TRIGGERnometry - Why Diversity Programs Need to Be ELIMINATED - Christopher Rufo

Episode Date: September 17, 2023

Christopher Rufo is an American conservative activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He is an opponent of critical race theory and has worked to bring about its regulation in the school system. In January 2023 he was appointed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to the board of trustees of New College of Florida. Rufo has also worked alongside the Governor to counter the spread of LGBTQ+ ideology. SPONSORED BY: Manscaped. Get 20% off and free shipping when you use the code TRIGGER20 at https://www.manscaped.com/ Become a Premium Member to receive exclusive benefits https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   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

I don't know how understand how anyone left or right can essentially put forward the idea that you are going to deny somebody a place at a university or on a grad program for the simple reason that they are the wrong color skin or that they are the wrong sex. To me, it's abhorrent. I feel the same way. But we're up against a bureaucracy and a system that is totally and fully committed to just the opposite. I mean, they want to create a racial spoil system in which individuals are punished or rewarded based on their ancestry. I find it disgusting. I find it abhorrent, and that's what I'm fighting against. In any kind of reform effort, there will be winners and losers. And who's losing in this regard are the people who are very comfortable maintaining orthodoxy, administering their echo chamber. We're challenging that in terms of political power.

were submitting their ideologies to a democratic test. And I think they're squealing in large part because they're losing. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. A terrific and returning guest today is an activist. He's the author of a new book called America's Cultural Revolution

and the subject of the most hit pieces in the last week that I've ever read about anybody. Christopher Rufa, welcome back to Trigonometry. It's good to be with you. It's great to be with you. I mentioned the hit pieces. People, of course, will have seen our first interview with you so they know who you are. I would say you're one of the most effective people at dismantling the diversity, inclusion, and equity, the dye industry in America. And I suspect that is why you're coming under attack.

But before we get into that, tell everybody about some of the things you've been doing in education in America and the results that you've had. Yeah, this year, my big focus for my reporting, my activism, and other facets of my work is to put pressure on and abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion departments in public universities. So I did an investigative reporting campaign exposing these kind of ideological commissars in Florida and Texas, worked with Governor DeSantis, worked with legislators in Texas. Both of those states abolished their DEI departments in public universities. they will be totally eliminated by the end of the summer and phased out. And we also had this incredible project. The governor of Florida, Ronda Sanda Samp, has appointed me as a board member of the smallest public university in the state, of part of this new slate of activist board members.

And we were tasked with something very simply. He said, turn this university around and make it a classical liberal arts institution. And so these are some of the big projects that I've been working on. And I think that the reason there's been such a furious reaction is because I'm not just fighting in the abstract. I'm not just writing another think piece, but actually challenging left-wing orthodoxy and challenging, more importantly, left-wing power within academia, which is, of course, their primary institution. And I'm racking up some big wins. You are, and that's why you're getting a lot of the negative attention right now. What's interesting to me is you talk, you are not talking about a conservative educational.

system, you're talking about a classical liberal education. What does that look like exactly? What does that mean for people thinking? Because I think people would rightly see you as someone on the center right, and a lot of conservatives feel that the left is pushing the education system too far to the left. And the natural reaction for them is to demand this sort of very conservative reaction. But you're talking about classical liberal education. What does that mean, and why is that your focus? So the mission that we've adopted. and what we're trying to implement over the next few years is to restore classical notions of liberal education. And what that means is, you know, liberal education comes for the Latin liber meaning free. So it's an

education befitting a free human being, befitting a free society. And it's an education that is not oriented towards partisan, ideological and political fights, the kind of questions of the day, but oriented towards the highest transcendental goods. You have the true, the good, the beautiful. You have philosophy, history, aesthetics, art, all of the great disciplines, the seven great disciplines of the classical liberal arts. And in addition, some of more practical disciplines because it's a public university. You want kids that attend, have a chance to get success in the job market after graduation. But what it means in practice is that what we've done is we've put in a new president, we've put in a new provost, we're designing a core curriculum that is going to take students

through the Greeks, the Romans, the Renaissance, the American founding, all of the great historical periods, looking at literature, history, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, and other great disciplines. And then what it also means is rebalancing the universities. And this is something that's happening at New College, but I'm hoping happens more broadly. What you have right now is a left-wing echo chamber. And it's not good for conservatives who are excluded largely from the academic environment. But it's actually not good for liberals either, kind of left liberals or even far-left liberals because their ideas are never challenged. Their ideas are never tested. Their ideas are never tested with this kind of friction of debate. And so what we're hoping to do is have a wide variety of viewpoints.

I know that's shocking and offensive to some, but we want to have a real debate. We want to have good rules of civil discourse. We want to have people from all parts of the spectrum. And what that means is a rebalancing has to occur. And for some people, this is painful, but for some people, it's exciting. It's a process of renewal. I completely agree, Chris. I think it's very, very important. As somebody who still identifies with a lot of left-wing principles, I think it's very important. Why do you think that there's been so much backlash to what you're trying to implement in these colleges, or in this college in particular? I mean, since the late 1960s, the left has made the universities its wholly owned subsidiary. I mean, this is the base of their power.

They have saturated these institutions with left-wing ideology. They've established bureaucracies of diversity, equity, and inclusion that function as activist training departments or orthodoxy enforcement agencies. And so what I'm doing is I'm saying, this has to pass muster with the Democratic test, do the people of the state of Florida support this kind of activity in their public universities, or do they not? And the mandate that was given to Governor DeSantis by the voters of Florida and his resounding reelection win indicates that voters do not consent to this kind of governance. They do not want left-wing ideological commissars running their public universities. And Governor DeSantis is the kind of man who has the courage, the tenacity, the self-discipline,

and the intelligence to actually go after it and start reforming these institutions. And so in any kind of reform effort, there will be winners and losers. And who's losing in this regard are the people who are very comfortable maintaining orthodoxy, administering their echo chamber. We're challenging that in terms of political power. We're submitting their ideologies to a democratic test. And I think they're squealing in large part because they're losing both the intellectual case and also the practical political case. It's very interesting. What does that mean that you know, that what are you actually doing in these colleges, Chris?

Are you going in and what strategies are you using? There are a couple key strategies. So legislatively, the bill that passed the Florida legislature and was signed by the governor earlier this year does a few things that are really important. One, it sets, A, it abolishes DEI departments. From the exposés that I wrote, it was very clear that these departments were not advancing pluralism or tolerance or acceptance of a variety of viewpoints and people, but they were actually enforcing a dogma and an orthodoxy. And they were using public resources to push left-wing ideology, saying that the United States was a racist country, pushing BLM, training students had to participate in violent protests, et cetera, et cetera. And so this bill eliminates those departments.

just zeros a mountain says no more left-wing ideology within the administrative bureaucracy. A couple other reforms that are really important. The second one is that it restrains the core curriculum to say, we have to have a core curriculum that teaches students the basics of getting a liberal education, of being a productive citizen, of understanding what it means to be a human being in the United States and a free society. So there's a reform to the general education requirements in Florida's public universities. And then third, it reforms the hiring process. What's happened in so many universities, and I expose this in Florida, they're putting race-based preferences and they're putting ideological preferences, which results in this department structure

where many departments are 10 to 1, 20 to 1, 30 to 1, 100 to 1, left to right. And so if you have a department in a public university system that is 100 to 1, left-wing, to write when. You don't have free speech. You don't have debate. You don't even have a substantive intellectual environment. And so I think that changing some of the hiring process, restricting some of the discriminatory hiring processes, giving university presidents greater discretion, can help start to rebalance the intellectual environment so that students can hear from a variety of perspectives. Students can test their ideas against one another and against their professors and faculty members. And I think that is ultimately what's going to create a great public university

system is having a dedication to the liberal arts, having a core curriculum that educates citizens, and having a pluralistic intellectual environment where students care exposed to more than just one set of ideas. And Chris, when you were talking about the college and the curriculum, I'm thinking as a dad of a young boy, that is exactly the sort of place I'd want him to be educated, the classics, logic, all of these things sound incredible. But I suppose I'm a little bit concerned, and I'm curious to hear your opinion about this, that we've now got ourselves into a position as your society and ours, where we automatically evaluate a professor by their politics, if you like. And I'm not saying you have done this, of course. But do you think

we're ever going to get to a point where you're going to have colleagues in a department that don't even particularly know each other's politics because they're teaching Greek history or you know, ancient Latin or something like that. Are we ever going to go back to that if we were ever there? Yeah, I mean, there's there's there's two ways of looking at that question. I mean, first in some sense, it would be nice if you're running a, you know, statistics and data science department. If it wasn't, you know, fully saturated with politics and ideology, you know, if you're doing, you know, quantum physics, think about quantum physics, not about, you know, you know, how many genders there might be. And so in some sense, I think for certain disciplines,

that makes sense. But in others, it doesn't make sense at all. I mean, ultimately what I think is important for people to realize is that there's a distinction between ideology and politics. And my contention that I've advanced and has gotten a lot of pushback, but I think is ultimately still true, is that our universities have been overly ideologized, but insufficiently politicized. And so what that means is that we have, you know, critical theory, postmodernism, gender ideology, driving intellectual life in the departments. But we have this fiction that universities are neutral spaces that should not be governed by anyone and that certainly shouldn't be intruded upon by legislators and taxpayers and voters who fund them, charter them, and pay for them. What I'm saying

is that it's time for public universities to be governed in the best interests of the public and to be governed specifically by the legislators who are elected by voters to fund, oversee, and administer these institutions. Academics want to be free to push their ideology at all times, but they also want to be free of democratic oversight. I hope that to reverse that, I hope that the opposite becomes true over time. Chris, what happened to the notion and as a former teacher and everybody who watches this show can now drink, because I mention it at least six times an episode? But when I was a teacher. I taught theater in secondary school and I was a primary school teacher. My opinion was my politics were completely irrelevant to my job. I left my politics at the door

and my job was to educate the students in my subject or in primary school in the subjects that I taught to the very best of my ability. And quite frankly, my politics was my business and nobody Well, you have a very sophisticated reserve and self-disciplined. I think that's what maybe describes it. But look, I had the same experience in my K-12 education, even in some of my college education. You know, you have a lot of professors who you don't even know their politics. You couldn't guess. You might be surprised if you heard their personal politics, their partisan politics. I think that is generally good, I mean, especially in K-12. You should absolutely check your politics. at the door. In university environment, look, if you're a university professor and you're studying some, or you're rather teaching something that is intertwined with politics, your politics might come out. But the best professors that I've had at that, at the higher education level, were professors who also sought to create a balance within the course syllabus, for example, to say, we're going to pair Adam Smith with Karl Marx. We're going to pair, you know,

kind of the federalist and the anti-federalists. We're going to pair you know Ebram Kennedy with John McWhorter if you want to have a more kind of contemporary and a more immediate question. And so I think that that is the ideal. But I

think that we should not mistake that kind of micro-level concealing of politics in a sense. You're concealing it because it's not exactly relevant. Just like you should conceal your sex life from your students. I mean, this is in a common sense, but we should not mistake that for concealing

the fact that public universities are political entities. They're created by politicians. And so I think that we have this two levels where this question must be asked and there are two different answers. And I suppose the question is about trying to get to a position because, look, when I think about my university education, I was not, I studied economics and politics, I was not taught to believe Karl Marx, I was taught about Karl Marx and I was taught about Adam Smith and the ideas that the, and Nietzsche and all these other philosophers, I was taught about their ideas instead of being indoctrinated with their ideas, right? I suppose that's what we're trying to get with you is, are we ever going to get to that point? Or is it?

it just now going to be about, you know, everyone being obsessed with their view and imposing it on students forever? Now, it sounds like you're making progress on that front. Yeah, that we absolutely are making progress. And so I have a bit more of a subtle take on the question of indoctrination. A lot of conservatives say universities are indoctrinating kids to be, you know, blue-haired gender communists. That's kind of a mean that you see everywhere. And, okay, I mean, I could understand why at first glance you might think that, but I don't think that's exactly how it works. I don't think that most professors are you kind of consciously in a cult-like manner, indoctrinating their students, pushing their ideology, you know, converting them to the cause

in that kind of recruiting sense. I actually think it's something more subtle and more insidious. I think that it's just that they're not exposing students to any alternative sets of ideas. And so there was a piece from the Guardian, a critical piece of me that came out yesterday in the Guardian that illustrates exactly what's happening. This is a college-educated writer, Moira Donagant, who made the media men list, which was kind of a horrific thing that, you know, tarred her reputation. But then she's a, you know, visiting teacher at Stanford in the Gender Studies Department. This is someone who is teaching at an elite university in some capacity, someone who has a prestigious spot as a columnist of the Guardian. And then she says, you know, Rufo wants. I wouldn't go that far, mate.

I don't know. Not that prestigious these days. Yeah. Okay. A once prestigious, maybe. But, you know, but she says in this piece, she says, Rufo wants to turn the curriculum at New College of Florida and base it on Logos. Nobody knows what the word logos means.

It means word and Greek. How are you going to make a curriculum based on word? And so what is this person missing? This person is missing that Logos was the heart of Greek philosophy and then also the heart of the kind of Christian biblical tradition. You know, in the beginning was the word, was the Logos. And of course, Herodotus, Aristotle, all of the Greek philosophers commented on logos. And then there's been 2,000 years of commentary on logos.

It's rationality, discourse, language, word, logic. I mean, the very description of how the, the, the, the, the, the order of the cosmos is constructed, is all embedded in that word logos. She doesn't have any idea. Can't even recognize that it's a philosophical word. Can't even recognize that it's a religious word. Can't even recognize that it's one of the most important words in the past 2,000 years in the history of the West.

And so this person is indoctrinated as a kind of gender cultist, not merely because someone was forcing it into her mind, although it's possible that that also happened, but because she has been deprived of any, education in the classical liberal arts to the point where she can't even recognize the key terms of the past two millennia. And so that's what we're trying to do. I think, you know, I look back in my own education. I feel like I was robbed of an education. I was deprived of the great traditions of the West, not having been exposed to some of these classical ideas, classical concepts,

and classical pedagogies until much later in life. That's such an interesting point, man. And one of the things I also wanted to ask you about, because you're very funny with the hit pieces that you get on Twitter. I enjoy back and forth with you. And one of the things I've found is both your supporters and your critics are agreed on what you're doing. And so when I read the hit pieces on you quite often, I'm like going, oh, this sounds like he's doing good things because a lot of them focus on the fact that you are dismantling the

diversity industry. and from my perspective, that is an unquestioned good because I just see it as a new form of racism that's been allowed to be perpetuated on the British and American institutions for far too long. But for people who are perhaps less initiated in the culture war and all of this,

what is the difference between, you know, in America, you guys always celebrate, oh, this person is the first Italian-American to do this or this person is the first African-American to do that? And that was never really a thing that was discriminatory. It was a celebratory way of doing things. But we've kind of got way past that towards affirmative action, which openly discriminated against certain people and stuff like that.

So why is getting rid of the diversity hierarchy a good thing? Well, in public universities, it's an especially crucial question. So look, I think most Americans, if not the vast majority of Americans, want people from all backgrounds to succeed. That's part of our national mythos, that this is a place where you can come with nothing and you can succeed. With debate about immigration and et cetera, set aside for the time being. That's a core part of the American story. And so, but when you look at universities, you have to ask the question, what is the university for? What is the purpose? I think that the university is to pursue truth, to pursue, to rather to produce, to, to rather to produce,

knowledge and to serve as a community of scholars from a variety of viewpoints that together through the process of reasoning and debate and constructive criticism can it can reveal or can touch or can arrive at those great transcendentals, the true, the good, and the beautiful. So you have, you know, of course, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics or art. Those are the kind of three channels that we can create, you know, truth and beauty. And so DEI bureaucracies in practice are antithetical to those pursuits. Dei bureaucracies enforce orthodoxy. You know, I've exposed public universities that are literally telling people, these are words that you can use, these are words that you can't use. You shouldn't say men and women. You should say people and people kind. You know,

you shouldn't say black and white. You should say, you know, something else. I mean, it's like, down to the minute management of language by bureaucracy. And so I think that it stifles open discourse. It stifles free debate. It stifles even the basic process of learning. It also then serves as a racial spoil system. They have hiring and admissions based on your ancestry rather than your academic capability. They're rewarding people and punishing people based on what their parents, you know,

who their parents are, where their ancestors came from. And I think that is really deeply destructive and especially undermines the concept of meritocracy. And so in the American context, you know, of course, you know, what Jefferson thought of as is having a natural aristocracy of talent. And of course, wasn't fully implemented during his lifetime, obviously. But we've moved toward that goal more and more. And I think that the DEI bureaucracy undermines that as well. And then as a third component, what the DEI bureaucracy does is it manages the university and transforms it away from the pursuit of the transcendentals and toward the pursuit of current day political activism. I mean, it's training programs, its student programs, it's faculty programs.

They want to turn universities away from the pursuit of knowledge and towards the pursuit of ideology and the pursuit of partisan activism. That betrays the fundamental mission of the universities. I think it betrays really the scam that the DEI bureaucracy is. It operates in these very nice buzzwords, but in practice, I think, destroys the very heart of liberal education. Hey, Francis, do you dream of that clean-shaven look but hate going through the hassle of a wet shave every day? Of course, because of disastrously low testosterone levels, I can only grow a mustache reminiscent of a cross between Freddie Mercury and a Greek grandmother. Every day I don't shave looks like an advert for Mexican Bandito Awareness Month.

And a very important month it is too. Your face is the first thing people see when you walk through the door. Give them something to look at with Manscapes Handyman. For me, being able to shave up to three days growth... More like half a day's growth. Good point. For me, being able to shave 12 hours of growth without the mess of traditional shaving is priceless.

With the Handyman's skin safe technology, I can reduce nicks and cuts and I can finally feel confident when going for that close shave. The compact design and airplane friendliness make this a perfect travel tool that you can take anywhere. And for the fellas with a little more juice in their purpoose, Manscape's Beard Hedger Pro Kit has everything you need to tame your mane without any pain in Spain. Did you add the Spain bit?

Yep. Never do that again. Featuring their signature Beard Hedger, this thing is the juggernaut of fixing faces. This cordless trimmer has a rotary wheel that gives you 20 hair cutting lengths all with one guard, so no more messy drawers full of extra add-ons. That's right, face grooming doesn't need to be hard. Get 20 different beard lengths in just one guard.

The beard hedger is a high-tip piece of art and a travel-sized package with a long-lasting battery, universal charging and a strong motor. Trust me, gents, you can't go wrong with any of these options. That is absolutely true. My Greek grandmother used it, and he gave it. for the smoothest shaves you'd had in years. Get 20% off and free shipping with the code Trigger20 at Manscape.com.

That's 20% off with free shipping at Manscape.com and use code Trigger20. Hit the refresh button with the handyman. What have I told you about improvising? It's in the script. Unbelievable. When it comes to ticking boxes, when it comes to diversity,

look, as a former teacher, I saw plenty of kids who were really talented, really smart, had the ability to go to college, university. But the reality is, we're not going to go there because the schools that they went to were to put it mildly, absolutely dreadful in which no learning took place

because bad behavior, underfunding, etc., etc. Is there not something to be said for having quotas for these types of kids who have got a huge amount of ability, but because the education system has to put it bluntly failed them, that universities can step in and maybe help to actually propel them forward in their careers. Yeah, I think there are two methods for attracting kids that are having those kind of difficulties into the university environment that also are consonant with the principle of colorblind equality,

treating people equally and not giving favor or punishment based on ancestry. You can do a couple things. One is there's a great system in Texas that says if you're in the top 10% of your high school graduating class and any high school in Texas, you're automatically admitted into the University of Texas system. And so what that does is there are, you know, of course, many affluent public schools where much more than the top 10% are going to college. They're qualified. They're, they're habituated to it. They're encouraged by their parents. But for those struggling high schools, everyone knows if you get that top 10% you're in, you can get to college. that's a way that I think in a sense disproportionately benefits those who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic class by virtue of proxy, including many minority students. But it does it in a neutral, colorblind manner that I think targets the right thing is saying,

if you're a top performer at any one of our public schools, you deserve a spot, you deserve a chance. The other method that you can do, and I think that it's a method that is, that is commonplace and certainly happens in the state of Florida is that you can reward scholarships or tuition reductions based on socioeconomic status. So if you're coming from a family, you know, like my family, I had two lawyers as parents, you know, I had to go for those merit scholarships that was not qualifying for those financial need scholarships. That's fine. But if you're coming from someone who say a great student but comes from a background where you have maybe be one parent or two parents, you know, working minimum wage, let's say. I think that it's right

and just and good to give those folks a break, if not a full break on tuition for public universities for which they're qualified. But the third thing that's really important is that this is really what the SATs were designed to do, standardized tests. In the mid-century period, the Ivy League universities were kind of an old boys club. Your dad went to Harvard, you went to Harvard, your son went to Harvard. And so what they did is they created these SAT tests so that kids from all over the United States in inner cities and small towns and rural areas could compete in a very objective, in a kind of quantitative sense, against all of their other peers. And what this allowed was for those great Ivy League schools at the time and those public universities as well to find those kids who were

immense talents, who had the brains, who had the intelligence, who had the, you know, the capacity to do well, but weren't connected socially or administratively with the universities. This gave them an opportunity to prove themselves. And so these are three solutions that I think solve the problem where left and right mostly agree, but they do it in a manner that doesn't create resentment, hostility, frustration, and isn't also a violation of our constitution. Look, I completely agree. I don't know how understand how anyone left or right can essentially put forward the idea that you were going to deny somebody a place at a university or on a grad program for the simple reason that they are the wrong color skin or that they are the wrong sex.

To me, it's abhorrent. I feel the same way. And sometimes I wonder, it's a very, very simple conclusion. It's a very simple position. It happens to be very popular with large majorities of the public. But we're up against a bureaucracy and a system that is totally enfilions. committed to just the opposite. I mean, they want to create a racial spoil system in which individuals are punished or rewarded based on their ancestry. I find it disgusting. I find it abhorrent,

and that's what I'm fighting against it. Yeah. And one of the things I was going to ask you, Chris, is you have been very effective, I would say uncommonly so among the people who are attempting to challenge the very things that we've just been talking about. So what do you think it is that you have been doing that other people have perhaps not been doing? Because I think we all would agree that there is kind of now a quite a large ecosystem of people who are concerned about the same things that you and I are concerned about. An ecosystem of people who discuss them, who do podcasts about them, who interview authors. You've got books about them, who write books about them, but there's a lot of talking, and you're someone who's actually converted that

into real action and real results. What do you think we can learn from the things you've been working on? Well, I mean, first off, I sometimes joke that, you know, politics is not a podcast. You can't win in politics on a podcast, but that's somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because the intellectual ecosystem of podcasts, journals, you know, social media accounts, you know, social media accounts, video channels is really, really important because programs like yours and others are how people start to get into the debate. They start to be thinking about these issues. They give a platform for the great journalists and writers and intellectuals who are working in this domain. But I think it's necessary but not sufficient. And what is required to make it both necessary

and sufficient is to actually do politics. And I find it so astonishing. I get critics, even from the right, that are saying, you know, we think critical race theory is horrible. We think DEI is antithetical to the Constitution, but we're really concerned that Rufo is getting rid of them within public institutions. It's like, what are you people for? I mean, what, how do you go from that premise of that conclusion, you know? Chris, sorry to interrupt.

Just to steal man their argument, and I have seen that argument made. Please. Their argument, I think, is they're uncomfortable with using the power of the government. government to do those things? That is their concern. Totally, but that is like the most absurd concern possible because they're uncomfortable with using the power of the government to regulate the government. These are government schools. These are government institutions. And so the only people who can't regulate them are government agents essentially. And so what my argument is, is if you say that legislators channeling the

sentiments and desires of their voters are not allowed to do. to regulate public institutions, what you're saying is that the supreme power in our country is not the people, is not the legislators who represent them, but the permanent bureaucracies and the permanent bureaucrats that administer our institutions. And so it is fundamentally an anti-democratic argument that they're making. They're saying the people have no right to regulate their government. That is completely backwards to the vision of the American founding, where the people were the ultimate arbiter, and the government only existed to secure the rights of the people.

Now we're getting into a kind of tyrannical model, and I think it fails on those grounds. No, I agree with you, and that makes a lot of sense, actually. Particularly when you travel around America and you realize how different states are and people's attitudes, it seems strange to me that you would want to, that it's even possible that you would have the same, same values and the same attitudes everywhere because it's just so different. And so the different

states do traveling around America has made me much more pro-states rights just as an outside observer, I have to say. Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean, and I think this is ultimately good, right? I think some values are better than others, obviously. You know, I support legislation in some states and do not support the legislation that gets through in other states. But what I think I recognize, and I hope most Americans recognize is that we want to have a pluralistic system. I mean, what is more boring, what is more humorless,

what is more stifling than an entire nation or 330-plus million people where everyone thinks the same, everyone has the same values, everyone has to do the same programs, all universities look identical to one another. That's the homogenous world

that we're drifting towards. And I think that what that does is it deadens the soul. and I think the people who lead those kind of bureaucracies are some of the worst people in our society, frankly. I'll say that because they want to destroy the great traditions of Western civilization, and they want to replace it with a desiccated and discriminatory system of DEI bureaucracies that simply circulate whatever is the fashionable orthodoxy of the day. Chris, isn't your challenge going to be as well when you're talking about recruitment?

There are certain professions, for instance, becoming a teacher, which is naturally going to appeal more to liberal people, more to left-wing people than it is going to appeal to right-wing people. I mean, that's just the reality of life, isn't it? Same if you're a college professor who is a specialist in the liberal arts. chances are you're going to be pretty liberal. I think that that is the, I think that that is the reality in very recent times, but has not been the reality over the course of a longer stretch of history. And so I hear this all the time.

You know, well, artists are always left-wing. But if you look at the 18th century and the 19th century, there were many right-wing artists. You could actually make the case that the kind of great arts we're embodying the spirit of the right, the spirit of the aristocracy, the spirit of hierarchy even. And so I don't think that it's inevitable, although I would certainly admit that it's pervasive. And I think that, you know, from a practical perspective, if you say that the kind of ratio of, you know, left to right and college's campuses, among the academics and professors is 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 to 1, depending on the discipline, you know,

we have to start acknowledging that that's the reality. and one of my personal goals, through legislation, through kind of governance in many different conservative states, red states, I want to see in the next 10 years a thousand professors that are aligned with the classical liberal arts hired in state universities around the country. And these professors will be because it's classical, in a sense, it's conservative. You're trying to conserve the classical notions of these ideas, of these concepts, of these histories. And so, in a sense, what I'm hoping to do is get at least a thousand academics that are broadly and

philosophically aligned with so many people who feel unrepresented in the institutions, who feel like their ideas don't have a home in academia. I think a thousand people creates a strong enough counterbalance, a strong enough cohort, a strong enough network, that then you can start taking over departments, you could start reforming entire universities, you could start launching new academic journals, you could start creating another parallel realm of academic discourse that provides protection, that provides patronage, that provides publication opportunities for people who dissent from the left-wing orthodoxy. That's something that I'm excited about and I'm going to be working for in the future.

Would it not be an idea just to say as well that when a professor enters a classroom, particularly undergrad, they are not allowed to present a political argument and say, this is the way that you should think, that it is their duty as an educator to go in and present these arguments neutrally. Would that not also be a way of doing it? There is an argument for that. But I think that there's a better solution to that. I think that the better solution to that. I think that the better solution is to hire people in the first place that are already predisposed to that kind of temperament and that kind of pedagogy in the classroom. And so I think that fundamentally this is a hiring problem, a recruiting problem, and a faculty problem in that sense. But, however, some states are now experimenting with restricting certain pedagogies in the classroom. I personally have expressed reservation about this. I've done it at the debate that I did at Stanford. And I said, look, I think that this is probably not the best place for conservatives

to fight. My own model legislation that I put together with Manhattan Institute provides a kind of exemption for classroom instruction, focuses more on the bureaucracy and hiring and colorblind policies. However, the states such as Florida that are experimenting with that approach will be challenge into courts, but my view is that they'll prevail in the courts because we have a Supreme Court precedent, Sabios v. Garcetti, that says that public employees, including public university employees, presumably, are ultimately, they have a job, and in their official duties, they do not have unlimited First Amendment rights. So you can't go into a kindergarten classroom and say, you know, all of you must be communists, your parents are evil, and, you know,

I declare you all, you know, cat gender. Well, you can't, you can get fired for that because you don't have unlimited First Amendment rights. You have a job that you're doing. You're hired to do specific tasks. The question is, does it apply to higher education, academics in a college classroom? Again, even my own reservations about the policy, I think that it does. I think ultimately college professors are in public universities are public employees and they're subject to reasonable oversight and they're subject to kind of the reasonable preferences of legislators and administration. I know you, I guess I know what your answer is going to be to this, but there's a lot of people that we speak to who are in higher education or have been in higher education who say that it's

completely compromised and actually the most effective strategy now is to build our own institutions, as it were. What do you say to that argument? I think that it is noble in spirit but deficient in its practical implementation. Because the fact is that founding in the university is extremely expensive. And it's also very onerous as far as accreditation and launch and recruitment and facilities. And we cannot do that at the scale to compete with the existing institutions. Look, I support initiatives like University of Austin. the new university that they're launching, it's kind of like an IDW university in a sense,

you know, heterodox university. I think that that's great, but the fact of the matter is that we have 3,000 other universities, and if your argument is that most of them are compromised, you have to do something about it. And while it's very hard to influence, say, a private institution in the Ivy Leagues, although there are ways. We can talk about that. where what we know we can absolutely influence in a profound way are public universities, because ultimately, if you have control of the legislature and the governor's mansion, you can do in a sense whatever you want, whatever you can get passed through the legislative process.

And so I think that that is a much more immediate and much more fruitful and a much more scalable method. And so you put in conservative-oriented research centers, you do university takeovers, as small universities. You reform the faculty hiring process to give more power to trustees and university presidents to create a little bit more balance on the faculty. And then you also make sure that you're restricting, eliminating robalcing programs that don't serve the public good. That's what I think is the best path, although it is, of course, certainly complementary rather than contradictory or entithetical to the idea of also creating new institutions. And I imagine you're hopeful that the marketplace sorts the wheat from the chaff.

In other words, five, 10, 15 years from now where there's enough colleges that have that classical liberal arts education available, that people vote with their feet and then the proof of that pudding gets shown. I'm curious, so coming back to the point about lessons for other things. What do you think are the lessons from what you've been doing into other things? Because you know full well that this capture that we're talking about with the education system also applies to things like the media. Do you think, given that those things are not owned and run by the government, do you think that that is an area where it is about building your own institution? Or do you think that in other areas it has to be about something like what you're doing with education?

Yeah, great, great question and very much the former. I think that the media is, thankfully, with very limited exceptions for NPR and PBS and federal grantmaking, the media in the United States is a kind of private enterprise. The media is kind of an open system. And so I'm very much think that we want to have, you know, print media, broadcast media, radio, social media, conservatives just need to build. They need to compete. They need to create great material. And I think that they need to create also businesses. And I think that the rest mostly solves itself. The only glaring exception where I think it's appropriate for public policy is under conditions of private monopoly. Some government intervention is justified, even under a libertarian reading. And so I think that there is some role, although it has to be delicate on social media censorship, for example, particularly with those kind of vertically integrated and kind of monopoly-like firms. And so I'd like to see some new ideas in that direction, but broadly speaking, I think the media is actually, I mean, look, the success of your show, the success of some of my journalistic work.

the limitation is not, you know, the system, the limitation is not that, you know, kind of left, far left people have taken over the, you know, NBC News room. The limitation is really that we have to compete and create great work. And I think that the role of policy is quite limited. Chris, and let's focus on the Ivy Leaks, the Harvard's, you know, the Columbia's, etc. These are private institutions. Correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not particularly. Okay. So what do we do with a private institution? Because that's not governmental. So what do we do with them?

Well, this is actually a fun question, and I'm glad you asked, because I've been working with some other scholars and policy analysts on exactly this question. And there's a couple things we can do. I mean, you know, a, private universities are subsidized to the gills by the federal government through student loans and student loan guarantees. And so I think that you could reform student loans and make universities liable in part for student loan defaults. So if a student racks up $250,000 in student loans, getting a gender studies degree from, you know, private university A and then can't pay it back, well, why isn't the university on the hook to repay that, say, half of that loan? So create some financial incentives for them to be more competitive and more judicious in how they run their programs. Second, what you can do and what I've recommending

the next president of the United States to do, you know, if it's a Republican, is to launch a Department of Justice and Department of Education investigation into all of the Ivy League universities to investigate them for illegal and unconstitutional racial discrimination in hiring and admissions. And so what we would do is essentially take what the lawyers did with the Harvard lawsuit, which established that Harvard's admissions policies was unconstitutional, were unconstitutional, and then expanded to all of the prestige universities using the power of federal investigation to procure documents, to put a few hundred lawyers on the case, and in a sense, to embarrass, to expose, to punish, and then to take corrective legal action against universities who are

violating the Constitution. I think that would make waves. I think that would make huge changes in behavior. And I also think that federal funding for these universities, they get billions of dollars, private universities get billions of dollars in grants and in programmatic funding and other kind of federal financial schemes. Why don't we tie that funding to principles of open speech and debate, principles of civic discourse, principles of non-discrimination, and in a sense say, if you don't fulfill the basic mission of the university, being a home for open discourse, having a standard of civil debate, you no longer qualify for federal funds. This is how it works in almost every other domain of life. If you do not follow the basic rules, you do not qualify for special benefits. And so I think there's a lot

that can be done to tame these private universities. And one thing I've learned in particular, fighting in academia. Academics are not very, you know, they're not economically productive, right? They're not, you know, creating, you know, iPhones or whatever. What they have, what they trade on is prestige. And that's really their full, they always put their full, you know, the famous Jacob Yaroski professor of whatever at Yale University, the famous line from Jason Stanley. And so what I've learned by kind of, you laugh at that, it's kind of funny, but actually

it signals a great vulnerability. If you can attack the prestige and attack the reputation and undermine the prestige and reputation of individual academics, but academic institutions as a whole, that is a very powerful method for getting change. And Chris, one of the things we wanted to talk with you about as well is, as I think you can tell, we're fully on board with the idea of dismantling the diversity, bureaucracy, classical liberal arts education. And I certainly see that, you know, and you talk about this in your book,

America's Cultural Revolution, the way that the far left has infiltrated so many institutions and essentially seized control of the means of intellectual production in all sorts of areas. Are you concerned, though? For example, we see that we saw the case in Florida where I think in one county,

Francis and I were looking at this article earlier. They've banned the teaching of Shakespeare in schools because it's got sexually explicit content. And you can kind of see what's happened there where maybe people have felt that, you know, rightly, we talked to Carol Markowitz when we were in Florida about some of the things that kids are being taught. And you're going, no, no, children should not be taught this. Very sexually explicit content. But it feels like there is at least a very real risk of a overcorrection, overreaction, an excessive backlash. Is that something that you see happening? And are you concerned about that at all?

Well, that's interesting. I don't know the specifics of that story of Shakespeare. But I would venture a guess, you know, speculating. And I would say that this is the pattern in many other cases that sound like this. You see the headline, school bands, you know, Shakespeare. you dig in a couple things might be happening. Might be. I don't know in this specific case. One, it might be a single parent says,

hey, I'm going to flag this book, and it has to go through a process of review. And then, of course, it's Shakespeare. It'll get reviewed and it'll get put back in the shelf or the curriculum or whatever is the case. But there's a second thing that is very commonly occurring, and it's very sneaky, and they almost never put it in the news article, because a lot of the news articles are not news. They're propaganda. But what's a phenomenon... Sorry to interrupt, Chris. this was a New York Post, by the way, just for clarity.

Okay, okay. Well, I would be curious to, I was curious to read it, but perhaps this is what's happening. There's something called a kind of technique called malicious compliance. And I've seen this over and over in Florida, where kind of left-wing, ideological, teachers, librarians, citizens, what have you, will say, oh, what can we do to embarrass, you know, the governor?

What can we do to put pressure? we're going to flag Shakespeare for a, you know, a racy sex scene or whatever. And then we can feed it to the media. The media will say that, you know, Shakespeare has been banned. But really what this is is a librarian or another official violating the spirit of the law, violating actually in most cases the plain reading of the law, distorting the reading, putting something on a list in a kind of manipulative and false way in order to generate negative headlines.

And so I would suspect that what you'll see is that Shakespeare will be back in the library. Immediately, I, of course, would support the complete works of Shakespeare in the library. And I think what parents are really trying to stop is against pornography and sexually explicit materials. You know, there's books that are teaching, you know, depicting acts of pedophilia, books that are teaching children how to use gay sex apps. that's the kind of thing that is in classrooms, that shouldn't be in classrooms. And so I don't think that any conservative that I know are really any conservatives in any meaningful sense wants to restrict Shakespeare. I would suspect something else is going on.

Yeah, that sounds perfectly credible. Chris, the one thing that I find quite interesting, and again as a former educator, is, and maybe look, I'm reading a left-wing liberal paper and it's a misrepresentation. I was reading about how sex education has been banned in Florida. Now, I'm, as a former educator, I'm not particularly comfortable with it, and I'll explain to you why, because particularly with young children, sex education is not teaching them to be sexual. It's actually teaching them to protect themselves from abuse.

And children who grew up in households that are sexually abusive are not taught about this for very obvious reasons. And I've seen in my own experience where cases of abuse have been missed because a child is not able to vocalize what is happening to them because they're not sexual people because they're children. Sure. Well, I think that it's important to then review the text of the law, let's say, in Florida, where I'm most familiar with it. The text of the law says there shall be no instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation. first in K through 3 and now in K through 12. And so, and then it also has a carve out for state mandated sex education should be, can, it must be, you know, permitted, included in the classroom. And so any kind of training or prevention or discussion about potential sexual abuse is not about gender identity or sexual orientation. It's part of the existing, you know,

K through 12 sex education curriculum. There's a clear need for. that would not be restricted. And so I think that that is a very good way to look at it. There are certain things like, you know, sex abuse prevention education or reporting education that I think are absolutely should be included. That's still in the curriculum in Florida. But teaching kids that they might be pansexual, teaching children that they might be, you know, how to use gay sex apps. I think that that is, you know, something that maybe Beth left. I mean, actually, maybe best, you So not in the case or drill system at all, but certainly if parents want to teach their kids, you know, all the new genders, you know, that's their right.

But they don't have, they don't have an entitlement to push these ideas in the public school system. Come on, little Johnny. Let me show you how to use grinder for kids. There you go. That is a fun time with that as no one has experienced. Chris, we're about to head over to locals where we ask you questions from our audience that they've already submitted. Before we do, as you know, we always wrap up this part of the interview by asking you what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think we should be.

You know, I think that it's something that we've been touching upon a bit in this conversation. It's that, you know, we need to talk about how democracy functions. And I think that the left has made their slogan, you know, this is what democracy looks like, democracy dies in darkness, some other, you know, some other kind of rift on this. You know, Trump is a threat to democracy. I mean, all of these democracy, democracy, democracy. I think conservatives, though, are missing something on the word democracy and also on the word justice. The left is this justice, that justice, you know, X, Y, Z justice. The conservatives have a temptation and even kind of center-right liberals, let's say,

have a temptation to say, oh, the left is demagoguing on democracy, the left is demagoguing on justice, you know, those are left-wing words. I think that that's totally a missed opportunity. And in fact, we need to have a competing vision of democracy and a competing vision of justice that I think would resonate with large majorities of the public. And we've really seeded those words, steeded those concepts to our opponents. And I think that this conversation about education reform, university reform, it speaks to this issue. It's that, you know, in a democracy, in a republic, but let's say in a democracy for kind of shorthand, the voters, the people, through their legislators, get to decide how their institutions are governed and towards which

values their institutions aspire. We've lost that in our country, maybe in your country as well. We've lost the sense that the people determine the ends, that the people determine how institutions function, that the people determine what institutions are transmitting from one generation to the next. we've seated that. We've closed our eyes to how our democracy functions. And I think that is a really dangerous future if we continue. And so one of my goals against the left and against even the right, my critics on the right, is to unapologetically be a champion of democratic governance of our institutions.

And I think that that's a conversation that needs to be had. Perfect. Well, if you're listening and watching this, we're going to continue the conversation on locals head on over there and we'll answer some of your questions. What was the breaking point that pushed you so far that you stopped caring when someone weaponized empathy against you?