TRIGGERnometry - The Ugly Truth About Critical Race Theory - Christopher Rufo

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

Christopher Rufo is a writer, filmmaker, and researcher, documenting the phenomena of critical race theory, homelessness, poverty, and other afflictions. Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Andrew Doyle here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873619472 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/​​​  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod​​​ Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Critical race theory is designed and has effectively achieved, not to explain the history of racial injustice, not to reveal the truth about racial attitudes in the United States, but actually to perpetuate a sense of division, to instill this idea that we can be separated into oppressor and oppressed classes, and to revive some of the ugliest tropes and ideas from the kind of racist, race science of the 1920s, things like race essentialism, like collective guilt, like neo-segregation, and then re-implant them in our institutions. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and one of America's most prominent critics of critical race theory, Christopher Rufo, welcome to Trigonometry. It's good to be with you. It's great to have you on. Listen, before we dive into all this fascinating stuff, just tell everybody here, particularly here in the UK. We have an international audience, but there may be many people who are not familiar with you, first of all.

Who are you? How are you where you are? What has been the journey through life that brings you to be here talking to us? Yeah, you know, I am born and raised in California on the west coast of the United States. after I graduated from university, I worked for more than 10 years as a documentary filmmaker. I directed four films for PBS, which is our equivalent of the BBC, roughly. I sold a film to Netflix a number of years ago. And then in the last few years, I've gotten, kind of transitioned from pure documentary filmmaking

to getting involved in more social and political issues. And then shifted my own kind of field of my own domain, my own field of expertise from kind of fit the filmmaking process to a journalism, writing, advocacy process. And I found myself almost exactly a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago now, kind of accidentally becoming one of the primary critics of critical race theory, as you explained. And it really happened to me very briefly because I started reporting on these issues, reporting on training programs, reporting on critical race theory in schools, reporting on critical race theory in corporations. and became the kind of go-to source for whistleblowers all over the United States

that we're seeing these ugly and divisive tenets of critical race theory starting to make headway and take over their institutions. Christopher, the one thing that I really take away from that is you've had a life which theoretically would make you super woke, right? You grew up in California, you make documentaries. You're married to Thai American woman. You've got mixed-race kids. Like, how did you, how did this become a thing for you?

I guess that's right. Yeah, I mean, like, you would add up all those things and you would say somehow that probably equals a woke. You know, I was to the left as a younger person and my growing up in high school for the first bit of college. But, you know, the ideas of the left started for me to break down as I saw more of the world. As a documentary filmmaker, I had a chance to travel to, I think, 70.

plus countries around the world. I've seen a lot. I've seen the highs, the lows, the awful, the beautiful, everything in between. And as I actually looked at the world in a very up-close and personal way, all the different systems of government, all the different cultures, I quickly realize, well, slowly realized, actually, that these ideas that I grew up with, these ideas that I had been stewing in, these ideas that I had been taught in a university setting, just didn't hold up to reality. And it took me a while to then, I guess, move to the right. It took me a number of years. But once I started actually kind of not just having the caricature of conservative thought or conservative politics, but actually started doing the reading, doing the homework, understanding a bit

more about the kind of conservative philosophy, the conservative body of work over the last, you know, 100 years or so, it started to me to match my experience with, reality more closely. Not perfectly, of course, nothing is perfect, but that was kind of my own journey, my own transition. And I think as things have gone into kind of hyperdrive wokeness in the last four or five years, that transition seemed to be more prescient and more accurate than ever. And what is critical race theory? And why, it's the second part to that question is, why is it so dangerous to our society? Yeah, so, you know, critical race theory, I'll try to give you a kind of succinct summaries.

Critical race theory is an academic discipline. It's a neo-Marxist philosophy derived from critical theory, which really took hold in the United States around 1965. And it holds something very simple. It says that the United States is a fundamentally racist country founded on white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation. and that those forces are still at the root of our society today. And even though it may seem that we've made progress,

the critical race theorists argue that in many ways we haven't made any progress. The country is just as racist, exploitative, and patriarchal today as it was 100 years ago or 200 years ago. Those forces have merely become more subtle, more sophisticated, and more insidious. The conclusion then that the critical race theorists arrive at is that all of our systems must be deconstructed, dismantled, and demolished. in order for a better and utopian society to emerge. This includes capitalism. They're explicitly anti-capitalist. This includes kind of gender relations and family structure that they want to kind of dismantle and deconstruct. And I think it also, crucially, includes our system

of constitutional government where they are deeply skeptical of the First Amendment right to free speech, the 14th Amendment right to equal protection, and so on and so forth. So when you kind of arrive at it in its totality. And the early work is explicit, even though they've tried to kind of cover their tracks lately. It is not a program of reform. It's not an extension of a civil rights movement. It's actually a program of liberation or revolution that was outlined in the early years in the 1960s as critical theory, taking on a racial component into 1990s, and now seemingly has spread throughout our institutions. And you said it spread right the way through our institutions, it seems to have come to prominence in the last year or so. Why is that? Do you think it's

related to what's been happening in America, or do you think it exploded into the public consciousness because of lockdowns, because of BLM, because of COVID? I think a bit of both. I mean, certainly in my reporting, what I've seen is that some of the earliest school districts to adopt the principles of critical race theory and their teacher training programs or their curricula, were doing so around 2010. I know Portland Public Schools was an early adopter. That's Portland, Oregon, kind of the home of Antifa, one of the woken's place on Earth. They were adopting it around 2010 in a kind of tentative, kind of light way. But certainly what you've seen is that school districts, not just in Portland or Berkeley or New York or Boston, but actually kind of Middle America

School District, suburban school districts, all started to adopt it around the same time following the death of George Floyd, which of course followed the COVID lockdowns, and then was kind of succeeded by these large-scale protests and then large-scale riots. And you see the documentation from these school districts, and it's like an immediate domino effect. It's actually a pretty profound process of spread, of contagion, where all of these school districts around the country are adopting the same kind of board resolutions, the same kind of training programs, the same kind of curriculum modules, things that have been in development for years and decades, all the sudden, in the environment of COVID lockdown, in the environment of remote school,

in the environment of ongoing racial unrest, they suddenly became adopted almost everywhere simultaneously. And this, I think, is significant not only in itself, but it's also significant because what we've seen, since I started really exposing it, reporting on it. Others have been working on this issue as well. We've seen a tremendous backlash and a tremendous resistance to this, you know, not only race conscious, but really racially divisive program in schools. Christopher, before we get into the real kind of implementation of some of this stuff, which is very important. I know you've done a lot of work on it. Let's explore just the theory itself. And, you know, you laid out, I think, an accurate description of what I understand to be

critical race theory. And the beginning part of it, isn't it accurate to say that the United States was founded, it was at its foundation, at least, let's say, a society that did involve elements, certainly of racism. I don't know about white supremacy, but probably white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, patriarchy. Aren't those things all quite accurate to point out? Yeah, well, I think that there is a subtle but very important distinction. I mean, you can certainly say that, I mean, undoubtedly anyone would agree that when the United States was founded, slavery was a widespread practice, racial discrimination and justice, exploitation, of course. But they're not making that argument that these are historical realities that we should grapple with,

that we should seek to understand. And if they have any kind of residual effects today, we should seek to rectify. That's an argument that I've made. That's an argument that I believe to be true. What they're saying is that the United States is fundamentally in its foundation and irredeemably racist, patriarchal, and exploitative. And this is then the premise for the conclusion, not a program of reform, but a program that it has to be abolished. So you have things like abolitionist teaching, abolish prisons, abolish, you know, the Constitution, abolish the United States as a kind of historical entity itself in some cases. And it lays the foundation for not a kind of responsible look at history,

trying to understand the bad and the good, trying to sort it out. They say even the declaration, even the civil war, even the Civil Rights Act, are remnants of white supremacy, our remnants of domination, are mechanisms for racial control. And I think that those are, that's in some ways a subtle, distinction, but I think it's very important because the story that I think is accurate and how I think that history should be taught in schools, for example, is that you should take an honest and hard look at the history of racism, slavery, segregation, injustice, et cetera, but you should also place

those historical injustices within the context of the country's highest ideals. First, kind of declared in the declaration, codified in the Constitution, fought over and consecrated in blood in the Civil War, and then put into kind of specific legal practice in the Civil Rights Act. That's always moving towards the principles of freedom and equality that were really the founding essence of our society, you know, not racial injustice exploitation. We don't live currently in a slaveocracy, as some critical race theorists have argued. The language is very important, and it's very important to make those distinctions. Because now what we've seen is precisely what you're suggesting.

They're now conflating all of these things together to try to conceal the true nature of their philosophy. And Christopher, the way you describe it, abolishing prisons, abolishing the United States, the civil rights act is a remnant of white, all of that sounds insane, right, to a normal person, to a normal, reasonable person. I hope that's still true. I really hope so. I have no doubt that it's true. I think the vast majority of the public completely wouldn't buy into that. So if that is the case, and let's just for the sake of arguments say that it is insane and it's crazy,

how has it happened that in a very short period of time, this ideology has not only become popularized in a small minority of people who talk about it, but is actually now bleeding into our institutions. How has that happened? Well, I think there's a key mechanism that you have to understand to explain that. This is still a very much a kind of numerical minority position. Very few people subscribe to critical race theory, very few people in the general public support critical race theory. The latest polling data shows that by a 19% margin, Americans who have an opinion about

this oppose it. And this includes Latinos. and Asians that oppose critical race theory in schools by a two to one margin. So it is deeply unpopular. It is a very kind of small numerical minority position, but the people who are true believers, the people who are the most fierce advocates for this philosophy, are in those bureaucratic positions predominantly in public institutions, so government jobs, where they can actually impose this without the consent of voters, without the consent of parents, without the consent of the public, they can implement it in many cases unilaterally through a bureaucratic process.

So you have all of these kind of woke bureaucrats in public schools, in municipal governments, in state governments, in the federal bureaucracy, everywhere, as I've documented in my investigative reporting, that are really taking these ideas and very, astutely, very shrewdly. They've then covered them in euphemism. So instead of the revolutionary theory to abolish capitalism, they're saying equity, inclusion, diversity, very nice, very soft-sounding words that are in themselves kind of unopposable. But then underneath, if you actually look at the documentation, even in Fortune 100 companies of all places, they're laundering in these more kind of revolutionary principles, these more radical ideas.

And that's what we're seeing. And I think that a lot of it is this confluence of public bureaucracies, of an apathetic citizenry, and then these ideologies that have leaked out of the university system. Well, maybe not leaked out, actually been exported from, very deliberately, from university system. to K through 12 education, to federal state and local bureaucracies. But wouldn't you say, Christopher, as well, that in some ways, the fact that this has come to prominence shows that America, there's still a problem with race, there's still anger that surrounds it. And what we see with critical race theory is people trying to explain the injustices that they still see in America.

Yeah, I would take a different and perhaps more sensitive. view, I actually think that if you look at the polling data from Gallup and others, for example, the kind of racial attitudes, the idea of, is there kind of racial harmony, is there racial integration, is there cooperation and trust between racial groups in the United States, was actually very high as recently as 10 years ago. It was roughly 70% of white Americans, slightly less, somewhere in the high 60% of African Americans, believed that race relations in the United States were good, starting in about 2013, 2014, and continuing today, to today, those numbers have plummeted. They've been reduced by roughly half. So you have a very

paradoxical situation where you have a kind of progression of a legal regime of equality over time that somehow peaks in the kind of 2000s, and then mysteriously just absolutely plummets among all racial groups. And I would say my hypothesis, again, it's very hard to kind of prove this and a social science method, but I think that my hypothesis is that critical race theory is designed and has effectively achieved not to explain the history of racial injustice, not to reveal the truth about racial attitudes in the United States, but actually to perpetuate a sense of division, to instill this idea that we can be separated into oppressor and oppressed classes, and to revive some of the ugliest tropes and ideas from the kind of racist race science of the

1920s, things like race essentialism, like collective guilt, like neo-segregation, and then re-implant them in our institutions. Of course, under different pretexts with different stated goals. But this is what we see. We see, for example, in classrooms where students are being told that they are either a member of the oppressor or the oppressed class based on their skin color. They're being told that they are guilty and responsible for historical crimes committed by people who look like them in the past. And they're also in the process of teacher training, for example, and employee training programs, adults are being separated into separate facilities, separate programs based on race. And I think that this is very ugly. It's very much counterproductive. And if the polling data is accurately reflects the kind of the spread or the hold of this ideology, it is actually tearing people apart rather than bringing them together. And Christopher, what would you say those people who would give you the First Amendment argument, which is, look, we have freedom of speech in this country.

You know, this is a theory just like Marxism, just like libertarianism. It should be free to be taught like any other theory. in our public schools, in our colleges, in our universities. Yeah, well, I, you know, I'm obviously, or maybe not obviously, I should make it clear. I'm a supporter of the First Amendment. I think it's essential. There's a reason why they put it first of all the amendments. But I think that you have to understand that this isn't a freedom of speech issue. Of course, if you're a critical race theorist, I support your right 100% to go on the street corner,

to publish in the newspaper, to write a book about critical race theory. to preach it as radically as you want, as often as you want. But we're talking about a context of publicly funded and publicly governed institutions, like, for example, K through 12 schools. K through 12 schools are government entities that are beholden, that are responsible and accountable to taxpayers. And the First Amendment in the case law and its own kind of intention was designed to protect individuals from the government, not to protect the government from the individuals or government from the voters. So as these institutions function, they include and exclude certain ideas. We don't have, we're not teaching kindergartners eugenics. We're not teaching them

phrenology. We're not teaching them flat earthism. You can preach all of those things from the street corner if you want as a First Amendment right, but you're not entitled to include them in the official state curriculum. That is a political decision. It's a political process. It's determined by state legislatures. It's determined by local school boards and boards of education. So they get to decide what is in the curriculum, what is out of the curriculum. Teachers, this is kind of First Amendment, kind of jurisprudence case law for many years. They don't have an unlimited First Amendment right in the classroom. It's restricted because they're public employees. So this idea that somehow, you know, one group gets the exclusive and kind of

right to use taxpayer dollars to promote their private ideology within public institutions doesn't stand up to scrutiny. And Christopher, tell us a little bit about some of the work that you've been doing because I said at the top of your introduction that you are one of the most prominent critics of this. But actually, I think it's more accurate to say that you're one of the people who's been doing the most to actively oppose all of this in the institution. So you've had some success in that area.

Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so I, you know, it really all started for me with the reporting. I think that it's one thing to criticize a theory where you can say, hey, this is a, this is critical race theory, this is what it holds, this is why it's wrong. You engage in a very abstract argument and you can win or lose. Sometimes it's very unclear who wins or who loses in those kind of debates. Whereas my approach and my strategy and then my kind of skill set was to actually expose the most egregious and sometimes salacious examples from public schools. So just very quickly, you have teaching third graders in Cupertino, California, to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and then rank themselves according to a hierarchy of power and privilege. So dividing, you know, eight-year-olds into oppressor and oppressed. You have the kind of system in Buffalo, New York, teaching K-12 students that, quote, all white people perpetuate systemic racism, that all white wealth derives from slavery, that white people are, quote, unfairly rich,

and then sharing a video, a video dramatization of dead black children. This is to kindergartners, to four and five-year-olds, speaking to them beyond the grave, warning them that, quote, racist police could murder them at any minute, instilling this kind of race-based terror in small children, or even a public high school in New York City that sent an email to white, directed to white parents that said that they need to become, quote, white traders to betray the white race and then to advocate for, quote, white abolition. So abolishing the white race, which is an idea from critical race theory and critical whiteness studies. Those are just three of the examples. And the idea was to basically cut through the gaslighting, cut through the line,

cut through the obfuscation, cut through the euphemisms, and show people, you know, these stories did about 250 million direct media impressions in the United States. They really brought this issue to the forefront. You see the kind of Fox News numbers, mentions of critical race theory, following my kind of work and exposés, just absolutely skyrockets. And then now what you've seen is a fight on three fronts. There are legal cases, some of which I've been involved in helping that are trying to get to the Supreme Court to show that these practices are not only morally wrong, but actually illegal and unconstitutional. There is a legislative effort. We've now passed state legislative bills or state Board of Education resolutions in nine states covering 75 million Americans

banning critical race theory indoctrination in public K-12 schools. That's a huge victory. And then we also see this grassroots revolt from parents all over the country. You've probably seen many clips on Twitter. Parents going berserk at school board meetings. saying, I don't want you to teach my kid that he's an oppressor. I don't want you to teach my kid that she is a member of the oppressed. Get this out of the classroom. You talk about critical race theory, which is pretty much going to be teaching kids how to hate each other, how to dislike each other.

That's pretty much what it's going to all come down to. You're going to deliberately teach kids. This white kid right here got it better than you because he's white. You're going to personally tell a white kid, oh, the black people are all down and suppressed. how do I have two medical de breads if I'm sitting here oppressed? How do I get, first of all, this is white parents, black parents, Asian parents, Latino parents, Native American parents, parents from across the political spectrum.

It's a broad-based movement. It's grassroots. It's decentralized. And it is totally organic in its presentation and nature. And they are really holding school boards accountable. And I live in outside of Seattle, Washington. One of the bluest kind of areas in the country, if not the world, and even to my surprise, something that I wasn't directly involved in, I saw in the paper that my local school board had voted 5-0 to ban critical race theory indoctrination in our local schools.

So this is something that is happening at, honestly, be very frank, to a degree that astonished me. I mean, when I started this, I could not imagine that it would snowball so quickly and rack up such incredible results at this kind of time frame. Well, I would argue that given some of the, I mean, what you've described there is, I mean, it's atrocious. It is horrendous what you're talking about there. So it kind of makes sense that a lot of people would thankfully be opposed to it. But there's a question I have for you because you talked about you yourself moving from being on the left to being more right-leaning. You've talked about talking about these things on Fox News, et cetera. Neither Francis or our right wing or on the right.

and we both... It depends who you ask. Some people would probably say you are. Some people, yeah. A lot of people on the left would say we're on the right. Yeah, but the thing is, they don't know what they're talking about. So I guess the interesting question for me here would be, Francis and I would obviously completely against what you're describing,

that four-year-olds and five-year-olds being taught about the racial guilt. I mean, it's just atrocious. But what is... Why is it a right-wing thing to oppose this? I don't understand. I mean, there are plenty of reasonable, sensible, intelligent people on the left. What's a good left-wing argument against this stuff?

Well, I mean, there's a... Well, I think you have to distinguish between the kind of hardcore racialist left and then the kind of classical liberal or center-left liberals. And in fact, a lot of center-left liberals oppose this. And among independence, for example, people who kind of don't go hard one way or another. 72% of American independent voters oppose this ideology in schools. And I hear from people who are on the center left all the time in places like San Francisco and places like New York City where they say, hey, I'm a good Democrat.

I've been a lifelong kind of left leaner. But this is insane. We have to get this stuff out of our schools. We have to get this stuff out of New York City private schools, for example, or Los Angeles public schools. but those voices aren't amplified and those voices unfortunately are not attached to any kind of political power because the people who run the kind of party machinery, the intellectual machinery of the left in the United States currently are very much on that hard racialist left flanked. And they really could care less and they actually viciously kind of undermine the people on the

center left. So it's really not a question of, well, a lot of center left people oppose it, but the only reason we're seeing results in more conservative school boards, more conservative districts, more conservative states, is because those voters that make up a strong majority, it's 90% plus of conservative voters oppose this, they have recourse through the political system because they can lobby their state legislatures which get to pass bills. They can lobby their local school boards, which are more responsive. But I think we're seeing that even now shifting, where certainly the right has basically shored up this side and said, nope, we're not going to do this. But we're seeing now even swing districts, even school districts in kind of purple areas. So

halfway between Democrat and Republican, they're starting to flip. Center left voters are coming out strong. Latino voters are coming out strong. Asian voters are coming out strong to oppose this ideology. I think we're seeing a shifting of the battlefield, a shifting of the landscape of power. And I think that my, well, I hope, rather, my hope is that we can continue to build this coalition that spans from the right to the center left that encompasses all different racial and ethnic backgrounds to really come with a united front to say this is not necessarily just a left-right issue. Of course it is. But this is an issue of fundamental principles about what it means to live in a Constitutional Republic in the United States of America in 2021.

We have the vast majority that opposes this. We're not going to let a very small group of committed ideologues who've embedded themselves in the bureaucracy to override the democratic will of American voters. We're actually going to stop this. We're going to put our foot down together. Hey Francis, do you want to learn another language? No, mate. I'm English. If foreigners can't understand, mate, I just shout at them. Think about it, you could learn how to say penalties in Italian. Leave it.

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and use promo code trigger for an extra six months free. That's UK. Dot, B-A-B-B-B-E-L dot C-O-M-F-W-S-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-ROMO-P-Trigger. And Christopher Disclosure, I'm a former teacher, and I mention it, every episode. Teaching is a phenomenally difficult job. You've got to look after the kids posturally, you've got to teach them, you've got to make sure that they all make progress, you know, there's going to be ones who are more adept, there's going to be ones who fall behind.

I don't understand how they have the time to teach all this stuff and be able to make sure that kids get a rounded education. How can they do that? Well, you know, there really is kind of a really interesting thing that's happening, and I think it would maybe illuminate the answer to your question, is that there are two kinds of schools that I've seen in my reporting that are pushing the critical race theory. There are the very elite, affluent, big city schools, including private schools. So the kind of places where it's, you know, $50,000 a year, maybe like 30,000 pounds, I don't know the exchange rate, a year, to attend these schools. I mean, these are, you know, the most affluent, elite places in the country. They've adopted it because they, in my

my reading, they believe that being fluent in the language of wokeness is essential for advancing in the Ivy League institutions, is essential for advancing in elite workplaces like consulting firms and government and politics and journalism. So they're preparing their kids not to be kind of throwing Molotov cocktails into a police car, although that does sometimes happen, even among this set, but they're preparing them for this kind of meritocratic system that has been really, that wokeness has grafted itself onto. But you also see it, and I think, and like, whatever, who cares? I really don't care personally what they do in elite private schools. I think they shouldn't do it, but it's really up to them. Um, those kids are going to be fine.

But where it really concerns me and frankly enrages me is in the big city, uh, poor school districts with high rates of, of educational failure. So for example, like, like Buffalo, which I talked about, also Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. These are big urban school districts, high number of black students in those two courses. They're teaching a very aggressive kind of critical race theory-based curriculum in the case of Buffalo from pre-K through grade 12. They've overhauled their curriculum. And the tragedy and the thing that I think should infuriate voters and parents and families is that these are school districts where in some schools, their literacy rates are less than 20%, sometimes less than 10%. So kids who are unable to reach basic proficiency in reading and writing, you have sometimes

80% of students that are functionally illiterate by the time they graduate from their kind of primary school or middle school education. So you have an educational crisis. You have kids in fifth, sixth grade that are illiterate, that have been in school for, you know, six thousand hours of classroom time that can't read, can't write at a basic level, and yet they're pumping them full of ideology. And the cynical read on this, which I think unfortunately has a lot of truth, is that this is used as a diversion tactic to shift the focus away from the failures of these of these institutions, the failures of teachers unions, the failures of the school districts, the failures of principals and classroom teachers in these districts, and then shift the blame

onto the abstract forces that are the kind of, is almost a kind of a safety valve mechanism, a scapegoating mechanism. Well, it's not that our schools are crumbling and dysfunctional and failing to teach you how to read. It's actually the fault of white supremacy, the fault, of anthropocentrism, the fault of, you know, whatever kind of, kind of evil villain of the day is. And I think that to me is just unconscionable. And those stories for me were really the most tragic, the most difficult, the most heartbreaking to report. I can imagine so. And what is the effect of this type of teaching on the kids? Do they respond to it? I mean, look, because like I said, I taught, there's a lot of time where I taught kids stuff

and they went out and you could have asked them a question for a million dollars and they wouldn't have been able to answer it. That's just more your teaching style. Yeah, it could have been you. That's why he's no longer a teacher, mate. Yeah, right, right. Now you have a kind of a voluntary audience, so this is better. So you don't have the captive audience.

But in some ways, it's too early to tell long term what happens. But I can share with you some anecdotes that could suggest maybe where it's going. I spoke recently to a father, actually, who kind of a clip who went viral on YouTube, I met him in Arizona when I was giving a speech. A black father actually met a number of interracial couples, black, white couples. And he said, hey, you know, this year after Black History Month, where they were doing the Black Lives Matter curriculum, they're doing the critical race theory style curriculum. My kids who are, you know, half black, half white, I kind of present as black, I guess, is the way they would say it. they came home and even my 10-year-old was terrified. He couldn't eat, he couldn't sleep. He would come back into the bed with his mother and me, you know, which he hadn't done in years. And I finally talked to

him and asked him, what happened? He's like, I'm terrified. I'm scared. I feel like I'm going to be hunted down by society. I feel like police can murder me at any moment. I feel like I should hate, you know, people who look like mom. And the father was just kind of horrified. He's like, what are they teaching in black history? And then started going to the school board to advocate. And he said, you know, they're trying to fill my kids with fear, with my kids with a sense that they can't accomplish anything in life,

a sense that they'll be forever oppressed. But this gentleman said, look, I grew up in the hood and in Watts or Compton, California. I know what it's like to struggle. we live in a good neighborhood now, we've moved up. I want to fill my kids with a sense of possibility, a sense of inspiration, a sense of potential. And this is actually, in the name of doing good, they're actually doing harm to my kids. Another couple said that this curriculum, an interracial couple, said that this was ripping their own family apart, that it was having their kids coming home saying, you know, should we hate our grandfather, who's a white person? Is he an oppressor? Is he a bad

person, is he, is he one of the, you know, people that wants to, you know, you know, harm us or hurt us and, and really just kind of could, had their parents not intervened and explained them the truth, ripped these families apart. So I think that on that side, I've seen damage done. And then also, you know, I reported on a story in Portland, Oregon, a long kind of reported feature where I think that there's a direct line from the kind of ideology that's being promoted in schools to the rioting, disruption, Antifa, attacks against property and people. And you had, for example, in Portland, this was documented by Andy Noe, who's a great reporter on this, that actually, I think four or three or four Portland public school teachers,

people in elementary schools and middle schools and high schools, were arrested for crimes, including felony crimes of rioting, including violent crimes during these political protest. So this is, again, it's early. This stuff in many places is still very early, but the early signs are very bad. They should be a kind of red spinning warning light for any administrator or teacher that's considering this kind of curriculum. And the stuff you're talking about there, Christopher, I mean, I have to say I find it terrifying because this is really the question I want to ask you is, are you optimistic and are you positive? Because when I think and I play the movie forward, if you teach a generation of young people, this racial animus that maps so neatly

onto our hardwired tribal prejudices that exist within all human beings, I wonder whether there is a positive outcome here. Do you know what I mean? It sounds really scary. Yeah, it does. It sounds very scary. It is very scary in some regards. But ultimately, I am optimistic. And I'm optimistic because what we've seen, in the U.S. and hopefully elsewhere, I don't really know, but at least since kind of February March of this year, the last three months, I mean, we've seen an incredible awakening of parents, of voters, of school board members, of politicians, of state legislatures. People are taking this issue very seriously. And what I would like to see, I think what is a hopeful,

hopeful vision, but also a very realistic vision, something that is kind of already happening, if you will, is that we'll see in our federal system, our kind of federalist system of government, we'll see states pursuing very different courses of action. The curriculum in California and Oregon and Washington state, very liberal states, will look very different from Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida, which are more conservative states. And they will embark on this experiment, Do you want woke politics as the founding ideology of your education system, or do you not? And over time, what results do those yield? And I think that eventually people will see that this is not the way, but this doesn't lead to better outcomes.

And I think crucially, and one thing that I find it important to say is that in the U.S., despite how the kind of MSNBC or the New York Times would like to present it, this is not a really white-black issue. As I already said, Latinos and Asians oppose this style of curriculum by two to one margins in the polling data. African Americans support it, but by just, I believe, a five-point margin very narrowly, kind of almost 50-50. I think that will shift over time in our favor, as people understand what this is really about. It's really a question of what is going to create better outcomes for kids.

And I think most Americans now understand it won't create better outcomes. for kids. But I think if you take a step back and you look at critical race theory, you know, critical race theory, if we implemented the policy, the radical and extreme policies that critical race theory has formulated, my argument, and I wrote a policy paper about this for Heritage Foundation, which is a think tank here in the United States, my argument is that it would create negative outcomes. You know, the critical race theorists oppose merit-based education. They oppose kind of, in some cases, even assigning grades, which are a racist, a racist practice. So they oppose kind of merit-based achievement and education.

They oppose a nuclear family structure in many of their papers. They think that the nuclear family structure, which social science has shown definitively kind of left and right, to be the essential precondition for people who grow up in rough circumstances for them to move up, the income ladder. they also oppose entry-level work, which they say is, again, capitalist exploitation. So when you take away those three building blocks and when you teach kids that those things are not only not important, but actually evil and wrong and oppressive, you take away merit-based academic achievement, you take away a strong family structure and strong household.

And then you take away the desire to get into the labor force to start working your way up the income ladder, you're going to create a kind of more, desperate and more dire situation, especially for people in low-income groups, especially for racial minorities. So I think critical race theory is a recipe for disaster. All that it does is help bolster the social status of multiracial elites in academia, in government, and policymaking. But if it were implemented, would be devastating for the kids who need, who desperately need the most help who desperately need a society that will lift them up. It's a very, very, very good point.

I'm listening to you and I'm thinking, where are the teachers in this? Are they all blindly following it? Are they being dictated to by the unions? What's happening? Well, I'll tell you in my reporting, I've talked to a lot of teachers and I'm trying to remember, yes, every single one of them. I did maybe 13, 14 reports on schools. every single one of them requested complete anonymity

because they're afraid that if their name and their voice or their face is attached to opposition to critical race theory in schools, they'll get fired, they'll get ostracized, they'll get bullied, protesters will show up at their house and intimidate them, their colleagues will scream at them, which has happened in a number of cases that I've reported on. and so they're scared. Even teachers who deeply oppose it in a principled way are scared to speak out. And then on the top, what we've seen is that the largest teachers union in the United States, the N-EA, National Education Association or Educators Association,

which represents three million teachers in all 14,000 school districts, just this summer at their annual conference, at their annual Congress, voted in committee as an institution to support. implementing critical race theory in all 14,000 school districts in all 50 states. They've gone on the record by name, critical race theory, saying we support this, we want to put this everywhere. And they've also approved funding to attack people like me, to attack journalists and writers and intellectuals who are opposing critical race theory. They're going to put part of their $375 million annual budget into attacking us, into intimidating us, into coming after us. So these institutions,

which I don't think reflect the majority of their members have been captured by this ideology. It's a top-down revolution. It's a revolution from above. It's an elite-driven revolution. And they want to impose it from their position of power and privilege, ironically, onto the rank-and-file people of all different social classes, all different racial backgrounds who, by large majorities, oppose it.

Christopher, but other than their revolutionary mindset, which you've detailed, surely they must have some good, arguments? Aren't they? What would, what, what, what is the strongest argument in favor of introducing the stuff in school that people make? This is a good question. I mean, it depends, right? I mean, the, the, the premise is right. I would say that the premise is a strong premise. The premise is the United States has a history of, of racial injustice and we should make sure to, to, to look at, look at history through the lens of racial injustice, to illuminate areas where the United States has fallen short of its ideals of freedom and equality.

I think virtually everyone in the country, if you put it to them that way, if you implemented it in those terms, would support it. But the problem is that that is really a kind of a kind of Mott and Bailey, a kind of presentation argument that really masks the real content of it. because, you know, you can say that I would agree with it. I think both of you would agree with it. Most parents would agree with it, including conservative parents. Yeah, we should really take a look at this history. We should really teach kids the deepest injustices in our past, but also the progress that we've made towards realizing those ideals. That, I think, could get almost universal support. But the critical raciers are deploying that argument disingenuously, but then implementing

things like segregating employees, like telling children that they're inherently oppressive, like telling, you know, small young people that they have a kind of blood guilt or ancestral guilt or collective guilt based on skin color. Those things aren't connected. Those things, those conclusions, those practices don't follow from the premise. So I think that what we could do theoretically, although I'm not optimistic about this, is we could say, hey, look, we agree on the premise. We agree on the premise that we should take a look at these issues. We disagree with your conclusions, but let's try to come up with a better curriculum, a better practice from that common premise. And to the extent that it's possible, you're never going to convince the people

on the fringes, to the extent that it's possible, get a large majority of citizens, whether it's locally or statewide or nationally, to agree on a new approach to address these issues in a way that is kind of broadly popular and reflects the truth, frankly, that reflects an accurate reading of history. And Christopher, what would you say to those people who go, look, right? This is very interesting as an episode, but I live in Sweden or the UK, whatever, and it's not going to affect me. I don't know, man. I think, I don't know. And I would defer to you guys, to you to the, to the UK. But from what I've seen, from what I've been reading, These are, you know, I'll tell you what, this is how I'll put it.

America has demonstrated one immense capacity and one immense talent. We take things from all over the world, we package them into commodities, and then we export them to every country on the planet. I mean, you can go to a kind of remote Tibetan village that has just achieved electricity and watch Michael Jackson dance videos with Buddhist. monks. I mean, I've actually done that. I mean, it really is extraordinary the reach of America's cultural commodities. So if it hasn't successfully been exported to you in the UK, into Sweden, into other countries, it will be. It's coming. And I think even the president of France, I saw that he said, France is being affected negatively by all of these American ideas, which I thought was amazing, a kind of a dodge. France has had its share of bad ideas. But I think that it's

certainly coming, even in relatively homogenous societies, like the Scandinavian societies, I don't think they'll be immune to this. This politics, once it takes hold, once it gets a foothold in institutions, it's very hard to dislodge, it's very hard to disrupt, and seems to spread quite easily. Christopher, we're going to have to wrap up in a few minutes, but before we do, I wanted to talk about the role of the media and all of this, because you and I interacted recently on Twitter over the long thread I wrote about the falling trust in public institutions, particularly the media. What do you think has been the role of the media in advancing this theory or opposing it or, you know, the role of different media outlets on different sides in having this

debate and facilitating the conversation? Oh, I mean, I think the media is, the media is the, is the, if academia is the flame, you know, if academia is the flame, you know, if academia is the origin of the flame. The media is the accelerant. You know, it's like the, the lighter fluid that's being squirted over the top of the flame. The media has done, you know, an incredibly bad job promoting this stuff. And you see the numbers from the social scientist Zach Goldberg where he looks at the terminology like systemic racism, racist, racist, white supremacy, white supremacist. It's kind of like boop, boop, booboo, hovering in the 1990s, 2013, Foon! I mean, just go straight vertical on the graph because the media basically adopted the terminology

from critical race theory and then just repeated it so many times in their narratives, in their language, and their concepts, in their terminology, in their tweets, that it became this kind of mythology, this new mythology for the kind of center-left or liberal left in our country. and I think that they mainstreamed or mainlined these ideas from academia into mainstream politics. And now I think it's just absolutely ridiculous what they're doing. I mean, the media promoted this ideology. And now that it turns out to be unpopular, now that there's a revolt in public schools, a revolt in state legislatures, now they're retreating from their own language and saying,

no, no, no, this is just accurate history. No, no, no, this is just equity. This is just inclusion. It's none of those other things. That the media had been promoting for years prior. So I am a man of little faith, and I'll say, you know, even me personally. I mean, there was about two months where I was just getting relentlessly into tact in the media. The Washington Post published 10 stories calling me out by name and trashing me.

The New York Times published multiple full pieces, profiling me in a very negative light. The Atlantic, MSNBC's Joy Reid, every night for a while, was putting my tweets on screen and trying to yell at me about them. I mean, they are really dedicated to the narrative. They're trying any tactic. They're trying any tactic to discredit the opposition, to gaslight the public, to obscure the true nature of their ideology that they've created. But I think that the American public is too smart. They see what's happening. their local schools. They see the documents that are being released in the media by me and others. And they know that this is bad, even if they don't understand the kind of nuances of the theory,

they know instinctually, they know intuitively that this ideology spells trouble for everyone, spells trouble for our country. And I think that they are, you know, one good thing, you know, kind of referencing your tweet threat about loss and trust of the media, in some ways this is good. I mean, the media deserves to be trusted less, and it creates the opportunity for programs like yours, for programs that are independent, to actually fill that gap and build real trust with the audience, not just getting firehosed by the New York Times with their endless stream of gaslighting and delusion. Do you know what, Christopher, you were talking about how you were getting trashed by the Atlantic, by MSNBC, by the Washington Post by New York Times? I'm like, we could get some of that action, can we? Yeah, I'll tell you. Why are they pulling up my tweets on MSNBC every night?

Come on, guys. Dude, I'll tell you what, you know, I've never had faster audience growth when I was put under, no, really, I mean, like, you know, and obviously, like, it sucks. It sucks to get attacked. It sucks to get, you know, everyone posting your picture and yelling at you in the media. But I'll tell you that the benefit of this

is that they elevate you into a position where then you become the person, that is that people rally to. And I think that I've, for every person that was, you know, that, that they persuaded to oppose me,

I gained at least 10 people that, that rallied to the cause that said, actually, no, this is right. I'm going to oppose what the, what the kind of corporate legacy media is doing. So,

yeah, I would recommend it. Don't do anything too bad. But certainly, if you can get some, some hit pieces, ultimately they say, you know,

I don't think this is true. I think there's a, this is 95% true. All press is good press. Not all press is good press, but most press is good press. I think that's absolutely right. I think Prince Andrew would disagree with that. But it's a good point you make about it because if you think about it from a normal person's point of view,

if you're being attacked by disgusting people that no one trusts, that probably says something about you, right? And I think that's kind of the position we've got into. And look, given what you're describing, I think it's really important to work that you're doing. And congratulations on getting the spotlight onto this issue. Because as you say, for us certainly here in the UK, we see it. When we see protests on our street, you know, BLM protesters saying to police officers, don't shoot. These police officers are unarmed in the UK.

There was one person in the whole year or two people, I think, who were unarmed, who were shot and killed by the police. One of them was a terrorist who just stabbed several people. We don't have that problem, but the ideology is being imported. And as you say, America is very good at exporting things good and bad. So all power to you. Keep up the great work. And as always, Christopher, we've got one more question for you. What's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?

Ooh, that's a good question. You know, I think, well, I guess this is maybe emerges from my own interest, but I think it's important. I think the kind of intellectual counterculture. And I think I'm part of it. I think you're part of it. We do a very good job at at kind of rebutting or refuting the arguments of the woke. We keep it in, we do a very good job at kind of exposing it. There's all these great publications. But I think we need to spend more time talking about, well, what do we do about it? Because it's one thing to kind of, you know, destroy our opponents with facts and logic, you know, like that kind of like meme. That's great. Like you should do. that, but if they're in charge of all the institutions that hold political power and they're in charge of billions of dollars of taxpayer budget money, our facts and logic don't mean much because they control money and power. So I think we should get our hands dirtier a little bit. We should start talking about, well, what can we do about it? What are public policies that we could adopt? What are

strategies that we could adopt? How could we actually move the fight from the realm of the intellect into the realm of politics. And that's something that I think I've started to do. And I've seen something very interesting. You have people now kind of, in a way, schisming, in a way, kind of separating, where there's a certain member of the kind of intellectual counterculture, the IDW, whatever you want to call it. There's a certain contingent that says, yes, get rid of this in schools. And a certain contingent that says, well, we can't do anything about this. That would be, you know, we can't exercise political power. We'd have to work with the mean, mean, bad, you know, Republicans, and we can't be caught doing that. We still ultimately want the,

you know, the approval of the New York Times. There is this weird division, and I think I'd like to clarify those lines. I'd like to persuade as many people as possible to join me and taking into the realm of action. But either way, wherever you fall, wherever you kind of shake out, we should all be expected to propose solutions and to propose concrete actions. Because I think ultimately, we've done the refutation work, we've done the intellectual work, and we can't just keep repeating it. We need to actually move to the next phase. It's interesting you say that, because in the UK, as we talked about earlier, neither Francis or I are conservative or right-leaning, really, but we had an election at the end of 2019, in which as a country overwhelmingly,

we elected a conservative government, which showed plenty of leg on the anti-woke stuff and all of that. And we've ended up exactly where we started, where all of this stuff is accepted, all of this stuff is going ahead. And I think you're absolutely right. And I take your criticism gratefully in that I think a lot more of us need to start thinking about how to have an impact on this stuff. You know, the free speech union here in the UK is doing some good work. And organizations like counterweight as well, that is something that really more people need to get stuck into. because I think if you look at the institutional capture of many of these places, you can get a politician into power,

but if they are still beholden to what the New York Times or the Guardian says about them, you're not going to get very far. That's right. And I think that, you know, from my experience, there's some great folks in your area. Yeah, counterweight, the Free Speech Union, Eric Kaufman at Birkbeck College. You also have, you know, I'm going to butcher her name,

Kemi Badenock. Yep, yep. You didn't put you on them, yeah. Unbelievable. I mean, I think she's just an absolute fire starter. I love the clips that make their way over here. So we have potential. And I think also, you know, maybe we can end on a note of unity. We need to revive the Anglo-American Alliance.

We need to get all of our people that we share the same values to exchange ideas, to exchange best practices, to exchange policies, because we certainly have a lot to learn from one another. And I'm grateful for the chance to speak with both of you. Christopher, thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find you online or support your work, where is the best place to do that? Yeah, follow me on Twitter at Real Chris Rufo, RUFO, or my website, which is Christopherrufo.com. That's Christopher RUFO.com.

I have an amazing community of small patrons and supporters. Certainly be grateful to add you if you're listening. Fantastic, Christopher. Thanks very much. And, of course, the idea of reigniting the American and Anglo-American Alliance is great as soon as you guys start paying taxes again. Now, thanks for coming on and guys, thank you for watching. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Raw Show.

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