TRIGGERnometry - Why Diversity Programs Need to Be ELIMINATED - Christopher Rufo

00:00:00.600 I don't understand how anyone, left or right, can essentially put forward the idea that you are going to deny somebody a place at a university or on a grad program for the simple reason that they are the wrong color skin or that they are the wrong sex.

00:00:15.840 To me, it's abhorrent.

00:00:17.500 I feel the same way.

00:00:19.580 But we're up against a bureaucracy and a system that is totally and fully committed to just the opposite.

00:00:26.460 I mean, they want to create a racial spoil system in which individuals are punished or rewarded based on their ancestry.

00:00:34.800 I find it disgusting.

00:00:36.900 I find it abhorrent.

00:00:38.680 And that's what I'm fighting against.

00:00:40.780 In any kind of reform effort, there will be winners and losers.

00:00:43.780 And who's losing in this regard are the people who are very comfortable maintaining orthodoxy, administering their echo chamber.

00:00:51.880 We're challenging that in terms of political power.

00:00:54.660 We're submitting their ideologies to a democratic test.

00:00:57.720 And I think they're squealing in large part because they're losing.

00:01:11.280 Hello and welcome to Triggerdometry.

00:01:14.220 I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:15.480 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:01:16.620 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:21.740 Our terrific and returning guest today is an activist.

00:01:24.560 He's the author of a new book called America's Cultural Revolution and the subject of the most hit pieces in the last week that I've ever read about anybody.

00:01:32.040 Christopher Ruffer, welcome back to Triggerdometry.

00:01:34.680 It's good to be with you.

00:01:36.300 It's great to be with you.

00:01:37.400 I mentioned the hit pieces.

00:01:38.600 People, of course, will have seen our first interview with you so they know who you are.

00:01:42.040 But I would say you're one of the most effective people at dismantling the diversity, inclusion and equity, the dye industry in America.

00:01:51.340 And I suspect that is why you're coming under attack.

00:01:54.420 But before we get into that, tell everybody about some of the things you've been doing in education in America and the results that you've had.

00:02:01.100 Yeah, this year, my my big focus for my reporting, my activism and other facets of my work is to put pressure on and abolish diversity, equity and inclusion departments in public universities.

00:02:14.080 So I did an investigative reporting campaign exposing these kind of ideological commissars in Florida and Texas, worked with Governor DeSantis, worked with legislators in Texas.

00:02:26.040 Both of those states abolished their DEI departments in public universities.

00:02:29.640 They will be totally eliminated by the end of the summer and phased out.

00:02:33.860 And we also had this incredible project.

00:02:37.500 The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, appointed me as a board member of the smallest public university in the state of part of this new slate of board activists, board members.

00:02:48.660 And we were tasked with something very simple.

00:02:50.540 He said, turn this university around and make it a classical liberal arts institution.

00:02:55.380 And so these are some of the big projects that I've been working on.

00:02:58.600 And I think that the reason there's been such a furious reaction is because I'm not just fighting in the abstract.

00:03:06.220 I'm not just writing another think piece, but actually challenging left wing orthodoxy and challenging, more importantly, left wing power within academia, which is, of course, their primary institution.

00:03:17.100 And I'm racking up some big wins.

00:03:20.080 You are.

00:03:20.840 And that's why you're getting a lot of the negative attention right now.

00:03:24.080 What's interesting to me is you talk you are not talking about a conservative education system.

00:03:29.360 You're talking about a classical liberal education.

00:03:32.940 What does that look like exactly?

00:03:34.720 What does that mean for people thinking?

00:03:37.020 Because I think people would rightly see you as someone on the center right.

00:03:41.360 And a lot of conservatives feel that the left is pushing the education system too far to the left.

00:03:47.080 And the natural reaction for them is to demand this sort of very conservative reaction.

00:03:51.680 But you're talking about classical liberal education.

00:03:53.560 What does that mean?

00:03:54.140 And why is that your focus?

00:03:55.180 So the mission that we've adopted and we're trying to implement over the next few years is to restore classical notions of liberal education.

00:04:05.320 And what that means is, you know, liberal education comes from the Latin liber meaning free.

00:04:10.040 So it's an education befitting a free human being, befitting a free society.

00:04:14.140 And it's an education that is not oriented towards partisan, ideological, and political fights, the kind of questions of the day, but oriented towards the highest transcendental goods.

00:04:25.280 You have the true, the good, the beautiful.

00:04:27.240 You have philosophy, history, aesthetics, art, all of the great disciplines, the seven great disciplines of the classical liberal arts.

00:04:35.200 And in addition, some of the more practical disciplines because it's a public university.

00:04:39.100 You want kids that attend have a chance to get success in the job market after graduation.

00:04:44.140 But what it means in practice is that what we've done is we've put in a new president.

00:04:50.480 We've put in a new provost.

00:04:51.940 We're designing a core curriculum that is going to take students through the Greeks, the Romans, the Renaissance, the American founding, all of the great historical periods, looking at literature, history, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, and other great disciplines.

00:05:06.660 And then what it also means is rebalancing the universities.

00:05:09.840 And this is something that's happening at New College, but I'm hoping happens more broadly.

00:05:14.500 What you have right now is a left-wing echo chamber.

00:05:17.720 And it's not good for conservatives who are excluded largely from the academic environment, but it's actually not good for liberals either, left liberals or even far-left liberals, because their ideas are never challenged.

00:05:30.740 Their ideas are never tested.

00:05:31.900 Their ideas are never tested with this kind of friction of debate.

00:05:36.220 And so what we're hoping to do is have a wide variety of viewpoints.

00:05:39.620 I know that's shocking and offensive to some, but we want to have a real debate.

00:05:45.220 We want to have good rules of civil discourse.

00:05:48.380 We want to have people from all parts of the spectrum.

00:05:50.940 And what that means is a rebalancing has to occur.

00:05:53.940 And for some people, this is painful, but for some people, it's exciting.

00:05:59.400 It's a process of renewal.

00:06:01.400 I completely agree, Chris.

00:06:02.540 I think it's very, very important.

00:06:04.060 As somebody who still identifies with a lot of left-wing principles, I think it's very important.

00:06:10.820 Why do you think that there's been so much backlash to what you're trying to implement in these colleges or in this college in particular?

00:06:18.560 I mean, since the late 1960s, the left has made the universities its wholly owned subsidiary.

00:06:27.780 I mean, this is the base of their power.

00:06:29.980 They have saturated these institutions with left-wing ideology.

00:06:33.760 They've established bureaucracies of diversity, equity, and inclusion that function as activist training departments or orthodoxy enforcement agencies.

00:06:45.060 And so what I'm doing is I'm saying this has to pass muster with the democratic test.

00:06:52.100 Do the people of the state of Florida support this kind of activity in their public universities or do they not?

00:06:58.320 And the mandate that was given to Governor DeSantis by the voters of Florida in his resounding re-election win indicates that voters do not consent to this kind of governance.

00:07:09.180 They do not want left-wing ideological commissars running their public universities.

00:07:13.040 And Governor DeSantis is the kind of man who has the courage, the tenacity, the self-discipline, and the intelligence to actually go after it and start reforming these institutions.

00:07:24.400 And so in any kind of reform effort, there will be winners and losers.

00:07:27.860 And who's losing in this regard are the people who are very comfortable maintaining orthodoxy, administering their echo chamber.

00:07:36.680 We're challenging that in terms of political power.

00:07:39.680 We're submitting their ideologies to a democratic test.

00:07:42.420 And I think they're squealing in large part because they're losing both the intellectual case and also the practical political case.

00:07:50.300 It's very interesting.

00:07:52.360 What does that mean?

00:07:54.680 What are you actually doing in these colleges, Chris?

00:07:57.660 Are you going in and what strategies are you using?

00:08:02.500 There are a couple of key strategies.

00:08:04.140 So legislatively, the bill that passed the Florida legislature and was signed by the governor earlier this year does a few things that are really important.

00:08:13.480 One, it sets, A, it abolishes DEI departments.

00:08:17.460 You know, from the exposés that I wrote, it was very clear that these departments were not advancing pluralism or tolerance or acceptance of a variety of viewpoints and people, but they were actually enforcing a dogma and an orthodoxy.

00:08:30.660 And they were using public resources to push left-wing ideology, saying that the United States was a racist country, pushing BLM, training students how to participate in violent protests, et cetera, et cetera.

00:08:43.160 And so this bill eliminates those departments, just zeroes a mountain, says no more left-wing ideology within the administrative bureaucracy.

00:08:51.380 A couple other reforms that are really important.

00:08:53.100 The second one is that it restrains the core curriculum to say we have to have a core curriculum that teaches students the basics of getting a liberal education, of being a productive citizen, of understanding what it means to be a human being in the United States and a free society.

00:09:10.140 So there's a reform to the general education requirements in Florida's public universities.

00:09:16.320 And then third, it reforms the hiring process.

00:09:19.400 What's happened in so many universities, and I expose this in Florida, they're putting race-based preferences and they're putting ideological preferences, which results in this department structure where many departments are 10 to 1, 20 to 1, 30 to 1, 100 to 1, left to right.

00:09:36.840 And so if you have a department in a public university system that is 100 to 1, left-wing to right-wing, you don't have free speech, you don't have debate, you don't even have a substantive intellectual environment.

00:09:49.360 And so I think that changing some of the hiring process, restricting some of the discriminatory hiring processes, giving university presidents greater discretion can help start to rebalance the intellectual environment so that students can hear from a variety of perspectives.

00:10:07.480 Students can test their ideas against one another and against their professors and faculty members, and I think that is ultimately what's going to create a great public university system, is having a dedication to the liberal arts, having a core curriculum that educates citizens, and having a kind of pluralistic intellectual environment where students get exposed to more than just one set of ideas.

00:10:30.700 And Chris, when you were talking about the college and the curriculum, I'm thinking as a dad of a young boy, that is exactly the sort of place I'd want him to be educated.

00:10:41.620 The classics, logic, all of these things sound incredible, but I suppose I'm a little bit concerned, and I'm curious to hear your opinion about this, that we've now got ourselves into a position as your society and ours where we automatically evaluate a professor by their politics, if you like.

00:11:00.280 And I'm not saying you have done this, of course, but do you think we're ever going to get to a point where you're going to have colleagues in a department that don't even particularly know each other's politics because they are teaching Greek history or, you know, ancient Latin or something like that.

00:11:15.700 Are we ever going to go back to that if we were ever there?

00:11:19.300 Yeah, I mean, there's two ways of looking at that question.

00:11:22.120 I mean, first, in some sense, it would be nice if you're running a, you know, statistics and data science department.

00:11:29.280 If it wasn't, you know, fully saturated with politics and ideology, you know, if you're doing, you know, quantum physics, think about quantum physics, not about, you know, you know, how many genders there might be.

00:11:40.300 And so in some sense, I think for certain disciplines, that makes sense.

00:11:43.960 But in others, it doesn't make sense at all.

00:11:45.460 I mean, ultimately, what I think is important for people to realize is that there's a distinction between ideology and politics.

00:11:53.380 And my contention that I've advanced and has gotten a lot of pushback, but I think is ultimately still true, is that our universities have been overly ideologized, but insufficiently politicized.

00:12:06.000 And so what that means is that we have, you know, critical theory, postmodernism, gender ideology driving intellectual life in the departments.

00:12:15.260 But we have this fiction that universities are neutral spaces that should not be governed by anyone and that certainly shouldn't be intruded upon by legislators and taxpayers and voters who fund them, charter them and pay for them.

00:12:28.700 What I'm saying is that it's time for public universities to be governed in the best interest of the public and to be governed specifically by the legislators who are elected by voters to fund, oversee and administer these institutions.

00:12:43.520 Academics want to be free to push their ideology at all times, but they also want to be free of democratic oversight.

00:12:51.160 I hope that to reverse that.

00:12:52.860 I hope that the opposite becomes true over time.

00:12:54.920 Chris, what happened to the notion, and as a former teacher and everybody who watches this show can now drink, because I mention it at least six times an episode.

00:13:04.700 But when I was a teacher, I taught theatre in secondary school and I was a primary school teacher.

00:13:11.440 My opinion was my politics were completely irrelevant to my job.

00:13:16.780 I left my politics at the door and my job was to educate the students in my subject or in primary school in the subjects that I taught to the very best of my ability.

00:13:27.540 And quite frankly, my politics was my business and nobody else's.

00:13:32.320 Well, you have a very, very sophisticated reserve and self-discipline.

00:13:37.540 I think that's what maybe describes it.

00:13:39.700 But look, I had the same experience in my K-12 education, even in some of my college education.

00:13:46.160 You know, you have a lot of professors who you don't even know their politics.

00:13:49.180 You couldn't guess.

00:13:50.480 You might be surprised if you heard their personal politics, their partisan politics.

00:13:55.360 I think that is generally good.

00:13:57.200 I mean, especially in K-12, you should absolutely check your politics at the door.

00:14:00.780 In university environments, look, if you're a university professor and you're studying some or you're rather teaching something that is intertwined with politics, your politics might come out.

00:14:11.700 But the best professors that I've had at the higher education level were professors who also sought to create a balance within the core syllabus, for example, to say, we're going to pair Adam Smith with Karl Marx.

00:14:23.760 We're going to pair, you know, kind of the Federalist and the Anti-Federalist.

00:14:28.060 We're going to pair, you know, you know, Ibram Kendi with John McWhorter, if you want to have a more kind of contemporary and a more immediate question.

00:14:36.740 And so I think that that is the ideal, but I think that we should not mistake that kind of micro level concealing of politics in a sense.

00:14:48.960 You're concealing it because it's not exactly relevant, just like you should conceal, you know, your sex life from your students.

00:14:56.100 I mean, this is kind of common sense, but we should not mistake that for concealing the fact that public universities are political entities.

00:15:05.560 They're created by politicians.

00:15:08.920 And so I think that we have this two levels where this question must be asked and there are two different answers.

00:15:16.500 And I suppose the question is about trying to get to a position because, look, when I think about my university education, I was not, I studied economics and politics.

00:15:26.420 I was not taught to believe Karl Marx.

00:15:31.440 I was taught about Karl Marx and I was taught about Adam Smith and the ideas that the and Nietzsche and all these other philosophers.

00:15:39.300 I was taught about their ideas instead of being indoctrinated with their ideas.

00:15:44.560 Right.

00:15:44.740 I suppose that's what we're trying to get with you is are we ever going to get to that point or is it just now going to be about, you know, everyone being obsessed with their view and imposing it on students forever?

00:15:58.520 Now, it sounds like you're making progress on that front.

00:16:01.140 Yeah, that we absolutely are making progress.

00:16:03.240 And so I have a bit more of a subtle take on the question of indoctrination.

00:16:09.140 A lot of conservatives say universities are indoctrinating kids to be, you know, blue haired gender communists.

00:16:14.920 That's kind of a meme that you see everywhere.

00:16:17.100 And OK, I mean, I could understand why at first glance you might think that.

00:16:21.520 But I don't think that's exactly how it works.

00:16:23.420 I don't think that most professors are are you kind of consciously in a cult like manner, indoctrinating their students, pushing their ideology, you know, you know, converting them to the to the to the cause in that kind of recruiting sense.

00:16:38.180 I actually think it's something more subtle and more insidious.

00:16:40.680 I think that it's just that they're not exposing students to any alternative sets of ideas.

00:16:44.740 And so there is a piece from The Guardian, a critical piece of me that came out yesterday in The Guardian that illustrates exactly what's happening.

00:16:53.800 This is a college educated writer, Moira Donaghan, who made the media men list, which was kind of a horrific thing that, you know, tarred her reputation. 0.54

00:17:03.420 But then she's a visiting teacher at Stanford in the gender studies department.

00:17:07.460 This is someone who is teaching at an elite university in some capacity, someone who has a prestigious spot as a columnist at The Guardian.

00:17:14.740 And then she says, you know, I wouldn't go that far, mate.

00:17:18.760 I don't know that prestigious these days.

00:17:21.140 Yeah.

00:17:21.620 OK, a once prestigious, maybe.

00:17:25.220 But, you know, but she says in this piece, she says, Rufo wants to turn the curriculum at New College of Florida and base it on logos.

00:17:34.380 Nobody knows what the word logos means.

00:17:36.620 It means word in Greek.

00:17:38.380 How are you going to make a curriculum based on word?

00:17:41.540 And so what is this person missing?

00:17:43.720 This person is missing that logos was the heart of Greek philosophy and then also the heart of the kind of Christian biblical tradition.

00:17:53.020 You know, in the beginning was the word, was the logos.

00:17:56.240 And of course, you know, Herodotus, Aristotle, all of the Greek philosophers commented on logos.

00:18:01.960 And then there's been 2000 years of commentary on logos.

00:18:04.540 It's rationality, discourse, language, word, logic.

00:18:09.840 I mean, the very description of how the order of the cosmos is constructed is all embedded in that word logos.

00:18:17.800 She doesn't have any idea, can't even recognize that it's a philosophical word, can't even recognize that it's a religious word, can't even recognize that it's one of the most important words in the past 2000 years in the history of the West.

00:18:30.220 And so this person is indoctrinated as a kind of gender cultist, not merely because someone was forcing it into her mind, although it's possible that that also happened.

00:18:40.580 But because she has been deprived of any education in the classical liberal arts to the point where she can't even recognize the key terms of the past two millennia.

00:18:50.180 And so that's what we're trying to do.

00:18:52.680 I think, you know, I look back at my own education.

00:18:55.720 I feel like I was robbed of an education.

00:18:57.980 I was deprived of the great traditions of the West, not having been exposed to some of these classical ideas, classical concepts and classical pedagogies until much later in life.

00:19:12.080 That's such an interesting point, man.

00:19:13.600 And one of the things I also wanted to ask you about, because you are very funny with the hit pieces that you get on Twitter, I enjoy back and forth with you.

00:19:22.540 And one of the things I found is both your supporters and your critics are agreed on what you're doing.

00:19:29.940 And so when I read the hit pieces on you, quite often I'm like going, oh, this sounds like he's doing good things, because a lot of them focus on the fact that you are dismantling the diversity industry.

00:19:40.820 And from my perspective, that is an unquestioned good, because I just see it as a new form of racism that's been allowed to be perpetuated on the British and American institutions for far too long.

00:19:53.600 But for people who are perhaps, you know, less initiated in the culture war and all of this, what is the difference between, you know, in America, you guys always celebrate, oh, this person is the first Italian American to do this.

00:20:07.180 Or this person is the first African American to do that.

00:20:09.920 And that was never really a thing that was discriminatory.

00:20:13.620 It was a celebratory way of doing things.

00:20:16.120 But we've kind of got way past that towards affirmative action, which openly discriminated against certain people and stuff like that.

00:20:23.560 So why is getting rid of the diversity hierarchy a good thing? 0.94

00:20:29.220 Well, in public universities, it's an especially crucial question.

00:20:32.960 So, look, I think most Americans, if not the vast majority of Americans, want people from all backgrounds to succeed.

00:20:41.240 That's part of our national mythos, that this is a place where you can come with nothing and you can succeed, you know, with, you know, debate about immigration and et cetera set aside for the time being.

00:20:52.960 And that's a core part of the American story.

00:20:56.420 And so, but when you look at universities, you have to ask the question, what is the university for?

00:21:00.980 What is the purpose?

00:21:02.200 I think that the university is to pursue truth, to pursue, to rather to produce knowledge and to serve as a community of scholars from a variety of viewpoints that together through the process of reasoning and debate and constructive criticism,

00:21:18.940 can reveal or can arrive at those great transcendentals, the true, the true, the good, and the beautiful.

00:21:27.580 So you have, you know, of course, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics or art.

00:21:32.940 Those are the kind of three channels that we can create, you know, truth and beauty.

00:21:39.760 And so DEI bureaucracies in practice are antithetical to those pursuits.

00:21:45.960 DEI bureaucracies enforce orthodoxy.

00:21:48.320 You know, I've exposed public universities that are literally telling people, these are words that you can use.

00:21:53.360 These are words that you can't use.

00:21:55.080 You shouldn't say men and women.

00:21:56.540 You should say people and people kind.

00:21:59.240 You know, you shouldn't say black and white.

00:22:01.360 You should say, you know, something else.

00:22:03.340 I mean, it's like down to the minute management of language by bureaucracy.

00:22:08.860 And so I think that it stifles open discourse.

00:22:11.900 It stifles free debate.

00:22:13.860 It stifles even the basic process of learning.

00:22:17.060 It also then serves as a racial spoils system.

00:22:21.040 They have hiring and admissions based on your ancestry rather than your academic capability.

00:22:26.400 They're rewarding people and punishing people based on what their parents, you know, who their parents are, where their ancestors came from.

00:22:34.280 And I think that is really deeply destructive and especially undermines the concept of meritocracy.

00:22:41.660 And so in the American context, you know, of course, you know, what Jefferson thought of as is having a natural aristocracy of talent.

00:22:49.120 And of course, wasn't fully implemented during his lifetime, obviously.

00:22:53.420 But we've moved toward that toward that goal more and more.

00:22:57.100 And I think that the DEI bureaucracy undermines that as well.

00:23:00.980 And then as a third component, what the DEI bureaucracy does is it manages the university and transforms it away from the pursuit of the transcendentals and toward the pursuit of current day political activism.

00:23:14.820 I mean, it's training programs, it's student programs, it's faculty programs.

00:23:19.600 They want to turn universities away from the pursuit of knowledge and towards the pursuit of ideology and the pursuit of partisan activism.

00:23:27.460 That betrays the fundamental mission of the universities.

00:23:30.380 And I think it betrays really the scam that the DEI bureaucracy is.

00:23:34.340 It operates in these very nice buzzwords, but in practice, I think, destroys the very heart of liberal education.

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00:25:43.380 When it comes to ticking boxes, when it comes to diversity, look, as a former teacher, I saw plenty of kids who were really talented, really smart, had the ability to go to college, university.

00:25:57.700 But the reality is, weren't going to go there because the schools that they went to were, to put it mildly, absolutely dreadful, in which no learning took place because bad behaviour, underfunding, etc., etc.

00:26:09.760 Is there not something to be said for having quotas for these types of kids who have got a huge amount of ability, but because the education system has, to put it bluntly, failed them, that the universities can step in and maybe help to actually propel them forward in their careers?

00:26:28.580 Yeah, I think there are two methods for attracting kids that are having those kind of difficulties into the university environment that also are consonant with the principle of colorblind equality, treating people equally and not giving favor or punishment based on ancestry.

00:26:47.540 You can do a couple things.

00:26:48.440 One is, there's a great system in Texas that says, if you're in the top 10% of your high school graduating class, in any high school in Texas, you're automatically admitted into the University of Texas system.

00:26:59.780 And so what that does is, there are, you know, of course, many affluent public schools where much more than the top 10% are going to college, they're qualified, they're habituated to it, they're encouraged by their parents.

00:27:11.280 But for those struggling high schools, everyone knows, if you get that top 10%, you're in, you can get to college.

00:27:18.060 That's a way that I think, in a sense, disproportionately benefits those who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic class by virtue of proxy, including many minority students.

00:27:29.340 But it does it in a neutral, colorblind manner that I think targets the right thing is saying, if you're a top performer at any one of our public schools, you deserve a spot, you deserve a chance.

00:27:43.200 The other method that you can do, and I think that it's a method that is commonplace and certainly happens in the state of Florida, is that you can reward scholarships or tuition reductions based on socioeconomic status.

00:27:58.440 So if you're coming from a family, you know, like my family, I had two lawyers as parents, you know, I had to go for those merit scholarships, I was not qualifying for those financial need scholarships, that's fine.

00:28:11.540 But if you're coming from someone who's a great student, but comes from a background where you have maybe one parent or two parents, you know, working minimum wage, let's say, I think that it's right and just and good to give those folks a break, if not a full break on tuition for public universities for which they're qualified.

00:28:30.520 But the third thing that's really important is that this is really what the SATs were designed to do, standardized tests in the mid-century period.

00:28:40.920 The Ivy League universities were kind of an old boys club where your dad went to Harvard, you went to Harvard, your son went to Harvard.

00:28:47.420 And so what they did is they created these SAT tests so that kids from all over the United States in inner cities and small towns and rural areas could compete in a very objective, in a kind of quantitative sense against all of their other peers.

00:29:03.360 And what this allowed was for those great Ivy League schools at the time and those public universities as well to find those kids who were immense talents, who had the brains, who had the intelligence, who had the capacity to do well, but weren't connected socially or administratively with the universities.

00:29:22.760 This gave them an opportunity to prove themselves.

00:29:25.240 And so these are three solutions that I think solve the problem where left and right mostly agree, but they do it in a manner that doesn't create resentment, hostility, frustration, and isn't also a violation of our Constitution.

00:29:39.720 Look, I completely agree.

00:29:41.140 I don't understand how anyone left or right can essentially put forward the idea that you are going to deny somebody a place at a university or on a grad program for the simple reason that they are the wrong country. 0.68

00:29:55.240 I feel the same way, and sometimes I wonder, it's a very, very simple conclusion.

00:30:07.180 It's a very simple position.

00:30:08.460 It happens to be very popular with large majorities of the public, but we're up against a bureaucracy and a system that is totally and fully committed to just the opposite.

00:30:19.880 I mean, they want to create a racial spoil system in which individuals are punished or rewarded based on their ancestry.

00:30:28.040 I find it disgusting.

00:30:30.220 I find it abhorrent, and that's what I'm fighting against.

00:30:33.620 Yeah, and one of the things I was going to ask you, Chris, is you have been very effective, I would say uncommonly so, among the people who are attempting to challenge the very things that we've just been talking about.

00:30:49.820 So what do you think it is that you have been doing that other people have perhaps not been doing?

00:30:55.680 Because I think we all would agree that there is kind of now quite a large ecosystem of people who are concerned about the same things that you and I are concerned about.

00:31:06.480 An ecosystem of people who discuss them, who do podcasts about them, who interview authors who've got books about them, who write books about them.

00:31:15.020 But there's a lot of talking, and you're someone who's actually converted that into real action and real results.

00:31:21.540 What do you think we can learn from the things you've been working on?

00:31:25.440 Well, I mean, first off, I sometimes joke that, you know, politics is not a podcast.

00:31:30.460 You can't win in politics on a podcast, but that's somewhat tongue-in-cheek because the intellectual ecosystem of podcasts, journals, you know, social media accounts, you know, video channels is really, really important because programs like yours and others are how people start to get into the debate.

00:31:52.320 They start to be thinking about these issues.

00:31:54.020 They give a platform for the great journalists and writers and intellectuals who are working in this domain.

00:32:03.140 But I think it's necessary but not sufficient.

00:32:05.940 And what is required to make it both necessary and sufficient is to actually do politics.

00:32:12.280 And I find it, you know, so astonishing.

00:32:14.240 I get critics, even from the right, that are saying, you know, we think critical race theory is horrible.

00:32:20.040 We think DEI is antithetical to the Constitution, but we're really concerned that Rufo is getting rid of them within public institutions.

00:32:28.420 It's like, what are you people for?

00:32:31.180 I mean, how do you go from that premise to that conclusion?

00:32:35.300 Chris, sorry to interrupt.

00:32:36.320 Just to steel man their argument, and I have seen that argument made.

00:32:39.240 Please.

00:32:39.680 Their argument, I think, is they're uncomfortable with using the power of government to do those things.

00:32:45.540 That is their concern.

00:32:46.620 Totally, but that is like the most absurd concern possible because they're uncomfortable with using the power of the government to regulate the government.

00:32:54.240 These are government schools.

00:32:55.780 These are government institutions.

00:32:57.640 And so the only people who can regulate them are government agents, essentially.

00:33:03.940 And so what my argument is, is if you say that legislators channeling the sentiments and desires of their voters are not allowed to regulate public institutions, what you're saying is that the supreme power in our country is not the people, is not the legislators who represent them, but the permanent bureaucracies and the permanent bureaucrats that administer our institutions.

00:33:28.180 And so it is fundamentally an anti-democratic argument that they're making.

00:33:32.480 They're saying the people have no right to regulate their government.

00:33:35.300 That is completely backwards to the vision of the American founding, where the people were the ultimate arbiter, and the government only existed to secure the rights of the people.

00:33:48.120 Now we're getting into a kind of tyrannical model, and I think it fails on those grounds.

00:33:54.380 No, I agree with you, and that makes a lot of sense, actually.

00:33:58.740 Particularly when you travel around America and you realize how different different states are and people's attitudes, it seems strange to me that you would want to, that it's even possible that you would have the same values and the same attitudes everywhere, because it's just so different.

00:34:14.500 And so the different states do.

00:34:16.060 Traveling around America has made me much more pro-states rights, just as an outside observer, I have to say.

00:34:21.320 Yeah, I think that's right, and I mean, and I think this is ultimately good, right?

00:34:26.820 I think some values are better than others, obviously.

00:34:29.900 You know, I support legislation in some states and do not support the legislation that gets through in other states.

00:34:36.880 But what I think I recognize, and I hope most Americans recognize, is that we want to have a pluralistic system.

00:34:43.300 I mean, what is more boring, what is more humorless, what is more stifling than an entire nation of 330 plus million people, where everyone thinks the same, everyone has the same values, everyone has to do the same programs, all universities look identical to one another.

00:35:00.220 That's the homogenous world that we're drifting towards, and I think that what that does is it deadens the soul. 0.99

00:35:08.820 And I think the people who lead those kind of bureaucracies are some of the worst people in our society, frankly.

00:35:15.460 I'll say that, because they want to destroy the great traditions of Western civilization, and they want to replace it with a desiccated and discriminatory system of DEI bureaucracies that simply circulate whatever is the fashionable orthodoxy of the day.

00:35:39.400 Chris, isn't your challenge going to be as well, when you're talking about recruitment, there are certain professions, for instance, becoming a teacher, which is naturally going to appeal more to liberal people, more to left wing people than it is going to appeal to right wing people.

00:35:55.400 I mean, that's just the reality of life, isn't it? Same if you're a college professor who is a specialist in the liberal arts. Chances are you're going to be pretty liberal.

00:36:03.680 I think that that is the reality in very recent times, but has not been the reality over the course of a longer stretch of history.

00:36:16.200 And so I hear this all the time, you know, well, artists are always left wing.

00:36:20.440 But if you look at the 18th century and the 19th century, there were many right wing artists.

00:36:25.960 You could actually make the case that that that that that the kind of great arts were were embodying the spirit of the right, the spirit of the aristocracy, the spirit of hierarchy, even.

00:36:36.960 And so I don't think that it's inevitable, although I would certainly admit that it's pervasive.

00:36:41.940 And I think that, you know, from a practical perspective, if you say that the kind of ratio of, you know, left to right and colleges campuses among the academics and professors is 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 to one, depending on the discipline.

00:36:57.500 You know, we have to start acknowledging that that's the reality.

00:37:00.500 And one of my personal goals through legislation, through kind of governance in many different conservative states, red states, I want to see in the next 10 years, a thousand professors that are aligned with the classical liberal arts hired in state universities around the country.

00:37:22.320 And these professors will be, because it's classical, in a sense, it's conservative.

00:37:27.300 You're trying to conserve the classical notions of these ideas, of these concepts, of these histories.

00:37:35.040 And so, in a sense, what I'm hoping to do is get at least a thousand academics that are broadly and philosophically aligned with so many people who feel unrepresented in the institutions, who feel like their ideas don't have a home in academia.

00:37:50.440 I think a thousand people creates a strong enough counterbalance, a strong enough cohort, a strong enough network that then you can start taking over departments.

00:38:00.620 You could start reforming entire universities.

00:38:03.300 You could start launching new academic journals.

00:38:06.300 You could start creating another parallel realm of academic discourse that provides protection, that provides patronage, that provides publication opportunities for people who dissent from the left-wing orthodoxy.

00:38:20.400 That's something that I'm excited about and I'm going to be working for in the future.

00:38:23.840 Would it not be an idea just to say, as well, that when a professor enters a classroom, particularly undergrad, they are not allowed to present a political argument and say, this is the way that you should think?

00:38:38.480 That it is their duty as an educator to go in and present these arguments neutrally.

00:38:44.940 Would that not also be a way of doing it?

00:38:47.500 There is an argument for that.

00:38:49.160 But I think that there's a better solution to that.

00:38:52.740 I think that the better solution is to hire people in the first place that are already predisposed to that kind of temperament and that kind of pedagogy in the classroom.

00:39:01.800 And so I think that fundamentally this is a hiring problem, a recruiting problem, and a faculty problem in that sense.

00:39:08.960 But, however, some states are now experimenting with restricting certain pedagogies in the classroom.

00:39:20.120 I personally have expressed reservation about this.

00:39:22.640 I've done it at the debate that I did at Stanford.

00:39:25.480 And I said, look, I think that this is probably not the best place for conservatives to fight.

00:39:30.980 My own model legislation that I've put together with Manhattan Institute provides a kind of exemption for classroom instruction, focuses more on the bureaucracy and hiring and colorblind policies.

00:39:44.020 However, the states such as Florida that are that are experimenting with that approach will be challenged in the courts.

00:39:52.100 But my view is that they'll prevail in the courts because we have a Supreme Court precedent, Ceballos v. Garcetti, that says that public employees, including public university employees, presumably, are ultimately they have a job.

00:40:07.380 And in their official duties, they do not have unlimited First Amendment rights.

00:40:10.500 So you can't go into a kindergarten classroom and say, you know, all of you must be communists. 0.96

00:40:17.100 Your parents are evil. 0.98

00:40:19.300 And, you know, I declare you all, you know, cat gender. 0.99

00:40:22.780 Well, you can't you can get fired for that because you don't have unlimited First Amendment rights.

00:40:26.680 You have a job that you're doing.

00:40:28.100 You're hired to do specific tasks.

00:40:30.360 The question is, does it apply to higher education academics in a college classroom?

00:40:35.760 Again, even my own reservations about the policy, I think that it does.

00:40:41.080 I think ultimately college professors are in public universities are public employees and they're subject to reasonable oversight and they're subject to kind of the reasonable preferences of legislators and administration.

00:40:54.680 I know you I know I guess I know what your answer is going to be to this, but there's a lot of people that we speak to who are in higher education or have been higher in higher education who say that it's completely compromised.

00:41:08.380 And actually, the most effective strategy now is to build our own institutions, as it were.

00:41:14.940 What do you say to that argument?

00:41:16.380 I think that it is noble in spirit, but deficient in its practical implementation, because the fact is, is that founding in the university is extremely expensive and it's also very onerous as far as accreditation and launch and recruitment and facilities.

00:41:37.680 And we cannot do that at the scale to compete with the existing institutions.

00:41:42.900 Look, I support initiatives like University of Austin.

00:41:45.160 The new university that's that that they're launching is kind of like an IDW university in a sense, you know, heterodox university.

00:41:54.380 I think that that's great. But the fact of the matter is that we have 3000 other universities.

00:41:59.500 And if your argument is that most of them are compromised, you have to do something about it.

00:42:04.100 And and while it's very hard to influence, say, a private institution in the Ivy Leagues, although there are ways we can talk about that, where what we know we can absolutely influence.

00:42:15.140 In a profound way are public universities, because ultimately, if you have control of the legislature and the governor's mansion, you can do, in a sense, whatever you want, whatever you can get passed through the legislative process.

00:42:28.120 And so I think that that is a much more immediate and much more fruitful and a much more scalable method.

00:42:34.520 And so you put in conservative oriented research centers, you do university takeovers as small universities, you reform the faculty hiring process to give more power to trustees and university presidents to create a little bit more balance on the faculty.

00:42:52.000 And then you also make sure that you're you're restricting, eliminating, revolting programs that don't serve the public good.

00:43:00.920 That's what I think is is the best path, although it is, of course, certain certainly complementary rather than contradictory or antithetical to the idea of also creating new institutions.

00:43:13.060 And I imagine you're hopeful that the marketplace sorts the wheat from the chaff, in other words, five, 10, 15 years from now, where there's enough colleges that have that classical liberal arts education available, that people vote with their feet.

00:43:28.080 And then the proof of that pudding gets shown.

00:43:31.160 I'm curious, though, coming back to the point about lessons for other things.

00:43:36.280 What do you think are the lessons from what you've been doing into other things?

00:43:42.540 Because you know full well that this capture that we're talking about with the education system also applies to things like the media.

00:43:51.620 Do you think, given that those things are not owned and run by the government, do you think that that is an area where it is about building your own institution?

00:44:00.680 Or do you think that in other areas it has to be about something like what you're doing with education?

00:44:06.580 Yeah, great, great question.

00:44:08.460 And very much the former.

00:44:09.600 I think that the media is thankfully, with very limited exceptions for NPR and PBS and federal grant making, the media in the United States is a kind of private enterprise.

00:44:21.620 The media is a kind of an open system.

00:44:24.340 And so I very much think that we want to have, you know, print media, broadcast media, radio, social media.

00:44:34.020 Conservatives just need to build.

00:44:35.820 They need to compete.

00:44:37.000 They need to create great material.

00:44:39.000 And I think that they need to create also businesses.

00:44:42.020 And I think that the rest mostly solves itself.

00:44:44.740 The only glaring exception where I think it's appropriate for public policy is under conditions of private monopoly.

00:44:52.960 Some government intervention is justified, even under a libertarian reading.

00:44:57.380 And so I think that there is some role, although it has to be delicate, on social media censorship, for example, particularly with those kind of vertically integrated and kind of monopoly-like firms.

00:45:13.460 And so I'd like to see some new ideas in that direction.

00:45:20.020 But broadly speaking, I think the media is actually, I mean, look, the success of your show, the success of some of my journalistic work, the limitation is not, you know, the system.

00:45:32.760 The limitation is not that, you know, kind of left, far left people have taken over the, you know, NBC News room.

00:45:40.120 The limitation is really that we have to compete and create great work.

00:45:44.060 And I think that the role of policy is quite limited.

00:45:47.980 Chris, and let's focus on the Ivy Leagues, the Harvards, you know, the Columbias, et cetera.

00:45:55.080 These are private institutions.

00:45:56.800 Correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm not particularly au fait.

00:45:59.460 Okay, so what do we do with a private institution?

00:46:03.800 Because that's not governmental.

00:46:05.280 So what do we do with them?

00:46:07.940 Well, this is actually a fun question, and I'm glad you asked, because I've been working with some other scholars and policy analysts on exactly this question.

00:46:15.740 And there's a couple of things we can do.

00:46:17.460 I mean, you know, A, private universities are subsidized to the gills by the federal government through student loans and student loan guarantees.

00:46:25.320 And so I think that you could reform student loans and make universities liable in part for student loan defaults.

00:46:33.840 So if a student racks up $250,000 in student loans, getting a gender studies degree from, you know, private university A, and then can't pay it back. 0.72

00:46:45.400 Well, why isn't the university on the hook to repay that, say, half of that loan?

00:46:50.160 So create some financial incentives for them to be more competitive and more judicious in how they run their programs.

00:46:59.220 Second, what you can do, and what I'm recommending the next president of the United States to do, you know, if it's a Republican, is to launch a Department of Justice and Department of Education investigation into all of the Ivy League universities to investigate them for illegal and unconstitutional racial discrimination in hiring and admissions.

00:47:24.080 And so what we would do is essentially take what the lawyers did with the Harvard lawsuit, which established that Harvard's admissions policies were unconstitutional, and then expand it to all of the prestige universities using the power of federal investigation to procure documents, to put, you know, a few hundred lawyers on the case.

00:47:48.340 And in a sense, to embarrass, to expose, to punish, and then to take corrective legal action against universities who are violating the Constitution.

00:47:59.020 I think that would make waves.

00:48:01.400 I think that would make huge changes in behavior.

00:48:03.320 And I also think that federal funding for these universities, they get billions of dollars, private universities get billions of dollars in grants and in programmatic funding and other kind of federal financial schemes.

00:48:18.240 Why don't we tie that funding to principles of open speech and debate, principles of civic discourse, principles of non-discrimination, and in a sense say, if you don't fulfill the basic mission of the university, being a home for open discourse, having a standard of civil debate, you no longer qualify for federal funds.

00:48:39.720 This is how it works in almost every other domain of life.

00:48:42.800 If you do not follow the basic rules, you do not qualify for special benefits.

00:48:47.360 And so I think there's a lot that can be done to tame these private universities.

00:48:52.340 And one thing I've learned, in particular, fighting in academia, academics are not very, you know, they're not economically productive, right?

00:49:00.420 They're not, you know, creating, you know, iPhones or whatever.

00:49:04.920 What they have, what they trade on is prestige.

00:49:07.120 And that's really their full, they always put their full, you know, the famous Jacob Urofsky professor of whatever at Yale University, the famous line from Jason Stanley.

00:49:18.700 And so what I've learned by kind of, you laugh at that, it's kind of funny, but actually it signals a great vulnerability.

00:49:24.820 If you can attack the prestige and attack the reputation and undermine the prestige and reputation of individual academics, but academic institutions as a whole, that is a very powerful method for getting change.

00:49:42.080 And Chris, one of the things we wanted to talk with you about as well is, as I think you can tell, we're fully on board with the idea of dismantling the diversity, bureaucracy, classical liberal arts education.

00:49:54.560 And I certainly see that, you know, and you talk about this in your book, America's Cultural Revolution, the way that the far left has infiltrated so many institutions and essentially seized control of the means of intellectual production in all sorts of areas.

00:50:12.680 Are you concerned that, for example, we see that we saw the case in Florida, where I think in one county, Francis and I were looking at this article earlier, they've banned the teaching of Shakespeare in schools because it's got sexually explicit content.

00:50:26.880 And you can kind of see what's happened there, where maybe people have felt that, you know, rightly, we talked to Carol Markowitz when we were in Florida about some of the things that kids are being taught.

00:50:38.380 Oh, and you're going, no, no, children should not be taught this, very sexually explicit content.

00:50:43.300 But it feels like there is at least a very real risk of a overcorrection, overreaction, an excessive backlash.

00:50:51.420 Is that something that you see happening?

00:50:53.200 And are you concerned about that at all?

00:50:55.020 Well, that's interesting.

00:50:55.940 I don't know the specifics of that story of Shakespeare, but I would venture a guess, you know, speculating.

00:51:04.120 And I would say that this is the pattern in many other cases that sound like this.

00:51:09.660 You know, you see the headline, school bans, you know, Shakespeare.

00:51:13.080 You dig in, a couple of things might be happening.

00:51:14.900 Might be.

00:51:15.240 I don't know in this specific case.

00:51:16.400 One, it might be a single parent says, hey, I'm going to flag this book and it has to go through a process of review.

00:51:23.000 And then, of course, it's Shakespeare.

00:51:24.200 It'll get reviewed and it'll get put back in the shelf or the curriculum or whatever is the case.

00:51:28.060 But there's a second thing that is very commonly occurring and it's very sneaky and they almost never put it in the news article because a lot of the news articles are not news.

00:51:38.120 They're propaganda.

00:51:39.320 But what's a phenomenon called malicious...

00:51:40.960 Sorry to interrupt, Chris.

00:51:42.300 This was a New York Post, by the way, just for clarity.

00:51:46.620 Okay.

00:51:47.060 Okay.

00:51:47.380 Well, I'd be curious to read it, but perhaps this is what's happening.

00:51:51.820 There's something called a kind of technique called malicious compliance.

00:51:54.680 And I've seen this over and over in Florida where kind of left-wing, ideological teachers, librarians, citizens, what have you, will say, oh, what can we do to embarrass the governor?

00:52:09.420 What can we do to put pressure?

00:52:11.360 We're going to flag Shakespeare for a racy sex scene or whatever.

00:52:17.040 And then we can feed it to the media.

00:52:19.080 The media will say that Shakespeare has been banned.

00:52:22.120 But really what this is is a librarian or another official violating the spirit of the law, violating actually in most cases the plain reading of the law, distorting the reading, putting something on a list in a kind of manipulative and false way in order to generate negative headlines.

00:52:41.480 And so I would suspect that what you'll see is that Shakespeare will be back in the library immediately.

00:52:46.540 I, of course, would support the complete works of Shakespeare in the library.

00:52:50.960 And I think what parents are really trying to stop is against pornography and sexually explicit materials. 0.88

00:52:58.680 You know, there's books that are teaching, you know, depicting acts of pedophilia, books that are teaching children how to use gay sex apps. 0.93

00:53:07.860 Um, that's the kind of thing that is in classrooms that shouldn't be in classrooms.

00:53:13.220 And so I don't think that any conservative that I know or really any conservatives in any meaningful sense wants to restrict Shakespeare.

00:53:20.760 Um, I would suspect something else is going on.

00:53:23.700 That's it.

00:53:24.440 Yeah, that sounds perfectly credible.

00:53:26.320 Chris, the one thing that I find quite interesting, and again, as a former educator is, and maybe look, I'm reading a left wing liberal paper and it's a misrepresentation.

00:53:36.000 I was reading about, uh, how sex education has been banned in Florida.

00:53:41.580 Now, I'm, as a former educator, I'm not particularly comfortable with it.

00:53:46.060 And I'll explain to you why.

00:53:47.440 Because particularly with young children, sex education is not teaching them to be sexual.

00:53:53.880 It's actually teaching them to protect themselves from abuse.

00:53:57.440 And children who grew up in households that are sexually abusive are not taught about this for very obvious reasons.

00:54:04.840 And I've seen, in my own experience, where cases of abuse have been missed because a child is not able to vocalize what is happening to them because they're not sexual people because they're children.

00:54:20.740 Sure.

00:54:21.420 Well, I think that it's important to then review the text of the law, let's say, in Florida, where I'm most familiar with it.

00:54:27.220 Um, the text of the law says there, there shall be no instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation in first in K through three and now in K through 12.

00:54:37.480 Uh, and so, and so, and then it also has a carve out for, um, state mandated sex education should be, can, can, can, it, it must be, you know, permitted, included in the classroom. 1.00

00:54:49.060 And so, uh, any kind of, uh, uh, training or prevention or discussion about potential sexual abuse is not about gender identity or sexual orientation.

00:54:57.860 It's part of the, the, the, the existing, you know, K through 12, uh, sex education curriculum.

00:55:03.460 There's a clear need for that, uh, would not be restricted.

00:55:06.540 And so I think that that is a very, uh, a good way to look at it.

00:55:10.080 There are certain things that like, you know, sex abuse prevention education, um, or reporting education that I think are absolutely should be included.

00:55:18.240 That's still in the curriculum in Florida, um, but teaching kids that they might be, uh, pansexual, teaching children that they might be, um, you know, how to use, uh, gay sex apps.

00:55:28.960 Eh, I think that that is, uh, you know, something that maybe Beth, uh, left, uh, I mean, actually maybe best, uh, you know, uh, not in the K through 12 system at all, but, but certainly if parents want to teach their kids, you know, all the new genders, um, you know, that's their right. 0.97

00:55:44.420 Uh, but they don't have, uh, they don't have an entitlement to push these ideas in the public school system. 0.90

00:55:49.540 Come on, little Johnny, let me show you how to use Grindr for kids.

00:55:53.500 That is a fun time with that as, as, as, as no one has experienced.

00:55:57.880 Uh, Chris, we're about to head over to Locals where we ask you questions from our audience that they've already submitted.

00:56:03.340 Before we do, as you know, we always wrap up this part of the interview by asking you, uh, what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think we should be?

00:56:12.340 You know, I, I think that it's something that we've been touching upon a bit in this conversation.

00:56:18.480 It's that, um, you know, we need to talk about how democracy functions.

00:56:24.180 And, and I think that the left has made their slogan, you know, this is what democracy looks like.

00:56:29.680 Democracy dies in darkness.

00:56:31.700 Um, some other, you know, there's some other kind of riff on this, uh, you know, Trump is a threat to democracy.

00:56:37.120 I mean, all of these, democracy, democracy, democracy.

00:56:39.240 I think conservatives, though, are missing, uh, are missing something on, on the word democracy and also on the word justice.

00:56:45.360 The left is this justice, that justice, you know, X, Y, Z justice.

00:56:49.960 The conservatives have a temptation and even kind of center, center right liberals, let's say, have a temptation to say, oh, the left is demagoguing on democracy.

00:56:57.640 The left is demagoguing on justice.

00:56:59.700 You know, uh, uh, uh, those are, those are left-wing words.

00:57:02.440 I think that that's totally a missed opportunity.

00:57:05.700 And in fact, we need to have a competing vision of democracy and a competing vision of justice, um, that I think would resonate with large majorities of the public.

00:57:14.760 And we've really ceded those words, ceded those concepts to our opponents.

00:57:19.240 And, uh, and I think that this, uh, conversation about education reform, university reform, it speaks to this issue.

00:57:25.540 It's that, um, you know, in a democracy, in a republic, but let's say in a democracy for kind of shorthand, um, uh, the voters, the people through their legislators get to decide how their institutions are governed.

00:57:37.700 And towards which values their institutions aspire.

00:57:40.800 We've lost that in our country, maybe in your country as well.

00:57:44.200 We've lost the sense that the people determine the ends, that the people determine how institutions function, that the people determine what institutions are transmitting from one generation to the next.

00:57:56.120 We've ceded that.

00:57:57.780 We've, we've, we've, we've, we've closed our eyes to how our democracy functions.

00:58:01.160 And I think that is a really dangerous future if we continue.

00:58:04.980 And so one of my goals against the left and against even the right, my, my critics on the right, is to unapologetically be a champion of democratic governance of our institutions.

00:58:16.620 And I think that that's a conversation that needs to be had.

00:58:20.260 Perfect.

00:58:20.460 Well, if you're listening and watching this, we're going to continue the conversation on Locals.

00:58:24.400 Head on over there and we'll answer some of your questions.

00:58:26.800 What was the breaking point that pushed you so far that you stopped caring when someone weaponized empathy against you?

00:58:38.800 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - September 17, 2023

Why Diversity Programs Need to Be ELIMINATED - Christopher Rufo

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