https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=LmnGW4ootDA
They have those high status positions. They’re entrenched in their economic fortunes. They have economic security through the bureaucracy, through the tenure system, et cetera. So they’re cynically pushing this narrative as a way to redistribute status and prestige, which is really what they crave. That’s the real currency. That’s the real redistribution. Well, everyone craves that, Christopher, I would say, because there isn’t anything that you have that’s more valuable than your reputation. You trade on your reputation. People who have stored up genuine value in their reputation and who have been honest players and who know how to work and know how to share are much more likely to be rewarded with a deserved prestige. But the narcissists and the psychopaths and the intellectual Machiavellians can parasitize that by making unwarranted moral claims and then saying about themselves that they are as good or better than the people they’re criticizing. And because they have intellectual prowess, they’re often able to out-argue the people who have accrued genuine moral virtue that might be like the self-made working class types who know what’s right and who act out what’s right, but who aren’t as able to articulate it, which is a challenge on the conservative side. Hello, everyone. I’m very pleased today to be talking with Mr. Christopher Ruffo, who’s emerged as a national and international class troublemaker, I would say, and policy advisor on the culture war front, especially in relationship to issues of public education and critical race theory, whatever that means, and both philosophically and politically, that’s what we’re going to delve into today. Christopher is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute. He’s also a contributing editor at City Journal, where his writing explores a range of issues, including critical race theory, homelessness, addiction, crime, and the decline of cities on America’s West Coast. Mr. Ruffo also, as I said, became a focal point of attention on the culture war front for reasons we will discuss in this podcast. He recently launched a YouTube channel called Christopher Ruffo Theory, concentrating on all these philosophical, political, and practical issues. Thank you very much, Mr. Ruffo, Christopher, for agreeing to talk to me today. It’s a pleasure to be with you. So let’s start with a broad question, three, I suppose. Who are you? What in the world are you up to? And why have people so suddenly, in some real sense, become interested? Why have you become a focal point of attention on these issues? Sure, I think it’s because I was really the first person to do the reporting, to actually substantiate the feeling that many people had, that our institutions had been captured by left-wing ideologies. And this has obviously been a kind of concern for many people for a long time. But for many years, it felt like it was relegated to the university setting. And so conservatives could say, well, you know, there’s something crazy going on at Vassar College. It doesn’t affect me. Then after the death of George Floyd in 2020, it seemed like all of our institutions suddenly shifted overnight. So I did a series of reports on diversity training programs in the federal government that got the attention of then President Trump. Then I shifted to looking at critical race theory implemented as a pedagogical approach in K through 12 schools, which set off this massive response or really revolt amongst parents nationwide. And now I’m focusing on gender ideology as well, looking at K through 12 schools, government agencies, and even the Fortune 100 companies. And so what I think I’ve been able to do that’s been able to galvanize attention is take these issues, establish a factual basis saying, this is what’s happening, these are the documents, and then describing the origins, whether it’s critical race theory or queer theory, in a way that the average person, a parent in a public school district, for example, can start to then push back. And that’s really been my goal. I’m kind of an accidental activist, never set out to be an activist. But as it turns out, I’m kind of leading this fight in many ways here in the United States. Right, so you think you were able to make these issues, to take them out of the purely academic realm while they were moving out of the purely academic realm, to articulate what they are, to articulate people’s concerns about that, parental concerns specifically, and also to act as an advisor, let’s say, and an educator on the political front. Does that seem about right? Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think what I’ve been able to do, and it’s actually been just really fascinating and rewarding process, is to kind of take my very small team and we run the whole gamut. So we start at the very beginning, which is always creating new information, in the sense that we’re fielding reports, we’re talking to whistleblowers, we’re authenticating documents, we’re putting them on television, we’re putting them on social media so people are aware of what’s happening. And then all of a sudden people said, well, how do we talk about this? Whether it’s people in Congressmen, or state legislators, or governors, hey, what’s going on with critical race theory? What’s the language I should be using? What can we do about it? And then I started putting together those kind of memos and an advisory capacity saying, hey, this is what’s actually happening. This is what’s going on beneath the surface, and this is what you can do about it. Right, okay, so you’re also detailing the way that this system of ideas, let’s say, you’re also detailing the way that this system of ideas is manifesting itself concretely in the educational establishment and in actual institutions. So it’s not merely a theoretical discussion. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And there’s a really important point on that distinction that I think is really critical. A lot of the debates that we’ve had in recent years kind of restrict themselves to that theoretical basis. It’s almost like people who are playing politics, intellectuals, journalists, are having an Oxford-style debate. And there’s this really, I think, an illusion that if you win the debate in the kind of marketplace that you have in the world of ideas, then your ideas will win. What I’ve done is I’ve exposed that that’s actually not true. It’s not how it works. It’s really actually a harmful illusion because when you have bureaucrats who have a very specific ideology that control public resources, they control the curriculum, they control human resources departments or diversity, equity, and inclusion departments, even if you have the better ideas, they have the political power. And so my big takeaway and my big call really to conservatives is to say, sure, having a stimulating intellectual discussion is important. I enjoy it. Many people enjoy it. But we actually have to get down to that structural level of bureaucratic and political power. And I was able to show through the reporting, hey, this is what they’re implementing in schools. These are the people who are doing it. And these are people who have captured hundreds of millions of dollars in public resources. And we should really focus the debate there if we wanna have a chance to changing this cultural pattern. Okay, well, I wanna return to that because one of the, I’m going to play devil’s advocate on the Kimberly Crenshaw intersectionality CRT front. And I also want to have a discussion with you about the place of this war, let’s say, the proper place of the war, because one of the concerns I have about attempts to fight critical race theory at the practical and pragmatic level is that attempts to regulate or ban it, and I’m not saying this is happening, I’m saying it’s a potential danger, attempts to regulate or ban it, run into the potential problem of expanding the sensorial capacity of governments in relationship to educational institutions and the free flow of ideas. And that, especially when you’re dealing with something that’s as difficult to pin down and define, let’s say, as critical race theory, because where’s its boundaries, that poses a potential danger for the future. We don’t wanna establish government institutions that are heavy handed in their sensorial capacity. So we’ll go back to that, we’ll go back to that. Let’s start though, maybe we could start for the audience, and I’d like you to talk about definition. So let’s talk about four domains, okay? Perhaps we can try to intertangle all of them. What specifically is critical race theory? That’s a very difficult thing to define. How is that related to queer theory, which is something that people know even less about, and why should we care? And then how do you think these are related to these broader issues of, say, postmodern philosophy and the Marxism that comes tagging along in its wake? So let’s start with CRT. What is CRT, how did you become aware of it, how should people understand it? So I first became aware of critical race theory, really working backwards. As I mentioned, I was doing this series of reports on these diversity training programs in the federal government. And once you look at enough of these documents, they’re all the same, they recycle the same 10 set of concepts or so. And so I said, where does this come from? What is the origin of this theory? And so I started working backwards, looking at the footnotes, looking at the suggested readings, and then really discovered over time the common intellectual framework is critical race theory. The definition is pretty simple. Critical race theory maintains that the United States is a fundamentally racist country, and that all of its institutions, from the constitution to the law, to the nuclear family, to the social institutions, manners and mores, preach the values of liberty and equality, but these are really just smoke screens for naked racial domination. And so they look at the entirety of American history, from the declaration to the constitution, even to Abraham Lincoln, and then to the Civil Rights Act. And they say, it appears that there’s racial progress, it appears that there’s reconciliation, but that’s an illusion. Actually, it’s just that power has become more sophisticated, more subtle, and more insidious. And so you’re starting from that point, and then you’re analyzing any social phenomenon, and you’re, surprise, surprise, discovering, not only that it’s a manifestation of racism, but they try to say, we’re going to give you tools to show exactly how that’s true. Okay, so who would you identify as, let’s do this in two tiers, who are the main thinkers on the critical race theory front per se, and then who would you identify as the more fundamental sources of the ideas that are driving these 10 common concepts, let’s say, that are running through such phenomena as diversity training? So who are the main critical race theorists? Sure, so the critical race theory, the godfather of critical race theory was a black Harvard law professor named Derrick Bell, who was hired as the first full-time black law professor at Harvard in the late 1960s. And Bell was a really fascinating person. He set the tone of critical race theory. It’s an ideology of extreme cynicism, a kind of negative philosophy, a kind of negation-based philosophy. And he cultivated a network of young students. He was a very charismatic figure, wrote a series of books, kind of allegorical books, talking about how racism was the permanent, indestructible and overwhelming feature of the United States. And this message had a lot of students, both at Harvard Law School and other law schools, other legal academies around the country. And some of those students came together in the late 1980s, Kimberley Crenshaw is one, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, a number of other figures at that time, came together really under his tutelage and then established critical race theory in the late 1980s. Then you see the kind of remarkable documentation that they’ve actually made themselves, talking about how they started in law schools and then they went to public health and sociology and other academic departments, and then finally trickled into diversity trainings and K through 12 pedagogy. And so that’s the basic kind of 10-second lineage of where this comes from. Okay, excellent. So now in terms of the intellectual influences, so look, for everyone listening, when you try to analyze the operation of a set of ideas, you wanna find out first who the current proponents are in the conversation that’s going on now, but then you need to trace it back to deeper ideas and the philosophers and sometimes the theologians even, depending on how deep you go, from whom those ideas flow. And in order to understand the entire structure of the system of ideas and its interrelationships so that you can understand its motivation and its nature, you have to delve deeper into the underlying history of the ideas. So we have Crenshaw, Matsudo and Lawrence. Matsudo, have I got that pronunciation right? Yeah, Matsuda. Matsuta, okay. And who would you say their intellectual, who are their intellectual inspirations? I would say there are really two key inspirations. One is Derrick Bell. And Derrick Bell’s innovation was bringing this really acidic, this really kind of solvent political philosophy. He was the first person to really weaponize identity politics in the elite institution. He was famous not for his legal scholarship, but actually famous for his political and campus activism. He would do things like write law review papers where he would fantasize about black law professors and the president of his university getting assassinated. And then he would conduct these protests outside their office to kind of raise the pressure to hire specific left-wing radicals in the legal academy. And so his students saw him not only as an intellectual inspiration, but also they said he’s really tapping into the pragmatic politics. And so you have Derrick Bell in the legal tradition. The other person that I think is really essential for them, someone that they cite over and over in their big red book of critical race theory, is Antonio Gramsci. And because what they wanted was not just Derrick Bell, who had this kind of cynical and pessimistic philosophy that didn’t seem to have much practical application beyond the campus. And so they bring in Gramsci, of course, who talks about how in order to win the battle of ideas, in order to have influence over the kind of economic and political base of a society, you want to infiltrate and then shift those mechanisms and institutions of cultural production and cultural patterning. And so they take Derrick Bell, kind of radical racialist philosophy. They take his identity politics and office politics, and then they graft onto it this kind of Marxian or Gramscian anthropology. And then also the Gramscian tactic of trying to then gain influence by getting into corporations, into schools, into other parts of the academy. And on that front, I think they’ve been remarkably successful. Okay, so that’s when it starts to sound conspiratorial. So now I want to do two things. I want to talk a little bit more about Gramsci, and I also want to talk about the relationship between, let’s say, Derrick Bell, Antonio Gramsci, the left wing, because you make the case, well, not only you, obviously, but the case is made quite continually that this is a left wing movement. So why left? And who are the influences on that front, the left wing influences? And how do you see all this developing in relationship to the ideas that people like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and Karl Marx have developed and put forward as well? That would bring us, in principle, somewhat deeper. Can we start with Gramsci? Yeah, we can start with Gramsci. I think Gramsci is very useful for, let’s say, post-World War II left-wing intellectuals. And specifically, if you look at the history of the United States, we had a really boom in radical left-wing politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of the greatest representations and something from which the critical race theorists explicitly draw from is the black nationalist movement. So these were explicit Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, revolutionaries, they believed that they could change the entire structure of the United States through armed guerrilla warfare, specifically looking at urban centers on the West Coast and the East Coast. And this, of course, spectacularly crashed and burned. And so the critical race theorists, they say we’re inspired by the black nationalist movements because we share in some sense the same goals. We want to have a kind of total overturning of society. We want to move away from capitalism. We want to move away from individual rights. We want to move away from a kind of unfettered First Amendment free speech. That’s Mari Matsuda’s argument. And we want to have a kind of collectivist and racially egalitarian society in which the scales are balanced based on group identity. But what they found and discovered is that the, throwing hand grenades at the police in Oakland, California is not gonna overturn an advanced industrial society like the United States. And of course, these are people who are embedded in the most elite institutions in the United States, places most notably like Harvard Law School. And so, a Harvard Law School student and then professor is unlikely to be winning in that way. So they said, what do we have? Well, we have access to elite institutions. We have a way of playing institutional politics that we learned from Derrick Bell. You can essentially bully, shame and pressure people using all of those tactics of identity politics to really get what you want. So why don’t we just do that at scale? Why don’t we use our position, our prestige, our institutional power within these places to then bring forth and legitimize some of those more radical ideas that you might get from, let’s say Eldridge Cleaver or Angela Davis in the 1960s. But we’re gonna take away the epithets and the profanities and the calls to execute police officers. We’re gonna make them respectable. We’re going to give them a gloss of academic language. So taking those Latinate words, those multisyllabic words, making it sound very, very, very fancy, very respectable, very intellectually intimidating. And then we’re gonna feed it through the system, through these transmission belts. And the critical race theorists themselves talk about this as they have their 10 year reunions. They actually interview each other and talk about the progress of their ideas. So you can actually market decade by decade. And they say, we started as a legal discipline, but actually our greatest strength is in education. And so they built up this entire pedagogy. And they said, to change the world again, like any left-wing revolutionary has said for the last hundred and odd years, you have to change how children are taught. And so the critical race theorists were very focused on building a pedagogy. And so these are the ideas, systemic racism, whiteness, white privilege, intersectionality, et cetera. These kind of core set of ideas that are now ubiquitous. At one time were really marginal academic ideas limited to just very few of these scholars and intellectuals. We’ll get back to more in just a second. First, we’d like to tell you about Birch Gold. 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Again, text Jordan to 989898 to claim your free no obligation information kit on how to protect your hard earned savings with gold. Okay, so now let’s go under that again a bit and then we’ll return to Gramsci, I think. So my understanding, please correct me, okay? My understanding of the relationship between such ideas and the broader intellectual tradition focuses for me on Foucault, Derrida and Marx. And so Derrida in particular based his philosophy, his postmodern philosophy on the idea that there’s no uniting grand narrative. And if there is that grand narrative has been harnessed in the service of the kind of power and oppression that you described. And Derrida described the West as fell, P-H-A-L-L-O, fellogocentric, male dominated, centered on the idea of logic from the Greeks, let’s say, in the enlightenment tradition and the idea of logos from the Judeo-Christian tradition and centering and privileging those concepts and hypothetically the people those concepts represented, which would have been males particularly and then secondarily in some sense white males. And part of what Derrida wanted to do and Foucault as well who had a similar theoretical framework was to bring those ideas and people he regarded as unfairly and inappropriately marginalized by tyrannical systems of power to the center. And that aligned as far as I can tell with the Marxist presupposition and Derrida makes this explicit. And it’s not like it is common knowledge that Foucault was also radically leftist as were so many French intellectuals of the time. Is the Marxists had a doctrine that was very similar because they regarded the entire battleground of human history, let’s say, and all the relations between individuals as characterized fundamentally by the expression of nothing but arbitrary power including institutions like marriage, all economic institutions and even friendship. And Marx decried the oppressive relationship between the bourgeoisie, the upper ruling class, let’s say in the proletariat, the working class and believed that when the revolution came that those who were unjustly oppressed in the name of power would take center stage. And so the postmodern and the neo-Marxist and the Marxist ideas could just collapse on top of each other. I think the French intellectuals of the 1970s did that in some sense and turned to ideas like the ones you’re discussing consciously and purposefully because they also realized as did the 1960s radicals, especially in the aftermath of Solzhenitsyn’s revolutions about the brutality of the Stalinist era, that a pure movement forward on the communist revolutionary front, let’s say, just wasn’t going to fly, was no longer ethically tenable but was also practically unachievable. Now, is there anything in my derivation of the sources of these ideas to those sources that you think is incomplete or erroneous that needs to be expanded? If you look at the lineage, this is a fascinating question on critical race theory, it’s almost like an intellectual stew. If you read their big red book and some of the other minor books, they appeal to almost everyone. It’s almost like they’re agnostic. Whatever left-wing revolutionary or deconstructionist thinkers, they’re gonna grab bits and pieces from all of them. So they specifically appeal to postmodernism, they specifically appeal to Gramsci, they specifically appeal to black nationalism, they specifically appeal to all these concepts. And in the early work, you sense that when they’re kind of grasping for the postmodernist techniques, they’re doing so almost out of a kind of fashionable pose or a posture. I don’t think that it’s really essential to what they’re doing though. Because I think if you look at queer theory, obviously Foucault, Derrida, postmodernism, it’s essential. It’s 100% of the intellectual lineage on the kind of axis of sex and gender. But on the axis of race and specifically looking at the critical race theorists, I don’t think that it’s the essential for defining a set of ideas. They may appeal to them because I think during the 90s, that was really fashionable among intellectuals. You had to cite Foucault, you had to cite postmodernism, you had to call into question the existence of an objective or absolute truth or a grand narrative. There is a bit of that, but I think when critical race theory kind of brass tacks when it comes down to it, it’s much more a direct Marxist revolutionary, even almost a materialistic philosophy. Because they take as the basis what they really want is a total leveling of society. And when they’re grasping around for solutions, that’s where I think you can really get to the crux of what critical race theory is. You take that old Marxist framework of oppressor and oppressed to kind of war between the classes. You substitute racial categories for economic categories. So they say the history of the United States is not the history of the rich oppressing the poor, although it is in part, but it’s really a history of whiteness and blackness. This almost metaphysical struggle between these two racial forces. And so what do they want? Well, you kind of read, you say, okay, let’s say we even buy into your premise, what would you want? They want to overturn capitalism. They think that that, they really think of whiteness and property as synonymous and mutually reinforcing. So unless you have the equality of property, the equality of wealth, you’re always gonna have a kind of racially based inequality because into our system of rights, into our system of private property, into our system of free exchange is embedded a racialist and really racially oppressive notion of whiteness. They’re inseparable. They also think that some of those key constitutional pillars or the key pillars of the Bill of Rights, such as free speech encourages or allows racial domination. So you need to have really a regulator or a state power to suppress the speech of people who would use it to reinforce that system of racial domination. And even the 14th Amendment, and then to a lesser extent, the civil rights act in 1964, they say, no, no, no, a lot of hand waving. Derek Bell famously said that, Lincoln didn’t free the slaves in order to advance racial justice. And the 14th Amendment was really a kind of fake, a fake expression of equality, all the way leading up even to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to desegregation. And so what do they want? They really want a focused state power. They look to, for example, the post-colonial regimes in Africa that seized land and wealth and then redistributed along racial lines. That was one of their inspirations in the 1990s. And so when you put all these elements together, you’re really getting the end of the constitutional system. Because look, if you don’t have free speech, you don’t have individual rights, you don’t have equal protection under the law. Those are just all masks for power, as you pointed out. Okay, so let me make the counterclaim here for a minute. Okay, and then we’ll get into this in more detail. So I’ve read a fair bit of the 1619 Project book, book actually I liked, and I was reviewing a fair bit of Kimberle Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality before I interviewed you today. And so let me push back as hard as I can on this. So the basic claim is that all of these institutions that are in some sense central to what has been described as the Western enlightenment and also Judeo-Christian tradition and put forth as a moral virtue, a set of truly moral guidelines, is actually nothing but a front for the domination of a small number of individuals who you can usually characterize by both race and gender, race, gender and sexual preference, let’s say. So white heterosexual males. Now it is the case that white heterosexual males occupy a disproportionate number of the most influential positions in society. It is also the case that racial minorities, and you could put sex minorities and sexual minorities in that same category, do tend to be overrepresented, let’s say, at the bottom of the heap. And it is also the case that people who have positions of authority and power are likely to harness whatever they can, philosophically and theologically, let’s say, to buttress their claim that their occupation of those positions of power, authority and privilege are justified not only on pragmatic grounds because they fought, let’s say, fair or unfairly for what they have, but also on moral grounds. And so why isn’t it acceptable to swallow the radical leftist critique wholeheartedly and say, look, if you’re not naive and you do know that power can corrupt and that power does corrupt and that many of our institutions are corrupt and that merit isn’t the only basis upon which people progress, that it’s reasonable to view the entire history, let’s say, of Western civilization as the attempt to merely dominate and to use very elaborate structures of rationalization to provide a moral framework for nothing but that dominance. That’s basically the argument. So what’s wrong with that argument? Sure, well, I mean, if we kind of take a step back, in some ways I’m somewhat sympathetic to it. If you look at the history of civilizations, obviously a lot of the principles proposed or espoused by leading figures are rationalizations. There’s a certain truth to that. This stuff is not totally bogus or totally out of left field, but the question is, okay, let’s actually get down to the implementation. Let’s get down into the practical unfolding of this historical experience. You start from a position, a starting point, let’s say around the American founding, where human slavery, for example, was a universal throughout space and time up until that point. And the Declaration of Independence was a radical egalitarian document, an attempt to raise human civilization up from a kind of morass, up from a kind of world of where this kind of domination was accepted. Did they transform every element in society in a single generation? No, but did they make significant progress towards those Republican values that they espoused? Absolutely they did. And so if you look at American history from that perspective, where you have the tragic nature of man, the tragic nature of society, you have these people entering into a historical moment in which the world looked very bleak in a lot of ways. They’re bringing that level of civilization, I think, undoubtedly upward. And so you start from that premise where they see nothing but domination, they see nothing but negativity, nothing but a kind of parade of horrors. I think any honest looking at American history could say, absolutely, we’ve had a real history of racial injustice, a real history that has to be grappled with. But if you put it in the context of the highest ideals from the declaration to the constitution, to the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and the actions of Lincoln, you can see this kind of rising level of always moving towards the completion or the realization of those highest ideals. So that’s one thing, you look at it from a historical context. And then the second thing is you look at it in a comparative way, where you say, okay, let’s even grant you, let’s say your argument is true, these are rationalizations used for domination. What other system would you suggest? What other country would you proffer as a better alternative? I started my career as a documentary filmmaker. And so over that 10, 15 years of my first part of my career, I traveled to somewhere between 70, 75 different countries around the world. And so I got to see how pretty much all of the major population groups live, all of the major governing systems. And so I think we should be very careful when we say, we’re gonna throw out the entire Western tradition, we’re gonna throw out the entire American tradition, we’re gonna throw out the entire system of capitalism, the entire system of constitutional government in pursuit of some vague and fuzzy utopia where we can really level society completely. And I think you asked them, well, what countries do it better? What countries would you rather model your society on? And then you start to actually have a practical view. Let me push back against that a little bit. Because I’m trying to do what I can to argue for the other side, let’s say. So I might say, well, these Western countries that you point to as pillars of freedom and democracy and wealth in terms of, let’s say, the remediation of absolute privation, the reason that a small minority of people within them are hyper successful is because they oppress and dominate the others in that society and siphon off excess resources from them in a manner that’s akin to theft. That’s a Marxist perspective. And then the reason that the United States and Canada and Great Britain, let’s say, are wealthy in the manner that they are, it has nothing to do with the essential virtues of capitalism in the free market and everything to do with the fact that they took all the land from the Native Americans, that they’ve been colonial nations, that they’ve exploited the third world and that they’ve diverted resources that should have been more equitably distributed across the world and within their own societies for the benefit of a very small number of people. So that would be the counter position to the case that you were making. That would, yeah. And it kind of, it falls apart on really a basic scrutiny. So the idea, you know, Marxists talk a lot about the distribution of resources. They never quite talk about the production of resources. And in fact, all of the Marxist systems throughout history, they’re great at distribution because when you have all of the guns, you can take things from one person, give them to another. They’re really bad at production. And so you have a kind of failure of production throughout the 20th century that was really catastrophic for tens of millions of people. The United States actually has created a system of production that has raised the basic level of standard of living beyond the wildest expectations of almost anyone a century ago. And it’s not out of exploitation. It’s actually out of cooperation. It’s out of the division of labor. It’s out of having a price mechanism where you can exchange your labor, you can exchange your time, you can exchange your cash, you can exchange other goods in a way that everyone is winning. And so if you look at even, for example, to say, well, comparing it to the third world, if you look at the ancestry of all of the different populations in the United States, European Americans, African Americans, Latin Americans, et cetera, even down to the ethnic level, being a European in the United States, you are much wealthier on average than being a European in Europe. And the same holds true from all the other populations. And then this is the reason why people vote with their feet to come to the United States from all over the world. But it’s also why when you ask people in survey data and even anecdotally, I think this is true across the board, people believe in the United States. And in fact, the only people who don’t believe in the United States are left-wing whites that have high levels of education. And so when you ask African Americans, when you ask Latinos, for example, is the United States the greatest country in the world? People still say yes to a great extent. When you ask people, if you work hard, can you still get ahead that basic bedrock principle of the United States, they still say yes. Everyone except for people in the kind of upper crust of our elite institutions. And the same thing holds true when you talk about critical race theory. Manhattan Institute did a poll, for example, asking parents, white parents, black parents, Asian parents, Latino parents, do you think public schools should be teaching that the United States is systemically racist? Do you think public schools should be teaching the doctrine of white privilege? Every group, black, white, Asian, and Latino, they all said no, we don’t want this in our schools. And so the Marxists and then the critical race theorists have to develop this really sophisticated and almost absurd idea of false consciousness. Yeah, they’ve internalized their oppression, all those groups. Exactly. And they’re saying, you know, the working class in the United States, the racial minority in the United States, all of the people who we know are oppressed, just as oppressed as they were under Jim Crow, just as oppressed as they were under slavery. They’ve actually make this argument, which is just so absurd. They’re really truly oppressed, they just don’t know it. And it’s up to us to explain it to them. And even if they don’t agree with us, we’re gonna change the entire society on their behalf. And so the really interesting thing, and I think the fatal kind of hypocrisy of critical race theory, is that these are the most privileged people in the world, the most privileged people in human history, to a great extent, regardless of racial background, trying to impose their ideology on working class people of all different racial backgrounds who reject it. It’s the same Marxist kind of jam that they get into. The proletariat, the working class, the racial minority doesn’t want what they’re selling. So they’re just gonna do it for them. I think it’s kind of a reversal of their entire philosophy. It’s a kind of intellectual imperialism that they use the kind of coded language of racial category that’s really been totally disconnected from the reality of even race in this country. Yeah, well, it’s so annoying when the working class doesn’t know what’s best for them. And so let’s take that apart in two ways. So one question might be, well, why is it the educated white upper class, so to speak? And I know this is more characteristic of white upper class women, by the way, than of men. Why is it that they are the ones most likely to espouse these theories? And I would say, and correct me if I’m wrong, there are perhaps two reasons for that is one is, they will be the last people affected by the detrimental consequences of these theories because they’re shielded from their effects. And number two, this is a deeper problem. You know, every system, every economic system that human beings has ever invented, every system of trade, which allows for cooperation, let’s say, and for us to benefit from the different abilities of other people, has also simultaneously produced inequality. And inequality, although necessary, and I would say for some reasons desirable because there’s no real difference, by the way, between inequality and diversity, it also does put a heavy load on the conscience of people. You know, if you’re a San Francisco upper middle-class housewife, let’s say, and you’re walking down the street and you see it littered with homeless people, so to speak, who are suffering and who clearly are suffering and who clearly are marginalized and haven’t been brought within the confines of the economic system for reasons that may be partly due to their own misbehavior, let’s say, and inadequacies, but also partly because of sociological circumstances that were beyond their control. It’s very, very difficult not to feel that your privilege and status is in some sense undeserved and also a moral burden and very tempting, therefore, to cheaply counterbalance that set of guilt with a proposition that not only are you in a dominant position, but you’re also firmly and 100% on the side of the oppressed, which is something you see happening in Ivy League schools all the time. And Rob Henderson, as you no doubt know, has described this proclivity as luxury beliefs, right? Is that you get to have your status and then instead of doing what you should do to remediate the problems of the world with that status and privilege, you jump on the bandwagon of cheaply compassionate theories and then you can have your moral cake and eat it too. I’ve been trying to parse out the psychological reasons why it is precisely those who are in these positions of vaunted privilege, let’s say, who are most likely to have these revolutionary ideas. Do you have any further thoughts on that? A couple things, I mean, A, this is kind of a stock character in American history. If you look at the Weather Underground movement in the late 60s, early 1970s, which is really a kind of prototype for all the things we’re seeing today, if you read their manifesto, Prairie Fire, and I highly recommend you read it. I read it last year and kind of my eyes popped out of my head because it’s all of the things that K through 12 students are learning today, white privilege, anti-colonialism, kind of Marxist economics, et cetera, that was at that time a radical fringe idea that has now moved into the mainstream. But you look at the backgrounds of all these people, they’re all elites. They’re all people who are the sons and daughters of bankers and politicians and wealthy people in New York City, wealthy people in San Francisco. They were living on houseboats in Marin while they were planting bombs in police stations. And so you kind of say, well, what is the psychology here? What’s happening? I think it’s a couple things. Certainly it functions as a luxury belief to the extent that they’re insulated from the consequences of those beliefs. I think we can’t underestimate two things, however. One is that a lot of these people are just true believers, the people who are most fervent. If you’re gonna pick up a gun, for example, like Eric Mann did and shoot it into the window of a police station in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you have to be deeply committed. And I think you see that same spirit among people who are members of Antifa, people who are members of BLM. They are really just possessed by this idea. And I think there’s a certain amount of attractiveness for people who are maybe bored, people who maybe feel resentful. They can fuel that resentment and that boredom into revolutionary action. And then they can take the mantle of romanticism. They can be Che Guevara. I mean, that’s a very attractive figure. Yeah, unless you know anything about him. You don’t even have to because you see the cool beret, you see the cool beard, you see the cool kind of high contrast print. And there’s a sense of fulfillment. And I think stemming from anger, resentment, a sense of guilt, you have this complex web of emotions that are then manipulated by media, manipulated by activists, manipulated by other leadership. And so there’s that latent. I think there’s also a sense among people, look, these are my peers. I have a lead education. I’ve traveled in those circles. I’ve lived in those cities. There’s a sense, I think among many of my peers in a way, especially the ones who are left. And I was on the left for many years, kind of graduated rightward over time. There’s a sense that they don’t deserve it. There’s a deep sense of inferiority. Well, maybe they don’t, you know, because one open question. Well, there’s an open question here on the guilt front. So there’s a gospel discussion of the unequal distribution of talents, right? Because it’s pretty clear that if you look at the world as it’s presently constituted and always has been, that, you know, some people are more beautiful than others and some people are healthier and some people are more intelligent and some people are more hardworking by nature. And sometimes some people are more creative and some people are more compassionate. There’s this massively unequal distribution of a priori resources, right? What you come into the world with, not what you deserve by dent of hard work. And then you might ask yourself, well, if you happen to be born, we’ll use all the tropes, white, rich, heterosexual, healthy, attractive, and you have all these benefits and privileges and the luxury of this, let’s say, immense wealth that was gathered by your parents, why shouldn’t you feel guilty about that? And then what, because look at all the people who don’t have that and it was just handed to you, it was just laid at your feet. And the answer that’s put forward in the New Testament, and I don’t like to refer to religious matters unless it’s necessary, is that to those to whom much has been given, much will be asked. And so then you might say, well, if you have all this remarkable technological and economic privilege, much of which was unearned and even much of which or some of which was purchased at the cost of historical atrocity, what should you do? And the answer is you should put yourself together so you’re as good ethically as you are rich financially. But that’s a heavy moral burden and a heavy burden of responsibility. And then I think you can take these cheap and uninformed routes out, and some of that’s just based in miseducation and pure ignorance, so that you can accrue to yourself the moral virtue that’s necessary to solve your conscience without having to do any of the real difficult work that making a full accounting of your talents and atoning for your privilege would actually require. Yeah, I think that’s 100% right. And I think that you have then a group of people, I mean, people who look like me, people who are my age, that are struggling to find an identity, struggling to find a structure, struggling to have a standard of living, maybe better than their parents. And then even people who come from wealthy backgrounds, there’s a tremendous pressure, right? If you’re born to that level of privilege, it’s very difficult to maybe exceed your family. In the past though, we had a kind of paternal structure where you’re saying, hey, even your kind of wayward son of a wealthy family, you have to come into the fold, you have to be a good steward of these resources, you have to build libraries, you have to build the opera house, you have to do great works that show that you can assume the responsibility of this wealth and prestige, and then really provide it back to the community in a substantial way. Right, right, right. That’s very difficult. It’s much easier to put on the keffiyeh march at a BLM protest, and then run a family foundation writing checks to a bunch of useless nonprofits. You get the status, you get the prestige, you get the love, you get the identity as a kind of class traitor, but it’s an adolescent posture of rebellion from a generation that refuses to grow up and become a father, let’s say, or become a mother, become a kind of matriarch figure. And so you have these permanent children that are in eternal revolution against their parents, that for them are symbolically represented in this society, and they feel like they can stuff that feeling or satisfy that feeling with these kind of, the sugar high of revolution by play acting, but it deals tremendous damage to real people. And the reason I’m a conservative, as opposed to where I started 10, 15 years ago kind of on the far left, is that I saw in the international context, in many places, what happens when these ideas take hold, but I also saw, I even spent five years in three of America’s poorest cities observing these communities. The theory of systemic racism, white privilege, intersectionality, et cetera, all the solutions that they proffer, are very good if you wanna achieve social status and position in an Ivy League university. They’re disastrous once they trickle down and are imposed on poor people of any racial background. And so this feeling, this psychological profile, I think is one of the most important things of our time. I think that’s why your work has been so successful and why people on the left have furiously kind of rejected it and furiously, in a deranged way, lashed out against it, because you’re calling them to responsibility. Yeah, I got a funny story for that, man. So, you know, I’ve had the misfortune to be invited to speak at universities. And I say misfortune because although some of the time that goes quite well, the most disastrous public events of my life have been on university campuses where I’m harassed by student radicals or literally accosted by them, yelled at by unbelievably narcissistic brats, generally harassed a lot by the administration for even daring to go to the damn university, having all sorts of obstacles put in my path when I agreed to do so, and spending a lot of time and resources to speak to people who are often extremely narcissistic for very little effect. Now, that’s not always the case. I’ve had good experiences at Cambridge and at MIT and at Stanford most recently. And so it can work, but it often doesn’t. And so, I figured out a way to go to a university and have it work. And this is really quite funny. I figured this out about five years ago. So imagine I’m invited to a university and I’m worried that there’s going to be protests. And I worry because sometimes there are murderous people at those protests. It’s no joke. And people get in my face and they threaten me and physically as well as psychologically. And I’m not afraid of that, but it makes me so angry that I’m afraid of my own anger in situations like that. I joke with my security people that half of the reason they’re there is to stop me from attacking other people. And I mean that, you know, it’s a joke, but it’s also not a joke. Anyways, I figured out very early that if I had a meeting at a university at eight o’clock in the morning, I’d never have a protester in sight. Because none of them had the bloody discipline to stick to their principles with enough, what would you say, assiduousness so that they would sacrifice their late night drinking session the night before so they wouldn’t be too hung over and bleary eyed to come out and confront the evil professor who is going to go out there and warp their compatriots. And so the fact that I could circumvent the bloody activists by merely showing up early in the morning is a pretty fundamental indictment of the fundamental maturity of their motivation. And also something that’s blackly comical in the deepest possible sense. And the fact that these idiot professors on these left-wing campuses take the messianic delusions of these overgrown adolescents with some degree of seriousness, overlay that with compassion, and then invite them to become useless activists and thereby fulfill their moral, the moral demands that their own conscience puts on them is an unbelievably deep indication of the absolute moral bankruptcy of the modern university. I love it. And weak parents create narcissistic children. And so the administrator is the weak parent and the children are quite narcissistic. And this reminds me, your story reminds me of two things. One, my dad was an immigrant from Italy, came over as a teenager with his family, very poor, had nothing. His father immediately died when they came over. My dad became the man of the household and he was a great athlete, a good student, got a scholarship, was living at home. And this was during the kind of 1960s, 1970s, Vietnam War protests, all of the kind of hippies and that kind of counterculture. And my dad got a scholarship to go to college, was working the whole time to support his mother, support his sister, kind of help the family. And he would tell, he says, you know, I see all these hippies, all the rich kids were the hippies and the protesters and the counterculture. He says, the working class kids, you know, we had to get a job, we had to take things seriously. We had to, you know, show up to work. And, you know, it really is this kind of class inversion. It’s this inversion of Marxism, where our elites are the Marxist revolutionaries and our working class people are our conservatives because they need that set of structures and values in order for them to have a dignified and meaningful life. And so we have an elite class that wants to dissolve all of the social and economic structures that are providing the basis for stable lives at the bottom. The second story I’m gonna tell you is very interesting. My wife and I went to see you in Seattle, Washington a number of years ago at one of your speeches. Next to us was this kid, young kid, maybe 25. We got to talking to him before the show, before you and Dave came on. And he said, you know, I drove, you know, an hour and a half. I drove from the kind of more rural area here in Washington state. And, you know, my life was a mess a few years ago. I was doing drugs, I was not showing up to work. I was waking up late. I was, you know, just couldn’t quite get things together. I was anxious all the time. And I was on YouTube. I’m not much of a reader, you know, barely finished high school. And I listened to Jordan Peterson. I don’t know how. And then piece by piece, I started following those basic building blocks of his advice. Now I’m working full time. I’ve got a great job on a construction crew. I’m getting paid over time. I wanted to hear him speak. And so for me, it was a kind of remarkable example of this phenomenon where you have people in the country, especially younger people, especially people from a middle-class or working class, for whom the stakes are high. If you screw up and you’re from a working class family, your life can be a disaster very quickly. And you’re giving this kind of time-tested advice about how to grow up, how to take responsibility. And it makes a difference in people’s lives. And I think the reason why the left is so upset with you, maybe the reason they’re so upset with me in the same token, is that they’re trying to give advice to the working class that will end up destroying their lives. You’re trying to give advice to working class people that will make their lives better. And it exposes the fraudulence of their ideas. It exposes the hypocrisy of their position. And it really exposes the kind of vengeful heart of their ideology. And to me, that’s really what converted me out of the left. I can’t spend any more time with these phony people, with these people who are the sons and daughters of immense privilege that are acting, playing revolutionary, trying to impose a set of ideas that I know out of my own observation in all the countries around the world, as well as spending significant time in the poorest places in the United States, lead to nothing but disaster. Well, don’t forget death. It’s not just disaster. It’s torture and death, right? Widescale economic failure, utter catastrophe. Okay, so let’s do this. Let’s first of all, throw out a compassionate rope to the narcissistic messianic young people who are entranced by the universities. Because one of the things that I have learned as a university professor is if you take people who have some vengeful motivation and some resentment, let’s say to their parents and to broader society, and you say, well, look, things are corrupted by power and you’re gonna feel oppressed. And that’s the constant lot of mankind since the beginning of day one, because history is anachronistic and out of date, and there is an element of atrocity in it. So you’re gonna have an antagonistic relationship to some degree with your past. But the appropriate thing to do with that is to put everything in its proper place and to realize that as an active moral agent, you can remediate the sins of the past as a consequence of your ethical striving. And if you introduce young people to that idea and show them a pathway forward that doesn’t allow them to merely mask their new and hard-won cynicism, they’re no longer naive. They can see that the world has some problems and that can easily send them into a tailspin. You say, yeah, yeah, the problems are there, but they don’t constitute the core central spirit, let’s say, of mankind, the desire to dominate. Then you can set them on a more appropriate path. And so these narcissistic young people bear some of the responsibility for their idiot revolutionary presumptions, but the fools and mountebanks and revengeful dimwits who educate them bear at least as much responsibility, who miseducate them, who anti-educate them, who make them stupider and worse than they would have been had they not attended the institution at all, as well as picking 7,000 a year per child to take to any educational institution of your choice, charter school, private school, religious school, home school. And so these different models saying, hey, we’re gonna have Hillsdale charter schools, we’re gonna have educational funding, follow the family, giving them greater choice, can create in the same way of a capitalist economic system, a more competitive educational environment where people can go to an institution that reflects their values, that serves their needs, where they can have self-governance or local governance. And then you can have, if, hey, look, I’m personally, if you wanna have critical race theory as your K through 12 pedagogy, you love it, all power to you. You should have a school that serves your needs, that reflects your values. I’ll respect that. But we wanna have a system of greater pluralism. So communities can really come together around a set of shared values. They can take responsibility for those institutions. And so we wanna have this patchwork republic, this system where people can find something that really speaks to them. And then you have a greater overall system at the general level of competition. So they can say, hey, wait a minute, the CRT schools are crashing and burning. They’re a total disaster. They’re run by pathological people and their outcomes are poor. And we have other options that are actually performing better. Right now, there’s no competition. There’s no alternatives. You are stuck in a residential assigned public school that is a zero sum game for the competition of values and competition of ideologies. They’re set at the state level. Okay, so let me ask you about that too. Have you talked to any political types at the governorship level, let’s say, about the fact that the faculties of education have a stronghold on certifying teachers? Because that’s part of the problem, because those institutions are 100% captured. I think I could say safely that there are no more corrupt institutions in Western society in general than faculties of education. And so why is it the case that states everywhere only require a teaching certificate, let’s say teaching certification from faculties of education? Why not open that up to holders of bachelor’s degrees more generally and remove the stranglehold of these centralized institutions? Is there anything happening on that front? There is. I’ve talked to a number of governors and then many, many state legislators. They’re aware of this problem. They’re aware that it functions as an ideological cartel that is permanently subsidized by taxpayers and then controls the key transmission belt of ideology to the K through 12 system. It also attracts the wrong people. It weeds out the right people. And so this is the phenomenon where you have the kind of proverbial pink hair elementary school teacher talking about pansexuality with their second graders. Those come from the graduate schools of education. Legislators know this is a problem. And there’s model legislation that is working through the system right now that I think has a good chance of passing in the coming years, where they’re gonna do a couple things. They’re gonna say no more requirement for these teacher training certificates or master’s degrees from graduate schools of education. If you have a bachelor’s degree in the subject area, for example, let’s say you have a bachelor’s in math, you can automatically be qualified to teach high school math. If you have a bachelor’s degree at the elementary school level, you have an automatic qualification to enter the teaching force. And then there’s even people saying, hey, look, we wanna have a kind of merit-based system. They take a competency test. They take a subject matter expertise test similar to the old SAT twos. Do you know American history? Do you know math? Can you perform? I think that’s coming. I think this is something that is absolutely gonna happen. And then what will happen is by attrition will bleed out those non-competitive and really captured institutions like the graduate schools of education. And the graduate schools of education are very aware of this. They’re very aware of this. They’re very scared. They’re fighting very hard. Well, I’m so pleased to hear that. So look, everybody, our time is coming to an end here. I’ve been talking today with Christopher Ruffo, who’s proved himself to be quite an ideological, intellectual, philosophical, and practical thorn in the side of those who wish to push revolutionary Marxist doctrines to elevate their own reputation in an unearned manner. And it was a pleasure talking to you today. And I’m very happy that we were able to walk through the complexities of these things to outline the history of these ideas, to discuss their virtues, let’s say in relationship to critiques of power and their shortcomings philosophically and practically. I would have liked to delve more into the ideas of intersectionality to get into the weeds a bit on that front. But we’ll save that for another discussion. Everyone, I’m going to talk to Christopher a little bit more behind the Daily Wire Plus paywall. I’ve parsed out my time now on the YouTube interview front into two sections, one where I discuss broad ideas with a bit of an emphasis on the personal with my guests, and then to spend an additional half an hour, which is a plus, hence Daily Wire Plus, let’s say, for those who are interested in subscribing. I’m going to talk to Christopher today about his intellectual journey personally. I’m interested, for example, he mentioned that he was quite radically on the left side for a while, and I want to find out why that was and how that changed. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on dailywireplus.com.