The Daily Signal - Chris Rufo on 'America's Cultural Revolution'

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

INTERVIEW | Christopher Rufo is at the forefront of exposing critical race theory, DEI, and the radical Left’s agenda to undermine traditional American values. His new book, “America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything,” is a history of the Left’s key figures and its playbook for infiltrating America’s institutions and indoctrinating our children. The book, which debuted at No. 14 on The New York Times' bestseller list Wednesday, profiles four figures who shaped the Left's thinking and strategies: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell. Rufo's detailed reporting and meticulous research paint a far different picture about them than you'll find in corporate media. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, spoke about his motivation for documenting the Left's game plan. He also offered his perspective on the counter-revolution that he hopes will ultimately prevail. Listen to our full interview or read a lightly edited transcript at The Daily Signal. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Governor DeSantis told me something very interesting when we were working on some higher education reform together. He said, Chris, you know, if you're not driving a massive number of hysterical attacks from the media against what you're doing here, you're not doing the job. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, July 27th. I'm Rob Bowie. And those were the words of Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute. He's the author of a new book, America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left, Conradict. conquered everything. You're probably familiar with Rufo's work, either because you've read it at the Daily Signal, watched him on television, or followed him on social media. He is at the forefront of

exposing critical race theory, DEI, and the Left's agenda to undermine traditional American values. His new book is a comprehensive history of the left's key figures and its playbook for infiltrating America's institutions and indoctrinating our children. Before we get to my interview with Chris Rufo, let me tell you about the Heritage Foundation's Young Leaders program. Heritage is the most effective conservative policy organization in the country, and every semester, our interns are a vital part of that mission. We pay competitively, we develop talent, and we give our interns access to some of the sharpest political minds in the country. We are going on offense, and we want them to join us. To learn more about the Young Leaders program at the Heritage Foundation, please go to heritage.org slash intern. Chris Rufo is the author of a brand new book called America's Cultural Revolution,

How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. He joins us on today's edition of The Daily Signal podcast. Chris, welcome to the show. It's good to be with you, Rob. Your book provides one of the most comprehensive stories of how the left had its long march through institutions. And when we talk about institutions, we're talking about multiple institutions. And I'm looking forward to talking to you about it today. I really appreciate how you break down.

and tell these stories and focus on some of the different people and players involved in this. But first, before we get into some of the content and the details, why was it important for you to put this together all in one package in the form of this book? Yeah, I mean, for me personally, it was a process of working backwards. And many of Daily Signal readers probably know me as the preeminent critic of critical race theory. I did the reporting, exposing CRT in our institutions. I did advocacy work with former President Trump and state legislators and governors to get critical race theory out of the curriculum and out of so-called DEI training programs.

But while I was running that campaign and doing that journalistic work, I really wanted to go deeper and understand where does this come from? How did our institutions suddenly seem like they were all captured by this ideology? And how did this ideology work through over the decades to gain power? And so the research for this book and then the writing of this book was really designed to answer those questions and to show the full scope of this long march from its beginnings in 1968 to its conclusion or culmination in that summer of 2020 with the George Floyd riots when it seemed like everything from the schools to the corporations to the to the government to the media organizations. we're all in the grips of the BLM and critical race theory style ideology. Well, certainly so. And that's one of the things that I think we obviously spotted as well.

One of the things that I think readers can expect when they pick up your book is you tell these stories, but you also document everything very thoroughly. So the pages of pages of footnotes at the end of the book are also, I think, probably a point that you're proud of because it'll show to the left and those who may criticize your work that you're, you have documented it very accurately. Let's talk about the different approach that you took. So you divided the book into four different parts, Revolution, Race, Education, and Power.

You tell a story about an individual in each of those different parts of the book. Let's go through those in order, starting with the father of the revolution. Can you tell us about who he is? Yeah, absolutely. The beginning of the book, it opens with a biographical portrait

of a German-American philosopher named Herbert Marcuse. And Marcusa is not discussed a ton today, but he was really, at the time, the father of the new left. You know, student radicals were marching in 1968 all over the United States and all over Europe, sometimes carrying banners.

Marx, Mao, Marcusa. And they said that Marx was the kind of the god or the prophet. You know, Mao was the sword who had revolution that was violent. And then Marcuse was their translator for the modern West. He was the philosopher for their time. And so his work is useful in understanding that moment. His work is also useful in a philosophical and theoretical sense because he developed the concepts,

the vocabulary, and even the specific phrases that are still used today, that still characterize and define the modern American left. wing. And so the process of writing the book is to weave together these biographical portraits, weave together some political analysis, and then showing how these ideas made conquered the institutions, so bringing in some historical evidence, and then using the investigative reporting that I've been doing for the last few years to show exactly how far these ideas have traveled and actually revealing them in our institutions today. So the writing, I think, is really engaging for readers because it's a very lively, very spirited, very well-documented combination of all

of these elements. And it's not like a typical political book that just makes a straight-ahead logical argument. This is my thesis. Here's why you should believe it's true and here's my conclusion. It's really a narrative nonfiction portrait of a movement over the period of time. and while of course I embed arguments within the narrative, it reads more like a story than it does a logical proof or a kind of philosophical tract. Well, in some of the most captivating stories are certainly about Angela Davis. And I learned a lot myself from your book about her and the past that I don't think, frankly, our broader culture really understands the radical nature of what she was preaching,

fact that she was wanted by the FBI, tried for a conspiracy to murder, all of these things that you go through and document in vivid detail. But tell us a little bit more about Angela Davis, obviously somebody who's still living to this day and who's had a profound impact on the new left. Yeah, and Angela Davis is really, in some ways, the key figure in the book. And it was so shocking when I was doing the research. She, of course, wrote a very famous autobiography when she was still very young after her trial and acquittal. But there wasn't much else out there about Angela Davis. There was really no deep scholarly biography on her life that was available,

that shed light on some of these questions. And so all that was there was really her self-definition and her autobiography. And then all of the hagiography, all of the praise pieces from magazines and newspapers over the last 50 years. But Angela Davis is important. the student of Herbert Marcusa. She was a pioneer in black American communism. She was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA. She gave them the 50 cents to register with the Communist Party. She was a pivotal figure in academia, really anticipating and laying the foundation for critical

race theory, which emerged in subsequent decades. And then she was the personal mentor and the philosophical inspiration for the Black Lives Matter movement founders. She has a personal relationship and then was of course celebrated with these splashy magazine articles from Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine and other publications in that summer of 2020. So even the left, not just me, but even the left acknowledged that Angela Davis was really an inspiration, if not the inspiration behind BLM. And yet there was really nothing about it.

her, certainly from a conservative perspective. So I had to dig into the archives. I had to dig into primary source material. I had to dig into a vast number of sources to get an actual picture of Angela Davis that was not distorted through the praise and admiration that she got from the left over the last 50 years. And so I think even just for that, not even showing how her ideas influenced the kind of modern left, I think even for that, even just for that, it's quite valuable because you get a sense with these personalities, these heroes of the left, that actually once you look into the facts and the evidence of their biographies, it's quite a different picture that emerges. It's something not of these idealistic heroes, but in some sense these cynical operators who've unleashed havoc and destruction on the very people that they claim to be helping.

You've got that absolutely correct, and it's amazing to me the picture that has been painted of Angela Davis by the broader media and a comparison to what you document in your book. I would say that for anybody who's picking up a copy, that alone is a story that we're grateful that you've documented so well. We're talking to Christopher Rufo. He's the author of America's Culture Revolution. And one of the areas where you have had a profound effect on American politics and policy is the education system here, obviously, during COVID and post-COVID. We saw a number of educational institutions move sharply to the left in terms of their practices, including K through 12 schools. And you also document that this is an area where the left has concentrated its focus and attention. Why has the education system been so important for them in order to capture perhaps the next generation of Americans?

I mean, it's because of a very basic insight that goes back to the ancient Greek philosophers who recognized it very clearly. Plato in his way and Aristotle as well were in agreement that the education of children is a core function of a society, of a republic, and that children must be educated into the political regime. That is the paramount duty of a society, of educated. of citizens. And I think what's happened in recent decades, unfortunately,

is that conservatives forgot about that insight. And certainly after the victory of the United States and the West over communism and the Soviet Union, it almost seemed as if conservatives relinquished control over education, relinquished their interest in governing the education system, and simply was satisfied that the public schools, if they were not perfect, were at least neutral, you know, vaguely patriotic and were administering education toward these quantifiable metrics. So towards test taking and towards, you kind of, you know, test outputs.

And so the focus of so much conservative education advocacy in my mind and my reading of it was that what can we do to improve, you know, scores, but they paid actually. relatively little attention to the content of the curriculum, to the virtues and values embedded in that curriculum. And I think that this was an immense mistake. And so while I, of course, think that we should improve educational attainment, while we should fight for charter schools, which we've seen some success with lately, partially and due to the exposure of CRT, I think conservatives are finally remembering and certainly

Heritage Foundation's great education team with whom I've worked closely over the years is really leading the way and saying, hey, wait a minute, it's not just about test taking, it's not just about these quantifiable metrics, it's actually about the values and virtues and content that we bring, and it's actually about cultivating successful citizens and shaping successful citizens. And the left has known this the whole time. And in fact, they've deliberately and very strategically and very successfully, captured the institutions that trained teachers, captured the institutions that then teach children

in the K-12 public schools, and they're now trying to shape those children in accordance with their political ideology. And my point that I make over and over to conservatives is that institutions are never neutral. Institutions will always be guided by a set of values. The only question is which values and who is administering and governing the transmission of those values.

And so those are the two key questions that I show very clearly in the book. It's the wrong values administered by the wrong kind of people. And I think it's a wake-up call for conservatives to really re-engage. Chris, as a resident of Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, which has had its share of obviously these controversies, it's something that I pay close attention to. one of the things that I found alarming were some of the stories that you captured in the book, particularly on the West Coast, closer to your home, and just how radical the policies are

that these school administrators are foisting on the next generation of Americans. One of the things that I think that maybe helps put things in perspective, and I've heard you speak about this, is we as conservative always point to school choice and all their alternatives homeschooling that parents can opt up for. But somewhere close to 90% I think I've heard you say of students in America are in public schools. So why does it matter at the end of the day those big questions that you posed when so many of our students are in these environments and captive audience?

Yeah. This is a big kind of intra-right debate. So conservatives are having this debate. We're debating amongst ourselves. But the answer is very, very, very simple. It has to be a both and strategy. I am an absolute kind of diehard advocate for school choice. I've worked closely with legislators and activists like Cordy Angeles and Heritage Foundation team

and political leaders to get school choice into the law books in state after state. We're seeing massive traction there for the first time. And so I see my fight against CRT as I see my fight against CRT as, as, as, um, really contributing and I try to channel that energy into the legislative fight for school choice. But even in those states like Arizona that now have universal school choice, parents are opting into that system. 90% approximately of the kids are still in public schools. So those schools and the curriculum in those schools are going to shape the experience and the worldview for the large majority of American kids for the foreseeable future, no matter how successful that school choice programs are.

And so you cannot merely say, as long as I can opt out, my kids will be fine. I mean, thank God for that. That is a baseline minimum that we should have. But we should also make sure that we don't just relinquish the responsibility to govern the public institutions that will be providing the education for most kids. Because at the end of the day, our society will be shaped by education. for the great majority of students that until now and for the foreseeable future will be in the public K through 12 school system. So we have to fight simultaneously on both fronts. We cannot give up.

We cannot just retreat, although the construction of alternatives is essential. It is essential, but not sufficient for the fight ahead. I'm so glad you brought up some of the legislative work and the accomplishments that conservatives have been able to achieve. What states, as you assess this environment, are doing the best? You mentioned Arizona. Are there other places that Daily Signal listeners maybe want to look to as a model or an example for who's getting it right? Yeah, I mean, I think that really we have to talk about Arizona first and foremost.

And I got to know Governor Ducey during his time in office and spent significant time with him. I mean, he is a really stellar leader and example of exactly how to do it. Those who are, those of us on the right, or really those on the right who are more kind of Reaganite, a bit more traditional conservatives, kind of more business-oriented conservatives. You know, Governor Ducey is very much amenable and very much a supporter of that kind of economic freedom message. He has been a long time diehard champion for school choice. He tried to get school choice throughout his eight years in office.

But as he explained to me in very blunt terms, he said that he was never able to get it done until those final years. And what really tipped the scale for him was COVID, the school lockdowns and masking and really exposing the public schools for not putting the interest of kids first. And then critical race theory and gender ideology. those are the two issues that I've been working on, exposing in the public schools. He said that was really the last straw for so many parents to say, hey, we need alternatives. And then he was very shrewd negotiator with the legislators and actually increasing funding for the K-12 schools by a billion dollars to negotiate with some of those holdouts, even among rural Republicans. And he said to me, he said, look, I'm a small government guy, but writing that billion-dollar chess, to increase funding to get those last votes that were necessary is worth it because now we're

kick-starting and we're really spearheading this incredible systemic reform to our education system. And simultaneously, though, Governor Ducey was one of the first governors to ban critical race theory in their K-12 public schools and to actually fight for a better curriculum to implement civic education in the K-12 schools in Arizona. And so to me, I love governor like Governor DeSantis, who is a kind of swashbuckling, cultural, conservative, fighting on these issues, getting all of those headlines. I've been working with him, and he's a wonderful, immensely talented leader. I think Governor Ducey at the end of the day was really the kind of leader who was putting the people first, putting parents first, and governing with the kind of responsible message of saying, we're going to get universal school choice, we're going to negotiate to make that happen. but we're also going to make sure that we have a good, solid, civic-minded, kind of anti-CRT curriculum in those public schools.

Well, there are so many opportunities, including in Texas, hopefully later this year, to do some really good work on education freedom and school choice. So that's an area that we're keeping a close eye on here at the Daily Signal and the Heritage Foundation. And so thank you for the work that you've done and the advocacy on behalf of so many parents and students in states. Chris, I want to ask you, the last chapter you talk about the counter-revolution. So what do you see happening next? You've outlined this detailed analysis of the lefts marched through these institutions, but what is the counter-revolution? Yeah, the counter-revolution, to me, is a term or a concept that signifies seriousness

of purpose and depth of analysis. because if you believe, as I think more and more conservatives are truly believing and understanding in visceral terms in their own lives, that we are going through America's cultural revolution. The solution cannot be incrementalism or reform around the edges. It has to meet the revolution with as much seriousness of purpose and as much ambition of policymaking. what I propose is a kind of radical and audacious program of counter-revolution. And I think that if you look at the history of the West over the last few hundred years, the thing that has always haunted Marxist revolutionaries is always a counter-revolutionary movement that erases all of their

gains and then reconquers territory and reorients it towards a different system of values. And so So the antidote, in my view, to what I think of as the Revolution of 1968, is the principles of the Revolution of 1776. And so if we hold these principles side by side, in my view, the principles of 1968 or the principles of 2020, the George Floyd Revolution, are not compatible with the principles of 1776 and the principles of Abraham Lincoln and the 14th Amendment. And so we will either have this system or the other system. And so we have to fight with the seriousness and with the commitment and the conviction and the passion and the ambition that is necessary for the principles of 1776 to triumph.

That's so true. Thank you for putting it so bluntly and succinctly there. I think that hopefully that is an inspiring message to all the people listening to this interview to make sure that they're doing their part. to live up to those ideals and to fight back. A couple of final questions for you. You have faced your share of criticism from the left, and increasingly, it seems, from some quarters on the right, as you alluded to in a previous answer.

So what motivates you? What keeps you going every day? Yeah, I mean, look, this is politics. The criticism is part of it. And, you know, Governor DeSantis told me something very interesting when we were working on higher education reform together. Chris, you know, if you're not driving a massive number of hysterical attacks from the media against what you're doing here, you're not doing the job. And so, and I appreciated that

because I think that the governor understands better than anyone, that to do the right thing in the current media environment will drive a massive amount of criticism in the media. But ultimately, the people can see through the criticism and the people will reward. conservatives who stand on principle, who fight the good fight, and who actually accomplish tangible goals for the people that they represent. And so he's done that in the state of Florida, really in my mind better than anyone. And so I use him as a model for that. And in actuality, I really have learned to enjoy the criticism, enjoy the debate, enjoy some

of the sparring, and actually turn it to my advantage. And so I think that conservatives, you know, look, we're outnumbered 500 to 1. as far as the broader media ecosystem. And so we have to get very comfortable with these kind of lines of attack, and we have to develop the strategies and tactics to turn them to our advantage. And more than anything, to be honest,

just from a personal point of view, you have to be able to hold them a bit outside yourself and not internalize them. And if you can maintain that distance, that personal and psychological distance, and not internalize some of those headlines, I think that's how to that's how you can really survive, and that's how you can keep waking up every day and having fun and

pushing and fighting and experimenting and always moving forward. Well, thank you on behalf of so many other conservatives for fighting on the front lines and sometimes going into enemy territory, as I know you've done, to make the points that you do so articulately. In addition to the book, you are also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and working on a critical race theory project. What's next on your horizon? What can we expect from Christopher Rufo in the future? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Great question.

Thank you. And, you know, the book really lays out the problem. It documents America's Cultural Revolution over time. And at the very last chapter, it suggests some of the, in broad strokes, what a counter-revolution might look like. And then in the coming weeks, you know, the next probably four to six weeks, I'll be publishing a series of essays and policy in a policy symposium with Manhattan Institute. that are going to outline in more concrete terms what a counter-revolutionary conservative agenda will look like. And so I hope that this book lays a narrative foundation

for, let's say, the upcoming presidential campaign, but also starts to get the concrete policy agenda into the conservative ecosystem, certainly into the public conversation, so that those candidates, whoever the candidate might be at the end, will be armed with a policy agenda that can reverse and overtake this counter-revolution. that has really plagued this country.

Oh, excellent. We'll certainly look forward to reading more about that, and I'd be remiss if I didn't plug the fact that we published an excerpt of the book on The Daily Signal last week, specifically about how the left conquered the New York Times, which I found to be a fascinating story in and of itself. Final question for you.

Where can our audience follow your work? Where can they pick up a copy of the book? Yeah, America's Cultural Revolution debuted as the number one bestseller on Amazon last week. It's available. Anywhere books are sold, there's also an audible audiobook version available. And then you can find me on Substack at Rufo.substack.com. That's where I publish all of my articles, essays, podcasts, videos, films, everything. It's totally free to subscribe. So make sure you do so. Well, Christopher Rufo, thank you again. Again, the book is called America's Cultural Revolution. It's an excellent

I have personally picked up a copy of that audio book and have been enjoying it on my commute and encourage our Daily Signal audience to support you, pick up a copy, and they'll learn a great deal about the left if they do. Thank you again for joining us on the Daily Signal podcast today. We appreciate it. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. If you haven't had a chance, be sure to check out our evening show right here in this podcast feed, where we bring you the top news of the day.

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