Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/19/23 Chris Rufo: Culture Wars, Ron DeSantis, Political Strategy

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

Ryan and Emily are joined by Chris Rufo to have a long form discussion on his new book, the culture wars, Ron DeSantis, Political Strategy in the midterms and beyond.Book: https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Cultural-Revolution-Conquered-Everything/dp/0063227533To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like, that's what's really important, and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us to hear this and more on how music and culture collide listen

to we need to talk from the black effect podcast network on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast hey guys ready or not 2024 is here and we here at breaking points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. We're really excited to be joined today by Christopher Ruffo. He is the author of the new book, America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Chris, thank you so much for joining Breaking Points and Counterpoints here on Wednesday. It's good to be with you.

Yeah, and Chris, you missed it earlier on the show, but I was saying that the book, from my perspective, is extraordinarily well done. There's clearly a lot of talent went into it. I think the writing, the storytelling, of talent went into it. I think the writing, the storytelling, the research are all impressive. I think a lot of that masks some fundamental problems underneath it. But we're going to get into the contradictions and the contradictory things that I think we found in it later. But I did want to say that just as a matter of craft, I think it's impressively done. And I think for that reason, it's going to get a lot of mileage. And I think the left ought to pay attention to it. Absolutely. Well, I appreciate that. And the craft is something that's really important and often

is invisible for a general audience. They feel like, okay, this is a good book. I like it. It's fun. It's good pacing. And let's tease out some of those disagreements. That's what it's all about. And I enjoy having some back and forth. A good place to start is probably with the title, America's Cultural Revolution. We wanted to begin by asking how you think critical race theory, which you describe, I think, really aptly in the book

as an uber discipline for the contemporary left. Where does that critical race theory in particular, you're so known as a student and an opponent of CRT, where does that factor into what you broadly describe as the cultural revolution? So the main storyline in the book is tracing the arc of ideological development on the far left from the 1970s to the present, more or less. And what I found, and I think the critical race theorists, if you ask them, they've certainly written as much, they kind of pick and choose. They had this process of picking and choosing from the various ideological strands, whether it's critical theory, whether it's the kind of race-based

ideology of Angela Davis, whether it's postmodernism. And so it's this interesting kind of converging point where you have all of these trends from the late 60s through the 1980s and 1990s, and they all come together in this intellectual stew that is critical race theory. And I think it also represents the culmination, but also the dead end of this ideology. Of course, I'm a critic of critical race theory. That's well known. But what I wanted to do is go a bit deeper than some of the three-minute news hits that I've done and show people exactly where it comes from, exactly how it developed, exactly how it achieved power, and then from my perspective, exactly how it can be defeated.

And there's a really interesting tension that you pick up on, and it's obvious, I think, to people who read their work really closely. But this is G2A. I think we made a pull-out quote of this part in your book. You write, for all of their faults, Davis Cleaver, referring to Angela Davis, and black revolutionaries at least grappled with and appealed to the black lumpen proletariat. The critical race theorists, on the other hand, treat them like lepers. The lumpen class is nowhere to be found in their work except as symbolic justification for their abstractions. This is where the critical race theorists

reach their final impasse. Their program has become a form of empty, professional class aestheticism designed for manipulating social status within elite institutions, not for alleviating real miseries or governing a nation. And this is where you write about Patrice Collars, for instance, the person behind

the Black Lives Matter global movement who described herself as a Marxist, a trained Marxist. And it raises this fascinating question of, you know, does the Nicole Hannah-Jones or does the Patrice Collars, who spent all this money on a mansion that was donated to BLM, do they actually want to seize the means of production?

And if not, how did you get from Marx to today's Marxists describing themselves as trained Marxists, but promoting something that looks more like Marcuse than it does Marx? Yeah, well, I mean, they certainly can be traced back to Marcuse. And so, you know, they're the person who really established all of the language, all of the ideas, all of the styles and aesthetics that were used by BLM is Angela Davis. I mean, she developed all of this, you know, many decades before, and then also became a personal mentor to the leaders of BLM. And so one of the interesting things, though, that I felt in the process of researching

and writing this book was even though I paint these biographical portraits of what I think of as the four prophets of the New Left and the Modern Left, Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, Derrick Bell, the godfather of CRT, even though I really disagree with the work that they do, I think they've yielded devastating consequences in the United States and also abroad. But I gained a grudging kind of respect for these people. They were idealists who I'm afraid through their mistakes became cynics in some way. But you actually have to respect their own personal transformation from that idealistic starting point to their cynicism. When you compare it to something like BLM, which I think is wholly cynical from the beginning,

it doesn't have any of that spirit of inquiry, discovery, breaking new ground, idealism, utopianism even. And so there's an attractive quality to these thinkers. And what I wanted to do in the book, and I hope you both agree, is I wanted to write a book that certainly has my point of view, obviously, but takes these subjects seriously, doesn't dismiss them, doesn't have a condescension towards them, but actually seeks to first understand them as they may have understood themselves before launching into the critique. And so to that point, let's put up G2C because I think you're on some of your most solid ground when you're kind of making fun of the kind of corporate DEI structures that have developed over the last couple of years.

But I want to talk about what that actually means structurally. So you write at one point, the major corporations have made a simple calculation. They've achieved all of their desires from the political right on economics, tax cuts, free trade, deregulation. And so they are looking to appease their potential enemies from the political left on culture. It is a classic inside-outside game.

Corporate lobbyists quietly secure favorable legislation through congressional Republicans while corporate executives publicly announce their contributions to racial equality and pledge allegiance to social justice. So when I read that, I'm underlining that and saying, sounds right to me. Hell yeah, brother. Like, okay, this sounds right. And I think this gets at what I think is a conflation of Marxism in a variety of different ways, because Marxism gets tossed around just

so utterly loosely. And you have, on the one hand, a Marxism from a standard class perspective, but then the way that you're often using it in the book is through these more Marcusean lenses of using the word Marx, but you're actually talking about what is effectively identity politics. And identity politics, as you're writing about here in your book, is the shield that the kind of power structure uses to maintain that power structure. And to me the reason that DEI and these types of things have been able to penetrate these institutions is not because Marcuse successfully you know pulled off a long march, but because they're useful to corporations and to institutions like universities for instance. If universities are getting protested

by groups for a variety of different things, if they can say, well, we did a training, you know, if they can let off the steam of that through their, through these trainings and through adopting the kind of lexicon of the protesters, but not the actual kind of structural demands that they're making, that's to me why corporate America and our political institutions have been so willing to embrace this. So to me, it seems like you're making the kind of counter argument that this isn't actually Marxist, this isn't actually revolutionary. It's just more, you know, cooptation by the power structure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of truth to that, certainly.

And the structural question is an interesting one. I think what we have today are Marxists without Marx or Marxism without Marx. And so the kind of dominant strand of the left that you see in critical race theory, that you see in the DEI infrastructure, the diversity training and such, critical race theorists explicitly say we are Marxists, we are revolutionary. But in some ways it's true, in other ways it's not true. And I think what's most striking about this is that it almost seems like we've come to a point where the left has given up the old Marxist politics of reshaping the economic base, using the Marxist terminology. The critical race theorists don't want to take over a Ford factory and start building F-150s. They don't want to do that. They have no interest in doing that, no capacity to do that.

They're very happy occupying the superstructure, and they have substituted that old demand to change the economic conditions with a new demand, simply to play symbolically with language, words, titles, prestige, and position within the superstructure. And so it serves as almost a substitute or a simulacrum of Marxism that ends always in cynicism, right? Because you can't claim to be a revolutionary, you know, sitting in your comfortable reading chair at the public university at UC Berkeley or UCLA or Harvard or University of Wisconsin, wherever you might be. And pretend that when you're doing Zoom calls with the Treasury Department, teaching employees about their white privilege, that you're doing something revolutionary.

I think it's wrong. I think it's harmful. I think it's wasteful. I think it could be disastrous for long-term. But you're right. It's been a kind of this uneasy truce or this uneasy management of power between the corporation and between these activists that probably really doesn't satisfy anyone. I don't think that old school Marxists are satisfied with DEI and certainly conservatives aren't either. And is it this Marcusean idea that you need a better elite?

Like the idea, the end goal can't be the Marxist end goal. Marxism, he's looking around at stuff like the hardhat riots and the Nixon administration and saying, you know, the Marxist idea of what progress would look like is falling apart around me, and what we actually need is this benevolent elite. And that's where you have the sort of limousine liberal stereotype sort of come into play. Is that what explains how you get a Patrice Collor spending millions and millions of dollars

on a mansion money that was donated to Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, whatever the formal group title is? Because otherwise it seems utterly inexplicable and unreconcilable that people are self-described trained Marxists are pouring money into a mansion. Is it rooted in what happened as this all started to fall apart in the 60s and 70s, and the new left kind of looked around and said, we're going to the universities because we need to train up a better elite? Well, I think this is always the case. I mean, if you look even back to the Russian Revolution, you have Lenin's theory of vanguardism, leading the proletariat, shaping the consciousness of

the proletariat. And so there's one argument that you could perhaps make that this is always the case on the left, that it requires essentially elites to shape the consciousness or less charitably to manipulate the masses along the lines of envy, revenge, hatred, et cetera, in order to get them to take political action. But I think that if we're being really honest about it, this is probably always true. I think politics is always been

and likely always will be an elite game first and foremost. And so public opinion in a mass democracy, in a mass media republic like we have today, public opinion alone is not enough to make any changes. That's something that I've learned. Public opinion has to be harnessed, shaped, directed, channeled, elevated, improved by organizations, institutions, leaders in order to actually bring public opinion as a force in the political process. So I think that the Marxist idea was always somewhat naive in how politics works. A spontaneous revolution. Marcuse saw this. Marcuse said in the 1960s, he said the working class in the West, in the United States in

particular, is anti-revolutionary. They want the three-bedroom house, the Ford car, the cabin in the woods for the summer. They're happy with this life that they have. And so it's the frustrated, alienated intellectuals, not the frustrated, alienated working class that becomes the new subject of the revolution. Let's do a little bit on Marcuse because I think that one of the problems I had with the book,

I think the chapters on Marcuse, they're a fun read. It's kind of a romp through the late 60s and early 70s. But I think that if you talk to people who were active in that period, they will tell you that to the extent that Marcuse was influential at all, it was more as a kind of after-the-fact justification for things that they were already going to do. Like, they already wanted to shout down, you know, right-wing speakers on campuses. The Weather Underground already kind of wanted to go out and start, you know, putting pipe bombs at police stations in the United States Capitol. And so to the extent that

there was this guy who was, you know, coming kind coming along behind them and writing things, that that was fine for them. And it reminded me a little bit of the Powell memo. You're familiar with the Powell memo, right? So for people who aren't, this is a memo written in 1971 by a future Supreme Court justice that if you're on the left, it's like an article of faith that the next 50 years of the conservative ascendancy came from literally this letter that a guy wrote to his neighbor. But all the letter says is what was conventional wisdom on the right at the time. And people have kind of gone back in time and said, oh, it was that Powell memo. It was that thing that produced the next 50 years. We cracked the code. And so then

you feel like then if you can crack the code, then you can kind of unwind it. So I feel like you've done a little bit of that with Marcuse. And I have my own book coming out in December that has a chapter on Marcuse. So I don't think he's completely inconsequential, but I don't think he's anywhere near as consequential as you say today. So are you, are you, so I guess the question would be, where do left wing, where does the left come from? Like, do you believe that the system has contradictions that are going to, you know, materially produce

opposition to the system? Or do you think it comes from kind of the imaginations and the theories of people like Marcuse who can then kind of lead their graduate students around to then lead movements? Because I obviously think it's the former. Oh, I mean, I think undoubtedly it's a combination of both. And what I tried to do in the book, I think contrary to the critique that you're laying out, is that I'm not saying that Marcuse was a prophet who was a causal force, that the 60s and early 70s would not have happened without his ideas. I think you're right. And I think I kind of lay this out in the book in a similar manner that he was, of course,

reacting to spontaneous movements and people and ideas that were bubbling up around him. But what he did was serve as a method of rationalization and legitimation for this movement, meaning he took this incoherent set of ideas, whether it was from the student protesters or the riots in the Black inner cities and the new political parties like the Black Panther Party or even some of the radical movements in the kind of white intelligentsia side, like the Weather Underground. And he synthesized all of these movements. He put it into a coherent narrative.

He made them rational using his really stunning intellectual capacities and put them in the frame of the movement of Western philosophy from Hegel to the present, and then legitimized it because he was seen, I think rightly so, as an intellectual force, as someone with intellectual authority. And so he served as a father or even a grandfather figure to this movement. But I still think, and the reason I chose to highlight him in the book, is that he offered the best intellectual case for the new left. He offered the best analysis of the new left. And while, of course, I think it would be just flattery to him to say that he was the cause of it, I don't think that's true.

I think that he's really the pivotal figure who understood it better than anyone. And then, of course, personally, he was connected to all of the most important radicals of the time. So through him, you can tell the story of the whole movement, both in his personal connections and his intellectual or ideological work. Unfortunately, as we have this conversation about critical race theory, queer theory, a lot of those theories are still alive. A lot of this came out of the 80s and the 90s. And so Kimberly Crenshaw, creator of intersectionality, has responded basically to the new conservative opposition to critical race theory and said basically, you know, this is all it is fundamentally misunderstood.

People are using intersectionality wrong. You get all the time, Chris, people saying you're just turning critical race theory into this blunt force object and it's too broad to mean what it's supposed to mean. What are, from your perspective, A, are people either being dishonest when they talk about their own positions on theories like intersectionality and CRT, or are they actually misunderstanding something about their own position or about their own worldview? No, I don't think they're misunderstanding it. I think that they're concealing it. They're obfuscating. And I think in some ways they're probably embarrassed of their own writings from the 80s and 90s, which simply don't hold up. Intersectionality is a complex word. It's a Latinate, multi-syllabic word for a very simple idea that most people understand. When you hear even the mocking terms like oppression Olympics,

that's basically what intersectionality is. It's not any more complex than that at heart. And I think that conservatives are criticizing it, or some conservatives criticizing it in an unfair way. Yeah, probably. But that's how politics works. And I think that Dr. Crenshaw's position of saying, oh, you don't understand, oh, you're doing this, or you're doing that, there's no such thing as CRT, I mean, it to me amounts to a lot of whining and complaining, obfuscation. And I think that it betrays a lack of confidence on the part of the critical race theorists. These are people that are tenured professors at some of the most prestigious universities in our country.

They could not mount a significant defense of their ideas. They failed to persuade the public. They got smoked in the matter of the public debate. And so they're trying to make excuses. And so, you know, to me, it's a good sign. I offered to debate Crenshaw and the rest of them. Of course, they didn't take me up on it. But if they want to clarify their position,

I'm still open. We could do it even right here on Breaking Points. I want to pick up on a point that you were making earlier, I'm still open. We could do it even right here on Breaking Points. I want to pick up on a point that you were making earlier where you allowed that the subtitle of the book is How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, but you do allow that the DEI world has not actually conquered corporate America. Like, in other words, if it had,

Twitter would not have sold itself to Elon Musk. Like, if a Marxist left had actually seized the means of communications through Twitter, they wouldn't have just handed it over to Musk when he made a bid of 5420. But more broadly, your point that it's an uneasy alliance between these corporate leaders and this movement, I think, is a fair way of putting it. Corporate America gets its own benefits from that. So if that's the case, what can we really, if it hasn't conquered everything, what can we really take from it? Sure. Well, the subtitle is provocative, it's polemical, it is hyperbolic. And I think that the meaning,

if you take it in the ironic form, if you understand that it's kind of a wink and a nod in some ways, is that the radical left has conquered, as we discussed, the entire superstructure. And so at the end of the day, when the board at Twitter is considering a sale and they're all going to get rich, of course they're going to sell Twitter to Elon Musk. I think at the end of the deal, Elon Musk was trying to get out of the deal.

Yeah, he was. But yeah, of course. And so I think that that actually, in a sense, is exactly the case that I make in the book. It's that they've conquered all of the superstructure. They've given up that old dream of conquering the kind of economic structure, and it's created this really uneasy contradiction. And in a sense, I would agree with some of my friends in the old Marxist camp who feel the same frustration. I, of course, am glad that they haven't conquered

the economic structure. That would be a total disaster. But I think that it's disastrous enough that they've conquered all of the lead institutions that shape culture, knowledge, science, censorship. I mean, these are significant things. Education, the transmission of values from one generation to the next, that is extremely significant. And I think significant things, education, the transmission of values from one generation to the next. That is extremely significant. And I think that actually, I'm a critic of many conservatives in this regard who say, well, we have low taxes, low regulation, corporations are people, they should be left alone to do whatever they want.

Whereas I think that culture is very important. And I embrace the term culture war because ultimately what is worth fighting for more than our culture? I mean, that to me in some ways is more important than fighting about the marginal tax rate. We can negotiate about that. Go up a little bit, go up, go down a little bit. I'd prefer to go down, of course. But I foreground culture. And so when I say they've conquered everything, in the terms of the cultural revolution, they have. In the terms of the orthodox Marxist revolution, of course they have not. Well, let me push you a little bit on the cynical politics of it. Lee Atwater, you're probably familiar with this infamous interview that he did back in 1981. I think we have this as

2E. He says, you start out in 1954 saying N-word, N-word, N-word. By 1968, you can't say N-word. That hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now you're talking about cutting taxes and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. We want to cut this as much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than n-word, n-word. And so if I were going to stretch that out just kind of 20 years or 40 years later, and the way I would,

if I were thinking about it in the voice of a contemporary, say, Ruffonian, you would say something like, there's now a populist working class right that doesn't want to hear those coded words about cutting social spending because that hits some of the working class base of the Republican Party. So now you have to abstract it even further and talk about critical race theory. So is this not just kind of an extension of a

Republican Southern strategy, just with a more sophisticated gloss? No, I mean, I don't think it is. Certainly, I mean, as one of the people involved in leading this, I don't think it is now at all. I think that that's not right. And I actually don't think it was that way in 1968. I think that Atwater's reading of that history is just flat out wrong. And, you know, Richard Nixon, of course, was a supporter of civil rights. Richard Nixon. Oh, he was an, Atwater was an architect of it as a close Nixon strategist. That's right. And I'm saying that I think he's misreading even Nixon's legacy.

And if you look at Nixon's, you know, taped conversations, you look at his diaries, you look at all of the material from Nixon himself, I don't think he thinks in those terms at all, even in his most candid moments. And in fact, in his critique of welfare policies, even though we're talking just a few years after these programs were established in the Great Society, Nixon already understood the nature and through his work, especially with Moynihan, what would happen eventually to these welfare state policies on the black community. And I think that even a Clinton style Democrat

could see that those policies, which were in the name of something good, something helpful, something to redress past discrimination and past maltreatment, were actually counterproductive for most people. I mean, I spent three years working on a film in a public housing project in Memphis. And you can see the legacy of those programs that just devastated these

communities. And so I wouldn't concede for even a single minute that that's what critical race theory is about in 2022, which is basically don't teach racial scapegoating to kindergartners, don't segregate people by race and training programs, don't portray the United States as a force for evil and portray the solution as suspending private property rights, limiting the First Amendment, abolishing the equal protection of the law. I just think that it's such a bad misread and doesn't hold water really at any time after 1964. And I think Ryan has another question, but just a quick comment there. It's so interesting that you have a New York Times that is happy to publish Nicole Hannah-Jones' 1619 project, but would never endorse Bernie

Sanders. If they're Hillary versus Bernie, they're always going to endorse Hillary and they're going to do it eagerly. To pick up on that, basically, to your point earlier that you'd much rather fight the culture war than talk about marginal tax rates or kind of fight over the structure and nature of the economy, that gets back to the, I think, the fundamental disagreement we have here around the role of class in the way that our politics are shaped. And you start the book with Marcuse delivering a speech titled Liberation from the Affluent Society. And for people who aren't kind of tuned into the politics of the 60s, Affluent Society...

Nerds, losers... Yeah, Nerds and losers who aren't. That's John Kenneth Galbraith's seminal book that kind of defined what the kind of Keynesian left understood to be the most just way to set up an economy and a political economy. And it was the thing that kind of Marcuse pointed to. He was sad that now the proletariat is no longer angry enough to lead a revolution. And instead of like being happy about that, like an Edward Bernstein might have been, he goes and tries to find thing you object to and you think CRT flows out of this,

then why not go back to the New Deal, affluent society, great society world where you're actually making sure that people are taken care of? And it goes to this question of, I think, economic nihilism on the right that says we're so angry that the patriarchy is collapsing, that the male breadwinner can't bring home the bacon anymore, while at the same time crafting economic policies that make it impossible for him to do that and produce the kind of social collapse that then creates the cultural rot that then becomes the grist for the culture war. So why not just go back to the New Deal, basically? If we could repeal the Great Society and go back to the New Deal,

I would make that deal in a second. I think the Greatest Society is an utter disaster. And there's two elements to your question that I think are smart and perceptive, and I can respond in kind to each one. But the Great Society is still the system that we have today, first and foremost. We have to understand that, as Robert Rector at Heritage Foundation has pointed out for years now, the United States spends more than $1 trillion per year on means-tested anti-poverty programs. More than one trillion dollars per year on means-tested anti-poverty programs. We spend an enormous sum. Medicaid is a huge one of those, right? Yeah. Of course, Medicaid is a huge part of that. Again, it's a means-tested anti-poverty program,

health education and welfare style program. And so the idea that somehow we have reduced the Great Society programs is just factually incorrect in multiple orders of magnitude, the scope and scale of it. And then the assumption, though, is that if we had more, things would be better. And I think that that, again, is just an assumption that doesn't hold true. Although where I would disagree or where I would rather agree with you with a twist is that, you know, a single income in the United States at a middle class wage can support a family at the same level of material comfort as was in the 1950s, 1960s. You would have to have, like they did in that time, a very small house, maybe one kind of old car. You'd have to make some other sacrifices. Never go to college.

Never go to college, et cetera. So I'm not saying that that is good and that we should return to that level of affluence. But what happens is that we have desires that have outpaced the ability of one income to provide for. And so we have more desires, and maybe Marcuse is even right a little bit in this regard. He says, ah, the affluent society ends up just replicating desires to the point where you're in a frenzy of consumption. I mean, I think it's a little bit too far, but there certainly is something that, and in my view, I wouldn't analyze it from his point of view, but while I would agree with certain elements of what he's saying, I would say that it's really the loss of those old Benjamin Franklin virtues of prudence, temperance, frugality, all of these things, self-restraint. And so I would like to

see not a society where the government spends more money on welfare programs that actually achieve the opposite of their intentions, but actually restoring people in a kind of, maybe even like a hokey Dave Ramsey kind of way. Those old American virtues that, you know, Ben Franklin did his famous checklist every day. Am I being temperate and frugal? And I think that those things are so foreign to how we think today. I think that again, it kind of is a cultural problem more than a material problem. If we have material solutions to technical challenges, to raising standards of living, I mean, we have an affluent society, absolutely, and that's good. But we need to have the virtues that can restrain some of the problems and some of the temptations of that society.

If we want to have happy families, if we want to have strong communities, and so forth. Well, one quick interjection before Emily responds to that, because I think actually Emily, I've started to agree on this more than disagree. But I would only say that I wouldn't characterize New Deal, Great Society and Affluent Society as government kind of support for the poor, but as government intervention in designing an economy that allows for union jobs, allows for wages to at least keep pace with inflation, allows for lots of private sector growth that is supporting families, not to just reduce it to transfer payments. Although I think that's where Chris is drawing the line,

rightfully, between the New Deal and the Great Society, in that there's the conflation of both. But Medicaid and Medicare... They're major economic interventions. Medicare is not a means-tested anti-poverty program. But even if you take out Medicaid, under the argument, and there's some persuasive element to it,

that Medicaid subsidizes corporations who no longer have to provide health insurance benefits. There's a point to be made there. But even if you take that out, we have the most high spending social safety net for means-tested anti-poverty programs, even minus health benefits of any country in the world. And if you look at poor communities, if you spend time in these communities, it's very hard to make the case that they're helping. I spent three years again in Memphis

in a public housing project. Memphis spends something like $30,000 a year per person under the poverty line. And then you look around the city of Memphis and you talk to people, you meet them, you go into their homes, you see their communities and you say, we would probably be better off not spending this money at all, but we would most certainly be better off. People are not living as if they had a $30,000 a year standard of living. I mean, where is the money going? How is this not working? How is it actually ending up entrenching people in some of these dire circumstances? I just, I think, and I would love for everyone on the left that is the cheerleading for these programs to actually

go look at the places where they've become the guiding force in society. Go look at those housing projects, those low-income apartment projects in places like Memphis or Youngstown, Ohio or Stockton, California. And I think it would change people's mind if you're a really compassionate person, you really care about people's mind. If you're a really compassionate person, you really care about people's ability to flourish and reach their potential. I think you come away from that experience saying, my God, we have to change something. This is not working. And it's creating these, it's manipulating social conditions in a way that ends up destroying people. That's the conclusion that I have reached through my own experience.

You've spent a lot of time with Ron DeSantis. I'm sure on this, as you launch this book, you're going to be getting a lot of questions. But just from a sort of human perspective, I'm curious what it's like to have conversations about these extremely esoteric academic theories, things like critical race theory, intersectionality, and to be sort of behind closed doors with somebody like Ron DeSantis, who even his critics should admit is a very smart man, and other Republican lawmakers who I know that you've sat down with over the last couple of years and gotten into sort of the weeds on what CRT is and what these ideas are. What is it like to sort of be face-to-face with a politician who's more concerned with the sort of day-to-day campaigning or fundraising, et cetera, et cetera, and sort of

then bring in what the stakes are from the sort of intellectual perspective. Yeah, I mean, I'm extremely impressed with the governor. I appreciate everything he's done. I think he's by far the best governor in the United States and, you know, of course, supporting him for the presidency. And I would say two things that I've noticed spending, you know, one on one time and small group time with him. He really has an astonishing attention to detail in every regard on public policy. I mean, he's like a behind closed doors, he is a wonks wonk. I mean, he really understands how law, culture, funding, legislative priorities, potential legal liability. I mean, he has a whole sense of the constellation of power, where all the levers are, what needs to move, who needs to be there, who should be delegated authority to achieve it,

who he needs to call in order to get the legislation moving. He's got this incredible vision that comes out when you talk to him about policy. And I think in my experience, at least, and I think I've read some reporting that seems to substantiate it otherwise, he's not one for small talk. You know, I kind of chit-chat with people. A lot of politicians want to kind of BS with you and chit-chat. And I realized, huh,

he's not really responding to this chit-chat. And then I started talking policy and he lights up and it's like a machine starts whirring in his mind. It's really impressive. And then what I've also noticed, and I also really appreciate about him, is he can talk about CRT and the structure of academia and tenure and hiring and all of these complex issues. And then he goes out there on the stump, and I've done a number of speeches with him and love listening to him. And he says, critical race theory is about, we're not going to teach our kids to hate each other

and to hate their country. And so it's like, oh, this is great. You take the wonkish issue, and then you bring it down to sixth grade syntax so that everyone can understand it. It becomes really clear and has an emotional quality to it. And so, you know, there's seems like there's some bumps in the road on the campaign side right now. But I hope that people can really get a chance to understand who he is and to see who he is. And I hope that he feels that he can let out the personality that he has, which is not a conventional, warm, Bill Clinton-style personality, but I think is the exact kind of person we need. He's right for the moment. And I know you've got to run in a second, but I wanted to press you on the R part of the CRT

again one more time. You quote in the book, Derrick Bell, writing that race is, quote, an indeterminate social construct that is continually reinvented and manipulated to maintain domination and enhance white privilege. That's a lot of big words, but he's basically just saying that racism is a real force in our society. And do we have Tim Scott? If we could roll that Tim Scott clip.

This is Tim Scott talking about it in a personal way, absent the kind of academic lingo. There's a deep divide between the black community and law enforcement. A trust gap. A tension that has been growing for decades. And as a family, one American family, we cannot ignore these issues. Because while so many officers do good, and we should be thankful, as I said on Monday, we should be very thankful and supportive

of all those officers that do good. Some simply do not. I've experienced it myself. And so today, I want to speak about some of those issues. Not with anger, though I have been angry. I tell my story not out of frustration, though at times I have been frustrated. I stand here before you today because I'm seeking for all of us, the entire American family, to work together so we all experience the lyrics of a song that we can hear but not see.

Peace, love, and understanding. Because I shuddered when I heard Eric Garner say, I can't breathe. He goes on, as I'm sure you've seen that famous speech, he goes on to talk about a lot of his personal experiences with police and otherwise living in a world that treats him differently because of his race. And so what do we do as a society about that? What is our role if we acknowledge that this is not just the kind of aggregation of a bunch of individuals who can be kind of untrained? Let's say we're going to reject that, that kind of get a two-hour DEI training is going to solve that. So what do we do? And do you acknowledge that racism is a strong and powerful force in our society? No, I don't think that racism is a strong

and powerful force in our society. I think it certainly has been in the past. But as I live my life and deal with people from all different backgrounds. I do not think that this society is racist. I do not think that racism is a determining force in the lives of most people and of all backgrounds. And I think I dispute also the factual basis of Senator Scott's speech here. America has the most well-disciplined, restrained, and professional policing system in the world. Unfortunately, we have also a country with very high rates of violence, crime, drug abuse, gang formation. And so the job for a police officer is very, very difficult. But the studies, the best studies from people like Roland Fryer at Harvard and others, show that in general, police do not show any kind of disparate treatment for African-Americans or other minorities.

And so I think that Senator Scott is doing a disservice with this narrative. He's playing to the crowd. He's playing to his political opponents, trying to wrap them in an empathetic message. But I think that it actually needs some more clear-headed thinking and analysis. And I've spent a lot of time with police officers, observing them, writing about them, working with them. And do they do bad things? Yes. And they are punished in those cases, as they should be. But I just totally reject that notion. And even Tim Scott himself, has he experienced some interpersonal racism? I think that he says that later in the clip. I'm not quite sure. I actually have not seen that before. That's true. I'm not sure what he said, but I would take him, believe it at face value. But if you look at the so-called systemic forces in

society, those are an advantage for Tim Scott. And in fact, all of the systems and policies that we have in the United States actually reward African-Americans and Latinos relative to a pure merit-based system and punish white, European Americans and Asian Americans relative to how they would be treated on a system of pure merit. And so with a widespread now 50 plus years of affirmative action, racial quotas and other such policies, I just think that it's astonishing to say that our government, our policies are somehow driven by racism when the only hard evidence suggests that in some ways, not denying that racism is bad and we should seek to reduce and eliminate it, actually the opposite of the idea that the America is a systemically racist society

appears to be true. I think a lot of the studies that show America is a systemically racist society appears to be true. I think a lot of the studies that show that, when you control for everything except race, you wind up having lower property values and neighborhoods, you wind up having higher interest rates for black homeowners controlling for everything. But we're getting told you've got to run to your next thing. Emily also has to run to her thing.

But I'm happy to pick this conversation up more in the future. We're going to have to leave it there, unfortunately. Yeah, we could do this forever. Anytime. I appreciate it. It's great to talk to you both, and I love the pushback. It's really fun, and I think it's a valuable service that you all are doing.

Well, likewise, from my perspective, you've been so generous with your time. The book, again, is called America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. You can get it. It's out now. Christopher Rufo, thank you for joining us on CounterPoints. The OGs of uncensored motherhood

are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Yeah, we're moms, but not your mommy.

Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women,, but not your mommy. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcast.

We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like, he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more.

Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives. Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us.

To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.