Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 308 | The Battle for Our Future: America vs. Critical Race Theory | Guest: Christopher Rufo

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

Christopher Rufo, adjunct fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, is leading the fight against the destructive ideology of critical race theory. His revealing research on CRT's infiltration into the American government inspired President Trump's executive order, which seeks to abolish the ideology from the federal government, the military, and all federal contractors. CRT is not "racial sensitivity training"; it's a worldview that obliterates biblical and Western concepts of justice, the rule of law, objective truth, and morality. We are seeing its consequences not only in academia, corporations, federal agencies, and even the church, but also in the left-wing violence in America's major cities. Today, Rufo tells Allie how to identify CRT and, more importantly, defeat it once and for all.   Today's Links Christopher Rufo https://christopherrufo.com/ Christopher Rufo's Facebook https://www.facebook.com/realchrisrufo Christopher Rufo's Twitter https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo ------ Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed.

You can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Friday. I am so excited for you to listen to today's conversation with Christopher Rufo. Man, it is a mind-blowing. We're talking about critical theory, where it is, how it exists, how it's going to break down society if we do not push back against it.

And this is just one of those conversations that is going to leave you shaking your head, but also feeling so informed, equipped, and empowered. So without further ado, here is Chris Rufo. Christopher, thank you so much for joining me. It's great to be with you. Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Sure. I'm Chris Rufo. I'm the director of the Discovery Institute Center on Wealth and Poverty.

I'm also a writer for City Journal. And the last two years, I've been covering the issues of public disorder in West Coast cities. So looking at homelessness, addiction, mental illness. crime. But starting in the summer, I took on a new beat looking at critical race theory in our public institution. So that's been keeping me quite busy the last 90 days. And what caused that transition from looking at these West Coast cities to looking at these ideologies like critical race theory in our government? It all really emerged from my work looking at the policies in the city of Seattle.

And early in the summer, I got a message from a city of Seattle in point. that told me, you know, hey, the city of Seattle is now holding segregated diversity trainings. There's one civil rights training for white employees and one training for people of color working at the city. So this immediately caught my attention. I thought that, you know, the kind of irony of the Seattle Office of Civil Rights holding racially segregated training sessions had the makings of a good story. So I filed a records request. And when I got the record request back, I was just shocked, horrified, and dismayed at the content that they were teaching, which was totally in line with critical race theory, which I had been following as an observer

for the last number of years. And that story, once I reported on it, I put out the documents, I wrote the analysis for City Journal and the New York Post. That really set me off on this journey where I started getting dozens and then hundreds of whistleblowers from public institutions all over the country telling me, hey, we have trainings that are on the same kind of thing happening here. And I was particularly interested in the training sessions that were teaching these extremely divisive and kind of racially kind of toxic principles in the federal government. So that's the story that I really latched on to. I did the Treasury. I did the National Nuclear Laboratories. I did the CDC. I did EPA. I did State Department. You name it. This

is something that has pervaded our institutions, and I thought that it was something I should follow as a journalist. And tell me, what is the content of these trainings, at least in general? Yeah, it all kind of critical race theory is this idea in the American context that the United States is fundamentally and irredeemably racist country and that all of our social institutions, from the Constitution, our legal system, our social structures, how kind of the government and economy works, is kind of a smoke screen or kind of a camouflage for naked racial oppression. And the idea is that because our institutions are actually not leading to equality, to freedom, to equal protection, they're actually enabling white supremacy.

The only choice is to destroy them. And what that means in practice is that they argue that white employees in the training context can be reduced to this racial essence of whiteness, which is a kind of white supremacist in nature, whether overt or covert, whether externalized or psychologically internalized, and the values that we think of as good, such as objectivity, intellectualization, rationality, mathematics, comfort, all of those things are actually just kind of rationalizations for white supremacy and they have to be dismantled in the workplace in individual psychologies and in society at large. And these are ideas that, you know, have been percolating

in academia for decades. And you can kind of laugh at them and mock them and dismiss them as the kind of fevered fantasies of an intellectual class. What's happened almost silently and invisibly is that these ideas have jumped out of the academy and started really infiltrating into all of our public institutions so that I think without hyperbole, I can say in almost every school district, in almost every federal agency, in almost every kind of university and education system, this has become the dominant ideology, the kind of political philosophy that has the most power and authority within the institutions. And I think once it's exposed, once people truly understand what it means in a kind of concrete, tangible way.

Once they actually read the documents, I think people have been unanimously horrified, whether they're on the right, in the center, or on the left. And you talked about that critical race theory asserts that whiteness, as it is defined, not just by the color of your skin, but by certain constructs and concepts, even as basic as objectivity and a certain perspective of history and mathematics and science. and things like that, that it has to be dismantled, critical race theory asserts, or it has to be destroyed, I guess. And how does critical race theory and these trainees, how do they suggest destroying and dismantling these concepts and constructs of whiteness?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think if you look back at the actual literature of critical race theories, some of the founding texts from the 90s and early 2000s, they're very explicit. They say we're deeply skeptical of the idea of progress. We're deeply skeptical of the constitutional system. We're deeply skeptical of the kind of legal structures that we have of individual rights. And they want to replace them with kind of group identity-based rights and a group identity-based power system that is in their own language incompatible with the American Constitution. And they're actually doing a good job at dismantling these because the first step is really to kind of create a social system where upholding the American Constitution,

upholding the American values, upholding objectivity or individual rights, is seen as somehow wrong or evil or aberrant. And then they're attacking individual psychology, the individual psychology of people that are in these institutions, creating a tremendous sense of fear where they're able to establish kind of institutional dominance. And then they're really kind of corrupting the institutions from the inside out. They're gaining political power, often at taxpayer expense in the kind of bureaucracies, whether it's education, university system, or the kind of government. And then they're slowly kind of dismantling the structures from within. And I think the height of irony is that for people who don't believe in the American system, the greatest

kind of advocates of critical race theory are funded by American taxpayers. And I think that This is what we have to wake up to. We have to say, you know what, if you're going to be kind of at the taxpayer expense, if you're going to be a public servant, you have to serve the public and you have to believe in the fundamental principles and systems of the United States. And if you don't, you're out of here. You can practice critical race theory under your First Amendment protections on your own time and your own dime, but you don't have the right to be subsidized by taxpayers. And I find it absolutely outrageous that every whole, poor American, every working class American, every plumber and Uber driver and electrician in

this country is going to pay the six-figure salaries of critical race theorists who have nothing but contempt for the American people, nothing but hatred for American history, and nothing, no greater ambition than to destroy the United States itself. So I understand the philosophy from an academic perspective, but I'm wondering what they believe, this looks like practically, especially like within corporations or local governments or within, you know, federal agencies, you know, they're probably not. I mean, you tell me, just coming out and saying in these trainings, hey, look, our goal is to dismantle the American system and the Western rule of law because we hate America and American history and white people in whiteness.

And so we're going to replace all of these things with subjectivity and collectivism. They're probably not just coming out and saying that. Like I'm guessing that's not what the training entails. I'm guessing it's a little bit more insidious than that. Like it's a it's a little bit more subtle and sly. And so I'm curious, what does it sound like in these trainings in a way that they make it relevant to, you know, the people's jobs in these agencies and in these local governments and in these corporations? Does that make sense? Like what does it actually look like on a practical level in these trainings? Yeah, it really, they operate on two levels, the explicit and the implicit. And in some cases, they're actually explicit about it. I broke a story about a Department of

Education funded organization that was hosting a conference with a keynote speaker who advocated for abolition, abolition of prisons, abolition of schools, abolition of the wage labor system, because the schools are prisons. That was the kind of metaphor. We need to abolish the public education system and replaced it with the kind of social justice system. And she advocated explicitly for the abolition of all of the kind of American institutions. And then, you know, when I broke the story, she was shocked and upset because I had essentially revealed publicly what they have been saying privately for years. But in most cases, you're right. It's implicit. And I think that the model is not, you know, the kind of revolutionary model of a kind of flag waving, let's overthrow the system.

It's implicit, it's insidious, and it's psychological in nature. And what they do is they rely on a series of psychological techniques that could be described almost as cult indoctrination, where the first step is to convince the employees that there's something fundamentally and inherently wrong with them. They'll say, actually, these are your internalized white supremacy. That's a phrase that they love to use, where you think X, Y, and Z is true, but actually X, Y, and Z are merely expressions of your own kind of internal psychology and your own internalized white supremacy. All those things that you thought were good are actually you being racist.

So, you've got my attention now. I'm actually racist. I didn't know about it. I don't treat people in a racist way. I don't think racist thoughts. But subconsciously, you know, I'm deeply racist is what they're telling you. And then what they do, once they hooked you in with persuading you of your kind of innate psychological aberration, then they say, we actually have the solution. We're going to fix you psychologically. And by fixing you psychologically, we can kind of wash away your sins. And then we can begin this great work of rebuilding society in the image of kind of anti-racism or social justice. But then they do something very tricky, which is again, kind of consonant with your basic kind of brainwashing techniques. They say,

You're going to become anti-racist, but because you're fundamentally and kind of irreversibly defined by whiteness, you can never quite get there. And society, because it's fundamentally based on institutional racism and white supremacy, can also never quite get there. So you're going to be permanently on this journey of anti-racism that never ends. And we're always going to remind you of your evil, but always dangling the kind of potential. for good in front of you. And then they hook you. They have you on a constant journey of anti-racism that never ends. That, by the way, is fun, it kind of always demanding new funding and multi-million

dollar grants for the anti-racist trainers. Well, also saying that capitalism is terrible. The new priestly class, that capitalism terrible. Yeah. And it's so wrought with contradictions. It's so absurd on the face of it that it only works because they bully people and they intimidate people in that which prevents them from speaking out. But that's changing. We cannot let this kind of intellectually and morally bankrupt ideology intimidate us anymore. We have to speak it out. We have to call it out for what it is. And I think that when enough people have the courage to stand up and just say no, not going to do this, this is wrong. I'm going to fight this. This is something that I think could crumble because let's face it. It's a, it's a critical race theory is a critical

threat to the country, but it has nothing in comparison to the fights that America has won before. Yeah. And I think that once we stand up to it, it'll crumble like a house of cards. I've said before that the antidote to critical race theory is critical thinking. Critical race theory hates critical thinking because like you said, it's a house of cards and it's wrought with contradictions. And once you start poking holes in it, really just kind of the asking clarifying questions. Well, okay, what does justice look like? Why are we ascribing guilt and innocence based on people's skin color and not what they've

actually done? What does the world look like without prisons, without real schools, without police, without the rule of law? Can we look throughout history and can we look at what these left-wing revolutions that have been waged in the name of equality and liberation have looked like have they ended well? Well, thankfully, history is a great teacher and does tell us that. And so critical thinking does a lot, I think, in the way of pushing back against critical theory.

The question is, what do people do who are caught in these situations? Like, I get these messages all the time. And quite frankly, I don't really know what to say. When people say, at my job, I'm having to go through what they call diversity and inclusion training. They typically don't, I guess, call it critical race training. Diversity and inclusion. Well, that sounds universally positive and great. So they sit in there.

They learn about how whiteness is terrible. need to divest from their whiteness and their company is, you know, intrinsically racist and now they're working to be anti-racist, all this stuff. Well, a lot of people who listen to me know that that is a crock, but they don't know what to do. They don't know how to push against it. They don't know what to say. They feel powerless. They say, do I quit?

Or do I leave my church? Because this is happening in the evangelical church. Or do I say something? So what is your advice? I know every situation is different. But if someone were to say something, to speak up and to say, you know what, I'm pushing back against this ridiculousness, what would that look like in an effective way? Yeah, there's a lot of different tactics that I can use. And my advice would always say,

go as far as your courage can go. So, you know, take what risks that you can take. But certainly, you know, that's a different formula for everyone. But there's a couple things. One is that if it's something that is especially egregious, get the documentation, take screenshots, download PDFs, you know, snap video clips. And then, send them almost as a whistleblower to media, send them to anywhere that you feel like might be carrying this story. Because once a spotlight has shined on these programs, especially in local media context, people kind of back away from it very quickly. And that's happening even in very progressive cities like Seattle, where they're running some programs that are kind of crazy

and parents don't like it, and they start pushing back. Second, find allies within your community, Find like-minded people that agree and show a united front because if it's one person, it can be dismissed. But if it's 20 people, 30 people, 100 people, they'll have to listen. Third, look at the legal recourse. The president's executive order that has followed some of my reporting provides a pathway, you know, either through the Attorney General's office or through the kind of local courts where some of these trainings that are kind of explicitly, you know, whiteness is bad and new people

are bad because you're white or you people are good because you're this or whatever, that likely constitutes a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. So there may be grounds for a lawsuit. And when we get enough of these lawsuits going across the country, corporations and universities and educational institutions are going to actually look at critical race theory trainings as a legal risk. And that will outweigh the kind of woke signaling that is driving them currently. And then, you know, third, I think that, you know, there are also other avenues for kind of investigations. I know that from my reporting just in the last 90 days,

it's launched a Department of Justice investigation into the city of Seattle. It's launched Office of the Special Counsel investigations into multiple federal departments. It's launched a Department of Education investigation. There are people that are starting to take this seriously. And you should reach out to kind of the institutions that might have some legal sway and just start hammering these people. Yeah. Because the ideologies that they're pushing, in my view, constitute racial harassment, constitute

toxic work environments. And I think that what I'd love to see moving forward. Again, the president who released an executive order on this is a great start. But I think that we need to start a concerted campaign to push back against this stuff through every mechanism and every avenue possible. And explain to people if it's not obvious enough already, but really just spell out. if we take critical theory to its logical conclusion, if it got its way by tearing down all of our institutions, infecting all of our corporations, our school systems, whatever, what do you think

it would look like? Like what would justice and education and our systems look like in America if critical race theory is able to fully manifest itself? Yeah, I mean, I think you'd basically, you can go through the first 10 amendments. You can go through the Bill of Rights one by one. And certainly the First Amendment would be gone because in critical theory, you don't have a right to speak a hate speech. If your speech is kind of enabling systemic racism, that should be actually curtailed and controlled by the government. Certainly the Second Amendment would be gone. I think there's a kind of critical theory-based argument where you could say the right to bear arms has historically been used as a tool of oppression and we actually need to get rid of that. And you can go and so on and so forth. And then I think even the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the

law, that would be gone. Critical race theorists and critical legal theorists have argued that those kind of the idea of equal protection under the law enables racial disparities, enables kind of race-based oppressions. And they want to replace individual rights with group-based rights. So you'd immediately see a legal system. that recognizes not the individual, but the kind of immutable characteristics of group-based identity, then you'd see a power structure and an economic structure that distributes power, that distributes a money, that distributes economic benefit on the basis of kind of group identity. And the result of that, we've tried this, right?

Historically, we've tried to implement these policies, these kind of ideas, not in the United States, but outside the United States. and they always end in famine, genocide, economic collapse, death, destruction, mayhem, and despair. So it's not a very good recipe. I mean, it's like if you're a baker and you try baking a recipe that always turns out bad every time, at a certain point you have to say, you know what, I think I'm actually going to try to just make a nice sourdough. That historically has turned out pretty good and we've evolved the kind of recipe for these breads over a thousand years. But you have a kind of committed utopian kind of radical utopianist philosophy that just says the only thing that's standing

in the way of a perfect society on earth is are these kind of outdated conservative institutions and if we just destroy them through no effort except for the effort of destruction something beautiful and something perfect will emerge unfortunately that's never happened and I don't think ever will. Yeah. Leftism just continually gets human nature wrong, which that's the reason why socialism, communism, these left-wing revolutions have not worked because it doesn't understand basic human nature. I encourage people. I have encouraged people before to go to go learn about what happened under Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, a revolution and change made in the name of liberation for indigenous people that actually ended not just in destroying the white farmers in Zimbabwe, but also the

indigenous populations there. Why Zimbabwe is the way it is today is because of these left-wing revolutions that are being waged in a much similar fashion to what's going on here. And like you said, so well, it always ends in destruction. It doesn't actually lead to the liberation that people are looking for. Can you talk a little bit more about the president's executive order and what it actually accomplishes? Are the agencies listening? Is it going to do anything? It is. You know, they released after kind of the initial volume of reporting about this, the president's directed the OMB director to issue a memo. And now that memo has been expanded in a formal executive order earlier this week. And it's actually quite breathtaking. The ambition of this executive order

is nothing short of astonishing. What it does is it basically prevents federal funding going towards critical race theory in any capacity. So what it does is, first of all, it instructs the federal agencies to stop doing any training based on the principles of critical race theory, which constitutes kind of race and sex-based harassment. So it's automatically out at any of the federal institutions and they've built in some enforcement mechanisms. It's out in the United States military. Critical race theory had been making inroads the last couple of years and in the military, that's now gone. And then third, and this is really, I think, the most ambitious and kind of incredible

jujitsu move, the order says that anyone who wants to do business with the federal government, so this is probably the majority of Fortune 500 companies that have federal contractors, you can no longer teach critical race theory-based trainings anywhere in your company. It's now a requirement, just like anti-discrimination elsewhere has been a requirement. You can't do it. So they're going after the corporations in this way. And then another great piece is that it's saying any federal grants, any federal research grants,

academic grants, university grants, none of those can fund critical race theory-based programs moving forward. So this is going to cripple potentially hundreds of research projects moving forward. And I think it's basically just saying, we're going to actually use the levers of power to go after this ideology. It has no business. You can do it privately. You can do it on your own time, your own dime.

But this is no longer going to be subsidized by taxpayers. And they really pulled out all the stops to push at it, to cut off the funding throughout all of our public institutions and even our kind of private institutions, you're no longer able to be able to push this. And certainly there will be fights moving forward, how it's implemented, how it's enforced. But I think that for the moment, we have to kind of celebrate. This is a unprecedented move. and people have been pushing back against critical race theory intellectually for years.

But this is the first time it's actually been operationalized and institutionalized from a position of political power. Yeah. Yeah. You talked about what the conclusions would be like if we didn't push back against it. I'm very, very thankful that the president has made a stand on this, that people like you are reporting on this, that people within their companies and within, you know, federal agencies where unfortunately this is happening, people are speaking up.

people are noticing it. I feel like for so long people just, they didn't notice. But now you have people actually, you know, Nicole Hannah Jones, Ibermex-Kendi, a lot of these activists actually coming out and just saying the quiet part out loud, I think he is the one who recommended that we, you know, have basically like an anti-racist task force, which is a group of unelected people that would kind of go around and determine which policies are creating or allowing for disparities, between racial groups and would take legal action to overturn those policies or, you know, perhaps indict the people that are in power. And so I feel like one of the big reasons why this idea that critical race theory has become so

popular is the misunderstanding that disparities in outcome always means discrimination and policy. And so when people push back against critical race theory and, you know, push back against the ideas of people like Iber Mexican D. They assume that, well, if you're pushing back against that, it's because you're racist, because you like disparities, because you like discrimination. And this is the only way to create equality. Obviously, people like Thomas Sol have pushed back against this a lot.

That disparities and outcome doesn't necessarily mean discrimination and opportunity. We are looking for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, correct? But, you know, I think that's part of why it's become. so popular is because of that misunderstanding. Do you agree with that? Or how do you think this is taken root so firmly? Yeah, I think that's the mechanism by which it works. And I think what you're describing in my mind is really the kind of rhetorical power of critical race theory. If you disagree with critical race theory, if you push back, if you dissent, the automatic kind of translation, the pushback is, well, you're only disagreeing with us because that's an expression.

of your white privilege, your white internalized white supremacy, your white fragility. So embedded in the argument is that if you disagree with the argument, it's just an expression that you are actually the problem. And this is a kind of circular logic, right? They try to construct it in a way where you can't disagree. So that's one. But two, is that these are extraordinarily powerful words. I mean, if you called someone a white supremacist, for example, a couple years ago, I mean, that is like the worst thing you can possibly be. It's the worst thing you can be. There may be a couple other things like horrible crimes you could commit.

Yeah. But I mean, that is kind of like one of the greatest moral crimes. And justifiably, white supremacy is wrong. It's wrong in 1950. It's wrong in 1850. It's wrong in 2020. It's a kind of universal wrong. But what they've done is that they've essentially kind of white supremacized everything.

I've read recent articles where they say square dancing is white supremacist, Math is white supremacist, logic is white supremacist, dogs are white supremacist. Someone told me boats are white supremacist yesterday. And it's like, so what they've done is that they've overplayed their hand. They've actually stripped the language of all of its rhetorical power. And I think that's actually going to be a turning point because they no longer have that as a weapon to strike fear into the hearts of people, to intimidate and to bully people into silence and compliance. As they've degraded the rhetorical power of those words, they've also lost a bit of

their kind of political power. And then, you know, kind of in the deepest irony, they've actually kind of kind of muddied the waters so that it's really hard to tell kind of what is right and wrong because they've kind of flooded the vocabulary. They've flooded the op-ed pages with this kind of extraordinary and reckless rhetoric that I think most people are kind of confused. to saying, you know, is, you know, is Rice-A-Roney, as white supremacist, I don't know what to do anymore. But I think that presents a problem, but also an opportunity. It presents the opportunity where people essentially have nothing to lose, and they can start fighting back. They can start retaking the territory. Yeah. You know, I have noticed that simultaneously, while critical theorists,

critical race theories, you know, I'm a Christian, this is partly, I mean, this is a Christian conservative podcast. So we talk about how this stuff is seeping into evangelicalism and the church, and it seems like these activists are getting louder and louder, but so is so is the dissent. And it's a shame that it's kind of taken us a long time. It seems like to realize that that it has a name that this is what's happening, not just in the church, but in all of our systems. But I agree with you. People of all different faiths and ideologies and backgrounds and academic persuasions, it seems like are saying, hang on. Actually, objective truth is important. Actually, the Western rule of law is pretty good. Actually, capitalism, not so bad. The police and prisons are probably necessary.

That doesn't mean there aren't necessarily, you know, reforms to be made in these areas. But I do see a lot of people pushing back and I hope people feel empowered by that. And unfortunately, you will be called a racist. You will be called a bigot. But like you said, those words, unfortunately, I think it's a travesty that they're losing the power that they should have. But at the same time, it's almost a good thing because people can kind of plow ahead and say, you know what, I'm going to be called a racist, but it almost doesn't mean anything if what you're doing is not actually, actually racist. I'd like to, you know, kind of make a point that I think is really important and really relevant

to your views and your audiences, is that critical race theory, if you're in a church and they're thinking of adopting this stuff, you should remind them of the lineage of critical race theory. It doesn't emerge from the Judeo-Christian tradition at all. In fact, it's deeply hostile to the Judeo-Christian tradition. And it really emerges from a kind of radical atheism. You can trace it back to Marx, who obviously is deeply hostile to Christianity. And then to the Frankfurt School, where they're trying to take economic Marxism and then kind of grafting identity politics on top of it.

These, again, are kind of militant atheists and deeply hostile to Christianity. And then even the kind of Black Lives Matter movement of the day, again is not coming from the tradition of Martin Luther King, who is inspired by the declaration, inspired by the Bible. These are coming from a totally different tradition. They have nothing to do with the kind of Christian sense of justice. And in effect, all they want to do is undermine it. So I think it is just really the height of folly for churches to be adopting this. You're adopting something that at the end wants to destroy you. And I think that people should be very vocal and very strong in keeping this out of our faith institutions. Yes, you're absolutely right.

That's such a good point. And I think that critical theories have become very strategic and very effective at infecting the minds of a lot of Christians by saying, oh, no, no, no, this is just a fight for justice. And, you know, God tells us to do justice and to love mercy, not realizing there's been a slight of hand there. There's been an exchange in the definitions of justice that is not biblical justice, like you said, as a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which, God's justice is truthful, it's proportionate, it is impartial, and it is direct. And that is not, that is not the justice of critical theory, which is collectivist and doesn't really care what you did or did not do, but as scribes guilt and innocence just based

on whatever oppression group according to your skin color that you are in. But they don't, the people who kind of buy into critical theory within the church don't realize that when they say, oh yeah, you know, I'm just pushing for racial justice and justice that the justice that they are very often pushing for is not real justice. It's not real biblical justice. And so, but you hear it's a lot of the same things as like in the secular world when you hear that, you know, you need to divest of your whiteness. Whiteness is an internalized white supremacy is something you need to get rid of.

And here's, you know, what you do to do that. And, you know, objectivity and all of this stuff is punctuality. That's all a traditional family. that's all a matter of white supremacy. We also hear that within the church. We hear things that biblical inerrancy, the belief that the Bible is anerrant and authoritative, that that's a part of white supremacy,

that having a certain biblical definition of justice is white supremacy, that believing that even within the church, that Jesus is the only way truth in life, that's white supremacist. So it's the same thing. It mirrors it very well. They push back against the institutions of Christianity that have had,

held it together as, you know, the religion that it's been for thousands of years by saying these things, these pillars are actually associated with whiteness. And it is an effort to do exactly what you said. It's actually an effort to make Christianity a form of agnosticism in the same way that it's an effort to make America, you know, some form of socialist dystopia. And I think a lot of people within Christianity and maybe other religions do, I don't know. They don't realize that in taking on these definitions, they're actually a, and abetting the destruction of their faith and of their country. But I just wanted to note that.

I got one more question for you. And that is, do you think that the riots and the violence and the chaos that we are seeing that seem to have been just exploded over the past few months but have been building for the past few years? Do you think that any of that is a result of this ideology of critical theory that's being propagated? Hey, this is Steve Dase. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing

our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular.

This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch. watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's not even, you don't even really need like an analytical capacity to say, actually, the riots are emerging from this ideology, from this philosophy. All you have to do is go to live streams. All of the kind of protests around the country, especially in the West Coast cities, they're actually live streaming the speeches, live

streaming the demonstrations. You can find them on Twitch and other platforms. And all you have to do is listen to the speeches from the riot leaders, from the protest leaders, they really kind of have translated the academic theories of critical race theory into the kind of language of street protests where they're saying, this protest is about George Floyd, but it's really about dismantling the patriarchy, overthrowing capitalism, and burning the constitution. And you see these American flags, you know, these flags are kind of a kind of legacy of imperialism. Let's light them up. And all you have to do is listen and with a kind of open mind and then kind of a curious mind. And if you have the background, if you understand where these ideas emerge from, you'll find that

the riots are kind of a crude translation of a very refined and intellectual academic theory. And they've done something remarkable, which is they've repackaged 1960s and 1970s cultural Marxism from Marcusa and the Frankfurt School and others. and they've revived it with the kind of millennial twist, which is kind of the black clothes and the Antifa flags and the kind of, and the kind of Molotov cocktail throwing kind of new enemies of ice and the Department of Justice, et cetera. But this is simply kind of reheated and warmed over 1960s Marxism. It's nothing new. And to imagine that it's really just about police brutality is to really be blind to the rhetoric that exists on the streets.

So, again, there's a direct line from critical theory to the diversity training program and the federal government, to the Molotov cocktails that are smashing against government buildings in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and other cities. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. And I think a lot of this has been pre-planned and building up for a long time. The person who wrote, in defense of looting, which NPR covered actually said back in April, you know, I feel like there is a movement that's brewing. There is a push coming up for, you know, for pushing against the system using looting.

That was back in April. That was before George Floyd. So I think this has been brewing for a long time. And I certainly agree with you that critical theory is at least in large part to blame. Yeah, no, that's right. And one last tidbit I'd leave you with to ponder, something kind of very small, but I think very suggestive detail, is that you just look at kind of the traditional RIP, right? right, rest in peace. The idea that in the afterlife, you're going to hopefully ascend to a kind of transcendent existence, something that is peaceful, something that is kind of an end state

for human good, light, and consciousness. But the kind of protesters and the race theorists, they've chose rest in power because they believe essentially there is no afterlife. The next world is just like ours. It can be reduced not to a kind of human goodness, but it can be reduced to a struggle for worldly power. And I think that detail is something that encapsulates and kind of captures everything. Do you want a world and a kind of transcendent metaphysics where you can rest in peace in eternity? Or do you want to be trapped in a struggle for political power until the end of time? That's your choice. So if you're listening and you want to choose, that's the fundamental choice. What world do you want to believe in and what are your fundamental

convictions. And I think with any kind of thinking and right person, they would choose that wisely as they think about these issues. Yeah. How freeing is it to realize that we can actually regard people as individuals with individual souls and individual personalities and wants and interests and talents and needs rather than ascribing characteristics or guilt or innocence to people based on their group identity. That really is ironically an oppressive way to think. that kind of collectivist mentality. And what people need to realize is that it is not in the nature of critical theory to unite. So people who are like, we need reconciliation and unity and intersectionality is the way to get there.

It's not in its nature. Its nature is division. Its nature and end is destruction, as you have explained so well. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Can you please tell everyone where they can follow you, how they can support you? Yeah, great. I'm on Twitter at Real Chris Rufo, last name RUFO. That's just real Chris Rufo.

That's been a lot of fun to be on Twitter lately. And then if you want to learn more about my other work and read some of my papers and op-eds and articles and then support my work, it's just Christopherrufo.com. Again, that's RUFO. Christopherrufo.com. And it's really great to sit down with you. Thank you so much, Christopher. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you. Hey, this is Steve Deist. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype

and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed. You can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.