The Megyn Kelly Show - Race and Schools, with Jodi Shaw and Christopher Rufo | Ep. 59

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Jodi Shaw, a student support coordinator at Smith College whose video about discrimination at the school went viral last year, and Christopher Rufo, writer, filmmaker and director of Discovery Institute's Center on Wealth and Poverty, to discuss Shaw's situation at Smith, identity politics and racial essentialism, the radical left's emphasis on immutable characteristics, the origins of Critical Race Theory, fighting back against the woke drift in schools and on college campuses and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today on the program, Jodi Shaw and Christopher Ruffo. These two are warriors in a very uncomfortable space, and that is the critical race theory that is being shoved down our throats collectively as a people in our universities, in our K through 12 schools, in corporate America and elsewhere. And it isn't easy to stand up and say, no, no, this is itself racist. But both of them have been doing it. Jodi in her own personal circumstance at Smith College and Chris on a more macro level across many schools and colleges. And now he is organizing a real response, a real fight back. And so they're both here to talk about their circumstances. Jodi, I don't know if you guys remember this.

I remember Glenn Lowry. He was on the program praising her. We talked about her video. But she seems kind of understated and I don't know, just sort of sweet. And she works at Smith and she's essentially an administrative assistant there and decided to speak out against the constant, constant shaming of white employees, assumptions about white people and black people based on their pigmentation. And she was a one woman pushback machine. She spoke up and made national headlines doing it.

And now we'll tell you the consequences. And Chris was a liberal who kind of got pulled into this by some whistleblowers who turned into thousands of whistleblowers and now is running point on how we push back against this nonsense, divisive ideology. So you'll hear from both of them in just one second. But first, I have got to talk to you about Paint Your Life. Do you remember paintyourlife.com? I mentioned them. They're a new sponsor. I was like, all right, we'll do it together, right? Like I'll get this painting of my kids, this picture of my kids sent in and converted into a painting. They'll frame it for

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about like something I've been asked to try in a long time. We nailed it. Okay. And now Jodi Shaw. Thrilled you are here. Thank you so much for having me, Megan.

So I was sitting at home. It was an evening in October in bed at night, you know, just surfing the net on my phone and up popped an article with links to your video. And I'm like, it's kind of tired, whatever. I have to click on it. Well, I mean, I watched the whole thing twice. I made my husband, Doug, watch the whole thing twice. I was like, who is this heroine who not only did you choose to speak out against basically racism, you know, they used to be called reverse racism. I just think it's plain old-fashioned racism at Smith against you, this forcing of critical race theory down your throats at every turn. But you found the perfect words. Did you write out, we'll get to what you said in one

second, but did you write it out because what you said was so spot on and you said it so perfectly. Oh, thank you, Megan. Yeah, I did write out a list. I wrote out a list of things I wanted. And it was actually at the end of a long, it was more like a 40 minute video. And then I'd gone through it a few times, quite angrily, actually. And then I just decided, you know, I'm just going to ask for what I want. And so it turned out just to be 10 minutes. And it turned out to be quite calm. In the end, I decided that what am I hoping to accomplish here?

Do I just want to rail at Smith College? Or do I want to make a good faith effort to open dialogue? And I decided that's what I wanted to do. And so I just stuck to, it was really just a list I was improvising around. Part of its brilliance was how calm it was. If you had been angrier, you know how it is, especially as a woman, you would have been too easily dismissed as an hysteric or, you know, the angrier you are, the more people think you've got some agenda. You are so measured, so matter of fact. And all I could think when you were talking about the things they were doing to you is

if you were black and you were saying these things, Smith College would be on every newspaper in the country for its racism. But that's the interesting thing about what's happening right now is racism against people who aren't in traditionally marginalized groups, it gets a shoulder shrug, even though it's just as unlawful. Yeah, I'm really glad you said that, Megan, because that has been demonstrated over and over at Smith. I mean, I exhausted all internal remedies. And one of the things I did was to file an internal complaint. And literally when I went to file the complaint, the person who has a JD, who is in charge of processing the complaints, asked me, she seemed incredulous to me, and she asked me, do of things like the Civil Rights Act was created for traditionally marginalized groups. And I'm going to need to hire an outside investigator because I do not have expertise in this area. And when I asked her to explain what she meant, she said, well, it's different because you're white. Meaning she doesn't have quote unquote reverse racism, which I later found out is not actually a legal term. And she's 100% right.

Exactly. She's 100% wrong. Just I want to make this clear at the beginning of the podcast. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, protects individuals from employment discrimination on the basis of race and color, as well as national origin, sex or religion. Title VII, I am quoting now from the EEOC website. You don't have to take Megyn Kelly's word for it. Title VII prohibits race or color discrimination against all persons, including Caucasians, end quote. There is no doubt that you may not discriminate against white people because of their color either

under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and typically under various state and local statutes that get passed preventing race discrimination. So it is no answer to a complaint to say, but you're white. And it's not an assertion of white privilege for you to say, I feel I'm being treated differently because I have white skin. So let's just back up. Let's just back up. And I'm going to get to your letter and you know, you read it. So I have some sound bites because I want our audience to hear them. But can we just talk about how long you'd been

working at Smith? Let's just set it up for the audience. You went to Smith, and then how long had you been working there and in what capacity? So I graduated from Smith in 93 and then lived in various parts of the country, mostly New York City, and moved back up here in 2017 to Western Massachusetts and started working at Smith in September or October of 2017. So I've been at Smith for three and a quarter years now. And you were working in the library? Yeah, I started off in the library as a temporary librarian. So I was an outreach and engagement librarian. I was hired for my

engagement skills and kind of community building and outreach. And yeah, then I moved into residence life. And part of moving into residence life was because of a situation that happened in the library. That was kind of the first thing that happened to me that was pretty blatant discrimination. So let's start there. Let's start there. That's the first incident when I understand you were a candidate for a higher position in the library staff.

So what happened? So, I mean, really, I think, and I, I, I think it's really important to provide the backdrop of a situation that happened on July 31st, about a month before the situation in the library. So a black student accused a white staff member, a custodian of, um, racially motivated incident. She was in a house that was not open to students at the time. It was in fact being used just for, it was during the summer. And so the houses at Smith where students normally reside get used for summer programs. And this particular house was being used for children's programs. So all the staff had to have quarry checks, background checks,

that kind of thing. And so she wandered in at lunch and she wasn't supposed to be there, but the dining staff allowed her to be there because they're already accustomed to the school not backing them up if they enforce certain rules in the dining hall. And she ended up moving into the living room and the staff were told, if you see something, say something, no matter how insignificant. That's kind of the conventional wisdom at that time. And it was hard to see her. The custodian had, I think he had bad eyesight. There's a and this is wrong. And the college hired an outside investigator. And I think they generated almost 200 pages of a very thorough investigation, which concluded it was not a racially motivated incident. However, they maintained this narrative that it was. They implemented programs, initiatives,

discussions, dialogues, discussions, dialogues, all around the systemic racism because the student said, this is another example in a long line of systemic racism I have suffered as a student at Smith. Although when you read the investigative report, she was unable to provide other examples and they state that in the report. So this is the backdrop. We now have a campus that's hyper, hyper aware of race, right? And that we have a big problem of systemic racism on campus that smith all the newspapers. This was in all the newspapers, this situation. So cut to one month later. Just if I can just interrupt, when was this? What was the date that we're talking about here? July 31st, 2018. Okay. So long before the George Floyd thing. Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. Keep going. I had been working on an orientation presentation

for 600 first-year students. It had already been approved. It was going to involve a rap. And some people, oh, that's so cheesy, rap in the library. Well, I had been asked to quote, do something crazy. Please do not get up there and do a slideshow about the boring card catalog. I have a musical background. I'm a very creative person. Whether or not one thinks it's cheesy to do a rap is beside the point. And I worked really hard on this. I had musicians from town. I had a sound person. Anyone who's produced an event of that magnitude for 600 people in a concert hall, I was the point person. So it's a big event. So I worked all

summer on it. The budget was approved. Everything was fine. The July 31st, 2018 event happened. So the campus was kind of roiling from that. And so about a month later, it was within a week of the orientation that I was supposed to do for these students. My supervisor took me aside. He said, you can't do the rap. And so I said, well, why? And he said, because you're white.

Those are the literal words. So I asked him, I said, so if I were a student, sorry, if I were a person of color, would it be okay? And I didn't specify what color, which I think is interesting. And he said, yes. He didn't even hesitate. Yes, that would be okay. So clearly the problem wasn't that it was a rap. It wasn't the format. The problem was that I was not a person of color, apparently any other color. The problem was that I was white and this was memorialized in an email. And so that was quite crushing to me because I was a temporary employee at the time. I was up for a position and this would have been kind of a big coup if I'd pulled it off, which I really think I would have been able to pull it off quite successfully.

That's my opinion. And so that was an employment opportunity that was denied to me. You wrote, or I don't remember where I saw this, maybe it was in the video, but I know you said you felt shame after that. I mean, I don't want to gloss over how something like that makes you feel. It's not just disappointment, I can't do my thing, and this feels unfair, but you had effectively been shamed. I felt, oh gosh, I felt so many things. I felt ashamed that

there was a void because at the time I was on board with this systemic racism is bad and it's a real problem and I have white privilege. I had all these voices in my head and I thought, oh, geez, was I really off the mark? Was I being culturally insensitive, cultural appropriation? And then I had another voice that was telling me, no, you know, this is racial discrimination. But it was, I mean, the way it was done without any hesitation at all, memorialized in an email, backed up by the dean, I really didn't know. I thought, is it racial? Maybe it's not, you know? Right. So you're, you're proceeding in good faith. Like I'm open-minded. I want to be sensitive. Um, I, you know, I'm going to think about it. And this is like the beginning of

things starting to turn. And you, so you go to the Dean of the library to say, Hey, I guess I can't do this. And the, and I was told the quote was, how you respond to this, Jodi, will show us your resourcefulness and resiliency in light of your candidacy for the full-time position. Yeah. Yeah. I remember. Wink, wink. Yeah. That was really the whole bottom dropped out. And I thought, oh my gosh, I don't know if I can stay in this environment. Yeah, because I was at the top, really, the dean of the libraries. I remember telling my former supervisor that, the person who had hired me who was no longer there, and she said it made her feel nauseous. What do you think the dean was trying to say, was really trying to say? Oh, I think it was a veiled threat. If you do not go along with this

racially discriminatory behavior we have just placed upon you, then you will not be considered for this job. It was kind of like, go along with this, be quiet. And it was horrible. I mean, there's no other way to describe it. I was in complete turmoil. I did go to HR. I talked to HR, talked to the ombudsman. Nobody at Smith that I spoke to, you know, aside from colleagues, you know, whispering on the side, told me, you know, maybe you should file a complaint. This this really feels like a threat or this feels like racial discrimination. I was not, you know, it's just that that's, you know, go along. Yes. By the way, I mean, it's like even if if you really want to get into it of course there have been plenty of very famous and successful white rappers so you know if you really want to

do a tit for tat on their argument you could have gone there um it's it's not an it's not a medium completely dominated i mean it's majority i would say people of color but not all um so it kind of falls apart the more you probe it. But in any event, no one had any desire to be sensitive to you. Right, right. As a white person, I was thinking about that last night, Megan, about the rap thing. A lot of people pointed that out on the YouTube comments. Well, Eminem and Macklemore, they were talking about cultural appropriation too. That was in the email. And isn't, I mean, rap is part of my culture. I listen to rap.

So doesn't that mean it's part of my culture? If it's something that's in my life that I listen to, it seems like it's part of American culture, rap. I guarantee it was a white person saying this to you. Was it? Was it? Yes. All of the direct discrimination I have encountered at Smith has been other white people as far as I can.

Naturally. Yes. So, so you, you're intimidated, you're, you've been shamed and then you decide you're going to take a different job. You're going to, you're not going to go for the promotion. You've, you've effectively been told how that's going to work out. You go and take a job, I guess, as an administrative assistant. And that's when the second incident took place. Do I have it right? That's correct. And in the background, a whole lot of other incidents were taking place across campus to other people and more and more programs and things for white, ways for white people to talk about whiteness and so on and so forth. So I took a job as providing administrative support

in the Department of Residence Life and thinking that maybe if I get away from the academic side, there would be less, like it would be less racially tense and so much about race. And boy, was I wrong. I didn't know this because I'm new to higher education, but the residence life departments often have, you know, they do a co-curriculum and just very grounded in this kind

of social justice, critical social justice. And so I learned that it was required of me to attend staff meetings where I needed to discuss my identity and those kinds of topics. And so I thought, well, I'll just keep my head down and go along with it. It really had nothing, I could not see the connection to my job. My job at that point was very nuts and bolts. It wasn't like the library. There's no instruction going on. I wasn't teaching, just helping students get lock changes and ID cards. There was some student contact, but it didn't feel... The social justice stuff in res life is a whole story unto itself. But regardless, I was mandated to attend a professional development retreat in January of 2020.

And so I started getting nervous about that because by now, I'm very... And some other things have happened on campus. I'm really not comfortable talking about my race at work. And I've learned that it's a very performative endeavor, these discussions and these trainings and initiatives, very performative. They feel fake. And I just, is the phrase, I don it's very hard for me to go along with something that we're pretending to be really having an authentic discussion about race when really it's just feels like theater. Well, and think about it. If you used a different sort of form here, if they said we have to do this with gender and you must sit there and talk about all of the ways in which being a woman has affected your life. The implication would be negatively and for a man positively and everything. So I'm being told I have to sit in my workplace and I got to talk about my lady parts and I got to talk about my menstrual cycle and, um, all the ways in which my, you attention by men has like, I don't want to

talk about that. No one's going to be able to force me to talk about my lady parts at the workplace. That would be obvious. But when it comes to race, they feel very emboldened to make you talk about your pigmentation, something which is also an immutable characteristic. You have no control over it. That's why it gets protected by the law. Yes, that is why it's protected. Exactly. So you had to go to a three-day retreat, I'm told. Yeah, it was a three-day retreat. The first day was really focused on identity, which I knew meant race in my mind, which it did pretty much turn out to be. Yeah. And so I went and I actually

approached my director about a month before and I said, you know, I'm not comfortable discussing my race. And I think I said, I'm not comfortable discussing my race or any other protected characteristic at work. And she said, no problem. Just say that at the meeting. Just say you're uncomfortable. And so I thought, okay, great. So I went to the meeting and the hired facilitators who presumably have authority in this area asked us to discuss, I'm paraphrasing, please talk about your understanding about your race slash culture, as if they are one in the same. In the context of your childhood years or your adolescent years, it was like a three-part question. So everyone went around the room and did so. And I was the

last person to respond. And I said, I'm not comfortable talking about that at work. And so later in the presentation, one of the facilitators said, I want to be clear that any white person who expresses any discomfort in discussing their race when asked to, I believe she said that, you might feel like you want to comfort them because they seem uncomfortable, but don't, because what they're doing is they're displaying white fragility and it's a power play. Oh, man. Gee. Yeah. So when you say that, it seems like, oh, okay, that kind of stinks. But I cannot tell you the feeling of sitting there with your coworkers and effectively having your feelings, that your honest feelings that you've just expressed of discomfort being framed as an act of aggression because of your color.

And I often wonder if my skin were any other color and I had said, you know, I'm uncomfortable discussing that. The implication is that that would not happen because she said as she said this only applies to white people the way she stated it made it seem like it only applies to white people she said at for white people so i don't i think if i had been a black person or latino like i would have not if i had said i am not comfortable discussing marriage at work, I probably, they would have been like, oh, okay, fine. Because it's not quote a power play. Meanwhile, you've been told to do it by your supervisor. It's completely out of line and, and, and, but in line with the way these training sessions go down. I mean, I, I have a friend who went through one of these sessions at a school here in New York, and she sat for two full days and listened to the black instructor shame the white people in the room for their say something like, well, you know, um, sometimes

the shoe is on the other foot and I have felt in comfortable situations, whatever. She tried to just push back a little and was shamed, was shamed. She felt completely attacked by the instructor, by other people in the class, because the whole thing is built on the notion that white people may not speak. The only, not even I'm sorry is an appropriate thing to say. They'll tell you, it's not our obligation to make you feel better. We don't have any obligation to take your apology. So there's just no good way out of it for a person who feels uncomfortable.

So when it's over, that's when you did file a complaint, yes? I did. I decided, okay, now, I think it was because at that point I realized, one, now we're using shame as a tool to compel behavior. It wasn't just, we're not just talking about suppression of speech, right? We're talking about now public shaming is being used to try to compel me to say certain words. And I thought now, now I knew that would be framed or could be framed as an act of aggression. Because essentially that's what my colleagues have been instructed to do, to frame anything kind of abstaining or not participating as an act of aggression. So yes, that's when I decided to file a complaint. And I went to the EEO compliance officer on campus and that's when she asked me, do you believe in white privilege? And this law was created to protect traditionally marginalized groups

and I need to hire an outside investigator because I do not have expertise in this kind of discrimination, meaning- I love that she was the EEO compliance officer and did not understand. I mean, she should just read their website. You don't have to work that hard. You don't have to hire a lawyer. Just go to the website. It's right there that that these laws protect white people as well. You may not like it. Eric Holder didn't like it. That came out during his administration.

But the law is the law. And I know I mean, Jodi, tell us, because it wasn't just those two incidents. In reading up about you and your story, I walked away thinking, this place, Smith College, is obsessed with race. They were shoving it down your throat at lectures and presentations and behind the scene in questions about students involved in altercations or like, it just seemed to constantly be their focus. Yeah, constantly. I mean, I, I only arrived there in 2017. It was already a topic. And then when the July 31st, 2018 incident happened, it was like they went into hyperdrive, right? So then it was in hyperdrive for a while. And then I filed the complaint. And

immediately after I filed the second part of my complaint in May 2020, George Floyd was murdered and BLM got active and there was a global pandemic on top of it where staff were told, you might be getting furloughed. Then they went into like hyper, hyper drive. I mean, I was getting invited. My director sent an email to only the white staff in my department, inviting us to get together to talk about how we can support the non-white staff. And of course, and she said, oh, well, it's optional. So I didn't go and I'm sure everyone else went. And I don't know how that went down. We were invited to the entire school had a generating justice event. And they said that the president said that white

people are especially responsible for dismantling racism. This was in an email. So I actually went to that and right in the beginning, they said, we're going to privilege voices of color. So white people kind of need to take a back seat. So you're right. There's no way you can win here. Or you're being told that, first of all, here's the problem. There's systemic racism. And this is how you as a white person need to respond and behave in order to, quote, help. It was just bombarded last summer after George Floyd. Let's talk about masks. You know how now, like, the push is, like, to double mask? How about just wearing one mask that works?

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insulting, offensive messaging, which, you know, I think our next guest, Chris Rufo, is going to tell us had been percolating all along. They just had been given a huge green light in the wake of the BLM protests and so on to just shove it down everyone's throat and compliance, submission, open acceptance and vocalization was the only way through it. So you've gone through all of this. You filed the complaint and so on, or you tried to. Then in October, on October 27th, 2020 was when you released your video, your first Facebook video, calling attention to all of this, the problems there. What made you do that? What was the final straw there? Well, the whole time I'm thinking if, you know, I hope they investigate this complaint thoroughly because clearly nobody was even denying that these things had happened that I was alleging in the complaint.

And I hope things can change. But in my mind, I thought that was kind of the last gasp or the last thing I had that I could pull out because I know the college does not like publicity, especially around anything having to do with race. So that summer, so I filed the complaint and that summer after George Floyd, things got, it got, they got worse. You know, I was getting invited to be part of the white staff, this part of the white staff, that the college released a four page document called Toward Racial Justice at Smith that had all kinds of initiatives in it that were tied to, uh, performance evaluations and paying people equity equitably across registers of identity. Um, and I, so I had all these questions like, what does all this stuff mean? And so I started asking HR, what does this mean in terms

of my job? Like what is, and I, and I started questioning HR, what does this mean in terms of my job? And I started questioning the very basic terms, like what is equity and inclusion? Can I have a definition of that? And new terms like anti-blackness and anti-racism, what do those things mean? And so I kind of went on a quest. I was shuffled around to different people. My complaint was still pending. And I think the final straw was that I was told I would have to attend a meeting, actually a couple of meetings to discuss this document toward racial justice at Smith. And I did not, I had made very clear, I do not want to attend any more discussions while my complaint is pending, having to do with race. I mean, even where I just have to sit there

and listen, because I did not want my not speaking to be framed as a... I didn't want to be publicly humiliated again. I didn't want to put myself in that position. So I wrote emails. I said, I don't want to do this. I don't understand what this document is. Nobody responded. I did meet with some people, but there were no answers, no adequate responses, let's put it that way. And so the week I released the video, I did send what I call my Hail Mary emails to members of the president's cabinet and all of the people I'd ever been referred to. And I just said, just so we're all on the same page, this has gotten worse. And I find it morally, I think I use the word morally reprehensible. I will not participate

in, because they were asking me to take color into account in questionable ways in dealing with students and other colleagues. I do not want to participate in this. That was basically the email. And there was no response. These were very high level deans and members of the president's cabinet. Nobody responded to that email. So a week later, I released the video. Okay. And that brings us to the apex of our discussion because I watched this and I thought, holy, you know, holy moly, because I knew Smith wasn't going to like it. And I think a lot of people had been feeling this, you know, as, as I put it to my own school, the answer to racism is not more racism.

You know, it, that doesn't cure racism. In fact, it just creates more on both sides and is really dangerous. This constant obsession with skin color is incredibly divisive and the messaging around it has been explicitly divisive. So, and a lot of people, especially in the wake of the George Floyd thing, have been very afraid to talk about it, especially white people. Let's be honest. So you fire off this, um, this video and we have, we have like a two minute clip queued up. I said to my producer, Debbie, I'm like, make it long because there's no way I'm going to

be able to paraphrase as well as she said it in the first instance. So let's just listen to Jody Shaw, October 27th, 2020. I'm white and that really shouldn't be relevant. But my employer has made it clear that not only is it relevant, but it's possibly one of the most important or if not the most important feature of me as a human. I've been put in a position where I had to do this. I'm speaking for the staff who can't speak and want to be saying these things because I have spoken to a lot of you who feel similarly to me. So here we go. I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself because I feel like you do that a lot. Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is

based upon my skin color because you don't know that. Stop asking me to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color, because you don't know that. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based upon their skin color. Stop telling me young women of color have no power or agency in this world. Stop telling me that young white women have power and privilege over everyone else. Equally not true. And both of those narratives that you are teaching to students and trying to convince staff of are very disempowering. Stop demanding that I admit to white privilege and work on my so-called implicit bias as a condition of my continued employment. Stop telling me that as a white person,

I am quote, especially responsible for doing the work of dismantling racism. Most of us happen to make a salary around the equivalent of what it costs to attend Smith for a single semester. Stop emboldening students to act abusively towards staff by refusing to hold them accountable for their own egregious behavior. We have the right to work in an environment free from the ever-present terror that any unverified student allegation of racism or any other ism has the power to crush our reputations, ruin our livelihood, and even endanger the physical safety of ourselves or our family members. Wow. Stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on skin color. I feel like all you should have received in response to this was, I'm sorry, you're right, and we will stop.

The fact that Smith did anything other than say, you've got a point, is terrifying to me. I mean, again, think of if a black person said, stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. There would have been a panic from the Smith president to whom this was addressed. And saying, saying a white person saying you're asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on skin color should start a five alarm fire. That's what white people did in the 1950s and before in a way that was so damaging. And now they want us to do it again. One of the saddest parts of this was, there was a statement where, I think we've got this queued up, but you said, you talked about

how this had been affecting your self-worth at Smith. And we've got this here. Just one more soundbite. Take a listen. I don't really feel valuable anymore because I don't feel like you value me. I feel like my skin color is the most important thing about me. And that doesn't feel good. I believe my value lies in the quality of my work, the goodness of my deeds, the essence of my character, and the fullness of my heart, not my skin color. These videos I'm making are really an effort to organize in the workplace for better working conditions. Organizing in the workplace to improve working conditions is protected by federal law, so staff talking is protected. I didn't want to be the one talking about it, but Smith has engaged in behavior

toward me that has pushed me over a line. This is not a left, right, or a red versus blue issue. This is a human issue. I'm a lifelong liberal in case that helps. I love that. I love that. And it didn't help, did it? It didn't help with Smith, no. I think that signifier helps for some people on the left, because I made another video about the left being so afraid of the left, afraid of being associated with the right, that I think that's part of what keeps us from speaking out in a general sense, in addition to our employers being afraid we're going to lose our jobs. But no, it didn't help with Smith. That's so interesting. Right. They don't want to be associated with the right. And certainly in the Trump era, that term meant something most liberals

did not want to adopt. I mean, we've talked a lot on this program about how there's no amount of wokeness that's sufficient for the woke. So being liberal doesn't do it. Being gay doesn't do it. Being, you know, even being a person of color doesn't do it. You have to subscribe to everything, everything and be on the right side on every issue and case where you get sort of kicked out of the cool kids group. What happened after you released it? Because I know you said you'd been speaking with other staff. What happened in your life, in your world? because, you know, we're all remote at this point. All of the people I had spoken to regularly about this kind of thing, you know, kind of whispering on the side, being careful, you know, close doors. And other people just really bothered also and said, well, we should do something, but nobody,

nobody, everybody's afraid of losing their job. And so I did something and then none of those people are in contact with me now, except for one, one person texted me and said, good job. No way. They all made very clear. I remember texting one and she made very clear. She did not want to be associated with me anymore. And I kind of understand that because it's kind of like guilt by association. Like they know other people have seen us together before. And now, my gosh, like I have to, like people are going to know that I'm speaking with Jodi and I don't want that association anymore. I mean, there is real terror. There is terror. But on the other hand, a lot of Smith staff and faculty have reached out to me, you know, on the down low, and we are now in touch, and I'm now in communications.

I will say there is still, there are only few who put their name on it. It is a high terror situation, which is very concerning to me because if we are already at that level, I'm very concerned if this keeps going. Like if we're already at a level where we can't say anything,

then how is this going to progress? Like where does this go next? Like what is the next step of this? The first step is you might lose your job. What if this keeps going? That's why it was so bold. What you did is so bold. Nobody does this. They're afraid. And for good reason. They need their jobs. And I think you accurately read Smith's mood and understood you were taking a big risk. It's the same reason parents don't speak out about what's happening in the schools right now. They don't want to hurt their child's future.

They don't want to hurt his chances of getting into a good college or getting or being well liked at a school that leans hard left on identity politics. The students are praised for being little social justice warriors. And that's what gets results at the university campuses too. So all those fears are totally understandable and underscore the courage it took to do this. The spike the ball moment of this video, and I used to practice law, so for me, I was like, oh my God, I love her, was the warning about how they could not fire you for this. Organizing in the workplace to improve working conditions is protected under federal law. So staff talking is protected.

Boom. I was like, I might need to marry Jodi Shaw in my next life and teach Smith a lesson. Did you consult a lawyer? How did you understand all that? Reading a lot. And when I was thinking it might come to making a video, it really might come to, the whole time I'm thinking, this might come to me having to do that.

So I had to think very carefully about how to do it in a way that would be most protective of myself. It's no guarantee. And so when I found that, that actually made me realize I could speak about more than just race, really. If we're talking about working conditions, that kind of opens up the field for what I can really speak about. I am now, I am under investigation now, however. I'm not, I'm on a leave. They did put me on a leave and I am under investigation,

but I have not been terminated. This is so crazy, this piece of the story. So I want to get to that. But so the university president, Kathleen McCartney, did respond two days later and basically said she doesn't speak for this college or any part of the college. And the video mischaracterizes our important ongoing efforts to build a more equitable and inclusive living, learning and

working. But she's got all the buzz terms. She knows exactly what to say and who she's appealing to. Then she says the National Labor Relations Act protects employees who engage in concerted activities, including speech with respect to workplace conditions. All employees have the freedom to criticize the policies and practices of their employer. Nevertheless, I'm ready to affirm that the president's cabinet and I believe we have a moral responsibility to promote racial justice, equity and inclusion. It's myth to people of color in our community. Please know our commitment is steadfast. And you took that message as what what was she saying oh well i mean to me it was quite clearly like letting everyone know because

by then we were getting emails like please fire joe i think we were getting emailed please fire jody shaw um that you know we would fire her but we can't because it's husky law i read it the same right like rest assured she would definitely be gone by now but totally was like fucking hate jody but i know i can't fire her the part though about the um uh she does not speak for any part of the college that really kind of like oof you know like am i not part of the college that really kind of like, oof, you know, like, am I not part of the college? Yeah. And she's wrong. I mean,

you, she hasn't been talking to the people that you've been talking to. And what's happened is she's created an environment there in which I think it's a silent majority, but let's say it's a silent minority of people who share your view are terrified to be open about the fact that they agree with you. She needs to pause and consider that. What have you done to make people who do feel as Jodi feels comfortable with expressing a divergent viewpoint? I agree, Megan. I mean, that would be the healthy thing to do. But I think this fear, this terror,

I think it goes all the way up to the top. And I think that it would behoove the administration to do a little self-reflection and consider why they are this afraid. That feels like fear to me. These are fear-based responses, reactions. They're fear-based reactions. And maybe that's indicative of a hostile work environment and that they themselves feel such fear. I'm speculating, but I believe that fear goes all the way up to the top. I think there's a lot of places, but you get the sort of black at this school, black at that school in the wake of George Floyd

and alleged incidents of racism would be raised, some of which were horrible. And you'd say, Jesus, you know, my God, look back at whenever it took place. And invariably it was a long time ago, but you know, you'd be horrified. But there were more incidents of when I went there every day in middle school, I sat alone at the lunch table by myself. And I looked at all of that thinking, okay, so that's called middle school. We all have that. And that's one of the disadvantages of having to litigate these things 20 years, 15 years, 10 years after the fact. There's no way of knowing why people weren't sitting with you at the middle school table at this point. It's like the Christine Blasey Ford thing. Like 30 years after the fact, we're never going to have real answers on this because the passage of time makes it very difficult to find evidence one way or the other. And that's why we don't, that's why there are statues of limitations on allegations in the criminal world.

Anyway, all of it sort of plays together, but can we just, I do want to get to what I think was clearly their retaliation against you. They decided that you had to be placed on administrative leave. Why, when and why? So it was right after Thanksgiving.

So a month later. Yeah, a month later. Yeah, a month later, I showed up and there was a meeting on my account. I showed up, I opened my computer. And I'm on a half furlough by this point. I've been for half time furloughed. So I showed up and there was a meeting with an HR rep and a dean from my division. And I had kind of been expecting this meeting because I thought it was. She told me that your colleagues have been, your actions have had a negative impact on your colleagues and they feel harmed by your behavior. That's how she started the meeting. And then the HR rep took over and made several allegations in a very hostile tone. And that's what I took away from the meeting. It took me about three weeks to really get over that meeting. It was so hostile. Several different allegations, like there was a tweet you made that was disparaging about the

college and you're not allowed to do that because it wasn't about your job. So it's not protected by the NLRA. And I pointed out how it was connected to my job. She said I made a statement about the affinity houses. We have two affinity houses on campus, one for black students, one for students of color, and wanted to know how I could continue to support those students. I don't recall ever making a statement about the affinity houses, but I assured her I could continue to support the students in those houses. And then the final thing was you forwarded a bunch of emails to your home account from the departmental account. Now the departmental account, you know, a bunch of people have access to it. We were getting, you know, a whole spate of angry letters from mostly alums saying,

please denounce Jody Shaw. Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist and she talked to Tucker Carlson, ergo, you need to denounce her. Please terminate her. Those kinds of emails. And so I was forwarding them to myself. They were about me. And she said, why did you do that? Why did you forward those emails to yourself? And I said, well, I have a potential legal action against Smith College, so I'm collecting documents. And then she said, well, one of the emails contained student information. And I didn't know which email she was referring to. So I asked her, can you tell me which email it is? And she said, you should know, you forwarded it to yourself. So I did go home. I

go home. I was at home. I checked the email and there, there was reference to a student from a third party in an email. But I assured her, you know, she said, you, that's a, that's a privacy, a violation of FERPA. It's a privacy, privacy policy violation. And I assured her, you know, it's, it's not because I had not, I've not shared those emails with anyone else. No third party has seen those emails. And she seemed a little taken aback by that. I guess she hadn't thought of that. But in the end, I was not under investigation for any of those things. It was just that one email. And so they said they needed to conduct an impact

assessment investigation into that one email, the fact that I had forwarded it to my home account. And so, yeah, clearly it's pretextual. It's clearly pretextual. This is so obvious. I would love for this to wind up in front of a jury somehow. I would too. so so i want to ask you what your next move is you're on administrative leave as they investigate this um so you're still getting paid but if they like what what's what's your next move if they if they fire you i assume you're going to sue them well yeah if they fire me that's retaliation i am exploring my options megan good you a lawyer, you have a good lawyer. I do have a lawyer. I have a good lawyer and, um, there's, yeah, I'm, I'm looking into it. So can I ask you, cause you asked, you mentioned you don't make a lot of money in your job at Smith College. I read that you're a single mom. Is that true?

Yes. I mean, yes. I'm divorced. Okay. So you've got a child. You've got to support your child. You've got to support yourself. You did not have a tenured position. So if they fire you, what's the plan to pay the bills? Well, I am going to be working in, I'm going to be doing maintenance. I'm going to be painting sheds and removing snow and learning a trade, basically. I'm going to be working with somebody who does, you know, he will be another pay cut, but it will pay the bills and I won't have to, you know, I can, my mind can be my own. Let's put it that way. I can think of the thoughts that I want to think while I'm working and I can do my job and feel good about having done my job and go home. And that's really all

I ever really wanted was just to be able to do my job and feel good about what I was doing and then go home. My mind can be my own. I can think my own thoughts while I'm working. This is absurd. We have crossed over to the point of absurdity so with all of that right with you know you're going to be shoveling the snow and you've got a single you've got a you got a kid to support and and you don't have a financial partner to support you at this point i have a partner oh good okay yeah yeah but not if are they supporting you financially? Because that would be helpful. Yeah, that would be helpful. But why? So aside from improving working conditions at Smith College, why do this? Why put your neck on the chopping block? And was it worth it?

Because I actually have two kids. It's really for them. I don't think I would be doing this if it wasn't for them. Because I'm very, very worried, Megan. I'm very worried. I do know a little bit about history. I see something forming that seems dangerous to me. And I have two white boys, you know, and I want them to know that who they are is more important than what they look like.

And I want them to grow up in a world that, you know, rewards their hard work and not what they look like. So it's really for them, for their future. And also something that a lot of people don't know is I am a songwriter. I'm an artist. And there's that too. I see a very dark future for the arts if we can't establish that there is a universal human condition really is what I think is we're losing that. And that's a whole nother discussion, but really it's for my children. And was it worth it? Yes. I would say the relief that I feel

in coming out and being honest. So anybody else thinking about doing this, the practical matters are serious things that you have to consider, serious considerations. But the relief I feel at telling the truth and being out of the closet, so to speak, is immense. I feel like the relationship, I lost relationships, but I have gained so many connections now with people that are authentic and real and I can speak openly. I forgot what it felt like, to be honest with you. It just feels such a relief. It's such a relief. So yes, at this point, I could say it's worth it. I don't know how I'll feel a year from now, but definitely. There's real activism starting in this space with people like our next guest,

starting to fight back and organizing legal groups and so on to push back on this awfulness. And whatever happens at Smith, I think for whatever it's worth, you should become a part of that. You're such an effective communicator. You have such a gentle way of expressing yourself. But it's like my friend Janice Dean. I always joke that she wrote this book called Mostly Sunny, but and she is mostly sunny until she looks like the slasher and psycho with the big butcher knife slashing at you. So like if you get on the wrong side, like Governor Cuomo did, she knows how to she knows how to defend herself. And that you kind of remind me of her in that way. And I think you should use your powers to continue to use your powers to help others and maybe do a podcast. But I, I kind

of hope you do separate from Smith because I don't think you belong there. And I bet you the next chapter is going to be the best one yet. Thank you, Megan. I do. I didn't mention that, but I do have aspirations in those areas. Yes. Good.

Well, I will help you however I can. And I think I speak for my audience and I say we're rooting for you. All the best. Thank you for your courage. Thank you so much, Megan. I know what's going to make you happy. Getting your best credit score. The average American has 97 points they can add to their credit score. Almost 100 points, but no idea how to get them.

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And for mortgage brokers, one of my good friends is a mortgage broker and they need an edge, right? And they love getting their clients better deals. So go to Scoremaster before you do. Scoremaster is great for everybody. It can show you the score consequences of spending too much or of identity theft. Nobody else does what they do. So enroll in minutes and see how many points you can add to your credit score and how fast. Visit scoremaster.com slash MK. That's scoremaster.com slash MK. And now, before we get to Chris, we are going to do a feature that we call Asked and Answered here on The Megyn Kelly Show, where our executive producer, Steve Krakauer, swings by with some questions that the viewers or the listeners want to know. What do we have today, Steve? Hey, Megyn.

Yeah, this one came to us from questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. We're getting a lot of great ones in there, so everyone can keep them coming or just send it to our social media accounts at Megyn Kelly Show. But today's sort of a personal one. This one comes from Lynette Kelly, and she wants to know what was absolutely required of you when you were growing up? And also, what are the non-negotiable expectations you have for your children? We might be related. And she's seeing if my roles were the same as hers. They probably were because all Kellys have a certain sensibility in my experience.

So there were certain that were number one, non-negotiable in my family of origin and my current family. My nuclear family now is a sense of humor, like the ability to laugh at yourself and definitely at others, too. It's fun to laugh at others, you know, when they're not around. You don't want to laugh right in their face. But like if one of us tripped, oh my God, we'd be merciless with one another. I saw that. I can't, like if I'm walking down the street now and I trip, I'm like, oh God, did they see it? Because I know I'm going to get it. My family's going to gang up on me and laugh. And it makes me laugh. I love it. And if you can't laugh at yourself, good God, you're going to have a difficult time in this world. So also I have really unattractive toes. They're super long. They're like fingers. My toes are like fingers. And my family was merciless to me about them growing up. And we laughed,

you know, you got to like build in a little bit of a thick skin on your kids because life's going to throw a lot harder things at them than that. And if you can practice laughing at yourself on small matters or, you know, long spidery toe matters, I think it sets you up well for life. The other thing is my mom, she was always there with emotional support. My mom is, she's a psychiatric nurse, so she understands emotional support, but she shored us up so that we could do it for ourselves. And she never swooped in to save us when we screwed something up. You know, she'd let us fall and get ourselves back up. She used to have a sign on our kitchen cupboard that read lack of planning on your part does not justify an emergency on my part.

And man, did we live that? Um, I, I remember somebody wrote into the Kelly file, a stranger to me who had worked with my mom at the Albany veterans hospital for years. That's where she was a nurse. And, uh, he told a story unsolicited about how he remembered a day he was talking to my mother in her office. She got a call from me saying, I forgot my homework at home. You know, I was in high school. I'm like, I need it. I'm going to get in trouble with this teacher was due today. And I'm asking my mom now I laughed at the thought that my mom would have done this like that. The 50 year old me knows exactly what would have happened. But the 16-year-old me was confused. And I asked my mom to go back to leave her job, go to my house, get the homework assignment and

bring it to me at the high school. And he remembered her laughing. The absurdity of that. In no world was my mother going to do that. And it wasn't because she didn't care about my grades. It was because she cared more about my character than this particular grade or assignment. And the message she was trying to send is, was personal responsibility, you know, and again, lack of planning on your part does not justify an emergency on my part. And I'll tell you what, I didn't forget my homework ever again. It only takes a few of those moments for you to learn the lesson. And a little tough love goes a long way. We do it now for our kids too. And it does work just a little, goes a long way. So maybe that's been your experience too, Lynette, as a fellow Kelly. If not, I recommend

it. And thanks for asking. Chris Ruffo, thank you so much for being here. It's good to be with you. Since many of our listeners won't know what your background is, can you just tell us, because you've become this sort of warrior against this critical race theory and this crazy racist teaching that's getting shoved down the throats of our American school kids, of corporate America employees, sort of everywhere we look. And you've been sounding the alarm on this like nobody else, you and Jodi. So what's your background? How did you get to this point of activist on this issue? Yeah, it's kind of a backwards-leaning story, but I spent the first 10 plus years of my career directing

documentaries primarily for PBS. And I was probably a kind of center left person 10, 15 years ago and slowly saw some of these theories creeping into the documentary world, the art world. And then as I shifted to do more politics and reporting, it kind of bit back in this really extraordinary way where all of a sudden, within kind of months of the death of George Floyd, it seemed like these critical race theory based programs and were everywhere in every institution and every corporation and every workplace. And I stumbled into reporting on it really through chance. A source at the city of Seattle sent me some documents and said, hey, you should really look at what the Seattle Office of Civil Rights is doing. And so I filed a records request. I forgot about it for about a month and I finally got it back. And the documents that I found were absolutely astonishing. I mean, they were teaching as a kind of entry level employee training for white employees. They were segregating them by race. They were telling them that they had

internalized white supremacy, that they needed to denounce their own kind of inborn characteristics and join essentially a kind of cult of anti-racism. And as soon as I broke that story, the floodgates opened and I started getting first tens and dozens and then hundreds of people all across the country telling me exactly what was happening in their institutions. Right. It was their own me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. We've seen it here in New York. I mean, in all the schools for sure. But it reminds me of a couple of years ago when there was this one school in particular that made the news because they were doing this when it came to gender. They were separating the

little boys and the little girls and having the girls write down the list of grievances that not they, but women have against men and then shouting, shouting at the boys for perpetuating this unequal system. And like even at that far left school, parents were pulling their kids after that. Hell no. This is too much. It's not even liberal conservative. It's sane and insane. This is not anti-Black. And that other thing was not anti-girls' rights. It's sane and insane. Yeah, I think that's right. And what we're seeing is a really interesting political realignment where old line liberals

or kind of New Deal liberals or kind of Clinton style liberals are really caught in this place where they're trying to figure out where they find a home. And, you know, I'm at this point firmly in the kind of conservative camp, but, you know, I've really tried to open my arms and welcome in people on the center and center left who are really kind of revolted by this. People who, you know, believed in the civil rights laws, believed in equality under the law, believed in individual protection of individual rights. Those are really all under assault by the very far left that have taken identity issues and tried to really look at the foundations of our society and really try to shift them. And the schools is a good point. I broke a story recently

in Cupertino, California, very similarly to what you're talking about, where the teacher basically said, every student, you have to break down and deconstruct your identity. Now, these are eight and nine-year-olds, third graders. Deconstruct your racial identity, your sexual identity, create an identity map. And then we're going to divide you on a kind of ranking of power and privilege. So separating a classroom full of eight and nine-year-olds into the oppressors and the oppressed. And I mean, it's absolutely crazy. And unfortunately, we're in a cultural moment where it's actually scary for a lot of people to call out something that is really just blatantly wrong, totally inappropriate. But people are so scared of being denounced on these racial and cultural issues.

In a lot of cases, they remain silent. Yep. Because it's happening again. I mentioned gender, but it happens with the trans issue too. The sort of messaging on, on trans, uh, boys and girls is shoved down your throat. Like there are way more than two sexes. There could be hundreds. Um, and if you push back, it's, you know, you're a transphobe. And so parents are having this shoved on their kids. And many departments were going to get into critical race theory with you because you've taken a hard look at that and gotten a lot of reporting on it. But just keep in mind for the audience at home, this is happening on many different cultural fronts, all of which are deeply problematic. This is social experimentation

on, as you point out, kids who are eight, right? And the Cupertino article that you wrote, I saw that and you had written that students were told, these are little ones, told that they live in a dominant culture of white, middle-class, cisgender, educated, able-bodied, Christian, English speakers who created and maintained this culture in order to hold power and stay in power. And you point out this is a well-off school district. No one is oppressed there. And the parents in that particular case are mad about what happened. Yeah, they were outraged.

And the kind of wrinkle in this story and really the kind of wrinkle in our identity politics that's emerging, especially here on the West Coast, is that the parents who mobilized against this program were Chinese American. It was a group of about a half dozen Chinese American parents. They banded together, they demanded a meeting with the principal, and they shut it down. And I think this is really significant for two reasons. One is that, you know, Asian Americans, it's very difficult to call them white supremacists. I mean, it really doesn't make any sense. So they don't have that kind of fear of being denounced on those terms. So they can act kind of more directly, more bluntly.

But two, you look at the kind of the kind of racial composition of our institutions, of universities, of kind of testing. And Asian Americans are going to be the biggest losers of this kind of new race-based apportionment of power and privilege. So we're moving away from a kind of system of individual merit determines your opportunities, individual achievement, towards a kind of group-based and identity-based distribution of power and resources. And Asian Americans are looking at the numbers and they're saying, we are right now overrepresented in college admissions and in certain high prestige fields, especially in the math and sciences. And they're looking at this not only for their own self-interest, but some of the Chinese

American parents at that school and frankly in other places in the Seattle area where I live, they say, hey, we've seen this playbook before. When you try to deconstruct identity, pit group against group, come up with these kind of really aggressive kind of strategies of cultural change. This is straight out of the Cultural Revolution. And some of these parents told me, we fled China to get away from this. And now we're finding ourselves seeing it here in America. And that's why they're standing up against it. Right.

And the Chinese education experience has been studied and discussed by a lot of scholars. But it is interesting because there is a culture of academic achievement. And it doesn't matter whether you come from a very rich family or a very poor family. There is a culture of working hard and getting good grades and that that's prized. And so they're not in favor of, as you wrote about the San Diego Unified School District, abolishing homework deadlines. And some other schools are getting rid of grades, getting rid of the SATs, getting rid of anything that would reward that kind of hard work and hours and hours of grit that they would like to be rewarded for the amount of effort they are willing to put into their academic careers. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I mean, ultimately, right, no matter what systems that we create, there's really no substitute for hard work, for achievement, for excellence. And even in my own household, my wife is Thai-American. She grew up in a slum in Thailand, very poor. Her mother was able to flee, come to the United States and had a

difficult time really growing up in poverty. But her mother drilled into her head, study hard, work hard, learn English, you know, go to college, do all of these steps because this is a place of enormous opportunity. And, you know, you escaped some system that was really rigged against all people into this new system. And, you know, my wife was able to excel. And I see it even at home with our kids. You know, our oldest child, who's 10, came home with a B+. And my wife was furious. She's like, B plus is not good enough.

We're going to have to do an extra hour of homework every night with mom. We're going to have to push, push, push. We know that you can do better. And I think that, you know, that small experience is indicative of even the academic literature that shows that Asian Americans consistently put in more hours of studying than any other group and consequently have really good outcomes. And I think the solution isn't really to do what we're doing now, which is basically saying, get rid of homework, get rid of the requirement to show up on time, get rid of

standardized tests, really try to basically eliminate anything that could distinguish people based on academic achievement and just lump people into these really kind of crude, chromatized, kind of skin color based groupings, kind of skin color-based groupings, but actually figure out, hey, what are the students that are doing most successful doing? And this goes for all categories. What are successful white and black and Asian

and Native American students doing? And how can we replicate what's happening with those students more broadly? To try to, rather than lower the bar, we want to lift the floor, but that's really hard to do. And a lot of these ideologues have no interest in doing it. Just to pick up on a point you just made, you talked about some of the quote training,

diversity training that was being done at the Department of Homeland Security. And one of the terms you were just basically discussing, which is merit, right? Meritocracy and working hard, right? And believing that this is a land of opportunity that was specifically derided by the DHS diversity trainers as, as racist as, um, they say, I just, I took notes from your article that, uh, whites have been fed a racial curriculum based on falsehoods, unwarranted fears, and they believe in their own white superiority that they've been socialized into oppressor roles, and that there is a myth of meritocracy and statements like anyone can succeed here if they work hard enough and the most

qualified person should get the job. Those statements are racist and they're harmful. They're code for people of color are lazy or incompetent, need to work harder. Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty common meme or a pretty common idea in the social justice circles and in trainings all over the country. This idea that meritocracy is a form of white supremacy, this idea that punctuality is a form of white supremacy, objectivity even. So any kind of, you know, abstract noun that we think of as a kind of value or a virtue, the critical race theorists argue that that's merely a camouflage for racial domination and oppression. So all of these things that you think are either neutral or in some cases good, are actually under the surface bad because they enable a system of white supremacy, etc.

Another one is colorblindness. Colorblindness, the critical race theorists tell us, is actually racist because it, again, enables a system of discrimination and oppression under a kind of false pretense of equal protection. So it's really a upside down world in a lot of ways. And I think the big problem is even people who mouth this stuff, right? The people in the training sessions and the diversity trainers themselves, they say in kind of their language, oh, these things are all kind of white supremacist values. They should be deconstructed and denounced. But how many of them show up to work on time? How many of them try to

gain achievements and credentials and academic awards or prizes or publications? How many of them function in a day-to-day basis as if objectivity is a kind of basis for rational decision-making? The answer is all of them. I mean, the thing that is so infuriating is that they will browbeat their opponents in the most vicious terms when their actual behavior reflects that they have internalized, adopted, and even value those same structures.

And I think it's really up to us to call them out. But at least they feel bad about it, right? They've got guilt over it. Yeah. And it's just a performance. That's the thing. It's like, you know, I've had a number of trainings, actually, even one that came into my email box today. The new thing now is to introduce yourself in a meeting, not only by your name, but actually introduce yourself by your race, your gender, and your name. So you're now basically in meetings in school districts and in government agencies where you say, hey, I'm Chris. I'm a white male and my pronouns are he and him. And it's like, we do this kind of unconscious dance where we try to check all the boxes of what's polite and what

you're supposed to do and what's expected to avoid, you know, the kind of blowback. But, you know, does anyone really believe it? I'm not convinced that they do. Oh my God, it's absurd. This is what I'm going to say. Megyn Kelly, figure it out. This is ridiculous. It's absurd. I know transgender people. I have transgender family members and they don't want to have to say pronouns. The whole point in switching over and sort of living in the body and in the gender that they felt they were meant to be born with is to live in that gender. And if they wanted more attention called to the fact that they had transitioned, then maybe they'd be

in for, uh, they'd be in favor of this. But if their living life is a woman and they were born as a, you know, in the body identified as male, they don't want to have to run around saying pronouns all the time. They just want you to call her, her or she it like, there's a real split within the transgender community about this pronoun thing. So there's, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. And I mean, like saying your race, I can open your eyes. It's just absurd where we're going, prioritizing all the wrong things. Yeah. Yeah. And I think like, you know, the answer is actually much more simple. You know, they, the, the kind of social justice crowd is basically saying all of these things are kind of irredeemable evil.

We need to overthrow the very basic foundations of our society in order to rectify them. But the solution actually in so many cases is really simple. It's basic courtesy. It's recognizing people's individual dignity. And if you come across someone, I don't know, this is what my practice is saying, okay, this person is maybe transgender identifying as a woman. I just, I just use that thing and then be very open to any feedback that's different. Try to respect and honor people's choices. And you don't necessarily need this kind of cultural revolution underneath, but I'm pretty convinced at this point that a lot of these kind of games that are set up, right, these are really games that were required to play. These kind of loyalty tests or litmus tests to the cause are really just mechanisms. They're not actually important in themselves to a lot of these people, but they're mechanisms for

a broader pattern of cultural revolution. And the old ideas that kind of failed, you know, century after century, kind of from, you know, the 1840s onward with kind of Marxism and then centralized planning in the 20th century, they kind of, they're zombie ideas. They never die. You can't kill them. And they come back in these reformulated ways. And I think that in a small way, these little games that we play as a society are reflective of deeper currents of a political movement that wants, you know, revolution that wants fundamental change. Can we talk about that? So let's go back and just talk about what critical race theory is. I think a lot of people think they have a general idea, but don't really understand what is critical race theory.

Yeah. And critical race theory is a kind of academic movement that started really to kind of blossom in the 1990s and was really relegated to academia. And the idea is that is to kind of use race as a lens through which to analyze society and basically saying analysis up to this point has discounted the importance of race. We should really look at race, racial discrimination, racial oppression. And as at that point, I agree. I think that's actually important. So the kind of premise is correct. But they take another step, which is to say that they make a kind of historical judgment and then a legal judgment and a cultural judgment that the United States is fundamentally and irredeemably racist and white supremacist, and that all of our institutions from the founding

of the country to the current day are merely kind of cover or smoke screens for racist oppression. And the critical race theorists actually started out of law schools. And their idea was that the fundamental rights that we have as Americans enshrined in the Constitution, articulated in the Declaration, are actually kind of perpetuators of evil and that we should essentially overthrow the constitutional order and end the kind of unfettered protection of speech and individual rights as individuals and private property, which is another form of discrimination, and then end kind of 14th Amendment protections that you're all treated equally under the law. For the critical race theorists, these aren't actually signs of progress.

Even the Civil Rights Act, even desegregating schools, they were very skeptical of this because they say it gives the appearance of progress, but actually doesn't change the fact that racism is as bad in 2021 as it was in 1814. Oh, good God. So I know it has its roots in cultural Marxism. Are you able to explain what that means? Yeah, I can explain it. You know, everyone's on the left, people's heads explode when you say cultural Marxism, because they say that's not a real thing. It's a made up kind of problem. But this is how I describe it. And I think it's accurate. And people have been using the term cultural Marxism since the 1960s and 70s. So it has a kind of lineage, but I would best describe it in this way, in kind of old style Marxism from Karl Marx based on kind of coming out of the work of Hegel.

The idea was that there's a kind of dichotomy in society between the oppressor and the oppressed. And in Marx's time, he thought that class analysis was really the most fundamentally important dynamic in society. So there was a kind of bourgeoisie. So the owners of capital, the owners of factories, the owners of financial institutions. And then there was the proletariat, the kind of downtrodden workers and laborers at the bottom. And I mean, there's a certain truth to that, right? But what they tried to do from Marx's time through the 20th century was we need to have a kind of communistic central planning system that overthrows the kind of capitalist domination.

And it didn't work out very well. Actually, it led to, you know, more than 100 million deaths around the world. Those systems collapsed. And even in the states that are nominally communist, like China, they've abandoned that kind of economic system. So in the 1960s, a group of philosophers and scholars called the Frankfurt School, that eventually actually many came to the United States, said, hey, we know that the kind of Marxist revolution has failed. They understood this by the 1960s. So we have to find

a new strategy to get to that revolutionary goal, to get to that goal of overthrowing the kind of European capitalist society. And they said, what we need to do is now focus on identity and on race and to create a coalition of the dispossessed. That's the kind of key framework. And they got to work kind of putting together that ideology. It was picked up and then modified and changed and adapted by the critical race theorists in the 1990s. And then with an almost astonishing speed, after the death of George Floyd, these ideas that had been brewing for a half century were all of a sudden perpetuated in every corporate office and every government agency and in every school in the country. It's something, you know, to their

credit, they patiently developed and built and perpetuated this in academia until the time was right where it was just caught fire. So what do they want? What is the end goal? They want to get rid of meritocracy. They want to get rid of grades. They want to get rid of white privilege. But what does the world look like in Ibram X. Kendi's utopia? Well, there's two answers. I'll give you the broad answer, and then I'll answer on Ibram X. Kendi. I have a paper coming out that describes exactly this world.

But the bigger picture is that when you ask folks, and I've asked this to a lot of people in my reporting, what do you want? They never answer with a kind of positive. They never answer with, we want a society that looks like X, Y, and Z, that institutions function in this way. It's almost always a negative or a negation. It's basically saying, well, we want to destroy capitalism. We want to be anti-racist.

It always functions in what kind of philosophers call negation. So denying, dismantling, deconstructing, interrupting, all of those verbs that you hear in the language of social justice are all really fundamentally negative. And from Marx onward, even Marx had this problem where Marx never really said, what does the great kind of socialist communist society look like? His answer was very vague. It basically said, well, we can't even understand how glorious this utopian future will be

until we destroy the nightmare that we have today. And the social justice folks, in many cases, operate on the same framework where they say, we have to destroy racism, patriarchy, capitalism, et cetera, et cetera. And then out of the ashes, a kind of beautiful new world will emerge. So that's one. Second, Ibram Kendi is a bit more specific and it's frankly totalitarian. He wrote a piece for Politico that said, we need to have a department of anti-racism that is permanently funded, staffed by unelected experts, theoretically appointed by people like Ibram Kendi. And this department of anti-racism should be essentially a fourth branch of government

that has the power, and this is in the article, anyone can read it, that has the power to nullify or void any law at any level of government in the United States, and also has the power to monitor the speech of policymakers, which would include, you know, you would assume journalists and think tanks, et cetera, and essentially to shut down any speech that is not anti-racist. So in this world, it would have a kind of omnipotent fourth branch of government that has total power to regulate speech and total power to control the law in every level of government in the United States.

I mean, if that's not a kind of authoritarian and totalitarian regime, and he publishes it in the pages of Politico, and then wins the kind of praise of all of the kind of technocratic class from Twitter to academia to the media. And it just, it blows my mind that if you could get away, you know, get away with outlining something like that very bluntly and face not only no pushback, but get the kind of universal plays praise of America's elites. Oh, I mean, Politico just had to melt down the staffers there because Ben Shapiro for one day edited the playbook, like basically the website and its editorial for one day. I don't remember any pushback when Ibram X. Kendi published these ideas on the site. This is madness. Instead, you've got David Remnick of The New Yorker

out there saying, he's like a brother to me, Ibram X. Kendi, as he pushes ideas that are un-American. That really is cultural Marxism. That's actual Marxism. And right now, people are in such a cowed position that the only response we're hearing is, yes, more. I I'm an ally and I submit.

And if you don't, you you get called anti-black, anti-person of color and a white supremacist. Yeah. I mean, you know, I would say though, like I get that a lot of people saying, Oh, aren't you scared of being called this or that? And it's like, well, you know, I've been called this and that, and you know, you survive, you move on and, and people who actually can read your work and know your character, um, you know, we'll make a better judgment, but we also live in this weird moment that I've seen pieces in academic articles and popular press where they're saying that logic is white supremacist. Math is white supremacist.

Square dancing is white supremacist. I've seen even that from a very well-known Black Lives Matter activist in Seattle that Barack Obama is a white supremacist. I mean, we've defined white supremacy as essentially anything in this moment that people on the left don't like. And I think it's doing, hopefully, over the kind of short and medium term, people will say, well, wait a minute, if logic and objectivity are white supremacist, I mean, we've reached kind of beyond the point of absurd and this epithet, which is really the worst thing that someone can call you in modern day America, right? It's a reputation destroyer.

If once it loses its meaning by overuse, it's kind of like the boy who cried wolf. And I think we're getting close to that point where people are going to start saying, Hey, wait a minute. You know, the SATs aren't white supremacist showing up to work on time. Isn't white supremacists. Showing up to work on time isn't white supremacist. The adults need to start putting their foot down and just saying, none of this. Stop. It's too much. Let's look out for people who are poor. Let's look out for people who are suffering. But this isn't helping anyone. The other piece of it is, I talked about this with Douglas Murray not long ago last week, which was what a lot of these folks seem to want is not equality, as they say. They want whites to

be cowed and self-flagellating and in a permanent apologetic stance for sins that were committed hundreds of years ago. And that, like I've been saying all along, that is no way forward for the country. It's the same thing these sort of radical feminists were doing to men when the Me Too movement exploded and then imploded, right? Like they went too far. They just started to sweep up any man

with any small transgression in their hoover. And then the movement lost all power because people just became afraid of them, started rolling their eyes at them and started to avoid them. of emotional battering ram because they know that it's extremely effective at eliciting a response and getting results as far as practical political power. But if you look at actually what does the world look like, I don't think it's saying, hey, we're going to voluntarily renounce our positions in the universities, step down from our positions on corporate boards and elevate people in our place that reflect the kind of demographic preferences of our policy statements. I think it's a political move and it's the left that is a multiracial left elite that is using the kind of, frankly, using black pain and suffering and historical trauma in order to advance their

own agenda. Again, that actually isn't a kind of predominantly African-American agenda. It's really a kind of predominantly left agenda that is multiracial in nature. I've said many times, this isn't about white versus black. This is about left versus right and not even because I think most of the left are with the right on this. It's this crazy faction on the hard left, hard sort of radical left. Right. I don't mean people who like Bernie Sanders economic policies. I mean, the radical left that's pursuing this crazy woke world that's unattainable and dangerous. Those are the it and they tend to be Upper West Side white women. I mean, it's like, yes, there are some black people say, but like they're the ones pushing this. They're the ones doing the self-flagellating and making the rest of us feel. I mean, their messaging actually is that if a black person makes any allegation, not believing them is racist, that that calling

the police on a black person suspected of a crime that has been witnessed by a store manager in CVS is racist, right? Like it's, it's getting to that point where upholding the law, pursuing due process is considered racist. Yeah. And if you look at it, that's really the battlefield right now. They're really going after criminal justice. And I think they're going after criminal justice primarily because, you know, they already have kind of what you might call cultural hegemony over blue cities, right? This kind of far left ideology is really running the show in New York and San Francisco and Seattle and DC and Boston. But in these cities where they have pretty much total domination, there's one sector of society that they don't. It's the criminal justice system. It's prosecutors, it's courts,

it's jails. And you notice their rhetoric is abolish courts, abolish prisons, abolish the police. And they sense that that is really in their kind of apocalyptic worldview. That is the final impediment to their revolution. The criminal justice apparatus is really the last vestige of historical oppression in these cities. And you can just feel all of the energy just converging on that point. And what they're doing in New York and other cities is now being reflected because as cities are de-policing or de-criminalizing or even defunding in some cases, you see crime come back again. And it's almost like we forgot the lessons of the 1990s in New York, where we actually had to take proactive measures to make society more peaceful and safer, especially for minority communities.

It's almost as if we've forgotten all those lessons and we've been swept up in this mania. And the latest numbers from the FBI show, you know, double digit increases in homicides in dozens of cities. In some cases, 50, 60, 70 percent, the biggest one year increase in recorded history. And at what point does that evidence and that true suffering and that kind of horrific violence start to make those Upper West Side wine moms start to reevaluate their Kendi fanship? I don't know, we'll have to see. Yeah, no, we did. We defunded our police by a billion dollars here in New York. Now we've got shootings have doubled. Murder rate is up by 50 percent. Gun violence has surged to levels not seen in years. And for what? Because we were told after the killing of George Floyd that this is a systemic problem, that the were hunting black men to trying to kill them in the streets, which was a lie. It was a lie. The data do not support it. And in fact, here in New York City, go ahead and read Coleman Hughes in City Journal here in New York City. The rate at

which police have killed unarmed black men or even just black men or even just defendants, suspects in general, has fallen precipitously over the past 20, 30 years. So we're going in the right direction. But because of a lie perpetrated by the media and activists who do want to like Black Lives Matter, who do want to, I quote, dismantle the nuclear family, we're having money taken away from the very communities who most need the police. And the murder rate is going up. The murder rate has doubled as a result. No one seems to give a damn. I've said this before, Chris.

I am going to be fine. I live in a nice doorman building. I'll make sure I have security if New York goes to hell or wherever I am. It's I'm worried about my fellow women in the inner city who are the ones who want cops. And if you pull blacks in the inner cities, they'll say they want more police presence, not less. And yet my fellow women on the Upper West Side who are in the Lululemon Lycra have

decided to make to feel better about themselves. They need to defund the police. I know it's like it's straight out of a Tom Wolfe novel. It's really amazing. And I think, on one hand, it's so absurd that it's almost funny in a kind of dark way. But the more serious point is this, is that the great kind of moral crime of critical race theory and its related political movements is that it serves to kind of establish and strengthen elite status. So if you are a professor or a pundit or a media personality on the far left, this stuff is great for business. It's great for your reputation.

But actually, it does nothing to help the people that are most vulnerable, that are most kind of dispossessed, that are living in the poorest neighborhoods. And, you know, I spent actually five years directing a film for PBS about America's poorest cities. And I spent, you know, months and months and months in some of the poorest places on earth, in the country rather, including a housing project in Memphis. It was 100% African-American, nearly 100% rate of poverty. And I spent so much time talking to people, listening to people. And it struck me that from that experience to then thinking about the rhetoric from critical race theory, these are people that live in two completely different worlds. The actual concerns

of people who are living in poverty, living in housing projects, have nothing to do with the concerns that are coming out of the mouths of the kind of academics and journalists who profess the kind of new racial orthodoxy. Those solutions that come from the top actually would do nothing to help people at the bottom. And as I'm going to be arguing in an upcoming paper, actually, in a lot of ways, actually make things worse, both through crime and also through how institutions are refigured. It actually undermines those institutions like strong families, like strong communities, like strong churches that are actually the foundation of these places. And I think that, you know, we shouldn't be afraid to oppose this movement because I think it's intellectually bankrupt, but it's also morally bankrupt. And I think both of those are tremendously important.

Just to follow up on my stat from Coleman Hughes's article, one of the many in City Journal, in 2018, the NYPD killed five people down from 93 people in 1971. Can you just talk for a minute? Because your articles are always so good, Chris, and they go through like the craziness of this critical race theory. And I'm just going to tick off a couple of things, but I want to pivot to God and family after this. But like these are just a couple that you've publicly outlined. At the Treasury Department, they were being toldica was built on the backs of the enslaved all white americans are complicit in a system of white supremacy whites share an inborn racist and oppressive streak okay um uh whiteness whiteness includes white privilege and white

supremacy uh all whites struggle to own their own racism, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. And then, oh, and, and by the way, they say, as you have to sit in the discomfort of your own racism as a white person, as the, as black employees tell you about their pain, they warn the black employees that, that they quote, have no obligation to like you, thank you, or feel sorry for you or forgive you. So it's a sewing division. I read it and I have a note here. Forgive me. My note reads, this is so fucked up. It is fucked up. I'm sorry, but it is.

And then I got onto an article you wrote about the San Diego Unified School District having been radicalized. They're getting rid of the homework deadlines. And did they bring in Bettina Love or were they just talking about something? They hired her to speak at two separate events. Okay. So Bettina Love, according to what I read in your piece,

starts by telling the teachers that they're colonizers and they're sitting on stolen, stolen native land and that they're racist. That American schools are guilty of the spirit murder of black children. That racism runs deep in the U.S. and blacks alone know who America really is, that public schools don't see blacks as human. Public schools don't see blacks as human and are guilty of systemic anti-blackness and the spirit murder of babies, and that whites are directly responsible for the plight of, quote, dark children. Whiteness reproduces poverty, failing schools, high unemployment, school closings, and trauma for persons of color, and that white attendees must

undergo anti-racist therapy in order to overcome their racism, ignorance, and history of harm. I cannot imagine how a white teacher hearing that would feel. I can guess it's not more unified and not less colorblind, right? Not more colorblind, but shamed, disempowered, loathed, divided. This is evil. This kind of talk now being embraced by a whole school district is evil. And was there any pushback? Like, do the teachers, what did they do? Did they just take it? Yeah. I mean, this is, this is, they held a, one of these speeches for all the principals of schools in the San Diego school district, which teaches more than 100,000 kids. And then on the kind of teacher training over the summer and people sat there and took it and didn't

protest, didn't stand up, didn't object, didn't file a kind of complaint. Luckily, one of the teachers sent me all of the documents and said, this is outrageous. Can you please report on this? But please keep my identity anonymous because I'm terrified of getting fired. I'm terrified of getting mobbed. But this needs to be out there. And it's absolutely crazy. And you can almost sense the glee that this woman, Bettina Love, who's a professor, I believe, at the University of Georgia, she is really denouncing people in the most kind of vicious terms straight to their face. And they're sitting there and saying, yeah, yeah, we agree. We are inherently evil. We spirit murder babies.

We I mean, like the most like the verbiage is so out of control. It's almost like hard to believe. But it's racist happening everywhere. It's absolutely racist. And I think if you, if you take the language and you, if you, if you kind of flip the kind of racial categories, um, this is some of like the most toxic and awful stuff from a hundred years ago from eugenicists and white supremacists and Klansmen. I mean, the language, the categorizations, and even intellectually, what they're doing is they're reviving three key concepts in my view. One is race essentialism, this idea of whiteness, that every white person is not an individual,

but can be reduced to a racial essence. That's what people argued, again, 100 years ago. The second one is kind of collective guilt. That's a strategy that totalitarian regimes have used to manipulate people where you're saying you are in this category and someone did something bad in your category. Therefore, you also are responsible or guilty for that bad thing. And third, in a lot of cases and a lot of institutions now, they're reviving neo-segregationism. They're reviving segregation by saying they're calling them affinity groups or kind of other kind of euphemisms for it. But they're actually holding training

sessions and meetings explicitly. This is the room for blacks, this is the room for whites. And this is the room for the others, the kind of Asians and, you know, Latinos and Native Americans. And Indians, a lot of my friends are Indians. They're like, where do I fit in? I don't know what I am. The Asians and the Indians are most confused by all this. They're just like, this seems bad. Where do we go? I don't like this. You know, I've talked to a lot of folks in the tech sector about this and kind of cracking jokes, but it really is bizarre. Like it's 2021. We're now having racially segregated workplaces. We're now, you know, explicitly saying we need to get rid of equal protection and go back to kind of race, race based decision making. And it's happening quickly, it's happening, kind of in a profound way. And I think that as a as a reporter, as someone covering this, it's, it's, it's kind of darkly fascinating to watch society

get consumed by this mania. And I'm, you know, frankly, scary. If you have children, as I know you do, and I do, and Jody Shaw does, it's scary. I don't want to pass this baton to them. You know, I've joked before that it's I can get targeted, of course, because I'm a white woman. And that's power adjacent in the in the language of these critical race theorists. I'm a woman. So I got that going for me. So I have a right to speak. but I'm white, which is power adjacent, uh, you know, a white woman. So I'm power adjacent to white men.

But then I did the worst thing you could possibly do, which is I created, I have three children, but I created two, two little white future men. Right. So it's like poor white men. They like,

good God. They talk openly behind the scenes about how they know that's the worst thing to be. Everybody looks at them as though they hate everybody who's other than a white man. It's all nonsense. And they've been subjected to a lot of racist, sexist talk. Again, the answer to racism is not more racism. So I want to ask you because Douglas Murray says the answer to this, and I know you're going bigger picture, which we're going to get to, but his answer in the moment is for somebody to stand up at the, at the schoolhouse or the corporate boardroom and say, I will not allow you to re-racialize my company, my country, or myself. I, I will not talk in these terms that you are trying to force me to talk in. And honestly, Jodi Shaw did it. She just talked

to her and her words were, stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on skin color. Okay. And now Jodi Shaw has been placed on administrative leave for some bs pretext of a you forwarded one email that may have had a student's information to your personal account obviously pretextual that they got rid of her because of or trying to because of her video because of her speaking out so my question to you is let's let's talk micro before we go macro what do you think the teacher in the moment should do? What do you think the Jody Shaw should do in the moment?

No, I think that's exactly right. And there was another whistleblower at the Sandia National Nuclear Labs that emailed all of his colleagues a kind of painstaking rebuttal of some of these programs. And again, he was placed on leave. Luckily, we were able to advocate for him. So he retained his job. But I think that's exactly what needs to happen. People need to have courage. I think that the value that matters more than anything in this moment is courage. And courage, by definition, requires putting something at risk. And in many cases, putting your job at risk. And this obviously isn't a solution for everyone. Everyone has to kind of judge their life kind of structure and

their risk tolerance. But for the courageous among us, they have to stand up, stand tall, and just say, no, I won't do this. I won't comply. It's not appropriate. It's wrong. And it violates these core values that I have and we have as a society. And I think that people are so scared that they can get away with this right now because they've bullied people into submission. more people stand up and say no, it's going to encourage others and then hopefully others after that until you have enough people where you just can't fire all of them. They can actually stand tall together. And I'm seeing very encouraging small scale stories all across the country of people standing up in schools and the workplace and have been successful. And I think that as these stories replicate, we're going to get two things. We're either going to get success stories that can be kind of models for future action, or in some cases, we're going to get martyrs, people who have been canceled. And those are tragedies, obviously, but they also kind of serve as a kind of rallying point and also as a kind of a point for condemnation of these systems that

are willing to sacrifice individuals to uphold this ideology. That's funny because I can relate on a couple of those fronts, right? I've definitely been attacked, in my view, unfairly for, you know, statements about race that were factually correct. Anytime I see you trending on Twitter, I'm always like, oh boy, what's going on now? Oh yeah. And it doesn't, and it can be about, it can be about anything, you know, it doesn't have to be about race. I just, I, I actually do kind of love how much I irritate the far left and the Twitter people that, that kind of brings me enjoyment. I love that they don't, they're too stupid to realize how much power they give me. Go ahead, make me trend again. Get my name everywhere. Fine.

All you do is increase my name recognition and keep me in the news. And then they tell you you're irrelevant. That's weird how you follow me and tweet about me and make me trend then. Anyway, but obviously I can relate on a personal level, but I, and I've talked publicly about having to pull my kids from their schools. You know what I mean? At my boy's school, they actually circulated a memo, which, which they wanted to be mandated reading for all faculty that said in every children where I'm sorry, that said in every classroom where white children learn, there is a future killer cop that white children are being indoctrinated into black death. I mean, I'm sorry, but it took something

that egregious for us to say and goodbye because things had been ramping up there at a slow but steady pace for months and months and months. Not every school will be that explicit and that offensive, but parents, if you won't do it for yourself, you have to do it for your kid. Who would let a teacher who'd been indoctrinated in that kind of thinking have access to their little one, right? I sat and thought, who? Is it my little love? Is it my little six-year-old? Is it his best friend? How dare you? How dare you? And I do think like, it's okay to feel some outrage at what's being done to our kids if you won't feel it for yourself. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And, you know, working on this investigative series on schools all over the country, and it's not just New York and San Francisco, it's Missouri, it's other other kind of small cities

where you wouldn't expect it. And it really is kind of strange. And I'm working on some research right now in Portland, Oregon, which is really kind of ground zero for the madness. And they're implementing a curriculum and teacher training and kind of kind of administrative positions, too. And I'm saying this. It's it's a kind of hyperbolic, but it's actually not. They're training child soldiers to fight this kind of race conscious revolution. And I say that because the actual materials that I've had leaked to me outline very clearly, we need to reform white identity into becoming a kind of member of this anti-racist movement. We need to train our kids how to protest, how to host demonstrations, how to get on the streets.

And then the results of this kind of political education in predominantly public schools in Portland is that you have now dozens of minors being arrested as kind of members of Antifa rioting, waving guns at crowds, throwing bricks and bottles and rocks at police, lighting buildings on fire. All of these crimes and kind of rioting are being, in some cases, led by and then executed by children. And what happens when you get those kind of underlying ideologies that lead

to these outcomes cemented in school curriculums throughout the state of Oregon, and especially in an egregious way in the city of Portland, you are training kids to be born angry, fearful, entitled, this kind of toxic mix of all of these attributes that's going to lead to chaos and destruction, whether it's self-destruction, whether it's actually just collapsing people's sense of value internally, or, and sometimes as a result of, external destruction. Society is wrong. Society is oppressing me. Society is evil. Burn it down. And that's what I think we're seeing. It's brainwashing. It's cult-like. And it's wrong. It's morally wrong in every way. And by the way, so before I move off of this,

I did want to ask you, it's not all about alienating people by race, by gender, and so on. More and more, it's alienating children of faith from God and their families. Like we're seeing more and more of that creep up in some of the literature that's getting leaked and talked about publicly. And I can say, I mean, I know that I'm personally familiar with a book that was shared at the kindergarten level that in talking about the Harvey Milk case, put God says no on the page of what's wrong. Right. So the little children are being told what God said when God said that this was wrong. God's wrong. And, you know, you can talk about sexual identity and sexual preference, and you can talk about gay marriage, which I support and always have, in a way that brings your political view forward.

But you should not be telling six-year-olds that God is wrong. And I think this is what really upsets, in my experience, I have a lot of Black friends who that was the last line for them when it comes to this stuff. My friends don't like this critical race theory either. But but pushing God as like the purveyor of wrongness. It goes it's a bridge too far. Yeah. And I think what you're talking about illustrates the really kind of two separate lineages, the two separate genealogies of activism, let's say. And there's one that is in the kind of Martin Luther King vein, the civil rights movement.

Now, a lot of people forget that the civil rights movement was emanated from black churches. It was deeply rooted in Christianity and then also deeply rooted, and Martin Luther King wrote about this and spoke about this, in the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution that he felt, and many people felt correctly, weren't being fulfilled, weren't being honored by society. So you have that kind of one lineage, right? The origins of the civil rights movement, again, in the kind of constitutional principles in the Declaration and in Christian churches, predominantly Southern Black churches. And Black Lives Matter, they like to claim that they are the new civil rights movement or the extension of the civil rights movement, the natural successor to the civil rights movement. But they don't believe in either of those things that were the fundamental structures of the civil rights movement. They're explicitly atheistic. I mean, they're also against the constitution. Critical race theorists

make this explicit in their academic work. They say, we are really down on the constitution. We really are skeptical of it. We want to reformulate it. It actually is a structure of systemic racism, et cetera. So you have this thing that I think we need to separate. The civil rights movement is not Black Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter is not the civil rights movement. And I think what we're finding in the Black community and then in the wider community of all Americans is that we're being faced with a choice. Which value and vision do we want to pursue and uphold and strengthen? And, you know, I think pretty clearly the value and vision that is based on the constitution and on a kind of the kind of Christian principle of equality under God is far superior than the position of a kind of Marxist

revolution and kind of vicious identity-based politics that we see in our streets today. So that leads me to the macro, which is larger solutions. And you are one of the few people working on real solutions to this problem. Now, I retweet all your stuff because it's always so spot on, but I've been saying for a long time that I feel like the law is the answer to this. And a lot of the cultural craziness we're seeing the law. I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm not saying you don't have judges who are political one way or the other and let that creep into their rulings.

But my overall experience of the law is judges follow it. It's the very nature of being a judge. And it doesn't actually allow for that much identity politics to creep in. It's not to say it never does, but it doesn't really allow for it in the way it could in an academic institution. And we talked about this with Jody, but people may not understand the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Constitution and its equal protection law do not allow for racial discrimination against white people. treat a white person as less than or give them a lower job or what have you, discriminate against them because they have the immutable characteristic of white skin, something over which they have no control. So you're trying to organize a group of lawyers, Chris, because I saw you say the other day it's up to over 100 lawyers who have now volunteered to help you do what? Yeah, well, you know, the context is that, you know, last year, as many of the listeners might remember, some of my investigative reporting

caught the eye of President Trump, who passed an executive order banning these critical race theory trainings from the government. And when Joe Biden won the election, I realized that that executive order probably wasn't going to last. And sure enough, one of the first 15 things that he did was get rid of that executive order banning critical race theory. And but in that kind of intervening period, I said, all right, well, rather than just, you know, throw in my hat, we need to get activated. We need to figure out what's the next strategy. And I took a series of calls with a lot of the conservative think tanks and legal foundations, people who are, you know, kind of expert lawyers, very experienced. And I said, hey, I think that we could, you know, take some of my

whistleblowers. I now have probably more than a thousand different whistleblowers with documents and evidence. We can pick some of these cases and then all hand them off and you guys can start suing these institutions in federal court, making the argument that these are violations of civil rights because they traffic in racial stereotypes. They constitute a kind of race-based harassment. They create a toxic work environment. They also compel speech. So we have a number of great kind of constitutional cases we can take. Here was the problem. All of these great institutions are like, hey, we're big institutions. We're bureaucratic. We typically

don't fight on culture issues. We don't have a kind of dedicated staff to fight these issues. We're really interested. We're really excited about this. We think it's important, but we're just not there yet. And as you know, a lot of the conservative legal foundations have been more focused on economic issues, on regulatory issues, licensing, et cetera, and are not really ready for this culture fight that we're in the middle of. So I was kind of discouraged. And then I said, you know, I'm going to take one more of these calls. And then in that final call, before I was going to throw in the towel, I talked to a small group of private attorneys and they said, hey,

we don't have bureaucracy. We don't have any decision making tree. We can start suing right now. And then I realized, okay, I can't just hand this off. I'm going to have to actually organize this myself. So I found a kind of a network of advisors from some of the, some of the institutions, but then also cobbled together a network of private attorneys and smaller legal foundations. Our coalition has already filed three cases. We're going to be filing another one in the coming weeks. And then all of a sudden, I get now more than 100 other attorneys that are volunteering to file lawsuits in dozens of states around the country. So what I'm viewing this as,

the strategy on this piece, is relentless, decentralized legal warfare with the ultimate objective of getting a case before the United States Supreme Court. And if we win there, it will have an immediate ripple effect in every school, every government agency, and every corporation in the country. That would say what? What's the ideal Supreme Court ruling? That would say critical race theory-based programs. These programs that traffic in the concepts of race essentialism, conspelled speech, racial harassment, racial stereotypes are violations of the Civil Rights Act and violations of the U.S. Constitution. very clearly ruled that what we're doing here is illegal, they can reach out to me and our network of lawyers to send a cease and desist. And then again, I think a lot of people who are in risk management, who are in kind of corporate legal departments are going to say, this is a

liability. This is a risk. This is actually illegal. Get rid of it. And the kind of proof of that is that after we got the executive order, every Fortune 500 company in the United States that does business with the federal government that the president banned from conducting critical race theory trainings, we saw them immediately cease all of these programs. So we know that they can press a button and knock it off and stop it, but we have to have the legal leverage to force them to do so. And that's what we're going to do. And there are a lot of these corporations, their heart's not in it.

They're paying the ransom. They're afraid, too. And same with a lot of these school boards. They're afraid. They're afraid that they're going to get targeted. They're going to be called racist. If there's one racist incident at a school, and let's face it, racism is not gone in America. We all know that. way it does its education. They have to replace math with critical race theory training. You know, they're bumping curriculum for these mandated sessions for students and teachers. None of that is true, but the corporations are afraid and need cover. You know, frankly, they need cover. They

need PR cover. Then a Supreme Court decision or a legal decision, which would be 100% on the money, as far as I'm concerned, lawfully, legally, saying this is not lawful, would do it. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I think corporate corporations, I mean, you know, are cynical entities in a lot of ways, right? They're very kind of practical politics. They want to defend the bottom line. They want to protect against bad PR. But if you shift the incentives, these corporations are going to adapt very quickly. And I think that, you figures like Ibram Kendi as kind of like gurus, you know, in the 1960s and in the 90s, it's like you have the kind of yoga kind of fads and health food fads and kind of other like cults, you know, that you can watch like eight part Netflix series about. And I think we're going through a similar moment. And I think that it's a fad. It is

a kind of cult-like structure. It is scary. It's overwhelming. It's being successful. But ultimately, I think our country and our institutions and our people in the United States are going to come to their senses at a certain point and recognize that we can be, you know, supportive of reducing racial inequalities and care about racial inequalities, but actually at the same time, oppose this method, oppose this philosophy, oppose this program. And I think once we get to that reasonable point, and we have a kind of silent majority that turns into maybe a little bit more vocal majority, we can kind of, you know, crush this at its roots. We can kind of excavate some of the kind of the most kind of bankrupt ideas from this movement,

expose them to the light, and then Americans will simply move on. Okay. And to those who say you're on the wrong side of history, you are misreading the national mood when it comes to race in America. What say you? Well, I mean, it's right there in the language, right? The national mood. Moods, what are moods? Moods are kind of fleeting and transitory emotional states. And I think that you can't be, just like in personal life, right? If you and I just reacted 100% according to our moods with integrity, we have to say we recognize the national mood is here. And we're actually going to stand against the national mood, even if temporarily it causes us problems. It gets us flack. It gets us, you know, insulted in The New York Times because we know that after this mood passes, the country is going to be here. These are the fundamentals. These are the structures and values we care about. And, you know, I'm happy to stand against the current mood. And I think that we have to remember too, and I think like this important thing I've been thinking

about a lot is that you look at how they're using incidents, right? You look at how they are notching up these victories. It's almost always predicated on an emotional moment, right? Where it was George Floyd that gets replicated billions of times in the media. It's, you know, whatever kind of story that is the emotional anchor to a lot of these movements is that, you know, obviously you can lament the tragic death of George Floyd, but what they do is they create this emotional premise where if you don't agree with all of our solutions, therefore you, you know, you don't care about George Floyd. You don't care about X, Y, and Z. And I think that we need to break that logic. We need to say, we need to separate out premises from conclusions and say, you know, not let people essentially manipulate the country by using emotionally charged kind of affectively loaded incidents or images or experiences to justify these huge political programs that in once you really look at it and think about it and step back from that emotional overload, aren't actually connected by any kind of rationality or logic.

Well, especially when the incidents that they are using are dishonestly represented. You know, I'm not saying the tape wasn't the tape on George Floyd, but again, as Coleman's pointed out, you could find the exact same story with a white victim every time. And especially the George Floyd case, a guy named Tony Timpa had exactly the same thing done to him. Thirteen minutes under the knee, begging for his life. And after he expired, the cops made jokes about him and they were not prosecuted. The charges charges against them were dropped. Breonna Taylor, same thing had happened earlier. I think that same year to a white person inside of his home. No knock warrant.

The same like the the knee jerk resort to race is not always supported and no one will go back and be honest about that, nor is it always police brutality that's unjustified. We've been talking about the Jacob Blake case. There it was very clear early on that there were reports he was in fact armed and that's why he got shot. But I've seen almost no coverage of that piece of the story after the same media went over and over and over telling us he was unarmed. So people need to be aware that we're being manipulated by people with an agenda. It's not blacks versus whites. Again, it's hard leftists versus the rest of us. They're trying to manipulate us to advance their own agenda and in some instances make themselves feel good as virtue signalers. But as you point out, we're not there to service the mood in particular of one small activist group. If we were, we never would have

had the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because the loud majority or the loud minority in the country at that point didn't, they wanted segregation, right? It was sort of the white Jim Crow folks down in the South who said the mood of the country

doesn't support equality. We didn't listen. We followed the law and we didn't think the law was good enough. We strengthened it. So anyway, I do believe the law is sort of at the heart of what our future is. And before I let you go, I got to ask you one other question. That is, how are you feeling about Joe Biden and these issues? Yeah, I don't know. I kind of have kind of conflicting kind of conflicting thoughts about it. I think Joe Biden, I mean, let's face it,

Joe Biden is a kind of back-slapping New Deal Democrat who, you know, he isn't a social justice warrior. That's just not his personality. It's not his generation. But I think what you've seen is that, well, I don't think Biden's instincts are there. What does concern me is that certainly't think Biden's instincts are there. What does concern me is that certainly the vice president's instincts are there. Certainly his social media team's instincts are there.

And then all of the different kind of cabinet members and sub-cabinet officials are there. And, you know, I think, you know, I thought of Joe Biden as kind of, you know, as like a carapace, like a kind of armor that was kind of battering through the election, but within kind of protected by that armor was the kind of modern democratic left, the kind of identity politics based, the equity instead of equality based folks. And we're seeing that in some of his cabinet choices. Actually, the superintendent of San Diego schools who hosted the spirit murder sessions and lavish praise on the speaker. She's actually been nominated for deputy secretary of education. So I'm not so much worried about, you know, Grandpa Joe.

But I am I'm very much worried at the kind of administrative level where these programs and ideologies are being implemented in the federal government. So I don't know. I'm kind of, you know, I'm kind of torn, but but, you know, ultimately optimistic. I think that, you know, one silver lining, I voted for Donald Trump, you know, didn't vote for him in 2016, voted for him in 2020. But one silver lining for him being out of office, and even again, I oppose banning the president from Twitter, but given that that's the factual reality, one thing of him being gone from our kind of national Twitter timeline is that the left cannot say simply, orange man bad. They actually have to now defend the ideas, defend the policies. So we have an opportunity in the next four years to actually make this a substantive debate and not give them the excuse, well, you know, Donald Trump

is bad. So that's what I hope will happen. But we'll have to see. If somebody listening wants to help you, how can they do that? Yeah, you know, the best thing that we can do is we're establishing a coalition that is three parts. Investigative reporting. So if you have any critical race theory trainings that are happening in any institutions in your area, send me an email at chrisrufo at protonmail.com. Second, we're recruiting lawyers. So if you're an attorney, send an email to that same address, letting us know you want to get involved. And then third, if you want to support my reporting and my work, you can visit my website at christopherrufo.com. That's christopherrufo.com. And, you know, now have about a thousand different people making small monthly contributions. That's ChristopherRUFO.com. And, you know, now I have about a thousand different people making small monthly contributions.

That's been a huge source of excitement and inspiration and also help, you know, provide support for my ongoing efforts. They're going to kick you out of Seattle at this rate. Well, you know, it's so funny. Like I actually, you know, in January or last January, a year ago, I moved out of Seattle for a lot of these reasons. I mean, the political culture in Seattle is extreme. They were harassing me, harassing my wife, started harassing my kids. And it just became untenable. So we moved to a small town in Washington state. And it's it's awesome because I went from, you know, walking home from the office in Seattle and having random strangers flip me off to, you know, having now, you know, driving home and having my neighbors and say, oh, man, I saw you on Tucker, awesome job. So it's been quite a culture shift

and it's been just a huge blessing for us to flee the city. And then given all the COVID stuff, it was just lucky timing. Well, I don't mean to sound like Dan rather, but to reiterate what you said and what Jodi Shaw said too, courage is the word of the

moment. And it's going to take a lot of it. You've shown it. She did too. I hope our listeners will as well in whatever ways they feel comfortable or can muster up because now it is not a time for the meek. It's a time to stand up and fight for true equality, for love, for support, for wellness, for our communities, not for divisiveness and shaming and awful presumptions about people thanks to immutable characteristics. We were trying to get away from that as a country for the better part of five, six decades. And we should continue doing that. Chris, thank you so much. Thank you. It's really great to speak with you and I appreciate all your support. Our thanks again to Chris Ruffo and Jody Shaw.

I want to tell you that today's episode was brought to you in part by Armbrust USA. Go to DontShutDownMaskUp.com and enter code MK for a 20% discount on your first order of Armbrust USA masks. Now, listen, I want to ask you to do me a favor. Go subscribe to the show, would you? Subscribe to the show, download the show, and give me a rating, five stars if you please, and a review. And I haven't done this on the show yet. I've never done this before. But can I just, I read all the reviews and there was one I loved so much, I actually thought I'd share it with you. Forgive me because I feel self-aggrandizing, but it was so clever and it made me smile. And it was like the only one I've ever shared with Abby, my, you know, my assistant, like she's like my little

sister. Here's the headline. It's from Dan T in Georgia. And the headline of his review is five-star hate. Okay. So I like how it. Megyn Kelly is very talented at having conversations, and that's why I hate this podcast. I subscribed thinking I would listen when she had someone interesting on the show, but I have to listen to all of them because every guest is interesting. I have other things to do, like listening to books, streaming TV, live sports, and sports podcasts, but I get sucked in every time i start listening to an episode it might help if she weren't so reasonable and smart i'm loving this guy damn i'm out here trying to find shallow entertainment to forget about the crazy right-wing politics and the insane left

wingers but i'm a sucker for common sense people that love the country so i keep listening apart from restoring what little faith I have left in journalism and politics, I can't think of any reason to listen to this. I love Dan T in Georgia. Dan, thank you so much for the clever, funny, kind review. And I have to tell you, one thing I've noticed in reading the reviews, we have smart listeners. You people are smart. The comments have been really, really good and insightful and thoughtful. You know, occasionally you get the like, you're hot. That's fine, too.

As you know, I'm not one to tell somebody not to say that, but I love it. So it's a great way for us to stay connected and communicate. Right. I just wish I could write back. So this will be my way of writing back. I'll read one on the show or we can talk about it. And in the meantime, we'll talk on Friday. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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