a nuclear family structure in many of their, many of their
00:43:02.700 papers. They think that the nuclear family structure, which social science has shown
00:43:07.000 definitively kind of left and right to be the essential precondition for people who grow up
00:43:12.320 in rough circumstances for them to move up the income ladder. They also oppose entry-level work,
00:43:19.160 which they say is, again, capitalist exploitation. So when you take away those three building blocks
00:43:24.040 and when you teach kids that those things are not only not important, but actually evil and wrong
00:43:29.320 and oppressive, you take away merit-based academic achievement. You take away a strong family
00:43:35.020 structure and strong household. And then you take away the desire to get into the labor force,
00:43:40.720 to start working your way up the income ladder. You're going to create a kind of more desperate
00:43:47.060 and more dire situation, especially for people in low-income groups, especially for
00:43:53.100 racial minorities. So I think critical race theory is a recipe for disaster. 0.99
00:43:58.960 All that it does is help bolster the social status of multiracial elites in academia,
00:44:05.380 in government, in policymaking. But if it were implemented, it would be devastating for the kids
00:44:10.920 who desperately need the most help,
00:44:15.120 who desperately need a society that will lift them up.
00:44:19.220 It's a very, very, very good point.
00:44:22.160 I'm listening to you and I'm thinking,
00:44:24.140 where are the teachers in this?
00:44:26.200 Are they all blindly following it?
00:44:28.100 Are they being dictated to by the unions?
00:44:30.420 What's happening?
00:44:32.080 Well, I'll tell you in my reporting,
00:44:33.900 I've talked to a lot of teachers
00:44:34.920 and I'm trying to remember,
00:44:37.480 yes, every single one of them.
00:44:39.040 I did maybe 13, 14 reports on schools.
00:44:42.900 Every single one of them requested complete anonymity
00:44:45.980 because they're afraid that if their name
00:44:49.200 and their voice or their face is attached
00:44:51.880 to opposition to critical race theory in schools,
00:44:55.960 they'll get fired, they'll get ostracized,
00:44:58.920 they'll get bullied.
00:45:00.740 Protesters will show up at their house and intimidate them.
00:45:04.280 Their colleagues will scream at them,
00:45:06.400 which has happened in a number of cases
00:45:07.760 that I've reported on.
00:45:09.040 And so they're scared. Even teachers who deeply oppose it in a principled way are scared to speak out. And then on the top, what we've seen is that the largest teachers union in the United States, the NEA, National Education Association or Educators Association, which represents 3 million teachers in all 14,000 school districts, just this summer at their annual conference, at their annual Congress, voted in committee as an institution to support
00:45:38.840 implementing critical race theory in all 14,000 school districts in all 50 states.
00:45:43.160 They've gone on the record by name, critical race theory, saying we support this. We want to put
00:45:48.160 this everywhere. And they've also approved funding to attack people like me, to attack journalists
00:45:54.380 and writers and intellectuals who are opposing critical race theory. They're going to put their
00:45:58.620 part of their $375 million annual budget into attacking us, into intimidating us, into coming
00:46:05.440 after us. So these institutions, which I don't think reflect the majority of their members,
00:46:11.220 have been captured by this ideology. It's a top-down revolution. It's a revolution from
00:46:15.980 above. It's an elite-driven revolution. And they want to impose it from their position of power
00:46:22.380 and privilege, ironically, onto the rank-and-file people of all different social classes, all
00:46:28.140 different racial backgrounds, who by large majorities oppose it. Christopher, but other
00:46:32.940 than their revolutionary mindset, which you've detailed, surely they must have some good
00:46:38.180 arguments, aren't they? What is the strongest argument in favor of introducing the stuff
00:46:43.520 in school that people make? This is a good question. I mean, it depends, right? I mean,
00:46:49.080 the premise is right. I would say that the premise is a strong premise. The premise is
00:46:54.460 the United States has a history of racial injustice, and we should make sure to look at
00:47:01.540 look at history through the lens of racial injustice to illuminate areas where the United
00:47:06.160 States has fallen short of its ideals of freedom and equality. I think virtually everyone in the
00:47:13.260 country, if you put it to them that way, if you implemented it in those terms, would support it.
00:47:18.340 But the problem is, is that that is really a kind of a kind of Mott and Bailey, a kind of
00:47:25.500 kind of presentation argument that really masks the real content of it. Because you can say that
00:47:33.920 I would agree with it. I think both of you would agree with it. Most parents would agree with it,
00:47:38.220 including conservative parents. Yeah, we should really take a look at this history. We should
00:47:42.640 really teach kids the deepest injustices in our past, but also the progress that we've made
00:47:48.960 towards realizing those ideals. That, I think, could get almost universal support. But the
00:47:53.480 critical racers are deploying that argument uh disingenuously but then implementing things like
00:47:59.100 like segregating employees like telling children that they're inherently oppressive like telling
00:48:04.640 you know small uh young people that they are have a kind of blood guilt or ancestral guilt or
00:48:10.560 collective guilt based on skin color those things aren't connected those things those conclusions
00:48:17.000 those practices don't follow from the premise so i think that what we could do theoretically
00:48:22.720 although I'm not optimistic about this, is we can say, hey, look, we agree on the premise.
00:48:28.520 We agree on the premise that we should take a look at these issues. We disagree with your
00:48:32.420 conclusions, but let's try to come up with a better curriculum, a better practice from that
00:48:36.840 common premise. And to the extent that it's possible, you're never going to convince the
00:48:40.280 people on the fringes. To the extent that it's possible, get a large majority of citizens,
00:48:45.020 whether it's locally or statewide or nationally, to agree on a new approach to address these issues
00:48:51.240 in a way that is kind of broadly popular
00:48:54.540 and reflects the truth, frankly,
00:48:57.320 that reflects an accurate reading of history.
00:49:00.320 And Christopher, what would you say to those people?
00:49:02.180 Go look, right, this is very interesting as an episode,
00:49:04.900 but I live in Sweden, UK, whatever,
00:49:08.520 and it's not going to affect me.
00:49:12.040 I don't know, man.
00:49:13.200 I think, I don't know.
00:49:14.660 And I would defer to you guys, to you two in the UK,
00:49:19.120 but from what I've seen, from what I've been reading, these are, you know, I'll tell you
00:49:25.220 what, this is how I'll put it. America has demonstrated one immense capacity and one
00:49:32.320 immense talent. We take things from all over the world, we package them into commodities,
00:49:39.840 and then we export them to every country on the planet. I mean, you can go to a kind of
00:49:45.100 remote Tibetan village that has just achieved electricity and watched Michael Jackson dance
00:49:51.000 videos with Buddhist monks. I mean, I've actually done that. I mean, it really is extraordinary,
00:49:56.220 the reach of America's cultural commodities. So if it hasn't successfully been exported to you
00:50:01.920 in the UK, into Sweden, into other countries, it will be. It's coming. And I think even
00:50:07.040 the president of France, I saw that he said, France is being affected negatively by all of
00:50:14.060 these American ideas, which I thought was amazing, a kind of a dodge. France has had its share of bad
00:50:19.520 ideas. But I think that it's certainly coming, even in relatively homogenous societies like
00:50:27.340 the Scandinavian societies. I don't think they'll be immune to this. This politics, once it takes 0.99
00:50:32.300 hold, once it gets a foothold in institutions, it's very hard to dislodge. It's very hard to
00:50:37.920 disrupt and seems to spread quite easily. Christopher, we're going to have to wrap up
00:50:43.620 in a few minutes. But before we do, I wanted to talk about the role of the media in all of this,
00:50:48.220 because you and I interacted recently on Twitter over the long thread I wrote about the falling
00:50:53.300 trust in public institutions, particularly the media. What do you think has been the role of
00:50:58.780 the media in advancing this theory or opposing it or, you know, the role of different media
00:51:05.380 outlets on different sides in in having this debate and facilitating the conversation oh i mean i mean
00:51:11.760 i think the media is uh uh the media is is is the um if academia is the the flame you know if
00:51:20.640 academia is the origin the flame the media is the accelerant you know it's like the the lighter
00:51:25.860 fluid that's being squirted over the top of the flame uh the media has has done uh you know an
00:51:33.020 an incredibly bad job promoting this stuff. And you see the numbers from the social scientist
00:51:38.020 Zach Goldberg, where he looks at the terminology like systemic racism, racist, racist, white 0.88
00:51:43.160 supremacy, white supremacist. It's kind of like boop, boop, boop, hovering in the 1990s, 2000s,
00:51:48.080 2013, boom. I mean, just go straight vertical on the graph because the media basically adopted
00:51:55.160 the terminology from critical race theory and then just repeated it so many times in their
00:52:00.200 narratives and their language and their concepts and their terminology in their tweets, that it
00:52:05.540 became this kind of mythology, this new mythology for the kind of center left or liberal left
00:52:15.540 in our country. And I think that they mainstreamed or mainlined these ideas from academia
00:52:22.100 into mainstream politics. And now I think it's just absolutely ridiculous what they're doing.
00:52:29.000 I mean, the media promoted this ideology. And now that it turns out to be unpopular, now that there's a revolt in public schools, a revolt in state legislatures, now they're retreating from their own language and saying, no, no, no, this is just accurate history. No, no, no, this is just equity. This is just inclusion. It's none of those other things.
00:52:49.040 that the media had been promoting for years prior. So I have I have I am a man of little faith.
00:52:57.020 And and I'll say, you know, even even me personally, I mean, there was about two months
00:53:03.360 where I was just getting relentlessly into tact in the media. The Washington Post published 10
00:53:08.300 stories calling me out by name and trashing me. The The New York Times published multiple
00:53:14.460 full pieces profiling me in a very negative light. The Atlantic, MSNBC's Joy Reid, every night for a
00:53:22.860 while, was putting my tweets on screen and trying to yell at me about them. I mean, they are really
00:53:28.960 dedicated to the narrative. They're trying any tactic to discredit the opposition, to gaslight
00:53:37.040 the public, to obscure the true nature of their ideology that they've created. But I think that
00:53:42.160 the American public is too smart. They see what's happening in their local schools. They see
00:53:47.280 the documents that are being released in the media by me and others. And they know that this
00:53:53.580 is bad, even if they don't understand the kind of nuances of the theory. They know instinctually,
00:53:58.960 they know intuitively that this ideology spells trouble for everyone, spells trouble for our
00:54:05.000 country. And I think that they are, you know, one good thing, you know, kind of referencing your
00:54:11.440 tweet thread about loss and trust of the media. In some ways, this is good. I mean, the media
00:54:15.820 deserves to be trusted less, and it creates the opportunity for programs like yours, for programs
00:54:21.000 that are independent, to actually fill that gap and build real trust with the audience,
00:54:26.100 not just getting fire hosed by the New York Times with their, you know, endless stream of
00:54:33.520 of gaslighting and delusion.
00:54:36.240 Do you know what, Christopher?
00:54:37.420 You were talking about how you were getting trashed
00:54:39.280 by The Atlantic, by MSNBC,
00:54:41.400 by The Washington Post, by New York Times.
00:54:43.440 I'm like, we could get some of that, actually.
00:54:45.820 Yeah, why are they pulling up my tweets
00:54:48.340 on MSNBC every night?
00:54:49.640 Come on, guys.
00:54:50.480 Dude, I'll tell you what.
00:54:51.980 You know, I've never had faster audience growth
00:54:54.640 when I was put under.
00:54:56.220 No, really. 0.98
00:54:56.740 I mean, like, you know, and obviously, like, it sucks. 0.96
00:54:59.880 It sucks to get attacked.
00:55:00.880 It sucks to get, you know, everyone posting your picture 0.98
00:55:02.960 and yelling at you in the media. But I'll tell you that the benefit of this is that they elevate
00:55:09.660 you into a position where then you become the person that people rally to. And I think that
00:55:16.640 for every person that they persuaded to oppose me, I gained at least 10 people that rallied to the
00:55:25.440 cause that said, actually, no, this is right. I'm going to oppose what the kind of corporate
00:55:31.800 legacy media is doing. So yeah, I would recommend it. Don't do anything too bad, but certainly if
00:55:37.760 you can get some hit pieces, ultimately they say, you know, I don't think this is true. I think
00:55:43.080 there's a, this is 95% true. All press is good press. Not all press is good press, but most
00:55:50.260 press is good press. I think that's absolutely right. I think Prince Andrew would disagree
00:55:54.360 with that, but it's a good point you make about it because if you think about it from a normal
00:55:59.660 person's point of view, if you're being attacked by disgusting people that no one trusts,
00:56:06.460 that probably says something about you, right? And I think that's kind of the position we've
00:56:10.440 got into. And look, given what you're describing, I think it's really important the work that you're
00:56:15.300 doing. And congratulations on getting the spotlight onto this issue. Because as you say,
00:56:21.040 for us certainly here in the UK, we see it when we see protests on our street.
00:56:24.940 you know blm protesters saying to police officers don't shoot these police officers are unarmed in
00:56:32.160 the uk there was one person in the whole year or two people i think who were unarmed who were shot
00:56:37.540 and killed by the police one of them was a terrorist who just stabbed several people right
00:56:41.240 we don't have that problem but the ideology is being imported and as you say america is very
00:56:46.080 good at exporting things good and bad so all power to you keep up the great work and as always
00:56:51.700 Christopher. We've got one more question for you. What's the one thing we're not talking about,
00:56:56.040 but we really should be? Oh, that's a good question. You know, I think,
00:57:00.760 well, I guess this is maybe emerges from my own interest, but I think it's important.
00:57:07.060 I think the kind of intellectual counterculture, and I think I'm part of it. I think you're part
00:57:12.800 of it. We do a very good job at kind of rebutting or refuting the arguments of the woke.
00:57:20.520 We keep it in.
00:57:21.700 We do a very good job at kind of exposing it.
00:57:24.220 There's all these great publications.
00:57:26.000 But I think we need to spend more time talking about, well, what do we do about it?
00:57:30.740 Because it's one thing to kind of, you know, destroy our opponents with facts and logic.
00:57:37.240 You know, like that kind of like meme.
00:57:39.640 That's great.
00:57:40.320 Like you should do that.
00:57:41.420 But if they're in charge of all the institutions that hold political power and they're in charge
00:57:45.780 of billions of dollars of taxpayer budget money, you know, our facts and logic don't mean much
00:57:54.280 because they control money and power. So I think we should get our hands dirtier a little bit. We
00:57:59.880 should start talking about, well, what can we do about it? What are public policies that we could
00:58:04.240 adopt? What are strategies that we could adopt? How could we actually move the fight from the
00:58:08.300 realm of the intellect into the realm of politics? And that's something that I think I've started to
00:58:13.040 do. And I've seen something very interesting. You have people now kind of, in a way, schisming,
00:58:19.940 in a way, kind of separating where there's a certain member of the kind of intellectual
00:58:23.980 counterculture, the IDW, whatever you want to call it. There's a certain contingent that says,
00:58:28.020 yes, get rid of this in schools. And a certain contingent that says, oh, we can't do anything
00:58:34.160 about this. That would be, you know, we can't exercise political power. We'd have to work with
00:58:38.340 the mean, bad Republicans, and we can't be caught doing that. We still ultimately want the approval
00:58:45.240 of the New York Times. There is this weird division, and I think I'd like to clarify those
00:58:50.160 lines. I'd like to persuade as many people as possible to join me in taking into the realm of
00:58:55.420 action. But either way, wherever you fall, wherever you kind of shake out, we should all be expected
00:59:01.900 to propose solutions and to propose concrete actions. Because I think ultimately we've done
00:59:09.660 the refutation work, we've done the intellectual work, and we can't just keep repeating it. We
00:59:14.060 need to actually move to the next phase. It's interesting you say that because in the UK,
00:59:18.140 as we talked about earlier, neither Francis or I are conservative or right-leaning really. But
00:59:23.660 we had an election at the end of 2019 in which, as a country, overwhelmingly we elected a
00:59:30.660 conservative government which showed plenty of leg on the anti-woke stuff and all of that and
00:59:36.360 we've ended up exactly where we started where all of this stuff is accepted all of this stuff is
00:59:41.540 going ahead and i think you're absolutely right and i i take your uh criticism gratefully uh in
00:59:48.140 that i think a lot more of us need to start thinking about how to have an impact on this
00:59:52.640 stuff you know the free speech union here in the uk is doing some good work and organizations like
00:59:57.480 counterweight as well. That is something that really more people need to get stuck into. Because
01:00:02.900 I think if you look at the institutional capture of many of these places, you can get a politician
01:00:08.580 into power. But if they are still beholden to what the New York Times or The Guardian says about them,
01:00:13.800 you're not going to get very far. That's right. And I think that, you know,
01:00:17.580 from my experience, there's some great folks in your area. Yeah, counterweight, the free speech
01:00:21.900 Union, Eric Kaufman at Birkbeck College. You also have, you know, I'm going to butcher her 0.85
01:00:29.320 name, Kemi Badenoch. Unbelievable. I mean, I think she's just a absolute fire starter. I love 0.75
01:00:37.140 the clips that make their way over here. So we have potential. And I think also, you know,
01:00:41.840 maybe we can end on a note of unity. We need to revive the Anglo-American alliance. We need to
01:00:46.960 get all of our people, that we share the same values, to exchange ideas, to exchange best
01:00:52.220 practices, to exchange policies, because we certainly have a lot to learn from one another.
01:00:56.620 And I'm grateful for the chance to speak with both of you.
01:01:00.720 Christopher, thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find you online or
01:01:05.020 support your work, where is the best place to do that? Yeah, follow me on Twitter at
01:01:08.960 RealChrisRufo, R-U-F-O, or my website, which is ChristopherRufo.com. That's ChristopherRufo.com.
01:01:15.720 I have an amazing community of small patrons and supporters.
01:01:20.620 Certainly be grateful to add you if you're listening.
01:01:24.360 Fantastic, Christopher.
01:01:25.320 Thanks very much.
01:01:25.920 And of course, the idea of reigniting the Anglo-American Alliance is great
01:01:31.140 as soon as you guys start paying taxes again.
01:01:33.740 Now, thanks for coming on.
01:01:36.000 And guys, thank you for watching.
01:01:37.460 We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one.
01:01:41.180 Aurore Show.
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01:01:49.960 We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview.
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