Pirate Wires - The Man Who Wants To End DEI Forever - Christopher Rufo On Claudine Gay, Tech, Racism, and Diversity

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

In this episode, Mike Solana is joined by Christoper Rufo, writer, activist, and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Chris has been in the headlines the past few months due to his public battle against DEI policies. Specifically, his efforts to have Harvard President, Claudine Gay, removed from her position. In this episode, we get into why Chis is on this mission, why DEI policies are so destructive, and how we can solve this issue. Featuring Mike Solana, Christopher Rufo Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Christopher Twitter: https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Christopher Rufo! Like & Subscribe! 2:00 - Defining Critical Race Theory & DEI 6:15 - Chris' Work - What Is His Mission, And Why? 10:00 - Differences Between Chris' Work & Left Wing Activists 22:00 - Chris' Undefined Positioning In The Discourse 29:00 - Claudine Gay, Harvard 39:00 - Advertising Dollars Are Left Wing 50:00 - DEI Lawsuits Are Coming 56:00 - The Vibe Shift - Tech Can Lead The Way 1:04:30 - Thanks For Joining Chris! Like & Subscribe!

I am unveiling or revealing the game as it actually exists. It's really a devil's bargain that executives have made to make sure that their PowerPoints at the end of the year look a little bit better on demographics. They are really hiring people primarily by ideology. Christopher Ruffo is a Bond villain, narrating his own evil plot. I think tech companies are uniquely positioned to eliminate

their DEI bureaucracies. Now that we're in a place where people can stand up and just say, that's bullshit. American greatness, American innovation and creativity, the principle of colorblind equality, the idea of having a hierarchy of merit, talent, and virtue rather than victimology. Welcome back to the pod, guys. We have an absolutely epic one today with Christopher Ruffo. Chris is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and genuinely one of the most successful political activists in memory. I was going to say, like, ever. I think because we're coming at this from a more of a right of center perspective. I've never seen a political activist like you in my life. There are, I think, a handful of reasons why I want to get through all of them. Because I think it's fascinating. I think the role that you have

taken in public life is a new thing and therefore automatically interesting to me. It's very effective. Specifically, there are two kind of broad topics, related topics. Banning critical race theory, I think, a couple years ago is kind of how you came up and what you're known for is sort of forwarding the push against that. But then there's diversity, equity, inclusion, or DEI, which I consider sort of the praxis of CRT or sort of CRT in practice in institutions. It's how it tends to manifest. And now through the sort of Claudine Gay stuff, most recently, that is, it's like DEI is this sort of new thing that you're going after. Lot to get into here. I think probably, first, thank you for coming on the show.

Second, probably the easiest thing for us to, before we get into the, or as we get into the conversation, is to start with definitions. How do you define critical race theory? Or again, as I mentioned, DEI, kind of think of it as the praxis. Do you agree with that? Is that kind of roughly how you think about it? Yeah, I think that's about right. And so critical race theory, of course, is an academic discipline. And the basic narrative that it pushes is that the United States is a systemically and fundamentally racist country. All of our institutions preach values and principles like liberty, equality, freedom. But these are merely a mystification or a smokescreen for racist systems that operate under the surface. And the critical race theorists argue that in order to create

racial equity, you have to abolish and deconstruct and dismantle all of those institutions. And so you have an academic ideology. It started in elite law schools, it trickled to other academic disciplines, and then into the curricula of K through 12 schools by that method of transmission. But in order to make institutional changes in a complex bureaucratic society like ours, you also have to figure out not only the idea, but how it plays out institutionally. And so they had the idea beginning in the 1970s to start doing, you know, so-called anti-racism trainings, critical consciousness trainings in corporations and such. And this is morphed in a dialectical manner or in a kind of call and response manner. With the ideology, you have now diversity, equity and inclusion as the concrete bureaucratic form. And so you just have to think of what is the ideal form and what is the material form? The ideal form, let's say it's critical race theory and it's purist. And then this translates into bureaucratic language.

This gets passed through the filter of McKinsey consultant PowerPoints. We can't call it critical race theory. We don't want to raise critical consciousness. We don't want to be, you know, kind of pushing race Marxism. They have the exact same cartoons. to increase diversity, but corralling a lot of those hires into an ideological department that is not subject to productivity concerns, subject to quality concerns. It's really a devil's bargain that executives have made to make sure that their PowerPoints at the end of the year look a little bit better on demographics. But, you know, they are really hiring people who are driven primarily by ideology, not, you know, profitability or public service. We've kind of laid out the problem at this point. And you are talking, I mean, it sounds like you're saying there's

essentially these massively important bureaucratic institutions throughout the country from academia to corporations have, in the name of diversity, sort of acquired an in-house political activist group that's kind of spreading through all of the institutions. It's very sort of cultural revolution, Chinese cultural revolution adjacent. I feel like it's definitely giving that energy. In facing this, and I have a lot of questions today just on your kind of activism, which is, it's not only unique in sort of the direction that it's coming from, but in its honesty, which again, we'll get into in a moment. How would you just sort of characterize your work in the face of this? So if you're looking at the problem, the problem is this political sort of thing that's happening at these companies that is sort of systemically racist and sexist. It's a quite huge problem. People kind of knew it was a problem for a while. You're one of the

first people who really decided to try and do something about it, which many people considered hopeless. How do you think about that? How do you approach it? What is your work? Yeah, well, it's a good question. And I think that the question boils down to what is my function? What is the role? What is the part that I'm playing in this national drama. And I've been criticized over the years for being an activist, been criticized for not being a journalist. And people really want to pigeonhole you in some kind of predetermined, predefined role with this largely invisible set of ethical requirements and restraints. And then they can say, well, you're this, but not this. And so therefore you're violating this, you know, unspoken rule.

And I've always found that so bizarre. I mean, you know, it strikes me as the kind of attitude that people acquire when they're used to the escalator model of building a career, where you, you know, you go to this university, you get this degree, you move on to this internship, you get this job, you move up L1, L2, L3, whatever it might be. And there are these kind of codified, routinized, bureaucratic imperatives on the profession. You are Washington Post journalists. These are the rules. I don't have that background and I don't have any of those limitations. And in fact, I reject those constraints as largely arbitrary. And so what I do is quite a unique mix.

I live in a very small town out in the Pacific Northwest. I have, you know, I run kind of my own shop according to my own kind of preferences and idiosyncrasies and eccentricities maybe. And so I figured out a new model of how I like to do things based on my own preferences and strengths and weaknesses. But I do journalism. You know, one of the things that is often missed is that all this work that I've done on CRT, on DEI, the primary tool that I'm using is journalism. I'm developing sources within institutions, I'm procuring documents, I'm vetting and verifying information, and then I'm packaging them into reports that I break on Twitter, that I publish at City Journal, Fox News, New York Post, Wall Street Journal. that I publish at City Journal, Fox News, New York Post, Wall Street Journal. And then I go on television, radio to kind of push these reports through the mass media and then work to then shape that with a specific political objective in mind. That's where the activism component comes in.

Because I'm not interested in just writing about something, communicating dead, inert information, and then moving on. I want the journalistic work to mean something and to drive political changes according to the vision and the principles that I have. I'd like to see those implemented. Well, of course, nobody wants their information to just die. And I think everybody is motivated by, everyone who's writing, every journalist is motivated, every journalist that I see, whether it's in politics or certainly in the tech industry, is trying to do the same thing.

They're just playing by a different set of aesthetic rules. They're not saying that. They're calling themselves this other thing, and they're pretending to be arbiters of truth. I think some of them really are trying to be as fair as they can. I think for the most part, that's not what's happening. That's like the sort of first bucket, and that's what your standard, it seems like to me, you're held against. But then there's this entire other class of left-wing activists who speak about this in

roughly the same way. They're not quite so honest about their actual tactics, but they clearly want to affect change, and they're cited favorably in the press all the time. Yeah. So it's like you're not allowed to be either one of them. Yeah. And so you're in this sort of strange new position.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I've learned to be very honest about it. And in fact, the more honest and transparent I've been about what I'm doing, even to the extent of how I'm doing it always, am I, am I reaching the goal? Am I meeting my objectives? Am I moving the ball forward politically? And so it, it creates you know, for lack of a better word, a game that, that you can play. And so I, I, I just kind of, I enjoy it. You know, that's, that's the thing, A game, you'll get good at a game that you enjoy, that you have fun with. And so I'm always trying to figure out what is fun to

do, what gets us excited, what, you know, what notches those victories and accomplishments. And, you know, for me, the ultimate prize and really what I measure my work on ultimately is, you know, are we getting legislation passed? Are we, you know, changing public opinion dramatically in our favor? Are we, you know, motivating elites and policymakers to change laws, policies, institutions? Are we conquering territory that was previously occupied by our opponents? And so it's a very practical, but I think it's also very tangible, which is something that I like and something that many of the journalists that operate in this more amorphous world where it's just kind of a dorm room, late night dorm room debate, that doesn't interest me. That doesn't get me excited. And I prefer to bring it down

to a much more tangible level. Hey guys, thanks for listening to the Pirate Wires pod. Make sure you like, subscribe, comment below and share this with your friends. But I do want to talk about something you just sort of alluded to or roughly mentioned, Make sure you like, subscribe, comment below very open in a CRT conversation. I recall you being, and please correct me if I don't get this exactly right, but I recall you being pretty open about sort of applying all of the things that were crazy to this phrase and making the sort of CRT proponents own all of the crazy sort of left-wing things that exist.

It was like a very honest approach to a form of political activism. It wasn't just like sort of reporting the facts or whatnot. And my assumption kind of watching that, and it's happened again and again, it happens even with sort of the Claudine Gay thing more recently, you kind of explained, you know, we're dropping this information directly before hearing in an attempt to get her fired. And you say this publicly out loud in front of everybody. Whereas what we see from left-wing activists is you sort of cloaking, we all know what's happening, but it's all, it's cloaked in bullshit and weird semantic games and things like this. And you just very straightforward say like, my goal is to get this woman fired because I believe

that she's like this DEI bureaucrat who I don't't like and the way i'm going to do this is x y and z now two questions here um one did you think about this strategy going in because it is bizarre um just genuinely speaking like as a person sort of watching from the sidelines it's very strange to watch you be so honest about it um did you think about it before you started or was it just sort of like a personality trait of yours? And then have you seen a difference in like the effect? Like, can you explain to me the results really of that specific style of activism, which I do, it seems new to me. Yeah, well, I'm glad you said a personality trait rather than neurosis. That's a kind of matter of opinion. But it's a few things. One is that I've done it now a number of times and it seems to work. And so I approach the

kind of political work heuristically. Like, all right, well, I did this. It seems to work. I think it works for these reasons i'm not gonna uh you know analyze it to death i'm i'm simply going to continue using that um until it stops working and when it stops working i'll try something else um but the the the kind of the the attack which i find very amusing and actually kind of fun is you know you know christopher ruffo is a bond villain narrating his own kind of fun is you know you know Christopher Ruffo is a Bond villain narrating his own evil plot and then you know dot dot dot and it works every time you know so it's like so it's like the insult is this kind of latent compliment like he does it and it works

and we're so upset about it and so um I think it works for a couple of reasons. One is for the precisely the kind of difference that you outline. Everyone does this on the left and they pretend that they're not doing it. I'm doing it on the right and I'm absolutely explaining to people that I am doing it. And so what it does is, I think it demystifies the game of public opinion warfare. And it forces my opponents to either acknowledge that what I'm doing is what they're doing, or to deny it, which I think ends up actually hurting them more because people can see the game for what it is. And so I think from a kind of metapolitical standpoint, I am unveiling or revealing the game as it actually exists. And this does two things. It shows people on our side how the game works.

And so it teaches them the true principles. You know, Gramsci has this great line where he's analyzing Machiavelli's Prince and he says, the Prince is a book written not for people who already know, but for people who don't know and need to know. And so I think that is a useful service to people on my own side. So how does it play on the opposite side? You know, how does the left react to this? I mean, apoplectically, irrationally, I mean, it's like unbelievable. And so what it ends up doing, and don't tell anyone, you know, I don't want them to catch on, but what it ends up doing is that they put massive amounts of media attention on these strategies. Yeah.

And they unconsciously treat them as a fait accompli. And so they're actually entrenching the narrative design that I am kind of teasing out there as the actual kind of impending or looming reality. And it gives it actually more force, more focus, more aura of inevitability. And then it also, of course, from a very, and again, I'll be honest, from a very personal point of view, it also puts my name in the newspaper with increasing frequency, which is good for me personally. Everyone likes to see their name in the newspaper, but also good for me politically, because it's building a kind of narrative power that I cannot have merely from the conservative press, which is very small in comparison. I actually have to play the game dialectically or play the game narratively with my opponents. And the worst thing you could do as an activist on the right

is be ignored. I mean, that's what they try to do for as long as possible. And so you have to figure out a way to engage your enemy, to set the terms, to create the frame, and then to try to anticipate their response. And fortunately for us, their responses are like, you know, Pavlov's dog. I mean, you ring the bell and you kind of know what they're going to do because they're so used to total narrative dominance. Their bag of rhetorical tricks is so depleted that you can anticipate their response with a high degree of accuracy. And so I try to play that game. I try to lay traps. I try to provoke certain reactions. I try to launder certain even words and phrases into the discourse. And again, I do it. Obviously, I have political objectives,

but I think it's fun. I enjoy doing it. I don't know. I see it coming. It seems like you're hit in two ways. One is by the left, which we've been talking about. I think that was super well instantiated in this debate I saw of yours. I don't know that I would call it a debate. A clip I saw of yours on the Joy Reid show from, I think it was 2021, where she is just going after you on your imprecise definitions of critical race theory. And she's trying to sort of be academic about it. And she's like, but you're lying. And it's not this. It's like this other super abstract thing that nobody's ever heard of. And in it, she does this thing where she sort of tries to bury you in a game of words, not give you any chance to express

your actual opinion, which is shared by most Americans, which is the sort of systemically racist and sexist stuff is terrible. And we don't want to see it in our schools or our businesses. But then she coins this phrase for you against underlying this thing where they're sort of really assisting you constantly. She says, it's really Christopher Ruffo theory. And she just gave it, she handed it to you and she thought it was a victory um and i was shocked at that because she's elevating you to the stature of villain and of course there are only two things you can be in the media uh there you're you as someone who was against critical race theory against diversity equity inclusion um not in existence but that sort of political tactic, you're allowed to either be

a neutered sort of sock puppet that they smack around or a supervillain. And it's like, you kind of have to pick which one and she's making you the supervillain. And that gives you the attention you talked about. But I think maybe the more interesting critique comes from the right. I went through, I just Googled you to see kind of where the press was. And I had, going into it, I had this idea that you, I expected, you know, a thousand negative headlines because I've seen a bunch of negative, all the most part, it was like a link to your Wikipedia page. It was your actual place of work. It was your pieces. It was your Twitter., but then it says that the Wikipedia article states that one of the places where this information was found was the Washington Post, which itself had engaged in misinformation sort of against you. Yeah, they had to retract, I mean, multiple retractions from the Post. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah. But then you get to the articles and yes, there are a handful of crazy headlines, right? It's like from the Guardian,

scientists cited in Claudine Gay, Oster linked to eugenics. There was another one, Chris Ruffo's troubling path to power, right-wing culture warriors from MSNBC developed formula to manipulate soft targets. But you're also, you have an op-ed in the New York Times. It's like there's some amount of, there seems to be a ton of articles in both sides sort of accurately saying what you're doing, because you say it out loud, your tactics, which they're distracted by. There's a lot in there kind of accurately reporting what you're doing. I think you have maybe more support than certainly that I realized, including from the establishment, maybe because of a sort of broad vibe shift. The one criticism that bothered me, this is our second camp of weird criticism,

was from Reason Magazine, the libertarian magazine, which I came up through politically in terms of all my favorite writers started there when I was in my early 20s and is a sort of place that means a lot to me. It's where I found Peter Thiel for the first time, his thinking and things that he was working on. He would go on to become my boss and mentor, very important person in my life. They wrote a piece titled Chris Ruffo Became the Thing He Hates. And this is a kind of criticism you get from the sort of like reasonable right, the like thoughtful right wing. It's sort of coming out of a kind of thinking that was popular in the late teens and early 20s, this classical liberalism, the sort of Sam Harris of it all, where we were going after

wokeness in a way that was very thoughtful. It was like, we're better than them, was the overall sort of tone of it. We're more principled than them. We have to get back to these things. But they lose. So what does that matter? And in my own personal life, I find myself kind of torn between these two places where I recognize the authoritarian tactics, and I'm also forced to recognize the fact that they are successful, and the alternative is not winning. What do you make of that type of criticism, specifically from the more like moderate or thoughtful corners of the right wing? Well, yeah, the libertarian critique, I think, is the one that is especially,

you know, preposterous. You know, libertarians have advocated, even on their own grounds. I mean, look, for some reason, libertarians are criticizing me for creating the political narrative and working with policymakers to abolish DEI bureaucracies in public universities in, I think, now five or even six states, depending on how things go in Utah imminently. So we're eliminating a ideological department of the government. In theory, libertarians should be cheering this on. We're reducing the size of government. We're saving taxpayer money.

We're reorienting the state towards rightful purposes, not left-wing ideology. But the libertarians are upset about this for some reason. Libertarians, likewise, have been advocating very ineffectively, reason. Libertarians likewise have been advocating very ineffectively despite putting huge resources into advocating school choice for decades now. And yet in recent years, if you talk to Doug Ducey, the governor of Arizona, the first governor to pass a universal school choice, if you talk to Ron DeSantis, if you talk to Governor Abbott, they'll tell you that my work on critical race theory and gender ideology in schools, exposing it, making parents aware of it, mobilizing parents at school board meetings, was essential for getting universal school choice,

this impossible goal for libertarians. And so I would say two things. I'm not a libertarian, but I am a better libertarian than many libertarians who criticize me. And so I think that is probably something that stings, something that they know at least subconsciously. But the ideological debate or conflict is that precisely what you've outlined. Some people cling to principles as a consolation prize. They're very happy to lose every political fight. They're very happy to watch the schools succumb to critical race ideologies. They're very happy to watch the state grow to the point now where the American state as a percentage of GDP is larger than the Chinese communist state as a percentage of GDP. You know, and so I'm actually trying to fight against this substantively. I think I'm notching wins And it may be an aesthetic disagreement. It may be an interpersonal disagreement. But it strikes me as libertarians operate as gadflies. They kind of zip around.

They have vaguely heterodox views. But they don't actually challenge any of the institutions that matter. They don't actually contest the power of the statist, collectivist left. And so I don't accept that. And in fact, I will call people out who operate in that manner. And that has earned me some bad blood with libertarians. But the smart libertarians, they see what I'm doing as advancing their goals on, you know, reducing the size of government, on getting universal school choice, on creating the kind of sociological and public opinion conditions for their ideas to advance. And so the smart ones see what I'm doing, they support it um and the kind of deranged ones uh you know right right off it's like the one you just mentioned yes i mean i it just does seem to me that you're supposed

to lose um like that's the expectation that's the polite thing to do is to just not win and that has been certainly my experience with almost everything I've ever cared about in my entire political memory is losing. Not on the wrong side of history, in my opinion, but on the wrong side of power. And that is growing up watching the media, watching the press, you can't help but internalize that from the arguments that you watch where they bring on the most benign loser to argue a point then they defeat him and then politically things change in in that direction and that has brought us to a place of um there are a lot of things politically that no one even talks about anymore

right now i think we're so distracted by the deiI stuff. And I think for good reason, I think it's a huge deal. But we don't talk about taxes or balancing a budget or even the military that much, bizarrely. This is really what we're talking about. All of those things though, right? These are points that we've, things that I care about have lost forever. This is the first one where I see some actual progress. And I have some questions now pertaining to like, am I right to see signs of progress? Claudine Gay is, I think, a good way to talk about this. Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, DEI bureaucrat, a piece that you wrote in the City Journal. And I just didn't realize that you were the one that wrote it. I had actually cited that piece for background on what she had done at Harvard. And then today when I was going over headlines,

I realized, wow, that was a Chris Ruffo piece. That is funny. You laid out a path to take out, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like who you perceive to be a major fount of DEI power in the institutions. I guess, one, could you kind of sketch that out for me? What was your strategy there in your thinking? And then two, without her, do we see... How meaningful is that? This is an entire bureaucratic apparatus. How meaningful is the removal of just one president who I think is still making, last I checked, like $900,000 a year or something crazy like that. That was reported. It could be sort of mistaken, but she's still employed at Harvard making a lot of money.

Yeah. So I'll give you kind of the rundown of how the politics worked. So of course, of how the politics worked. So, of course, you had this debacle on campus at Penn, at MIT, and at Harvard, where after the Hamas terror attack against innocent Israelis, students were celebrating on campus. They were chanting, you know, genocidal slogans in some cases.

And then the administrators were caught flat-footed. They seemed to condone it, excuse it, rationalize it, maybe even tacitly support it, if you compare their lack of statements on this to these hyperbolic statements on other issues. But it created this sense of turmoil, vulnerability, and a shift in political dynamics. Then you have them testifying before Congress. Claudine Gay says that, she's asked by Elise Stefanik, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard policies? And she says it depends on the context. I mean, just an absolute softball that she whiffs. And meanwhile, a colleague of mine comes to me with a document that he obtained with evidence that she had plagiarized, you know, dozens of passages in her PhD thesis. And so I knew right away that this was a bombshell,

I knew right away that this was a bombshell, that this had the power to really bury Claudine Gay and then shift this debate on even more favorable terms. So we did the work of verifying this. We did the work of consulting various experts. At the same time, you have Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager, putting financial pressure by telling the press that they've lost a billion dollars in donations. You have a lot of predominantly Jewish donors to Harvard saying, hey, wait a minute, no more money until we figure out this problem, rightly so. And then we dropped the plagiarism story, which set off, I mean, it was trending on Twitter for a month. It was dominating headlines. And so, as I was saying before, it's like, it's not just that I pull things out of thin air and I have kind of the Houdini capacity to manipulate opinion as they would like you to believe. It's that, no,

I obtained the documentation and broke the story about plagiarism. And then, of course, as I stated very clearly, I'm going to use this journalistic technique, this journalistic package, this product, this plagiarism story, to then play the political game and to mobilize political pressure, economic pressure, narrative pressure, and then squeeze Claudine Gay. It ended up, of course, working. They dispatched her. And your second question is important. Well, does this really matter? Is it important? Is it going to change things? I'd say yes and no. I think it did more damage to Harvard's reputation or brand than anything in a very long time. And I think that it has already shifted incentives and shifted the balance of power within the institution. I worked behind the scenes with many people inside Harvard

during this campaign, and they felt empowered, emboldened, and able to reassert themselves. And I think it also shifts the status incentives across our entire elite. It did massive damage to not only Harvard, but to DEI, but to the Ivy Leagues as a whole, reputationally. And then I think that it is shifting money. I've talked to a number in the wake of this Harvard story, I've talked to a number of people with very high net worth, some of the most wealthy and powerful people in the world saying, hey, money is shifting rightward. Influence is shifting rightward. The necessities are shifting rightward in finance, tech, venture capital, all of the kind of very high growth sectors. And so, look, are we living in a world where a kind of, you know, the war of maneuver, the catastrophic single strike taking out the university president can change everything? No. We live in a bureaucratic

world that changes more slowly and has to be penetrated more deeply. But is it a symbolic victory that has real material and political ramifications? I think the answer is obviously yes. Do you think you're facing a kind of root problem in the goal. If the goal is to change the bureaucratic structure, which is America, right? America is bureaucracy. Every facet of power at sufficient scale is bureaucratic. And if the goal is to alter that in some way, are you doomed to fail because the kind of people who are attracted to bureaucratic power and institutions, they naturally sort of are a little bit left of center. I don't think that that's necessarily true. You might remember that even in the 1970s, General Electric hired Ronald Reagan to go around the country giving speeches about American enterprise and innovation

and productivity. And so there is no immutable law that requires bureaucracies to be left-wing. And in fact, I think actually most people, for example, in Fortune 500 companies are probably generally right of center. And so it's not that the mass of people is left of center or left wing, it's that the mass of people within bureaucracies are cowardly. And so they will be silenced easily, they will be pushed around easily, and they will be recruited into the dominant ideology without too much trouble. And so left-wing activists are brilliant tactically on manipulating guilt and shame, on creating status hierarchies and incentives, and on using issues, especially of race and sex, to bully and cudgel people into submission. And so my job is first to define the problem,

then to complicate the problem, then to mobilize a counter elite within institutions to fight back against the problem, and then to vanquish, degrade, and humiliate, you know, the opponents of what I am advocating, which is, you know, American greatness, American innovation and creativity, the principle of colorblind equality, the idea of having a hierarchy of merit, talent, and virtue, rather than, you know, victimology. And I think that we simply need to shift the incentives at the top and show that our proposed hierarchy of values is superior to our opponents. And then I think the mass of people will follow. The game is not to change the whole bureaucracy and change everyone's opinions at once. The game is to figure out whose opinions matter the most

and to start there and then work outward. One place where all of this is at play in a very interesting way is the technology industry. This is something that we talked about off camera right before the show began. I'm very excited to talk about it. Did not realize that you were thinking about it quite so much as you have been lately.

I think maybe to set up this part of the discussion, there is a great sense among, I think, the average American that the tech industry is hopelessly, like delusionally woke, like extremely left-wing, crazy, et cetera. I do not believe that is true, and I have never believed that is true. I work in tech. I'm surrounded by people in tech. I think that the people in power, bureaucratic elements in power were very left-wing, specifically in a place like Twitter.

Now, the interesting thing about Twitter that I've discovered, the more that I've covered it and written about it and spoken to people at Twitter and learned about it, is yes, there was a machine in place to censor Americans, just like absolutely. And it was super left-wing and it mainstreamed a lot of the ideas, the most insidious ideas that we're now grappling with today. But one of the major dynamics there at play is advertising dollars. So every single ad exec is super left-wing. All the people who manage this stuff are very left-wing. All of the businesses that run ads are run by people who are left-wing. HR departments across the country, political bureaucracies, academics, media, those are extremely left-wing and they're more left-wing than tech, like much more left-wing. A lot of what we're seeing that we interpret as left-wing leftism is a sort of result of market

forces that a lot of people are just fundamentally at odds with. This has never been more obvious as in the case of Elon Musk, who bought Twitter only to have these sort of ad executives across the country go to war with him to force him to censor political speech. However, separate from that market pressure, we have seen some of the most courage that has existed in this country from the tech industry, starting with Brian Armstrong, perhaps. You saw it first with influencers, people who are investors and very popular ex-CEOs or former CEOs, founders of companies like Council, so Balaji Shriddha Vasan. But he was fighting very loud for a long time. But now you saw it a couple of years ago with Coinbase

sort of forcing people at work to talk about work only, no politics. That practice was implemented at Facebook quietly. Facebook has implemented a lot of stuff quietly. Are you serious? It never makes headlines. Wow. You see it across the board

in firings. I remember even at Apple, which has had a handful of really crazy stuff that I've written about. There was one, the last one that I read about was actually the demand internally that Tim Cook, and this was years ago before the most recent Israel thing. It was like two years ago. The demand that Tim Cook respond to this Israel-Palestine conflict, and he just didn't and didn't care. And it never didn't move the dial because the culture and tech changed first. Now what we have is, I would say, it is like consensus opinion among major, every loud, outsp of political voice in tech, people who are tech voices who will talk about politics is against DEI. What do you make of that generally?

And then I'd love to talk a little bit more about how things, you see things changing in like specifics and how we might get rid of this stuff a little faster. Well, there's an important general dynamic at play. And the right has two options at the moment. And so one of my favorite writers, Antonio Graham, she talks about how, correctly, how as economics changes, as the material base changes, it creates new sectors or new areas of growth.

And those areas create their own, what he called organic intellectuals. And those are the intellectuals that are going to have the ideological power and material power to change institutions and society. And they can then conquer the intellectuals of the older order, the older arrangement. And put aside as politics, with which I don't agree, I think, as far as analysis, it's correct. And so the right is now in this perilous moment where you have some on the right who are saying, we need to go kind of, let's say, downscale working class coalition, which electorally I think it makes sense, but we should create an alliance with labor. There's a whole strain of thinking on the right. We need to go after organized labor and create an alliance and disrupt that sector.

It's such an attack tech as big tech and bad and opposing the tech industry. I think it's such a huge mistake for a few reasons. One is that labor as a percentage of society, if you take out public sector unions, it has been dying for my whole lifetime, all of our lifetimes. It's just a dying sector. It's on the way out. It's losing power. It has really limited ability to grow and shape culture. Tech is obviously the exact opposite.

Tech, the kind of famous slogan is that software is eating the world is absolutely true. That's only going to accelerate. It is young, dynamic, innovative. It has all of the spirit of who can create the best product. It's very competitive in that way. It has a natural respect for hierarchies of competence, ability, genius. And so it is a natural ideological and philosophical fit. It's like Elon Musk is like kind of the real life Ayn Rand hero. Yes. I mean, it really is. If you like those novels, I'm not a huge fan, but if you like those novels, I mean, he's kind of the guy who embodies that. And so I think it's a huge

opportunity for my side of the political coalition to make these issues more salient, to create these alliances in tech. And I know personally, I'm trying to spend a lot of time this year building relationships in tech. And I think what you're seeing is that the people with the most range of motion or the most independence are the first movers. So you have the VC podcast crowd, you have the independent businessman, founder, retired founder. They have more latitude where they can speak. You're starting to see that. And the signals are very clear.

Even some of these guys speak obliquely in public. The signals are very clear even some of these guys speak obliquely in public the signals are very clear and what i've seen you know my wife worked in tech for a long time at microsoft and amazon and other companies and i have a lot of friends in tech here in the seattle region um you know the opinion shifts among the mid-layer of, let's say, product managers and software engineers and, you know, and other people within the organization, when they see the high-status individuals, like the all-in podcast crowd, or they see Marc Andreessen, or they see these guys who are legends in the field, when they see those signals shift, they have permission to then shift their own opinion. And I think that you're absolutely right. The big untold story

is that the tech world has shifted quietly, dramatically, but dramatically to the right. And so, you know, my job, and I talk with, you know, kind of buttoned up, you know, good, good, you know, good, responsible CEO types of big companies. And they say, you know, and the kind of deal that we've worked out is something like this. I am pushing a right wing ideological hard edged line in the public debate. I'm trying to move the Overton window as far to the right as possible, knowing that my full demands will never be met. But then I allow the rational, reasonable middle to reassert itself and to kind of regain control over some of those institutions. And then by contrast, by playing an inside-outside game,

we can move the whole balance of power back to kind of restoring a sense of balance. And then, look, the fact is that I would say the vast majority of tech CEOs, they don't want DEI. They want to create great products. They want to satisfy their customers. They want to create great products. They want to satisfy their customers. They want to increase value for shareholders. That's how capitalism is supposed to work. That's what's created kind of the highest standard, like unbelievable. We're living,

the median American is like living like the kings of the 18th century. I mean, living like the kings of the 18th century. I mean, it's unbelievable what we've done. And I think that most of these tech CEOs, including many of the immigrant CEOs, we have a huge number of immigrant CEOs, are very patriotic Americans. I mean, they love this country. They support this country, but they're also scared. They don't want to alienate board members. They don't want to alienate activist employees. They don't want to alienate the New York Times. And so what I'm hoping to do is create a protective layer around these folks

where they can start quietly and then I hope in the near future, very boldly, lay down a new statement of principle. And I hope to provide the political cover for them to do so. I have never spoken to a CEO, and I know a lot of them, a tech CEO who is in favor of DEI. And let's just very quickly, what does that mean for a CEO, especially of a startup rather than a publicly traded company that is mature and stable. But a startup, a high growth startup, you need to hire really competent people really fast. And DEI in practice is the idea that you are supposed to pass up talented people because they do not fit the demographics that you were in, the racial demographics that you were aiming for. And it's just like, I think people on the first hand don't like it because it is just

objectively racist. It's obviously a racist thing and you're expected to believe that it's not. So it's like the craziness that this sort of gaslighting element of that is very frustrating. But just practically to tell a CEO that they're supposed to ignore talented candidates is crazy. I think that a lot of people believe that I'm reducing this in a way that is not fair. And I think it's not actually the expectation of these companies. It's not actually what has happened at these companies for five plus years now. It is absolutely what happened. It started with gender actually before 2020. That was really where the conversation exploded. There was an idea that we were supposed to believe in tech that one, their colleges were not training enough female engineers and we had to address that problem in a variety of ways. And two, that there was no pipeline problem, that you could not say

there weren't enough women to hire. You had to believe both of these things at once. And you had to hire 50% female engineers. And anybody in tech knows that is an impossible task for everybody to do at once, literally impossible. There's no way that a CEO can fix this problem. Now, recently, so that's where it started. It has ended in the racism place and all of these ideas were codified into the rules at companies. IBM just had a massive scandal that I wrote about where video footage leaks from 2021 of the CEO openly talking about the bonus structure associated with hiring people of color and various genders, right? You would not be paid if you did not hire enough people of the

right race. That's crazy. No CEO wants that. It's going to end. It's already ending. And now because of the Supreme Court case at Harvard, a lot of CEOs I've talked to, again, many, many people who genuinely believe there is legal liability here. The lawsuits are coming for people who were discriminated against based on sex and gender. I guess my question for you is, I want to start there because the IBM thing to me seemed like I wondered, how is this legal? Do you see the litigation coming in the same way that I sort of do, or am I kind of off here? difficult to change incentives. You'll have to remember that even for something like the school desegregation in the South, they had to file hundreds and then thousands of cases because you have to not only win one and everything changes, you have to create a kind of body of work and a body of incentives in order to shift policy at corporations. So it's not just the

Supreme Court changes the opinion and everything miraculously changes. It's going to require some kind of trench warfare on the legal side. But the broader point, I'll illustrate it maybe with a story that I don't think I've ever told publicly before. You know, when my wife was working at Microsoft, you know, one time I went to go visit her.

She was on an engineering team. And I get up to this huge open office space in Bellevue, Washington. And it's high-rise. And one of her colleagues, a young South Asian woman, comes up to me. She says, oh, my God, Chris, you look just like Mike. I was like, OK. I'm like, cool, fine. You've got to meet him. You've got to meet Mike. And I was like, all right. I guess I'll. I'm nice. All right, let's go meet Mike. I was like, okay, cool, fine. You've got to meet him. You've got to meet Mike. I was

like, all right, I guess I'll, I'm nice. All right, let's go meet Mike. And so she takes me into the engineering floor and it's a sea of desks, computers, and it is virtually a hundred percent East Asian and South Asian men, right? I mean, you've seen the engineering floors. and South Asian men, right? I mean, you've seen the engineering floors. I'm like, all right, cool. And then she shouts out, Mike, Mike. And it's like one white guy in the far back stands up from his computer. It's like, we don't look anything. I mean, zero physical resemblance. He comes over. He's like, this is amazing. You guys need to meet. You guys just like each other? And then he used me to look like, oh my God. And I gave him the look like, oh my amazing. You guys need to meet. You guys just like each other? And then he used me to look like, oh, my God. And I gave him the look like, oh, my God.

And we said, oh, yeah, we, you know, very politely, we could be brothers. Great to meet you, Mike. You know, sit down. And so, like, there's two ways you could read this whole tableau, right, this whole scene. You could say that this is a racist microaggression and we don't all look the same. And, you know, you could say that, you know, why aren't there 50 percent females and 60 percent, you know, white computer programmers? Or you could just say, huh, different institutions, different professions, different cultures, different groups organize themselves in surprising ways. groups organize themselves in surprising ways. And because I know that the people that are working on this product are doing an amazing job, the product is good, the product is selling, the product is extremely profitable. Without hard evidence to the contrary, this is just

a kind of hierarchy of pure competence to the specific task. And the fact that this engineering floor is all East Asian, South Asians, and one guy named Mike who may or may not look like me, who cares? Fine. And then I knew the executive on the team. And so like, you know, is the executive discriminating against, it's like if a white applicant, a Latino applicant, a female applicant, a black applicant, whatever it is, had the skills, had the competence, had the right, you know, was the right fit for the job, would they hire that person?

Without a doubt. And that person will be compensated handsomely. And in fact, I think there is a natural human inclination even to say, okay, if you have a woman or let's say an African-American or Latino, not a lot of those demographics on engineering teams, there is a natural inclination that I know people have to say, all right, let's make sure to give this person an extra look, be fair, see if there's any little things we could do,

just out of basic human empathy and compassion. And so the idea that these institutions are racist, I find just totally despicable. And even the idea that every engineering floor has to have a kind of Benetton ad aesthetic, I just find, I said, why is this even desirable? Who cares? We shouldn't even concede the premise that that's what it should be, much less the practical problem like the pipeline problem you're talking about. Yes, I agree. I think that on the racism side, what you just mentioned is, first of all, phenomenal illustration of exactly what tech is um when this

the sort of dei conversation was first shifting in a serious way to race um in like 2020 uh we've been we've been talking about it previously but 2020 went obviously insane um i remember kara swisher talking about this it's's a tech journalist. I know her. Yeah. Loathed, can't stand her. Used to be more relevant than she is now, but still, I think back then she did have some influence. She said, I remember her talking about this problem.

She's like, it's all these white men. And then she paused and she's like, you know, and like Indians and Asian men as well. And I thought like, so not racist is what you're saying. It's like so clearly, like objectively, obviously, this is not, it is not that people are looking for a certain kind of race. Your problem is that they are not aggressively looking for another kind of race. You are asking for racism in these places.

I think it is just, tech is filled, tech is a lot of things. I could go on and on for hours. I love the technology industry. I think it represents something really important for both America and the world. It is exciting place to be. It's where all the talent is, in my opinion, in this country.

One thing it is not, it has never been as racist, sexist, homophobic. It is like the most open place in the world. What people care about here is talent. Are you good or are you not? And what have you built is like the most open place in the world what people care about here is talent are you good or are you not and what have you built is like the highest status thing that there is and has always been this way since i started it's like what have you done and if you've done cool shit everybody wants to be associated with you and i think for years we've been forced to not talk about that um in fact they they create all these rhetorical slights to it they maligned for

example the concept of meritocracy and it slights to it. They maligned, for example, the concept of meritocracy and it's supposed to be a dog whistle for something else insidious. It's just not. And now that we're in a place where people can stand up and just say, that's bullshit. That is crazy. That is not true. That little bit of courage has, I think, opened up the path for getting back to work in a serious way and just resisting this stuff. And it's an essential part of America's identity and America's... I mean, the Wright brothers, if I remember correctly, were bicycle mechanics in Ohio and they invented the airplane. I mean, it's like, this is something that Leonardo da Vinci had dreamed about and was trying to draw

kind of models of what that might be, you know, a human flight. And, you know, the internet, personal computing, you know, the great myth of, a myth in the positive sense of the tinkerer, the nerd working in his garage, you know, Jeff Bezos starting Amazon in a garage, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, all these guys. It's like, this is a miracle. Like, this is as close to a miracle as we're going to get in our kind of material and secular world. And so why are we dumping on this? I find it so disgusting. And people who do it are people whose lives depend on it. It's like digital journalists dumping on the tech industry is like,

I mean, it's like people that have no sense of their own existence. It's unbelievable. And, you know, what they want, look, diversity is a code word for, you know, in some ways, legitimate reasons. Diversity is a code word, not for certain kinds of diversity, you know, Asian, South Asian, like we're talking about, but for African American. I understand, I can sympathize, and I think there is a kind of legitimate concern, you know, because of America's history. But the solution is so, it cuts against the kind of ideal or the principle that we should be striving towards. And then it manifests itself in mundane ways. Another friend of mine who was running a mobile app, I mean, a big engineering team for one of the large Seattle-based technology companies.

There's only really two, so you can guess which one. You know, he gets a notice down from his boss and so the boss says, hey, you know, we need to promote African-American members of the team. This is coming from on high, you know. And then, you know, my friend says, okay, all right. Well, you know, I have this team. There are these people who worked their asses off, who delivered great features,

who took responsibility and they deserve, you know, promotions. And they are, you know, they weren't by just because it was this way, white and then Asian and South Asian men because of the composition of the team, because of who did the good work. And then he had on the team an African-American woman who, by objective standards, my friend is also Indian-American, immigrant from India. So it's not like he can be called a white supremacist, although they might try to call him that. And he says, look look this person did the worst

job i had to put her on a performance improve it's like this person does not deserve a promotion over all of these other people who do and yet it was a diktat from the top saying we can now you know only promote on the basis of uh you know ancestry and anatomy you know skin color and biology. And it distorts the purpose. Not only is it wrong as an individual instance, elevating people who don't deserve it on the merits, but for some reason deserve it on their ancestry. It's wrong morally. Okay, fine. But it also degrades the capacity of the team. It hurts the morale. It undercuts the creation of the product. And then all those people who love tech, I mean, they love building, they love coding, they love developing, they love selling to customers. It kind of degrades them because it's saying we're no longer prioritizing accomplishment.

We're just bean counting on identity. And I just think that people reject that. Yes. As discussed, we're seeing it already in the industry. Last question, technology industry specific, where do you see this conversation? Less the conversation. Where do you see the, the structure of DEI changing in tech over the next years and a couple, let's say two years. And how do you see that happening? Like from the sort of activist work to the real changes at the companies, what do you

think the shape of this stuff is going to be over the next 12 to 24 months? I think tech companies are uniquely positioned to eliminate and abolish their DEI bureaucracies almost entirely outside of civil rights compliance, which they're legally obligated to do for a number of reasons. One is because I think the whole ethos of our tech industry is against this kind of racialist ideology and subordinating the mission to, you know, kind of demographic considerations. But also because tech firms are the most nimble administratively and bureaucratically of any of our institutions. And you'll remember at inflections in the economy, tech firms, they're not hesitant to say,

hey, we're laying off 15,000 people. We're downsizing by 25,000 people. I once met the guy that ran the Microsoft's acquisition of the Nokia, this disaster of Microsoft phone. And they wrote off this massive thing and workforce. And so obviously, in individual cases, layoffs are not good. Layoffs are tragic. Layoffs are damaging to people. However, they're a necessary function of having a competitive economy. Tech CEOs understand that. And so what I think the economy inflects and our politics continues to shape the narrative on DEI, you're going to have the conditions set for companies to wind these things down entirely. There is no business justification for laying off engineers and retaining your DEI bureaucrats. And so when they're forced to make that decision, I just hope that the politics are established where they can say, you know what, we're getting

back to our core mission, creating great products, we're going to be ruthlessly competitive in the marketplace, and anything that detracts from that is done. It's below the line. And so this is what I hope happens. Obviously, I don't want any layoffs ever. I don't want any recession ever. But these are two inevitable facets of political and economic life. And so the prudent political calculation is to be prepared for them and then to also prepare the conditions in order to emerge from those stronger, more innovative, and better position on the political field. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. It has been absolutely real. That's that. Catch you guys here in the next pod. I think it's Friday. So have a good one. Later.

Thank you.