From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - America's Cultural Revolution & How To Take Back Control Of The Education System

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Sean and Rachel are joined by Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research Christopher Rufo, as they discuss his latest book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.  Christopher explains how the cultural revolution of the 1960s led to Leftists taking control of both the nation's school systems and the federal government. He also lays out the steps governors can take to work traditional values back into the education system.   Follow Sean and Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy along with my co-host for the podcast, my partner in life and my wife, Rachel Campos Duffy. Well, we are back, Sean, with more conversations from our kitchen table. And today at the kitchen table, we have a great guest. It's Chris Ruffo. He is the senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the author of the new book, America's Cultural Revolution. Chris, so great to have you on. Thanks for joining us. It's great to be with you. So your book is so interesting. By the way, we're going to talk to you about your book,

but we want to get to your experience in Hungary as well because we're fascinated by what lessons you can learn to help us with this cultural revolution. But before we do that, let's talk about the book because we know that there are deep roots to this cultural woke revolution that we're living through. woke revolution that we're living through. And I think what's interesting about your book is it really speaks to how much planning has been behind this to get us to the moment we are right now. Chris, before you kind of go into the book a little bit, I just got to tell our listeners that oftentimes people at Fox give us books. They'll go, hey, read my book. I'm going to give it to you, then talk about it. Rachel and I actually went out and bought your book. We got it delivered, I think, the day it came out. So again, this is such an important issue, such an important topic, and you've been such a thought leader on it, exposing wokeism for the American people. Yeah, tell us what you write about and what you've

seen in your studies on wokeism and its connection to Marxism. Well, I appreciate that you went out and bought the book. You must have been the copy that sent it on the New York Times bestseller list. You got us over the top. But America's Cultural Revolution really reveals the secret history of the radical left's 50-year-long march through the institutions that began in the late 1960s with the street riots and the intellectual ferment surrounding the New Left, the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground, other radical organizations. And then it traces how their ideas slowly and steadily managed to gain a foothold in institutions beginning with universities and then schools and then government

bureaucracies and then DEI departments within corporations, and then finally exploded into American life in 2020. And you're absolutely right. It's not by accident. It wasn't happening spontaneously. This is part of a concerted 50-year plan. They executed their plan meticulously in the shadows. And then I try to trace the origins of this ideology, not just looking at the surface level of it, but really show people how does it work? How do they gain power? I should say that for me, what was really interesting in helping me understand wokeism was I thought of Marxism in terms of economics as classism. And what I what I think happened in the 60s and correct me if I'm wrong, Chris, is that they realize that classism and these ideas that work maybe in in feudal societies or post feudal societies just wouldn't work here. We're you know, we had this, you know, functioning democracy, free markets and meritocracy.

And so they had to use something else. And it was these isms, feminism, racism, you know, and all these. And now we see it's LGBTQ and all these other sort of identity politics. Is that the right way to think about this? That's exactly right. And so the first figure in the book, Herbert Marcuse, who's the godfather of the new left, all of these what are called neo-Marxist radical theories. He said exactly what you're saying explicitly in the late 1960s, early 1970s. He said that the American working class and even the working class in the Western European countries was not the proletariat of Marx's imagination, but actually was anti-revolutionary. American middle class people of all backgrounds that were satisfied with the

economy, they were satisfied with their standard of living, they were satisfied with their work and their home life and their civic obligations. And so he said, we need a new revolutionary subject. And his idea that still drives the left to this day is we need college educated, white radicals beginning in universities to develop the to push the ideology and we need uh the black underclass living in urban areas and and slums uh he said to drive physical force to to push the revolution into the streets and so that was his cynical calculation and i think to a large extent we've seen that over and over i I mean, look at the two great factions of BLM in 2020. It was white college educated radicals, and then people that were pushing violence in the streets, all in the name of BLM ideology. And the brilliance of going

into the education system, into the university and college system, and you can start small and you produce more radicals. And if those radicals come back in to become professors, you have more professors radicalizing more kids. And now we're at a point where all of our colleges, most of our colleges have many radical professors. And those professors are teaching the students who then get an education degree to go back and teach K through 12. And so this is just fomented. get an education degree to go back and teach K through 12. And so this is just fomented. And this is where corporations get their employees and their executives. This is where people who serve in government go to college. And so this radicalization has taken place and taken hold in the country. But Chris, what is the end goal? If you play this out, again, I think that they're

using racism and sexism and LGBT, they're all vehicles to get us to a certain point, a certain place. And what does that look like? What do they want America to look like? Should they be successful, you know, in the last chapter of the book? Yeah, it's a great question. And so it operates on two levels. So what they say that they want, So it operates on two levels. So what they say that they want, what they claim that they want is that old Marxist paradise beyond class, beyond race, beyond gender. They want to have a total forced egalitarian society. They want to eliminate private property, redistribute it to equalize according to racial groups. They want to suppress any speech that is deemed harmful or hateful. And they want to have a bureaucracy that enforces what we think of as political correctness, not just in universities, but actually on the entire society as a whole.

But what happens, and this is the really interesting wrinkle, and I document this in the book as the ideology progresses, they know that they can't get this. They know that the public rejects this. They know that private property is deeply entrenched and actually a very important part of society. They know that they can't get around and break the entire constitution as a whole. So what they end up actually doing in practice is using the ideology to just reinforce their own status, their own prestige, their own financial interests. And so it becomes a cynical game that American elites play within our prestigious institutions that in the end doesn't have anything to offer people at the bottom, people in struggling neighborhoods, people in broken families,

people that are striving to get ahead. And I think that these folks at this point, they know it. And if you look at BLM as the perfect example, they didn't get abolition of the police. They didn't get the abolition of capitalism. They didn't get their revolution that they wanted, but what did they get? They got millions of dollars that they looted out of their organizations, took from people, took from companies, and then they disappeared to their mansions, you know, outside in the hills outside Los Angeles. And so what, what begins, outside in the hills outside Los Angeles. And so what begins as a revolution ends in a grift. And that's what I've seen over and over.

Yeah. I mean, the grift is definitely there. And there were elements within the black community who finally saw that and pointed it out, but not enough. And so I guess this brings me to the other part of the conversation. OK, so the end game is is, you know, an ideology that doesn't help anybody. And then some people are profiting from it and getting rich from it. But it's still these ideas are still embedded in our institutions. And so you have people still afraid to speak their mind. you know, the racial games and going to the DEI conferences in there, because they're afraid that, you know, they won't get promoted, or they won't, you know, you know, succeed in their profession, if they don't go along with all this. You spent some time in Hungary. And I read this fascinating

article about your experience there. And I think that I want to understand, I want to help our listeners understand that this is a country that is very serious about breaking this wokeness that has entrenched itself in their country as well. So what did you learn there? How can we undo what's happening in our own institutions? Hungary is a fascinated country. And I spent six weeks there earlier this year. That was the research that I did for this piece. And and Hungary actually was under the total domination of the original woke, you know, in one sense, the Soviet Union. And so Hungary was a communist country until it was able to overcome communism, until the Soviet Union collapsed, until they established independence in the early 1990s. And so the Hungarian government now is a conservative government.

It's a very serious government. And they were looking at all of their institutions that were old holdovers from the communist system, all the old communist professors from the Soviet days, all the old communist commissars and political leaders became the new oligarchs because after independence, they divided up the industries among themselves. They sold off a lot of the assets to foreign countries. They're trying to bring in this left wing and then now the woke ideology. And Hungary has developed a significant strategy. They're saying, you know what, if we have democratic power, if conservatives are in the majority, if we have a majority in the parliament, a majority, and we have the prime minister leading this movement, we're going to actually have

institutions that reflect our values. There is no law of nature that says that all institutions must be left wing, that every institution, every university must be left wing, every school, every teacher, every media company. They say, absolutely not. And if we are going to shape our public institutions to the majority of the voters in the democratic interest, we are going to unapologetically shape them toward conservative ends. And they told me they want to shape institutions in hungary so that they respect the family so that they respect the the national heritage that they respect the the the the sovereignty of the country and they want to create a healthy attachment between between the the citizens and the nation uh that will have hungarians having a sense of their own identity

and their own future for hundreds of years to come. Because, look, they live in a rough neighborhood between, you know, Russia, between Europe, between, you know, a lot of, you know, share a border with Ukraine. There's a lot of NGOs causing problems in that part of the world, including in Hungary, right? Left wing NGOs. That's right. And the american state department is heavily active spending millions of dollars to undermine the government and actually while i was there a kind of interesting story that i haven't told really is uh um someone broke into the apartment that i was staying with with my family um and stole all of our passports but didn't steal any of our money our wallets, our computers, you know. And they said, the official said, this is very odd. But, you know, this is extremely rare in Hungary. Hungary is one of the safest countries

in the Western world. And they said, you know, but there have been some intelligence services poking around in Hungary and looking for vulnerabilities, though I can't confirm that was just a speculation on behalf of some of my Hungarian hosts and counterparts. But what they're doing, I think, where conservatives thought the government is the enemy, and therefore we can't participate in the government, we just have to get rid of it. That didn't work. We still have a huge government. And we've abdicated and delegated responsibility for governing our institutions to people who don't share our values. And so I think that conservatives could take a lesson, not every lesson, it's not directly transposable. But but, you know, we should take governing seriously. We have institutions, we have universities, we have companies. Why is it that we're not willing to fight

to make sure that those companies reflect our values? We'll have more of this conversation after this. From the Fox News Podcast Network, stay on top of the latest news and information from Fox News. Listen and download the Fox News hourly update Network. Stay on top of the latest news and information from Fox News. Listen and download the Fox News hourly update on your time. The trending stories you need anytime you want it. Listen and download now by going to foxnewspodcasts.com. Right, using those institutions, using those tax dollars that match our values as opposed to funding these left-wing radicals at our university systems. And I wonder if, again, I always think about, well, how do you engage in this fight?

How do you win the fight? And it seems like, you know, in 1991, we had beat communism, and we became a little bit lethargic and soft in our victory. All the while, these radicals were percolating in the university system and for decades had been churning out these left-wing radicals were percolating in the university system and for decades had been churning out these left-wing radicals out of our elite institutions. Don't we really, Chris, have to go back almost what they did? Don't we have to start at the beginning, go to the basic building blocks of our K-12 school boards, go to our city councils, our town boards,

our states, our universities, and start to root this corruption out. And again, I was served in Congress. There's a big role that our federal government plays. But I don't think our federal government can actually fix the problem as much as we can at the local level where we have more power and control and influence in what our kids are learning, not just in K-12, but what our students are getting in the university systems in states across the country. That's 100% right. And that's actually a great thing for conservatives because education at the K-12 level and the college and university level is determined almost exclusively, with some exceptions on financing, et cetera, by local and state governments and

school boards. And so local people can get involved in those local school board races, shape the curriculum, shape the administration, shape the values that are transmitted in these local schools. And then at the state level, state legislators control the public university system, which is approximately three quarters of all of the university system as a whole. So we have huge leverage. And we're doing that in Florida. I've been working closely with Governor DeSantis on this. And just this year, we abolished DEI departments in every public university in the state of Florida. He appointed me and a number of other reformers to retake and recapture Florida's smallest public university and transform

it into a classical liberal arts university. That'll be a friendly place for conservative families, conservative professors, conservative voices. And he's understood, I think, better than anyone. If we have the democratic structure, if we have the people that are elected to the office, they should be willing to actually take action to reform these institutions. Otherwise, we're just here to take photographs and to get the prestige. And I think that he is demonstrating a model. We're managing a long slide into Marxism. And you're elected to stop it.

And again, I would agree with you. Governor DeSantis has done a great job. And it seems like it's small. It feels small. One university taking DEI out of the other universities. It is a step. But I wonder, where are the other Republican governors and legislatures pushing on their state-funded university systems to change course and stop indoctrinating our kids. So they could just start with the teachers' colleges, right?

Yes. And I would recommend, and I think that legislators are starting to get wise to this. They're starting to contemplate. What you do is you abolish the necessity of K-12 teachers for gaining these expensive master's degrees, teacher credentialing programs, all these certificates. And you just say very simply, if you have a bachelor's degree in math and you have some on-the-job training, kind of teacher training in the classroom, you are qualified to teach sixth grade math. You know, so you're saying, so wait a minute. So you're basically saying just eliminate the teacher's college and all that licensing altogether.

That completely makes sense to me. In fact, can I tell you, when I was in at Arizona State University, I was in the honors college. I studied economics and I had to take an honors college class. So that's a separate college within. And there was a professor there. He had a Ph.D. from Oxford and he was teaching us. We had to take Plato and Aristotle, read all these books. And it was sort of like a mini little Western civ class that if you were in the honors college, you would take, by the way, not really part of the main curriculum. Okay. So you're an honors college. I got to talking to him and I said, how did you end up here? I mean, you've, he's like, you know, I was retired and I wanted to go like basically teach at this elementary school that's near my house.

But they said I wasn't qualified. He had a PhD from Oxford and Western Civ and he wasn't qualified at the elementary school. So then he gave his services over to ASU. It's total bulls**t. Excuse my French. That's amazing. That's amazing. You're 100 percent right.

And look, this is where libertarians and social conservatives can really agree. Libertarians hate regulation. They hate cartels. They hate licensing that excludes qualified people. Social conservatives want to have an escape from the kind of neo-Marxist schools of education. Let's all come together. Let's persuade our legislators. Let's get it done. And look, we want to have really bright young people that are coming out of universities with skills in math, science, literature, other disciplines. Get them into public service. Get them into the classroom. Get good conservative kids as part of the teaching core. And I'll tell you, and I imagine you both have someone in your life similar the best teachers that i had the ones that i still remember now 20 25 years later

they were tough they were serious they were conservative they had high standards they would punish you if you got out of line they would begrudgingly reward you if you did a good job i mean we need those kind of teachers back in the classroom. Those are the teachers that really shape kids in the right direction. And unfortunately, what we have now is a bunch of losers and lunatics entering the teaching core. They kind of congregate in these credential mills, and then they use the classroom as a personal soapbox to push their ideology, to push their non-binary genders and all this madness. And it's like, doesn't it make you just wish for those old school nuns and other teachers to come in and wrap the knuckles and tell you what to do? Yes. I love how you use the word cartel to describe that whole education licensing organization.

That's what it is. It's a cartel. Do governors have the power in every state to remove the licensing requirement, or is that coming from the federal government? Nope. They can do it with a one-page legislation that gets passed through the state legislature,

goes to the governor's desk, and signs it. Will you lose federal funding, though, Chris? Any Republican governor could do this tomorrow. Will you lose federal funding though, Chris? Any Republican governor could do this tomorrow. Will you lose federal funding? Nope. And some states have gone through great lengths. Arizona has done some reforms in this direction. Arizona is a great state.

They could do it tomorrow, but I'll tell you what they're scared of, especially in small states. They're scared of the teachers' unions. I mean, they really, truly are scared of the teachers' unions. And teachers' unions in red states are very sophisticated. Teachers unions in red states don't give a lot of money to Democrats. They give a lot of money to moderate Republicans. And so they have the ear of a lot of these moderate Republicans or small district Republicans. And so my colleague, Corey DeAngelis, has shown decisively the influence of these teachers union Republicans, which I just find so disappointing. And the

teachers unions and look, look, I mean, every time Republicans and state legislatures and red states pass a bill that affects the teachers unions, the teachers unions bus in all of their goons to the state capitol, they occupy the capitol buildings, you know, they, they, you know, they stomp and they chant and they get national media attention. Republicans are scared of that. And I really don't think that they should be. And in Wisconsin, before this happened, the teachers union was dictating elections and the amount of money. So taxpayer money that comes into teachers that then went join the union and pay dues or do I keep my money? Um, because their collective bargaining isn't really helping me out. Teachers have chosen to keep their money and the power of the union has diminished. Um, but, but that was Wisconsin. And I don't, and I don't think, um, the unions weren't giving a lot of money to Republicans

in Wisconsin. Maybe they've learned since that 2011 act that Governor Walker implemented. But to your point, they took over the Capitol. They were chanting. It was violent. It was, if you will, it was an insurrection, Chris, of the state Capitol. But how about in Florida? Is Governor DeSantis thinking about this very thing, taking away the licensing requirements for K-12 school teachers? Yes, they are kind of working on this broader K-12 reform, higher education reform.

I think that a lot of these ideas are working their way through the legislative process right now. He's a little bit busy running for president, but I know that he'll come back and work with those great legislators. And he has an incredible staff at the at the at the governor's office on the policy side. And so that's happening. Another just thing that I want to get on your radar, because I think it's really important is what he's also done in Florida. And I've supported this effort is he's created independent centers and now three of Florida's largest public universities, created independent centers and now three of Florida's largest public universities, including the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, with a specific mandate to hire conservative faculty members to provide conservative faculty members with support, with infrastructure, with the ability to offer classes. And then I think eventually the ability to actually offer degrees that are shaped by some of these conservative ideas, the great books tradition,

all of the great ideas of the West, free enterprise, American civics, history of the American founding. And so even within these institutions that are left wing, even in Florida, we're now establishing footholds in all of the universities and then place like New College, where we are saying, you know what, in order to have a real exchange of ideas, in order to have a real liberal education, small L liberal education, we also need to expose kids to conservative ideas. We need to have scholars working to develop these ideas. And we're not going to make any apologies. We're going to put them in place. We're going to use democratic power to make it happen. And my personal goal is to work with legislators across

the country and hire a thousand conservative faculty members in public universities over the next five to 10 years. Yeah, that's an entirely necessary thing to do because it's and by the way, I hope that these centers are providing some legal help because, you know, it's interesting. My daughter went to the University of Chicago and she kind of encountered a getting canceled kind of situation and she fought back for being a conservative. And what was most fascinating to me through the experience, one was her strength through it was impressive, but also how many secret emails she got from closeted conservative professors, many of whom said, I'm ashamed because you're so brave and out there. I wish I could be. Others saying, I tried to step out, but had my livelihood threatened.

It almost destroyed my marriage. You know, like there are real like, you know, they almost sounded like POWs, you know, within this college system that have no power. So I want to move to something else. into the math departments and sciences. Now they're everywhere. And so that's where you're seeing even the medical communities becoming so woke. Doctors are becoming so woke, which is surprising because it doesn't always lead to the best outcomes for patients. COVID is a perfect example of that. So in Hungary, it seems like what they're actually trying to do, maybe this is what you're describing through these centers and what your your goal is with hiring these professors. But it seems like it's it's even more expansive what's happening in Hungary. They're literally trying to create a new conservative elite class. Right. So like when we think of elites here in the United States,

they're all liberal progressives. And so talk to me about that. And is that is that part duplicable outside of the university system? Right. So like that you have this new cohort of well-educated, the smartest, the brightest conservative minds, but going into business and film and other parts of our culture. our culture? Yeah, I think that it is. And Hungary has an advantage that it's a country of just 10 million people. So creating a national elite is a very small number of people. You know, it's a small country. In the United States, it's a bit more difficult. The thing in the United States that's hard is that the Ivy League universities have really squeezed out all of the kind of top conservative academics, with some exceptions, of course, but even relative to what it was 50 years ago, it was much more balanced back then. However, we do have an opportunity in the United States to do this. We can do it through these state universities. You know, if you have University of Florida, University of Texas, you know, University of

Oklahoma, all of the flagship state universities. If we can create these conservative centers, if we can create a robust experience, if we can train people to enter law, business, tech, finance, government, and have that solid foundation, education and credential, they can be successful. And there's also these other bright spots. And I think one of them is Hillsdale College in Michigan. spots. And I think one of them is Hillsdale College in Michigan. And Hillsdale College is increasingly becoming a stamp of a kind of elite conservative recognition. It's a rigorous program. It's a fantastic school that has a very clear set of principles that it follows. And so we need more institutions like Hillsdale. And then we need to retake these flagship state universities that are already, you know, large enterprises. And then we also need to have this, you know, great tech leaders. And there's people that are coming out, you know,

whether it's Peter Thiel or other, you know, great tech leaders that Elon Musk even that are aligned with us. You know, we need people to speak out in all in all of the institutions of society and then to cultivate and train talent beneath them that can actually steward and lead these institutions into the future. Are you truly optimistic about the ability to accomplish it? I mean, I know you're you I'll tell you this. The book that I wrote is really about the radical left and how their ideas gain power, why they have negative consequences, and why they need to be overcome. But I found that the greatest limitation for conservatives, for the political right, is our own self-limitation, our own lack of imagination, our own lack of courage, our own lack of leadership. our own lack of imagination, our own lack of courage, our own lack of leadership. And so really all we have to do is overcome these limitations within ourselves. We have to chart a way forward. We have to use the democratic power that is given to us by our constitution. And we have to have the guts and the grit in order to do the hard work of building the future that we would like to see. of building the future that we would like to see. And so I actually think that ultimately,

as much as I love sparring with the left, as much as I love the fight with our opponents, ultimately, this is a question of self. Do we have what it takes to make this? And I hope that we do, and I try to work hard to demonstrate a way forward and hopefully inspire others to do so as well. You know, if you're going to beat wokeism, if you're going to beat Marxism, you have to understand how this is creeping into our culture, why it's coming into our culture, how it's coming into our culture. You can't fight an enemy that you don't understand, which is why I love your book, America's Cultural Revolution by Christopher Ruffo. Chris, listen, thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thank you for all the good work you do to expose what the left is doing and your good work down in Florida. Again, giving us a beacon of hope with Governor Ron DeSantis of at least one state-funded institution and building

out into more. You start with one and you build from there. Thank you for all you're doing to fight back and preserve and protect what's so great about this country. We appreciate it. Yeah, we really do appreciate your work. You're a true patriot, Chris. Great to talk to you both. Thank you. You got it. We'll have more of this conversation after this. Listen, this is amazing work. And the more I've been reading more about this and started into his book and other papers as well, and the more angry I get. And it's our fault.

That we let it happen, right? We let it happen. It happened under our nose. It happened, I mean, it really was taking hold during the Reagan era as we were defeating the Iron Curtain, defeating the Soviet Union. This was rising up in our own institutions and we didn't see it coming. Or if we did see it coming, we didn't want to recognize that it was coming. And now it has absorbed every aspect of our culture. You know what I think, Sean? I think that there are some more nefarious reasons for how we allowed this to happen. And I do want to talk about the optimism of Chris.

But I think we need to also identify how we let this happen and why we let this happen. There's a lot more money to be made through election and grift and consulting and all that stuff than the hard work that the left was, you know, to counter the hard work that these left wing true believers were willing to do. The way they've embedded themselves and taken over little, you know, parts of education. You see like Bill Ayers. He's a domestic terrorist on the radical left. He gets out of jail and gets out. And what does he do? He starts to create curriculum for universities in K through 12.

And they were willing to do the work. And we had too many people following the shiny ball, but the shiny ball also had dollar signs on it. And I think then we woke up in 2020, and we saw that all this planning came, as he said, in these riots, we started to see all this stuff happen. And the hope is that, you know, people are waking up. I do think on the right, people are waking up. I think the question is, have we lost a generation of young people? And what will our future look like as those young people go into positions of power? Have you lost a generation? You've lost multiple generations of young people that have gone through these schools and have been indoctrinated by the left. And again, now they're in positions of power in government, in the military, in media, in news reporting.

They're everywhere in our culture, and they're making massive, massive changes. That, by the way, came from these—you made the point of Bill Ayers—but there was a point that they believed that they needed violent revolution in the 60s. And then they understood violent revolution was not a way to the Marxist promised land. They knew they had to use social and cultural movements to get to where they wanted to be. And they understood that they have to get off the streets and get into the classroom. And a small number of them worked over the course of the last 70 years and have had great impact as we see now what's happened in 2023. And so sometimes I get pessimistic, Rachel, about where we're at.

And I think Chris Rufo made a really good point. I'm a small government conservative. I want to see less government, limited government. But I think that if you're going to beat this cancer in our country, you actually have to use government. What tools do I have in government to leverage conservative, pro-American, free enterprise beliefs and push them down into this rot that's happened from these Marxist leftists? rot that's happened from these Marxist leftists. You make such a great point, Sean, because we have been complaining about the wokeism creeping into K through 12 for a long time. And we have been complaining about left-wing teachers for a long time. Now, we saw in our state, as you properly brought out in that podcast, what Scott Walker you know take on the unions but why weren't we having

conversations about getting rid of the licensing to begin with why have we allowed our state-funded teachers colleges to become little marxist hot pots you know and and churning out more marxist teachers into our k-12 system and beyond. Why have we not had, like, I really liked what he said. It's a failure of our imagination that we have not, we complain about it. And frankly, people fundraise on it. But why hasn't, why haven't we made those connections? Why has it taken this long?

I think people are just starting to think about it because they're seeing the problem you know uh why did we have to wait to get little uh litter litter boxes outside of our you know third graders classrooms with their with their becoming little fur babies or whatever they say before we decided to take on teachers but here's and it gets to government in some easy steps, not easy, but they're not that difficult of steps. So one, you have these left-wing professors who now have tenure and Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to address tenure in Florida. So you can rip these radical leftists out of the university system and put in people who believe in America and free enterprise and the founding principles of this country, getting rid of tenure allows you to

do that, right? The protection of tenure is to protect the radical leftist professor. Now, but listen, you like the idea of tenure. The practice of tenure has protected these radical leftists to stay in these positions and foment these cancerous ideas and indoctrinate your children. It has been. So the idea of tenure was that you could have free speech, right? That you could say whatever you wanted. But the truth is, as we talked about, it's been free speech for the left only.

And tenure for the left, but the conservative professor doesn't get tenure. And by the way, Sean, how many professors do we, you and I both know, that only started to speak their mind after they got tenure? So they remain in the closet, ideologically speaking, until they get tenure. And then they kind of tentatively come out. But this is his point. You can't be constrained by your own imagination. Right? So if you have this embedded radicalism in your university system that all has tenure, get rid of tenure.

Take these people out. But it's also in the federal government. So again, they were willing to embed themselves in universities, but they've also embedded themselves in government, in the bureaucracy of government. And so you have a presidential election where the president runs the executive branch. One guy runs the executive branch and he puts cabinet members in place to run agencies. But what these secretaries find out in the agencies is they can't actually accomplish any of their goals or they make small strides in their goals, but they are thwarted every step of the way because everyone who works in the agency, which they now run as the secretary, is working against them.

And you can't get rid of them because they're protected by a federal union. And so if you want a democracy to work, you can't continue to protect the rot in the federal government, in the deep state, we'll call it. You've got to be able to get rid of them. So if you win an election, Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy, whoever that may be, you got to get rid of the union so you can get rid of the rot and you can bring people in who will help you actually accomplish the goals that you ran on. But so many conservatives are angry and frustrated.

They're like, I gave money. I gave my time. You won this race. Nothing changed. Nothing's changed in our federal government. And it doesn't change because you can't change the internal embedded rot of little Marxists that now run these institutions. And you've made this point before, Rachel. Secretaries will come and go. But those who sit in these departments, in these agencies, they're going to be there for a long time. You can't even fire them, Sean. And that's what I'm saying. You can't fire them.

You have to be able to fire them. If you want, if, by the way, if they want to be employees at will and do the will of the president, great. You can stay. But if you don't. You brought that up in that podcast. You said you thought that was

literally the most important reform. Like if you had a list, number one on your list is make federal bureaucrats fire fireable at will employees because because again then elections don't matter if you win a race but you can't change the way the federal government works um what good is a federal election yeah right and actually who runs the government who runs the country is it the bureaucrat in the agency that all have group Marxist think? Or is it the president who was elected by the people? And that is the fundamental question, and which is why liberals, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, have gotten so much done because they have a deep state that agrees with them. with them. And Donald Trump not only didn't get things done because of the push back against his policies, not only that, they actually worked against him trying to prosecute him, tried to

investigate him, spied on him. That's how rotten these institutions actually are. And so to fix it, again, to Chris's point, you have to take your own handcuffs off. You have the key. Free your mind to think of how you're going to use government to put America on a course that's going to bring us back to the basic founding principles of freedom and free enterprise and free speech

and not be constrained by this new Marxist ideology. And again, we can do it. If you win, one election can have massive impacts in a governor's race and in a presidential race, but they have to free themselves. And I really do recommend people read Chris Rufo's book. There are other people. There's Cary Grass, who wrote the book End of Woman. Again, a look at sort of the roots of feminism.

the roots of feminism, its Marxist roots, the very sort of bad players who, you know, these really, really negative people who ended up forming this philosophy that kind of damaged women who are forming the ideology. You have James Lindsay, there's so many great videos of his as well. So I am encouraged by the fact that as a movement, conservatives are beginning to look at the roots of this, start to understand it. I think we're late to the game, but we're doing it. And I think, as you said, Sean, you cannot fix a problem you don't understand. And until you understand it, by the way, I have a little quibble with Chris. He says that this all started in the 60s. I disagree. If you look at the work that Pete Hegseth and his co-author did on education, if you look at, again, Cary Gress, these things go back to the Bolsheviks and even before.

They have been planting, plotting, planning for a long time. It's just that they realized in the 60s that the old methods of class warfare weren't going to work. And they used a new thing, and it worked to disorient us and confuse us and not see who they were. And to that point, I think that there's a lot of people who have bought into this ideology.

Again, I'm not a racist. I believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion. I believe in these concepts. They don't understand the purpose behind the movement. And they're just a vehicle to accomplish the end goal of Marxism. They're going to use your guilt and your... Yeah.

And so they don't actually realize it. So I think of some good liberal friends who have bought into these ideologies, who I disagree with them vigorously on politics and policy. I don't think they're bad people. I don't think they understand. They're not about a fundamental transformation of America. They don't want to see a Marxist country, but they don't understand that the ideas that they're promoting and voting for are actually bringing them closer to a communist country. But there are some Democrats like Barack Obama, for example, fully understand when he said, I want to fundamentally transform America. He meant it. He's friends with Bill Ayers. He's friends with all these radical Marxists from the 60s that

are exposed in the book that Chris Ruffo has. So there are these sort of the central planners, if you will, of their movement. There are people who are the true believers. They want that. And then there are other people who are, as you said, well-intentioned and have no idea to what end this goes to. But just, you know, these planners that you talk about, these movement Marxists, they're actually not about making black lives better. They're not about transgenderism. These are just vehicles. These are people, useful idiots who will help them get to their end goal. And that's why when you look at minority communities, things haven't gotten any better with Democrat rule. These ideas haven't made anyone's life better. It's actually made their lives worse. And these people don't care. The movement Marxists don't care about someone's life. They care about the use of race to get them

closer to their goal of this Marxist utopia. But chris said was so powerful because he said they want to get us to that goal right at some point barack obama maybe when he was in college and in harvard and was idealistic and young or maybe even when he first started into politics really thought he could get to this wonderful utopia but now he's just got like three mansions, you know, one in Martha's Vineyard, one which he basically illegally put, breaking all of his environmental rules. Right, literally, it's on the beach in Florida. It's sitting on the beach. They had to put up a wall so that the waves wouldn't get in. That's how close it is to the beach.

And he's the one who said, and the oceans are rising and everything else. Boiling oceans. He doesn't believe any of this stuff. He is one of the ones who went from ideologically sincere to realizing, well, at least me and Michelle will get rich off of it. And what I think is interesting, too, Rachel, if you look at the squad, right, so you have these, they're socialists. These are, whether it's Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they've been indoctrinated in the institutions and now they're coming out and they're in Congress and they're pushing these ideologies. And when you look at when they speak, they are covered by the left-wing media. They're promoted.

They're elevated. They're celebrated. And then Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Texas. Henry Cuellar doesn't get any press from the left-wing media. He's a Democrat, but they don't promote and elevate him. They're promoting the left wing of the Democrat Party, elevating them. And it just goes to show you where the media's heart is in Democrat land, MSNBC, CNN. They push these guys because they agree with the radical agenda of the AOCs and the Cori Bushes.

And they're also getting rich off of it, Sean. The elite has found a way. I love how he said the end is actually grift. The end is grift. Listen, I appreciate Chris Ruffo joining us on the podcast. We tried to get him for a number of weeks. I know he's busy doing great work exposing the left.

By the way, there's a great article about his experience in Hungary. It's called What Conservatives See in Hungary by Chris Rufo. It's in Compact Magazine, which I encourage people to get a subscription to. I think it's one of the most thoughtful sites out there. But it is a wonderful article. He spent six weeks with his family there sort of digging in, seeing what they're doing to try and pull and pull out as you said from the roots um some of the liberal uh marxist things that are happening in their country and and and rebuilding um and

forging a new identity for hungary and that that is sort of what we'll have to do here on on a much bigger scale so a very interesting deep dive into that so take a look at that it's called what conservatives see in hungary um compact magazine it'll happen at school boards city council medians deep dive into that. So take a look at that. It's called What Conservatives See in Hungary, Compact Magazine. It'll happen at school boards, city council meetings, and yes, in congressional races. But the fundamental place where it happens is at the kitchen table. At your home, yes. Where we're at right now. And I want to thank you all for joining us and Chris Ruffo at the kitchen table. If you like our podcast, you can rate, review, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. You can find us always at foxnewspodcast.com. We'd appreciate it if you like our podcast. You get a notice every time our podcasts come out,

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Thank you again for joining us at the kitchen table, Rachel. Always good to have a cup of coffee with you. Bye-bye. Bye. Listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. Fox News Senior Meteorologist. Be sure to subscribe to the Janisteen Podcast at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And don't forget to spread the sunshine.