The Daily Signal - Defeating the Radical Left: Chris Rufo Talks Strategy and Resilience

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Chris Rufo wrote “America’s Cultural Revolution” last year as a warning to conservatives about the radical Left's takeover of institutions—from business and government to education and entertainment. In addition to being an exposé, it also served as a call to action. Now, a year later, Rufo is optimistic that Americans, including some to left of center politically, are "waking up." He attributes the change to the gruesome and deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and the radical Left's unflinching (and often antisemitic) criticism of Israel that followed. "After 10/7, when those same people who were marching for BLM, who were pushing trans in schools, who were ramping up DEI, when they're out there celebrating the terrorists who butchered, raped, and murdered innocent people, I think it caused this moment of horror, but also this moment of clarity," Rufo told The Daily Signal. The popular writer, filmmaker, and activist—whose work is available at ChristopherRufo.com—was in Washington, D.C., last week to accept The Heritage Foundation’s prestigious Salvatori Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, May 29th. I'm your host, Rob Blewey. We're back today with part two of our interview with Chris Rufo, the popular writer, filmmaker, and activist. On yesterday's show, Rufo shared the results of his campaign to abolish DEI, his outlook on education and recent investigation of NPR. Today, we discuss his award-winning book, America's Cultural Revolution, and what he has planned next. Rufo was in Washington, D.C. last week to accept the Heritage Foundation's prestigious Salvatory Prize. His success, however, brings attention from left-wing agitators. Rufo explains why their smear machine is failing and offers practical advice for others who might encounter such attacks. And he ends on a hopeful note with a challenge for all of you.

After you listen, be sure to follow his work at Christopherrufo.com. Stay tuned for our interview right after this. As conservatives, sometimes it feels like we're constantly on defense against bad ideas. Bad philosophy, revisionist history, junk science, and divisive politics. But here's something I've come to understand. When faced with bad ideas, it's not enough to just defend. If we want to save this country, then it's time to go on offense. Conservative principles are ideas that work.

Individual responsibility, strong local communities, and belief in the American dream. As a former college professor and current president of the Heritage Foundation, my life's mission is to learn, educate, and take action. My podcast, The Kevin Roberts Show, is my opportunity to share that journey with you. I'll be diving into the critical issues that plague our nation, having deep conversations with high-profile guests, some of whom may surprise you. And I want to ensure freedom for the next generation.

Find the Kevin Roberts Show wherever you get your podcast. It's almost a year since you published America's Cultural Revolution. it was a call to action for Americans to really wake up to what's going on and the Marxist ideology that's infused so many of the institutions in this country. Do you feel that people are heeding that call to action today? Yeah, I think so. You always want a greater number of people to heed the call. But what I would say, and to kind of bring current events into this is the process of ideological capture that I documented and that story that I told in the book, I think was certainly revealed to be true at the time,

but it took on a new dimension following the Hamas terror attack on October 7th of last year. And I think that has just accelerated this waking up that is happening in the United States. And in particular, on the center left, a lot of people who would say, oh, it's kind of woke, is so overblown, it's not so bad, DEI is good, maybe it's not perfect, but maybe we can improve it. But those were rationalizations.

And after 10-7, when those same people who were marching for BLM, who were pushing trans in schools, who were kind of ramping up DEI, when they're out there, celebrating the terrorists who butchered, raped, and murdered, innocent people, I think it caused this moment of horror, but also this moment of clarity. Oh, all of that leads to this.

And so I've never seen anything like it. You're seeing a lot of shift right now, not just in public opinion, but in political, alliances, you're seeing a shift in kind of financing, people pulling back from giving money to universities, including the Ivy League universities. And I think that what was so my intention with the book, and in a way, I think why it's still quite valuable, is it explained the deeper history of how we got here. Wait a minute. College students are now calling for celebrating What is happening here? No, this is not spontaneous.

It's not random. It's not new even. There's actually a long history dating back many years. Yeah. No, I absolutely agree. Certainly a wake-up call. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, says that he's very optimistic that the American people will take back their country from the elites

that have set us down this path. That's the right. Yeah, and that's the right attitude. That's what I love about Kevin. Maybe it's like a Texas thing, a little Alamo spirit. Yeah. But I share the same conviction. And look, a lot of people on our side are down in the dumps.

They're demoralized. They're feeling pessimistic. But I think in look, we all feel that at times, of course. But I think we have to also have some greater historical perspective. And read history. Read the history of the founding. Read the history of the civil roar. Read the history of the Second World War.

Read the history. Read my book. Read the history of the 60s and 70s. As a country, we've been through much more difficult challenges in the past. And I think that the question is not, is the challenge greater than it was in the past? I actually don't think that it is. The question is, are we, can we meet the kind of standard of the past? That's the real question.

It's a question of our own culture, our own spirit, our own character. And so I certainly feel doubts about that sometime. But I think that if you look at even in the kind of pre-revolutionary period, the patriots of the American Revolution were, they doubted themselves the whole time. I mean, we were certain to lose. I mean, even in January of 17th, all of the smart opinion in the colonies was that most Americans did not want revolution.

Most Americans did not want to separate from Britain. Most Americans would refuse to participate. And so history is full of surprises. And I hope that we're fortunate again as we've been so many times in our past. Yeah. No, certainly the American people need to live up to that moment. And certainly sees the opportunity, as you said, as the public opinion is shifting.

And also, who's our enemy? Not our enemy, but we have foreign enemies, but we have domestic opponents, right, in a civil political order. Of course. It's like, all right, we beat the British Empire, the red coats, we beat the Nazis, we beat the communists.

And now we're going to be afraid of campus gender theorists. when you think of it in that terms, you get more optimistic. You say, all right, I think we could take the gender theorists. I do want to ask you this, though, because I think that the tactics that they sometimes use can sometimes be alarming. Particularly, we've had people on the show who have run for local school board and all of a sudden facing attacks. You recently hosted a conversation with some individuals who go by pseudonyms, who have been doxxed. And I wanted to ask you about that because it does seem that there are. is this, as you called it, the left-wing smear machine that is quite coordinated in some of its

activities. But you also sounded somewhat hopeful when I listened to that conversation that maybe things were changing in that regard as well. Absolutely. Yes. I mean, look, there's a whole range of reputational destruction mechanisms. And some of them are formalized, like the SPLC, for example, which is kind of sham organization that would try to put you on a list and refer you to law enforcement, for protesting a school career. It's, they've run out of, like, actual true hate groups. So they just have now labeled everything, kind of a hate group. It's absurd.

But then down to the kind of doxing, so a lot of people online want to maintain pseudonyms. Again, America has a long tradition of pseudonyms. The founders wrote under pseudonyms for many of their works. Thomas Payne wrote anonymously, the common sense, which the kind of literary work that helps spark the revolution. And then as now,

unmasking people as a way to put them towards reputational destruction. And then there are even more kind of personal tactics to kind of intimidate you, harass you, whatever. I think two things are happening, though. I think that those tactics

have lost their steam. those tactics have lost their effectiveness and I think that conservatives are getting much tougher and much smarter and much more courageous and much more sophisticated and adept at responding to those reputational attacks and then our audience, our supporters, our people

automatically discount them oh okay, another person on the so-and-so list oh okay another person gets a smear piece in the X-Wenzy, the Guardian, whatever publication. I think it's now baked in, and part of that is because the scare campaign against Trump

between, let's say, 2015 and then going through 2020, five years, six years, seven years, I'm still to this day, they really mastered those techniques, and they were very successful. But then you look back, I think most people are looking back, even not

partisans, not Trump supporters, but even people in the kind of reasonable moderate middle. Say, hey, wait a minute. Trump wasn't any of the things that they said he was. We still have democracy. There was actually peace

in the Middle East. The world wasn't on fire. And actually, things were, for all of the media drama, it was overblown. He's not, Orange Hitler, or whatever they were trying to call him.

And so I think that it was so overused for a period that it lost its rhetorical force, and conservatives have successfully adapted. And so, look, it can still be damaging to people who are in vulnerable position. If you're a employee at a big corporation, you know, so-and-so, yeah, maintaining your anonymity is probably smart. But if you're in politics or in the political world, I think that there is now, we have now the tools and we have now the support where some of these reputational attacks can be successfully countered. What keeps you going? Obviously, you are sometimes outgunned 100 to 1, 500 to 1, maybe more, and yet it doesn't seem to deter you. You have that

I love it. I love it. I love it. I enjoy it. I love the challenge. I enjoy the fight. I savor the victories when they come. And then I try to learn from defeats, which are inevitable. But I just, I love the process. And I like, I enjoy the drama. I enjoy the conflict. All the things that you're supposed to not like about politics, the longer that I've been studying it and then participating in it,

I realized that actually that is kind of the core of political life. And I just, for whatever reason, I'm suited to it. And I find just, I find it to be an intellectual challenge, emotionally challenging, professionally challenging. It's challenging from a business perspective, of course. I run my own little shop as well as partnerships with these great institutions. and so every day is an immense challenge and the odds are often stacked against you and that for me is like an ideal environment.

It's an environment that I love and I hope that it also inspires others and I know that it has inspired many others to kind of follow suit and to try to really get in the fray. And the other thing that I think has been helpful is understanding that politics hasn't really changed in a long time. And so I'm realizing over the last few years, it's like, all right, I'm kind of, I have many flaws and many limitations, but I maybe have one gift, and it's in the art of rhetoric, broadly speaking.

And so I've been reading a lot of the old works from Greece and Rome about rhetoric. And it could have been written yesterday. It's amazing. You're reading this stuff. You're reading Aristotle's The Treatise on Rhetoric. And you say, this is incredible. It's like nothing has changed. These guys were going down and they were duking it out intellectually in the Agora or in Rome and the Senate.

And of course they have grandeur that we don't have. We live in a different era. But you get a sense in participating in something greater. you're participating in a tradition that we've had in the West. And for me, that is also a source of joy, a source of sustenance. With that being said, is there a particular goal that you have for 2024 or something that you're working on and objective that you'd like to share with our listeners and how they may be able to support what you're doing? Sure, yeah, of course.

I'm still finishing up this campaign to abolish DEI, which we launched last year. I think that'll take me through the summer. The kind of 18-month campaign cycle, I think, is probably the max, where after that you start to kind of lose effectiveness. And my goal is always to launch campaigns entrepreneurial from scratch and then hand them off once they're well-developed to others. And so launching critical race theory, launching kind of trans ideology in schools, launching abolished DEI, launching the...

campaign against Harvard. And now others have taken up the mantle on many of those campaigns, like on critical race theory, I mean, great organizations. And so I feel like almost like a kind of venture capital investor, startup operator. The startup phase is exciting. I like it. And then I hand it over when these campaigns are mature. And so I'll tell you, though, I don't know what's next. I know that we're going to kind of wind down abolish the EI. I do know that I'll be hiring some additional staff in the coming months. But coming up with the campaign is not a work of mathematics. It's a work of art.

And so part of the artistic process is the mystery of inspiration. And so I know that my... And maybe contrary to some other organizations that are a bit more logical, a bit more rational, I tell my funders and supporters, like, all right, supporters want to support the work. I said, well, what's the next thing? I'm like, I don't know. We'll figure it out. But something will happen.

And I think part of the success in political activism is sense. opportunity with high intuition and high speed. And some of the best campaigns are kind of emerged spontaneously or emerged by accident. And so like a novelist or writer, sometimes you're just waiting for that moment of inspiration. And so, and then you have like anxiety, right? Because you have your fear, like, what if my inspiration is gone? What if it doesn't come? I'm waiting. I want something. I got to come with the next idea. Will it be good enough? And so you have that kind of inner dialogue, but ultimately I'm pretty relaxed about it. And the other thing about politics, the worst things get, the better they get, for those of us

in the business. And that's like a kind of cynical, but there's an element of truth. Politics never ends. And one thing, some of the kind of more radicals on our side is, oh, we have to utterly destroy the left so that it can never rise against. A, that's crazy. A, B, that's like a totalitarian mindset. It's not right.

But C, it's impossible. The left as a part of the human psyche is with us. I mean, it's in our nature. It's part of our nature that has to be tame, that has to be contained, that has to be directed towards positive ends. There's an energy there. And so I know that politics never ends. There's no end point.

to politics. And so I know that, you know, as long as I'm alive, there will be something to think about, something to fight about, something to work on. And so it's just a matter of time before the next thing comes up. So you are affiliated with some prestigious institutions like the Manhattan Institute and City Journal and Hillsdale College. Yes. But you're also, as you alluded to, running your own operation. You've been publishing on substact thing. You think for over a year now. That's been over a year. So what are some of the ways that you would encourage people to follow your work or if they want to financially support you and continue the investigative reporting and the other things that you do? What's the best way to do that?

Sure. Yeah. Really simple. Follow real Chris Rufo on Twitter X. Follow Christopherrufo.com on substack. Small supporters can become paid subscribers, $8 a month or $80 a year. we have a huge and growing audience there and philanthropic donors

can reach out to me, there's a contact form on my site and I'll tell you even on the support side it's been really unreal. I mean, we have incredible people in our country that want to see success and I actually don't do any outbound fundraising. I don't do any solicitation, I don't do any calls, I don't do but people, the last,

three, four years have just come out of the woodwork saying, hey, I love what you're doing and want to support it. And I think that's a very encouraging sign because what it shows is that there are people around the country that have the sophistication, the means, the inspiration, the capacity, they want to see something better. And the voting public is the same way. the voting public, if you measure public opinion, has the right idea on many issues, if not most issues. And so I always think that the limitation is not the public. The limitation is not the funders or the philanthropists. And look, we can grumble.

I'm sure anyone in this world can grumble about specifics. But actually, limitation is us. As political leaders, as intellectual leaders, as movement leaders. I'm more and more convinced that the raw materials are there. It's really up to us to shape them, to direct them, to point them in the right place, and to mobilize people in the most effective way possible. And so that to me is the big limitation right now.

And a limitation is just another word for a challenge. And so that to me is probably the most, there's a rich vein of opportunity. there. It really is truly a rich vein. How do we get these? I mean, Hillsdale is incredible. Manhattan Institute, Heritage Foundation, a whole range of other groups. There's these policy that really dedicated policy shops, the ones that are in kind of Trump world, FBI and others. We have brilliant people. We have great supporters. And now it's time for action. And that's really what I'm hoping that we're driving towards. Can I ask you one follow-up question on that?

I'll make this the last one. What's holding us back then as conservatives? Do you think that there's an impediment, or is there a challenge that you want to leave us with in our audience? There are many challenges. And look, I think that conservatives institutions have to radically modernize the way they approach politics. They have to have an understanding of how media works in the 21st century. They have to have an understanding of how politics works. and the second century BC is actually like more helpful than looking back at 1995.

But I think what it really boils down to is that we have to reconnect with the essence of political life. And we have to understand politics for what it is. We have to really refine our rhetorical sensibilities. And I think that is, and then of course, translating into administrative success. I think we're actually like fairly well there. but I think the rhetorical part is really the missing element on the right. And rhetoric has a negative connotation now. You feel this.

Oh, that's just rhetoric. Oh, that's empty rhetoric. Empty rhetoric is probably the most common phrase with the word rhetoric. Oh, rhetoric is propaganda. Rhetoric is this or that. But if you actually look at the great political leaders in history, from the Greeks and Romans to the American founders to Lincoln, in a less classical way, but of course Reagan,

they were very serious about rhetoric. I mean, the kind of the education for the people who were going to run Rome was extremely heavy on rhetoric. They were bringing in the great rhetoricians from Athens and Greece as they were building the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic to teach them rhetoric.

And the founders studied rhetoric. They studied Cicero. they studied other rhetoricians of the classical period. And so I actually think that that is the missing link. And rhetoric in a postmodern environment means media, activism, mass persuasion, elite influence, digital communications. All of those five areas are kind of how modern rhetoric plays out. I think if we can really kind of radically modernize on those kind of five practices, I think everything that we do could be much more successful.

Christopher Phil, thank you for giving us that challenge. All right now. All of you, listening, everyone. No, we appreciate it. Again, author of America's Cultural Revolution, thanks for being with us here in studio at the Daily Signal. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. thank you for listening to The Daily Signal podcast.

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