Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 503 | Now Is the Time to Double Down | Guest: Chris Rufo

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

Today we're talking with journalist Chris Rufo about the pandemic of critical race theory in schools. All over the country, parents are waking up to the leftist indoctrination their kids are receiving in the classroom and are rightly speaking up about it. In response, the federal government will now be looking into parents who disrupt school board meetings the same way they would look into a potential terrorist. At the same time, they'll still try to tell you that CRT isn't taught in schools, but the truth is out. Now's the time to double down and make absolutely sure that your school is educating kids, not indoctrinating them. Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (09:33) Interview (53:45) Outro --- Today's Sponsors: Reliefband is 100% drug-free, non-drowsy, providing all-natural relief with zero side effects and is the #1 FDA-cleared anti-nausea wristband that has been clinically proven to quickly relieve nausea & vomiting associated with motion sickness, anxiety, migraines, morning sickness, chemotherapy & so much more. Go to Reliefband.com & use promo code 'ALLIE' for 20% off plus free shipping! Hunter Douglas helps you live well with their innovative window shade designs, gorgeous fabrics, & control systems so advanced, they can be scheduled to automatically adjust to their optimal position throughout the day. Go to HunterDouglas.com/ALLIE today to take advantage of the Season of Style rebate savings event. Offer expires December 6, 2021! Marpipe is the new multivariate testing platform for Facebook ad creative that lets you do creative testing better! It's deceptively simple: just upload your assets & Marpipe will create hundreds of ad variants & seamlessly launch them with one click. Book a free demo at Marpipe.com/ALLIE right now & get a FREE $2,000 credit - but only until December 31, 2021! --- Past Episode Mentioned: Ep 495: The Truth About 'Social Emotional Learning' & What Your Kids Are Reading | Guest: Sherry Clemens https://apple.co/3aqmbKz --- 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.

Guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Monday. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. Wow, wow, well. I am very fired up. I was fired up coming into the studio this morning because there is a lot going on right now. We're going to talk about all of it this week or I'm going to try to talk about all of it. week Southwest Airlines. This is probably the biggest story going on right now, had to cancel

over a thousand flights, I think almost 2,000 flights over the weekend, apparently because of employees walking off the job in protest of the vaccine mandate. Now, that's not being covered by the media. So we're kind of relying, including myself, I'm relying on people who work for this airline to tell me what's going on. There are many conservative journalists who are kind of in the same boat. Southwest is saying it had something to do with weather. That's why a bunch of flights got canceled going in and out of Florida. But other airlines did not have to cancel their flights going in and out of Florida. And people in Florida are like, what the heck? Our weather is fine. It turns out that at least from voices on the inside, they are saying that people are protesting this

vaccine mandate. We're hearing rumblings of other airlines who have mandated the vaccine like American Airlines that this is going to happen as well. Thankfully, the unions, which I'm not a big fan of what unions have become. I understand and appreciate the original need for labor unions, but they have become these very left-wing bureaucratic bodies that mostly exist for themselves in their own power and not actually representing workers' needs and speaking truth to power and all of that. this case, it seems like the airline unions, the pilots unions and just the airline unions in general, are actually pushing back against these mandates. And from what I have learned, there are just a few thousand pilots at Southwest Air that are saying, no, either no, they're not giving the vaccine,

or they have gotten the vaccine. And they are simply pushing back against what they see as an unjust and tyrannical mandate. And you know what? Good for you. Good for you. Pilots. Good for you. Flight attendants.

I, it's truly, sincerely feel for everyone whose plans were disrupted over the weekend. Like, there truly are few things more stressful than being stranded at an airport and getting a flight canceled. I had to fly over this weekend. I don't travel that much, but I had to go two places this weekend. And I actually had to fly three days. different airlines, which is very unique to me. I'm typically an American Airlines girl, just what I've always flown. But I didn't fly Southwest at all this weekend. And I'm like,

oh, thank you, Lord, for your providence and helping me get home because I would really hate to be stranded in Detroit where I was or stranded anywhere. But that's where I was on Saturday. And so I'm very thankful, very thankful for that, because I really feel for the people who are stranded at airports, even as I am fully supportive. I'm fully supportive of everyone who is pushing back in this way. Like to pilots, to teachers, to flight attendants, to nurses that are pushing back against this in a peaceful and effective way. Hold the freaking line.

Like this fight matters. It absolutely matters. This is not an anti-vaccine stance, although there are people who are against the vaccine, okay, that's fine. But more than anything, like the mass protests that you are seeing around the world, the protests that you are seeing here that very often aren't covered by the media, the boycotts that you're seeing, the walking off of jobs that you are seen, it's a big, massive pushback against these mandates, against these passports that are a huge infringement upon people's liberty and their ability to provide for.

for their families. And honestly, I just have so little understanding at this point of Christians who don't see what's happening, who don't see this as a huge infringement upon people's liberty, who don't see this as an injustice, who don't see why all of these different restrictions, regulations, and mandates and passports have a cumulative effect of oppression and totalitarianism. How do you not see that that's where we're headed? Like, if you or someone over the past year who has talked about police brutality, and yet you're looking at what's going on in Australia where people are being beaten in the streets

because they're peacefully protesting. You don't have anything to say about that, or maybe you think that's good, or maybe you think the police should be enforcing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports and mask wearing and all of that. You're a giant hypocrite, and you don't see what's going on.

Like too many people did not pay attention in history class when it came to the history of the 20th century and the patterns that we see leading up to totalitarianism. So many people are just so dedicated to believing that everything is well and good, that the right is always blowing things out of proportion, that everything is fine. It's okay that Australia, parts of Australia have become a police state. It's okay that pastors are getting arrested in places like Canada. Oh, maybe they deserve it. Maybe it's really for our public health. It's fine that there's a mandate that is causing thousands of nurses to quit, apparently in the midst of a pandemic that's putting a strain on our

hospitals. Oh, it's fine that military service men and women who signed up to pay the ultimate sacrifice are now being booted out of the military because they won't get a vaccine for a disease that they probably have natural immunity for, or if they don't, they simply don't want to get the vaccine and that choice should be honored. Oh, that's all fine. It's just a mask. It's just another restriction. It's just a mandate. It's, you know, just the Biden administration saying that they are going to cut antibody supply to these certain southern states that won't go along with his authoritarian mandates. It's fine. It's all for public health. You're asleep. You're asleep. And I just have so little patience for that anymore. How do you not see what's going on?

How do you not see it? I don't know. I don't know. And then what we're talking about today, we're talking about Merrick Garland mobilizing the FBI against concerned public school parents. We're going to talk to Chris Rufo. He is a journalist who has been one of the loudest and most persistent voices against critical theory in both the government and in schools. I don't see how anyone could look at this story that we're going to talk about today. The other stories that I just mentioned. And gosh, I haven't even talked about the supply chain issues, the fact that there are shipping containers all around outside of the United States that can't actually. actually unload all of their supplies because we have a worker shortage. The fact that the Biden

administration claimed that they were going to add, you know, half a million jobs last month. It was less than 200 million, or two, sorry, yeah, half a million jobs, 200,000 jobs were only added last month. The economic crisis that we are going through and are about to go through. I haven't even talked about all of that. How do you not see what's going on that we are being destroyed from the inside? How do you not see it? Anyway, we only have time to talk about one of these things today. We'll talk about the rest of them for the rest of the week. But we're going to talk about this memo from the Attorney General today and what it all means.

And then I'll have just a couple words of encouragement at the end for you. Hey, this is Steve Deast. 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 Steve Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Chris, thank you. so much for joining us again. So I noticed in the memo that it doesn't actually say anything about critical race theory. In your tweet, you talk about how this seems to be a referendum on the parents who are pushing back against critical race theory. So can you tell us how you kind of got there? Yeah, well, you know, at first it was kind of a hypothesis, but now we've actually confirmed it. So America First Legal led by Stephen Miller has

uncovered evidence that he's now sent to the Department of Justice that this was really a kind of inside job. This was a request that originated within the Department of Justice and the FBI. They farmed it out to the National School Boards Association, asking them to request it to give them a pretext. And in the National Schools Board's Association, original letter, which came out just a few days before the Attorney General's announcement, requested that not only the Attorney General unleashed the FBI on parents, but that he classify some parent protesters as domestic terrorists and prosecute them under the Patriot Act. And then what we're seeing now, and I have a document request, a FOIA request that will confirm this, and we're also getting this from reports

from America First Legal, is that this is really a collusion between the teachers unions, the National School Board Association, the Biden administration, to take the heat off of these school administrators that have been under tremendous pressure from parents and then unleash the state against them. It's something extraordinary that I think we haven't seen in a long time. And to those who say, and I know that you've talked about this many times, I've talked about it as well, too, to those who still say, because I'm still seeing this a lot,

not just from elected officials, but just from people in the public sphere saying, look, critical race theory is not being taught in schools. these parents who are pushing back are just believing some grand conspiracy theory, or maybe they're even racist, as one candidate for governor said in Virginia, Terry McAuliffe. Can you give us just some examples of what it might look like for critical race theory, which was once kind of an obscure collegiate legal theory being taught in grade school? Yeah, well, I mean, what I think is happening is that they're playing what I call a linguistic shell game.

They're using the definition of words. They're changing them. They're hiding them. They're moving them. In order to confuse parents, in order to shift the blame, in order to avoid responsibility. But you have to know the principles of critical race theory to know whether critical race theory is being taught. So if you see something like white privilege, white fragility, internalized white supremacy, if you see unconscious bias, which is it derives from critical race theory, all of these key terms, often diversity, and inclusion, not always, but I think more often than not adopts the principles of critical

race theory into its pedagogy. So if you're seeing any of these key terms or buzzwords, you're finding whether they label it critical race theory or not, the key tenets of critical race theory, which divides the world into oppressor oppressed by racial categories, which advocates for, you know, really crushing existing liberties, freedoms, constitutional guarantees in order to liberate the country in their word from racism and oppression.

Yep, and this is not just some kind of random deduction that you're doing or labeling every, you know, social justice, racial justice phrase is critical race theory or especially any teaching about racism as critical race theory. Like you can read, for example, Richard Delgado's introduction to critical race theory, as I have, and you see where all of those ideas originated. This is not an attempt to call everything that we don't like or every controversial teaching critical race theory. It truly does originate from the ideas of the original critical race theorists.

Part of the problem is that this is actually supposed to be an obscure legal theory, obviously one that I don't agree with. But that's where it's supposed to live. And yet these elementary school, middle school, high school teachers who are not at all even trained in this legal theory are trying to boil it down in its most crudest forms and teaching them to kids. What's going to be the effect of this, do you think, if they are continued to be allowed to do so? Well, there's two ways of looking at it. One is that American public schools in many cases are so incompetent. trouble teaching anything. Hopefully they will have trouble teaching this. But I think more likely is that this seeps into the background knowledge of kids. And I think what I've heard from parents

over and over is that when they're teaching intersectionality, privilege, oppression studies, etc., it creates a kind of guilt and shame complex among majority race kids, but also creates a kind of fatalism and fear complex within minority kids. You know, I had a, a kind of fatalism. I had a father who is a interracial couple in Arizona. He actually ended up speaking out at the school board meeting. You know, black father, white mother, and he said, this is ripping my family apart. It's filling my kids with fear. You know, my 10-year-old is now asking to sleep in the bed with mom and dad again because he's,

he was terrified by the lessons that they learned during Black History Month, which should be a celebration of black achievement and black resilience in the United States. But this father said it filled him with fear that he's. He would be hunted down and murdered by the police at any moment, that he couldn't ever succeed in life. And I think we're seeing now enough of these examples where they're saying not just that there has been historical groups of people in the United States with power and privilege, which is absolutely true and should be taught extensively, honestly, sometimes even brutally.

But it's saying that you, five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old, by virtue of your skin color, are inherently oppressive. You are responsible for the collective crimes of the past committed by people who look like you. It's one thing to teach honest history. It's quite another thing to teach critical race theory. Exactly. And that's the accusation that people, teachers, parents are getting from the left, that people who are pushing back on this just don't want anyone to talk about racism

or they don't want anyone to talk about, you know, the history of white supremacy or slavery or slavery or slavery. Crow in the United States. And that's not true at all. And not only do I believe that those things should be taught at the right time in the right way, but I actually think that critical race theory gets in the way of teaching those ugly points in American history accurately. Because if you are only looking at history through the lens of black oppressed and white oppressor, then you're missing a lot of nuance. You're missing a lot of in between. You are missing. the other reasons that other kind of injustice happen. Like you are teaching a form of morality that is based on skin color and not based on actual character, not based on motive, not based on

intention, not based on things that actually happened and the outcomes that were actually, that were actually exacted. You unfortunately are giving kids not only in an accurate look at history, but also I think in an accurate look of what it means to be good, what it means to be evil, because you're actually reducing it down to people's skin color and these very often inaccurate categories of bad versus good as white versus black. And so I just imagine it's not only oppressive to kids' minds, but it's very confusing and it actually inhibits them from being able to learn things accurately and well. I think that's right. And what you see throughout the critical race theory literature, I've read

thousands and thousands of pages of this stuff over the last year, is that it's at heart a philosophy of racial pessimism. And the founder of critical race theory, Harvard Law professor Derek Bell, says very explicitly that racism is a permanent and indestructible force in the United States. It was the foundation of this country, and it will always be the foundation of this country. It will always be essentially the most important thing. You can boil down anything in the United States to racism, racism, racism. And again, I think as you're saying, as I'm saying, obviously the United States has a history of racial injustice, sometimes really brutal, evil and horrific injustice, which we should reckon with, which we should explain to

people, which we should teach in schools, absolutely. But you also have to not have a one-dimensional story of the United States as evil only and evil always. You also have to teach the story of the United States's highest ideals, first declared in the founding, fought over and consecrated in blood during the Civil War, codified into law in the 1960s. And then now, I think, now seeping into the culture. I think most people in the United States today are probably the most tolerant people in the history of the world. I mean, we have people from every country on the planet, and we have a peaceful, productive, cooperative society. And how did that happen? If the United States, is permanently, essentially, just a kind of racist oppressor nation, how have we built the good

things that we've built over the centuries? Critical race theory doesn't have an answer to that. And therefore, it's a one-dimensional philosophy. It's a philosophy of racial pessimism. It's a philosophy that will fill kids not with a sense of hope and optimism and possibility, but a sense of despair. That's not, I think, what we should be teaching our kids. And importantly, I think this is a crucial point. to polling data, recent polling data in the 20 fastest growing cities, so places that are diversifying quickly, parents from every racial category, white, black, Asian, Latino, all opposed critical race theory in the classroom. And together, as a whole, they oppose it by a 42 point margin.

I mean, it's just overwhelming. People of all racial backgrounds do not want this in the classroom. Yeah. No one wants their kid to learn to hate themselves or do. to hate someone of a different skin color. I mean, that's supposed, that's the exact opposite direction that we are supposed to be going and that I think that we were going for a long time. It seems like over the past 10 or so, but especially the past six or so years, I mean, we have turned a very dark corner. I was actually looking at a Gallup poll recently that asked people what they think, you know, black Americans, white Americans, how they feel about race relations in the United States. It's the worst.

that it's been at least in 30 years. Black and white Americans feel that we are very divided among race. Now, how can that be possible if, as the critical race theorists say that critical race theory is supposed to make us reckon with our history, that it's supposed to bring us together, we're supposed to find some kind of restoration and reconciliation by, you know, reckoning with, that we really started in 1619 on slavery and not on all of these very good founding ideals that are found in our founding documents. It's obvious that these kinds of principles, which really became more popularized in mainstream while Barack Obama was president, it's obvious that it has torn us apart, which is in its nature. That is what critical race

theory is and does. Like you said, it believes that America essentially has to, we have to start back at zero and rebuild something different in order for, you know, people to be liberated and equal and equitable and all of that. But it doesn't have in its nature and it has no suggestion for how we build from zero. It only has plans for destruction and division. It doesn't have any plans to actually bring us together and build. Do you agree with that? Yeah, that's right.

And that's one of the most striking things when you actually read the literature of critical race theory. You go through, you read the books and you say, okay, you know, point, point diagnosis of the problem, problem, problem and what should we do about it? And on this point, the critical race theorists are more or less silent. They have very little to offer in the way of practical solutions. But what you see at the kind of end of a lot of these essays or in the kind of margins of a lot of these books is that they default to the old leftist ideology that has always animated that political movement. They want to seize and redistribute property. They want to severely limit or restrict the First Amendment. They want to, in essence, abolish the spirit of the 14th Amendment, replacing equal protection with group identity

based protection. And then they want to subvert and destroy the system of free enterprise and capitalism and want to install a bureaucracy with an almost totalitarian reach in order to enforce their ideology of, quote, unquote, anti-racism. And then you get the kind of outlines of a system that looks not much different than the kind of bureaucratic socialist regimes of the 20th century, which all ended in disaster. So if you're looking for hope, if you're looking for solutions, you're not going to find it with CRT. No, you're not.

And what's interesting to me is that, you know, they've been saying the same things for a very long time. I picked up a book by Thomas Soul that was read or that was written in 1984. And it was called Civil Rights, Rhetoric or Reality. I think it's rhetoric or reality. and he addresses all of the things that we're talking about because they've been around for a few decades now. I assume that that is the reason why the media doesn't elevate Thomas Sol as an influential black voice that we should be listening to because he has destroyed all of these arguments with basic economic data for a very long time.

And what it comes down to really for critical race theorists, as you just said, is power. It's about power. It's as, you know, all communists are. They are always about power. And I think we see this even today in something like the push for vaccine passports. Ibrax Kendi, who kind of, you know, he draws a lot of inspiration from critical race theorists, even though he would say maybe he doesn't. His whole schick is that any law that has the impact or the outcome of a disparate impact on black and brown Americans is racist. It is the impact, not the intent. And so considering that the majority of black Americans, there's the highest percentage of people in black Americans that are unvaccinated, things like vaccine passports will disproportionately affect black Americans.

And according to Ibramax Kendi and other critical race theorists, that is then, by their definition, racist. And yet I see maybe a few Black Lives Matter people talking up, the talking or standing. standing up about for that, against that, pushing back against that in places like New York City. But for the most part, I don't see Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi and a bunch of Democrats on the left who call themselves anti-racist pushing back against things like vaccine passports, even though they will disparately disproportionately affect black Americans. Why do you think that is? Well, it's actually, there's a twist of the story. Ibram Kendi spoke in Minneapolis, I believe, a few weeks ago. And the Twitter account, myth informed.

went to the event, asked him, do you think vaccine passports are racist? Kendi, because he knows where his bread is buttered, he knows that he doesn't want to offend the greater project of the left, said, well, no, vaccine passports aren't racist, health care is racist, and society is racist, and history is racist, which leads to things that may look like racist outcomes, but aren't. Oh, nice. And, I mean, stumbled into this ridiculous thing, got exposed and embarrassed on Twitter. surprise, surprise, Twitter just hunted down and took down all of these videos.

Really? Yeah, they did. They took down the videos with really no explanation. And then, you know, temporarily block the accounts of people who were posting them to protect Ibram Kennedy's reputation because he had botched this question so bad. And, you know, I don't think vaccine passports are racist. I think vaccine passports are a bad idea. I think they're a violation of our liberties. I think they're unnecessary.

Right. I think they're a path towards a kind of state of being that we really don't want. But certainly the anti-racist should be consistent. But what we see over and over is that they're not consistent because their goal is power. Their goal is control. Their goal is to move the country left. And I think that you have to think race is the means. Marxism is the end.

Yeah. This is the kind of two-part formula that they've used for decades that we see very clearly patterns. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm with you. I don't buy this definition that impact, not intent, is, you know, is the formula or the qualification for what is racist.

So I don't think they're racist either. But gosh, like you said, if anything, according to their definition of racism is racist, it's certainly vaccine passports, which are not just disproportionately affecting black Americans in some like intangible way. I mean, you're literally segregating. them from society. Like you are blocking on vaccinated people, which happen to be disproportionately black in places like New York City. you're blocking them out of polite society. And wow, what a coward.

You know, that's not the only time that Ibrax Kendi has been exposed for something that is hypocritical. Or in this case, it was something that wouldn't be popular on the left. He made some comment in an interview that he would be really sad if his daughter came home and said that, you know, or his daughter, I think did come home and say that, you know, she thinks she's a boy now. And instead of him celebrating it, he said, you know, that really made him really sad and distress. and that got buried real quick. You have to, I guess, protect Ibramax Kendi at all costs. Now, I want to get back quickly to this DOJ memo. What I want to know is, and I kind of, I know the answer,

but I want you to tell us, is there any evidence of concerned parents threatening or causing violence towards school administrators, school board members, at least in large numbers. Like, is the DOJ justified in any way to mobilize the FBI against allegedly violent parents? No, and I'll explain why. I mean, if you look at the evidence outlined, the Biden administration DOJ memo cites zero evidence. Right. They cite no evidence of threats.

They cite no evidence of violence, no absence of any kind of credible claim. towards domestic terrorism. But the NSBA letter, which started this whole thing, was served as a pretext, actually went through every footnote in the letter, every report, every bit of data. And they only provided one single example of parent violence against a school official. An individual, a 30-year-old man in Chicago was being taken out of a school meeting after disruption. And then he committed a battery against a school official. It's not clear whether he swung at him or pushed him or heard. but a simple battery, which is condemnable. You shouldn't be assaulting or committing battery against school officials or anyone else, obviously.

But it's hard. One case of a simple battery is hardly the pretext for a national counterterrorism investigation involving every branch of government. And guess what? Shubbing a school board official is not domestic terrorism. It's something that can be easily handled by local law enforcement. You arrest the person. You charge them. You take them to trial, and then, you know, at worst, they serve a little bit of time in jail, as they should.

But what they're doing is they're taking this energy that's out there. And because it's conservatives, they're using it as a pretext to say white supremacy, domestic terrorism, kind of criminalizing dissent. And I think what you're seeing is that you don't need a real pretext in this society right now. MSNBC will go to great lengths to cover for you. The New York Times will go to great lengths to cover for you. David French will go to great lengths to cover for you. David French might go to the greatest lengths of all. I mean, his length is on this stuff is endless, and his hypocrisy is boundless.

But really, they know they're going to get cover from the left wing and then kind of formally right wing media. so they can just brazenly lie to say that parents who show up and they're angry, parents who show up and they're yelling, parents who are showing up and they're disruptive, it's not just that this is a kind of boisterous, loud part of democracy. Maybe parents should tone it down a little bit. I think it would be better if they did personally. Yeah. But no, no, boisterous, loud arguments, yelling, this is domestic terrorism.

I mean, it's absolutely absurd. and the idea that anyone would buy into it, I find really disturbing because if they can use this as a pretext, they can use anything as a pretext. They can come after you. And, you know, the point on David French, like I have really learned a lot from what he, you know, used to write. I appreciate a lot of his advocacy work for things like the First Amendment. And I've given him the benefit of the doubt many, many times because I don't think he's a bad, I don't think he's a bad, I don't think he's a bad person. His evolution, at least in my eyes, over the past couple years, has been disturbing, particularly on this. When I did ask him, I tagged him, you know, underneath your tweet asking him. And he said that there, you know, has been an increase in threats and things like that. And so I looked into it. And the letter that the NSBA sent does include a couple examples of what they consider domestic terrorism. Apparently, according to then, there was a guy giving a Nazi salute at a meeting. One guy called a recess at a school board meeting because of its opposition to critical race theory.

There was a video that went viral reported on by the Washington Post of Parents in Williamson County, Tennessee, yelling at the health experts called to give testimony at a four-hour school board meeting in favor of mask mandates. School board members in Loudoun County, Virginia, say that they have gotten death threats. But again, to your point, and I would agree with this, while we would say, you know what, that really doesn't help our cause. Can parents try to be as respectful? and raising their ruckus as possible, like the death threats and, of course, any kind of like Nazi, I don't even know. I mean, anything like that's commendable. No, I mean, no Nazi salute anywhere at any time.

At any time. Yeah, it's never the right idea. I mean, but I think it's like you have to know local politics. Like I participated in local politics throughout my life and it does attract some, some strange people. Some nutty people. Some weird people. On both sides. On both sides.

I mean, I participated in Seattle and you get some real, you know, kind of psychotic people that show up because there's conflict. And we should all condemn that. We should minimize that. We should attempt to marginalize that kind of behavior. But parents have a legitimate claim. And 98%, 99% of parents are just hardworking middle class people who are showing up after work hours on their own private time to say, hey, look, I don't want you teaching my kids. kid that he or she's an oppressor. I don't want you teaching my kid that this country is out to get him. And these are good people with a real grievance. And I think that they're following the process.

This is how the process works. If you want change at your schools, you show up at your school board meeting. And once we criminalize this basic form of dissent, we're not just telling parents to shut up and sit down. We're also telling parents that the bureaucrats are in charge. It's not you who gets to decide what's taught, how the school runs, who gets elected, what the curriculum looks like. No, it's the experts, the anti-racist program directors, the school board officials, the teachers union bosses. We are in control. You're merely a kind of cash service for us. And that's the message that they're sending. And I think parents are really revolting against that because they want to know that they still have democratic rights and democratic participation within our system, especially at that local level.

Yep. And it's obvious what Democrats and bureaucrats in general think about this. Terry McCalliff, again, running for Democrat, running for governor in Virginia recently said in an interview or no, in a debate, actually, against his Republican contender that parents don't, shouldn't have a say and what gets taught in schools. And that's not just one thing that said, obviously, he's a mainstream Democrat. But we have heard this kind of rhetoric coming from academics, coming from left-wing researchers, coming in so many words from activists and politicians on the left, that really parents just need to step aside. They need to step aside for a second and realize that these teachers teaching not just racially divisive,

racially divisive lessons, but also in some cases sexually explicit and confusing lessons at curriculum to kids, they just need to be the ones that are who are in charge. And parents just kind of need to be quiet. So you would see why parents are really frustrated about this. This is a really big deal. I mean, you're talking about the only people in the world who have the biggest interest in their child's well-being, who will live with whatever consequences their child has to endure because of whatever they may be learning or not learning in school. I mean, you're talking about the parents, the only ones who are waking up in the middle of the night to comfort their child, the only people who know everything that makes their child tick, that their child loves,

their child hates. I mean, parents are the people who are tasked with protecting, providing for loving their child, not the state. I mean, what, Right. Does Terry McCulliffe or anyone in a teacher's union or school board have to say what a child should be learning in a way that trumps what the parents say? It's just so bizarre to me. It's bizarre, but unfortunately it comes from a very long lineage. The writer Christopher Lash wrote a book called Haven in a Heartless World where he looked at family politics over the course of a few hundred years. And he traced the lineage of the left-wing idea that the family is an oppressive. And even after Lash's death, in the literature of critical race here, they make it even more explicit. They say that the family is a, the nuclear family or the bourgeois family is a capitalist, white supremacist construct meant to oppress children, oppress women, and then keep society essentially

serving the capitalist interests. And in order to break up this patriarchal racist and capitalist oppression structure, the family. We actually have to undermine it at its deepest roots, which will allow us to then liberate each component part of the family, liberate the wife or the woman, liberate the children from the oppression of the father, from the oppression of the greater society. And so this has a long historical legacy. And in fact, I did a story, a scoop in Buffalo public schools. They were teaching as part of their official racial justice curriculum to disrupt the nuclear Western family. They were teaching kids as young as kindergarten that your family is oppressive,

your family is evil, you need to be inducted into our politics and liberated even from your own parents. Yeah. And without putting too fine a point on it, you see this in China's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s where they're using children, they're using young people, they're using students, and turning them against their parents, whether they're ratting them out to the authorities, whether they're hauling their teachers out of the classroom, filling their mouths with dirt, and then executing them. I mean, you had teenagers doing this kind of stuff on behalf of the state.

We're not anywhere near there. I don't mean to say that there's a parallel. But certainly, there is a kernel of this same kind of cultural spirit that I see in this left-wing ideology. at this point, thankfully, at least in the abstract. Yeah. And I see it. I'll say there's a parallel. Obviously not to that level, but it all does come from the same lineage. And I mean, you saw it throughout the 20th century.

You saw it in Paul Potts, Cambodia. You saw it in anywhere there was totalitarianism and in particular communism, but also fascism, especially in the 20th century. You see this recruitment of children for the cause of the people in charge. And you see this also in the dystopian novels like Brave New World in 1984. They both get certain things right about the moment that we're in and lots of moments throughout the past 100 years. But the one thing that both of those books share is the disintegration of the family. And I get really disappointed when I see well-meaning people say, you know, well, there are some good tenets to critical race theory that we need to hold on to.

This is mostly Christians that I'm talking to and saying, but not quite. queer theory, not the other critical theories, just critical race theory. But what you've kind of, yeah, what you've kind of just explained is that essentially, like maybe there are different premises, but essentially they're all the same, especially in this one sense of liberating different people from what they see as oppressive hierarchies. And one of those is the family. We see this certainly in the form of what queer theorists would call like sexual liberation of kids. That's part of why we are seeing a lot of what parents are uncovering at these school board meetings reading. I mean, just sexually grotesque, glorifying things like pedophilia and child rape

in books that are recommended to and assigned to middle schoolers. It's all, it's not, that's not critical race theory, but that is part of the umbrella of critical theory, the liberation of children, the disintegration of the parent-child relationship. It all works together, don't you think? Yeah, it does. And we're seeing all of these interlocking theories now really come to fruition in the school systems. And it all starts with the original critical theory, which in the United States came

to its kind of high point in the late 1960s, early 1970s, and then spawned all of these related ideologies, whether it's post-colonial theory or gender theory, queer theory, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies. All of these ideologies share as central what the philosopher Herbert Marcuse called new sensibility. Yeah. And they operate by negation. It's a dialectical philosophy that operates by destroying, shredding, and undermining existing institutions, which are deemed oppressive, with this idea that once you shred them, once you destroy them, those individuals that are caught in those social institutions will be liberated. And I guess for all of our friends who are Christians or like me and a Catholic, I mean, guess what?

In this ideology, the greatest oppressor of all is God. It's a myth that's used, in their words, it's a myth that's used to subjugate people, to habituate them to oppression, to provide them succor for the afterlife while actually exploiting them in the present life. going all the way back to Marx, this has been the steady line. And this is not the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which harkened back to two things. They predicated their philosophy on two things. The Declaration, Martin Luther King famously, student of the Declaration, and then also the Bible. This was a largely Christian movement formulated and really advanced from black churches. Critical race theory likes to claim the mantle of the civil rights movement, but it's neither an appreciator of the Declaration of Independence, which they say as a white

supremacist document, nor the Bible. This is an explicitly atheist movement. So the idea that you can kind of pick and choose, like some sort of fine buffet and only take what you want back to your back to your chair, I think is false. And critical race theory is a totalizing ideology. If you take any part of it, it's going to metastasize and grow and spread until it can express itself fully. And this would be a disaster for families, for churches, for schools, for our country. Yep. And I was just thinking when you were talking about it boils down to very often an assault on fatherhood. I mean, we saw that on the Black Lives Matter website. that it wouldn't mention fathers.

It said mothers and parents. We want to disrupt the nuclear family. They took that down after a lot of backlash. They put it down the memory hole. But thankfully, we have receipts of that. And when I think about Christianity, fatherhood, God the father is central to the eternal plan of redemption. I mean, we see that all the way in Genesis 1.

And then, of course, the Bible also ends in a marriage of the bride and the bridegroom, Christ and the church. And so anytime you see a specific attack on the family, anytime you see a specific attack specifically on fatherhood. And like you said, on God himself, like you know that that is going to be a destructive ideology, a destructive movement. And that's what we're seeing. A couple points I just, I just want to make. Like you already talked about the fact that we really don't see any evidence cited of this huge issue of parents like threatening school board members. Of course, when it happens, we condemn it.

But there has been evidence at least a few instances the other way around. In Rochester, New York and Pennfield Central School District, a father claims that when he told a school board member to, quote, be respectful and said, this is not about you, bud, about whatever they were discussing. The board member yelled an expletive at him, the F word, and tried to physically fight him. The Daily Wire uncovered that teachers in Loudoun County, Virginia, conspired together on Facebook to make a blacklist of parents that they suspected disagreed with things. like critical race theory. And as we've already discussed, like let's not forget what parents are

actually uncovering here. What they are uncovering is worth a lot of outrage. It's worth a lot of the energy, respectful, peaceful, but the energy that we are seeing, I had a mom on a couple weeks ago who said that her eighth grade daughter in Texas was recommended, you know, 10 books by her teacher. One of those books had a child gang rape, glorified pedophilia, a couple books had rape, one of them opened with a how-to guide to commit suicide in a variety of ways. And so why isn't that the thing that is causing outrage from the Biden administration? Why isn't that what is, I'm not even saying that the federal government should have any part of this, but if anything, why wouldn't that get the ire of the Department of Justice if they're

going to meddle at all? Why is it that the parents that are concerned about that filth are the ones that are the threat and not the curriculum itself? Oh, man, I didn't know about all that. I've seen some of these examples, and they're really horrific, and you truly wonder, I mean, who is running a lot of these institutions? Is this deliberate? Is this accidental?

Right. You hope in some ways it's accidental, but then it comes up so many times, and it has to go through so many hoops in order to get there. Someone should have stopped it. And I think that, listen, we have 14,000 school districts in this country. They're supposed to operate with independence. They're supposed to tailor their curriculum to the needs and desires and democratic will of the people within those districts. We should get back to that system so that this isn't necessarily even a national political fight.

It's just handled at the local level. Hey, look, if Berkeley, California wants to have some books like that in their curriculum, you know, go for it. That's, you know, that's their right in many cases. And if a district in Texas doesn't want it, that's also theirs. But what we see is a one-way ratchet where things have to get more extreme. And then any pulling back from it is seen as censorship, an attack on free speech, kind of parents who are overstepping their bounds, domestic terrorism. And we have to figure out a political approach to solve this.

Because if you say, hey, look, I don't want critical race during my schools. I don't want, you know, pedophilia-oriented literature, as the featured book of the week for my fifth grader, that should not only be not controversial in the least. It should be easily done. It should be done immediately. And the fact that it's not, the fact that they're holding on, the fact that they're resisting, they're digging in their heels,

they're appealing to the federal government, they're really just trying to entrench themselves with this ideology against the will of parents should be a wake-up call for people. Hey, look, our institutions, our great, American institutions that defeated Nazism and fascism in World War II that built a great country over this massive continent are not what they were in the past. They're not what they were even in the 1990s. They're very different. And we have to treat them not necessarily as institutions to be reformed, but as institutions to be attacked because it's going to take some more aggressive,

political action in order to get them to heal. Yep. We like to say raise a respectful ruckus. We want you to be respectful. We want you to be convincing. We want you to be peaceful because I think peaceful can be very persuasive. That doesn't mean that you can't be boisterous and energetic and organized. We think that you should be or I think that you should be. I won't speak for you, but I'm sure that you agree with that. And this is an attempt to intimidate you, parents. This is an attempt to try to silence. you to preemptively try to get you to stop, you know, stop criticizing the system. But my encouragement to parents is to double down. Don't back down, double down. Keep raising a

respectful ruckus for the sake of your kids because it's absolutely worth it. Now, how can they support you, Chris? Where can they follow you and all that good stuff? Yeah, I'm most active on Twitter at Real Chris Rufo. You can also visit my website, Christopher Ruf. That's Christopher, RUFO.com. All of my essays, articles, videos. I've also have a critical race theory briefing book that's free for parents to give them the background on CRT, to give them the language that they can use at school board meetings. And then you can also sign up to support me.

Have a great community of now 2,500 small supporters and grateful for everyone who does. Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. Thank you. All right. I just want to give you guys a couple words of encouragement. I know that I came in hot at the beginning of this episode. I'm still coming in hot at the end.

I'm just super fired up about this moment that we're in. And I want to see Christians and Christian leaders speaking up about this as Christians should have spoken up in, for example, Soviet Russia. I'm not saying that we are in the exact same place as the Russians were during the Soviet revolution at the beginning of the 20th. century. We're not in the exact same place, but we see similar preliminary patterns. I mean, totalitarianism is so boring. Like, it always follows the same kind of path and paths. And I hope that we're not going in that direction here. I'm not saying necessarily that we are, but let's speak up

while we still can when we are just starting to see the silencing of dissent and the squashing of free speech and the trampling upon individual liberty. I mean, Solton Heights, And one thing that he says in the Gulag Archipelago is that the reason that people got where they were, the reason that the Soviet revolution happened is the reason that any totalitarian revolution was able to take root in the 20th century. And that is, he said, that men have forgotten God. And so it is incumbent upon Christians following the strong, reformed Christian tradition that we have to push back against tyranny. As you can see, maybe we can pull up my John Knox quote over here on the side if you are watching from on YouTube. Resistance to Tyranny is obedience to God. That is a way to love your neighbor.

As we say, politics matter because policy matters because people matter. Politics affects policy. Policy affects people. So this is a way, not the only way, maybe not even the primary way to love your neighbor. But one way to love your neighbor is to put. back against tyranny to hold the line to raise a respectful and peaceful ruckus. You push back. What you're seeing right now?

You're seeing people organized with other like-minded people in their organization. They're strategizing. They're coming up with a cohesive message and they're taking a risk. They're taking a risk to make a point that they don't want their individual liberty trampled on. And tomorrow, when we talk about this a lot more, we're going to talk about some COVID stuff tomorrow. I'll try to come up with some resources for you guys because I'm constantly asked,

do I do? How do I push back against this? How do I protect my individual choice? My husband is losing his job. I mean, I've talked to wives of firefighters, of police officers, of, of servicemen, of all kinds of different employees and different workers in our economy who are losing their jobs and their means to provide for their families because they're willing to stand for their individual choice, whether they've actually gotten the vaccine or not. That is honorable. That is, I am behind you and I will support you and I will help you however I can hold the line hold the line it is worth it's worth it like now's not the time for nostalgia when we look back at the 1990s for the early 2000s when it seemed like you know America was better it was still this beacon of liberty and that

people could come together the right and the left we just don't live there we don't live at that time anymore it's time to stop looking back we can't go back the only way is for it and the only way that we even have any chance. I don't know if we have a chance, honestly, the only way we have any chance or any hope of preserving the liberty that so many people have fought and died for is to do our own part in holding the line and sharing the arrows with people who are holding the line in very risky ways by potentially losing their job standing up for this liberty. So that's our role. If you don't know what to do, how to fix all of this, we can't. We still serve a sovereign God who is totally in control. All we can do is the next right thing in

faith with excellence and for the glory of God both big and small. That's the only role that we have, whether it's speaking out or just doing what's right in front of us, big and small ways. That's all we can do is the will of God with joy. All right. That's all you got for today. We'll be back here tomorrow to talk about the rest of it. Hey, this is Steve Deast. 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 Steve Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.