Imposing Limits on the Woke? | Christopher Rufo | EP 335

should accept yourself just the way you are what does that say about who I should become is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way so am I done or something get the hell up get your act together adopt some responsibility put your life together develop a vision unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within be a force for good in the world and that'll be the adventure of your life [Music] the research literature produced by the faculties of Education in the last 50 years has had a devastating negative effect on public education in the U.S time and time again if the faculties of Education put it forward it was wrong scientifically and disastrous socially so why the hell have conservatives gone along with the game of allowing the faculties of Education to maintain a monopolistic hammerlock on teacher certification I don't understand it the big problem is that legislators have really done nothing and they've let these bureaucracies move anti-democratically to install this ideology you have people that their livelihoods now hundreds of thousands of people depends on pushing this ideology within the public institutions these are government institutions these are institutions that are are created and funded by taxpayers and that are under the regulatory power of the legislature and so the legislature that has abdicated they're now moving in to say hey wait a minute we've let this go go go Rogue for too long we need to actually say these are political questions and they they by Nature by their very Nature by their by their essential nature will require political Solutions not merely uh the kind of light touch um you know approach of people who think that um you know signing a letter an open letter is going to get the job done [Music] thank you hello everyone I have the opportunity today to uh speak with one of Florida's leading troublemakers you might say Christopher Ruffo and he's been working on the education front in Florida and I want to play the role of friendly enemy today because I'm very interested in what's happening in Florida concerned as I am about the state of education in general in the West North America Canada U.S and also more specifically with regard to higher education and so I've been watching the goings-on in Florida with great amount of interest and I have a lot of questions and I'm going to try to push Mr ruffle Chris as hard as I can today in a you know friendly manner because I want to get to the bottom of all of this to the degree that that's possible and I'm certainly seeing excesses on the leftist radical side with regards to the reformulation of the education system and as far as I'm concerned something needs to be done about that but that's complicated and it's hard to do something about it without falling prey to potential access is on the more conservative and traditionalist sites we're going to Hash that out today at least that's my plan so welcome Chris it's good of you to agree to talk to me today and I'm I'm really looking forward to this yeah likewise it's a it's a pleasure and an honor to be with you and look forward to the conversation so let's start out by giving some people information about your background and you kind of sprang onto the scene at least in so far as I was concerned just a couple of years ago when you started really what would you say pushing back against the Dei activists on the education front and now you seem to be pretty integrally involved in Governor DeSantis of Florida's um what would you say strategic moves forward on the on the education reform front and so let's start with a bit of description about your background and how you came about doing what you are doing and what you're doing as well yeah well you know I think my background is pretty different than than a lot of the folks in the conservative world or the conservative movement um you know I was I grew up as a kind of a young man of the left um that was my politics kind of hard left Politics as a teenager my my family members were kind of in a long tradition of a kind of left-wing and even kind of marxist and and communist uh activism and uh and but then over the course of my adulthood in college and then after college I spent about 10 years directing documentaries all over the world for PBS sold a film to Netflix and other International TV stations and that left-wing worldview totally fell apart um I started working in the conservative world started doing journalism and then of course uh I think sprung onto the scene as you said it with my work exposing critical base Theory first in government then in K-12 schools and I think part of my background that is maybe even helped make me successful in this is that I I know how the left thinks uh intimately um and I don't think that's true for my opponents I don't think that they know how the right things I don't think they know how conservatives think they don't think the right does think yeah that's right yeah I get there was a there was that great line I think from uh that conservatism is a series of irritable gestures um you know right so condescending and and I think that you know while you could let that bother you or you could let that uh annoy you it actually presents a strategic Advantage for conservatives because we know how our opponents think I think in many ways I can make the argument on my opponent's behalf better than they can um and then they look at us just like we're Barbarians at the gate and so uh it's fun and even playing that role a little bit kind of leaning into it with a wink uh playing the Barbarian uh for me has been quite quite entertaining and quite amusing yeah [Music] despite the U.S blowing through the 31.4 trillion dollar debt ceiling last month the White House still refuses to reduce spending our national leadership has buried their heads in the sand but you don't have to call the experts at Birch gold today and start diversifying into gold 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you're traditionalist or conservative leading and I think there's some real truth in that um also partly and this has to do with you know your characterization of conservatism as a series of irritable gestures one of the things that young people are looking for to orient themselves in the world is a cause that's Noble that they can identify with and it's really up to the community to provide that Vision which is part of their enculturation and conservatives have done a dreadful job of that I would say in liberals as well for like the true liberals not the leftist type so when you were when you were a kid teenager what do you think was specifically attractive to you uh both personally and and philosophically about what was being offered to you on the left yeah I mean I think a lot of it is just a sense of heroism a sense of drama a sense of the Romantic you get all of the mythology of the left you know an aunt of mine gifted me a Che Guevara flag that I hung in my bedroom and you have this kind of heroic image of the swashbuckling reformer pursuing social justice holding the rich accountable providing for the poor and it is a very attractive narrative I mean there's no getting around that it's a magnetic narrative and the conservative narrative is really one of uh restraint Duty obligation and when you're 13 uh that's not exactly something that is going to inspire you and at the same time I think that I grew up in California um uh in Sacramento and the kind of Mythology around the University of Berkeley the Free Speech movement some of those great uh student moments at the time was also something that I gravitated towards I remember as a teenager my friends and I would go out and and visit the campus at Berkeley and kind of be really kind of wide-eyed and amazed at the the university culture and so those were some of the things and then of course my family members in Italy were kind of old school European working class marxists and so they would provide uh you know kind of long lectures when we would go back and visit uh you know the thought of Lenin the thought of Marx the thought of gram sheet they approached it from a a theoretical basis that was to me at the time very attractive because it was putting an intellectual frame to politics and so it engaged me mentally as well and so um it's an attraction so it's your first introduction to political Theory really well so the other thing we could point out too is that there is a very real issue at stake here a couple of very real issues we're going to give the left it's due so the first issue is the the pervasive reality of the unequal distribution of both talent and wealth and so Marx famously noted that Capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people as time went on now the cat the Catholicism make mistake that Marx made one of many was to assume that there was something unique about capitalism in the production of inequality and there's much more thorough work done now on all sorts of theoretical fronts ranging from physics to economics demonstrating that that proclivity of resource let's say or even substance for that matter to be unequally distributed is extremely pervasive and so for example it is the case that most of the world's capital is in the hands of a relatively few people but it's also the case that most of the world's water flows through a very small number of rivers and that most of the world's population lives in a very small number of cities and that most pla very few planets have almost all the planetary mass and that also applies to Stars it applies to your blood vessel vessels as well a very small proportion of your blood vessels have the largest volume of flow that's called a Pareto distribution and Pareto distributions tend to characterize a certain proportion of natural systems and so this proclivity for inequality to emerge is real and the danger that Capital will accumulate the hands of very small number of people is also real but but number one it can't it can't be attributed to capitalism because every economic system that humans have ever uh employed produces a Pareto distribution now but the problem there is is that if you're a young person and maybe you're looking for a romantic adventure and you see inequality it's going to grate on you emotionally because who the hell is happy about the fact that there are disenfranchised Street people and and then also people who are even perhaps you know with a street person you might say well you've made some bad life choices but you know what do you say about poverty-stricken children especially when they're poverty stricken in the face of wealth and so the idea that you're fighting on behalf of the oppressed is a pretty attractive proposition for a young person even if they're not ideologically adult right and it's it's also a reality that makes conservatives guilty when they're faced with the moral onslaught of leftist activists because well inequality is a painful reality and the truth of the matter is we don't know we really don't know what to do about it it's very difficult problem to solve and it's it's a complex the solutions are complex but then you know you can be Shea Guevara and you can have a nice flag in your bedroom and your relatives can tell you that you are a young hero in training and like that is a lot more attractive emotionally than as you pointed out the message of restraint Duty and obligation which is kind of the last thing a 13 year wants to hear when he's trying to make his adventurous way out in the world this is a very big problem yeah and I'll tell you kind of how My Views changed and really My Views changed significantly when I spent uh five years actually working on a documentary for PBS uh looking at three forgotten American cities Youngstown Ohio Memphis Tennessee and Stockton California I followed these families in some of the poorest ZIP codes in the country a white neighborhood a predominantly black neighborhood and a predominantly Latino and mixed race neighborhood over the course of a few years and really trying to understand this question what is driving inequality what does inequality look like what does the phenomenon uh reveal about itself and the answer was actually really my political Turning Point the completion of my political education and it's it's looking at it and saying hey wait a minute uh it's not just a simple economic story it's not a story of it leads to kind of greed it's not a story of that kind of left-wing ideology and in fact the fundamental Human Experience of inequality in America in a kind of advanced industrial country um is one that actually is a complex social store you have broken families and in one of the neighborhoods for example 92 percent of the families were single parent homes so there were no fathers in the home almost anywhere in the whole zip code um you look at the social pathologies um you know from from depression anxiety to drug addiction alcoholism um and then you look at the collapse of community institutions so those mediating uh social institutions that once provided a structure a sense of meaning a sense of restraint a sense of direction they've all been evaporated and all you get is the individual and the state and the ultimate irony that I discovered was that in a place like Memphis they're spending I I believe something like three billion dollars a year on means tested anti-poverty programs for a small population something around thirty thousand dollars per family per year so uh enough to have a median standard of living and yet you have a complete social disaster through through and so what that taught me was you have to look at the society you have to look at cultural factors and and kind of economic redistribution which we already have in this country the United States spends more than a trillion dollars a year on its welfare programs um it cannot solve problems that are human cultural spiritual in nature um and so for at that point the left-wing narrative on inequality those Simple Story um I mean just could could not could not meet the the standard of reality that I saw and and lived with for three three well you know one of the things one of the things that's perverse about the leftist philosophy and I would say this particularly about Marx is that all those socialists even the labor union socialist types who are much more forgivable one of the things they presume is that well capitalism is bad and there's an implicit presumption there that there's actually something wrong with the entire Monetary Exchange system and perhaps something wrong with the idea of money per se but all you have to do to address social problems is redistribute money and that is an absolutely it's such a primordial it's such a primitive and unsophisticated Theory because as you pointed out if you do delve into these situations in depth one of the things you find is that things are so broken and damaged at the bottom end of the socioeconomic pyramid let's say that the provision of money is not going to help in the least like I had clients for example who were part of the excluded class let's say and they actually didn't do too badly when they didn't have much money but as soon as their unemployment or disability checks showed up their narcissistic and Psychopathic friends would descend like a plague of vultures and they'd be off to the bar for like a three-day cocaine and alcohol you know uh uh uh party to the point of unconsciousness and I'd have clients that would find themselves face down in a ditch you know the next Tuesday morning and the idea that you can just dump excess resources into a structure that has no structure is the sort of thing that a deluded Che Guevara worshiping 13 year old could assume but that that bears absolutely no relationship whatsoever to how much trouble real trouble is and how little Mere Money can do about it yeah that's right and I think that they also make the fundamental mistake that they look at redistribution as the miracle right the Miracle Solution but in fact production is the miracle uh for almost all of human history we had we produced very little per capita and so with capitalist production which is presupposed in the Marxist economic analysis um I mean this is a miracle uh the fact that we have the standard of living that we have the fact that we've been able to reduce extreme poverty globally uh by such a large extent in the last you know 30 40 50 years as India and China moved away from a more socialist and centrally planned system uh I mean that is a miracle I mean it's a miracle of human invention um and so I and I think that at the same time you feel a sense of guilt uh um almost naturally because you see this great abundance and then you see its distribution but the question of how to solve that is very complex it's very difficult and to to dovetail on what you were saying it's like I I've spent times in these poor neighborhoods and then I found sound like you know you'd see people at like 1am just like huge groups of people partying fighting you'd see spikes in violence on a monthly Cadence I remember talking to someone say hey why is everyone out today it's like well the EBT money hit and so when you have an infusion of cash into these communities for example you can even just see the social patterns uh you know arrests violence Etc um and and and you have then you kind of start to understand okay money alone is not the solution it has to be obviously resources money that is I think earned uh and then also that is in the context of a culture that has a set of values that can hold it together and look all over and I think especially in the United States um that cultural net has really been shredded uh and it cannot be solved like the way we've been doing it since 1964-65 really the late 1960s by the time it got off the ground you know the war on poverty spending trillions of dollars now has not solved it I think if anything what I've observed in studying the history Oracle record and then studying it it kind of empirically looking at it face to face poverty is much worse now even though you have a higher median income and so we have this Paradox where we have actual material wealth poor people in the United States are richer than almost every other uh group globally and yet the experience is much worse and and I I think that in my travels abroad it's like almost if you have to choose from a cultural standpoint would you rather be poor uh in maybe a developing country buffeted from some of these things or poor in the United States which uh in in many cases it's like a it's like a hellscape you know violence addiction mental illness uh kind of shredded uh social net and um these aren't easy questions uh and they they certainly don't have easy answers we'll be back in one moment first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus so the Hebrews created history as we know it you don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert and we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest [Music] Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question well you know the part of the appalling hypersimplicity of the woke moralist claim is that poverty is reducible to lack of money and in fact true poverty is a multi-dimensional problem and the multi-dimensional problem is essentially something like lack of proper placement within a functioning social hierarchy and lack of forward vision and then what happens if people don't have anything they regard as useful productive and generous to do that they're committed to then what happens is because they can't find meaning or cersei's from anxiety in the pursuit of a well-constituted life they default to impulsive pleasure seeking and then if you add money into that situation it makes it worse because there's nothing that facilitates impulsive pleasure seeking than money like money right and so it's it's definitely the case that well it's a hell of a good time for four or five days in the bar and I'm not saying that poor people drink more although I am saying that people who drink more and act in that impulsive manner are far more likely to be poor and so there's also causal bi-directional causality constantly at work in a manner that this is also what makes me a manner that belies the leftist claims this is also one of the things that makes me very skeptical about the moral uh certainty that the leftists who are hypothetically on the side of the poor bring to the to the table with regard to arguments all the time it's like well these this this this this unidimensional sympathy you have and this insistence that all of this complex problem can be reduced to let's say the greed of the capitalist overlords might do wonders for you and your ego allowing you to parade as you know this year's incarnation of the spirit of Che Guevara who is a murderous Punk by the way but it it does nothing for the people who you are attempting to hypothetically help except make their lives a hell of a lot more miserable but you know you get to feel good about it so that's that's a small price to pay all things considered All right so that all broke for you when you were working for NPR yeah yeah I started to see so now did you actually did you actually start moving in more say classic liberals liberal or conservative circles at that point I mean you must kind of be now at a loss for a while given that you're you know your worldview had come under assault under the brutal lessons of reality yeah yeah exactly and you know these are documentaries for for PBS and and I was kind of moving to the center moving to the right I went through kind of a Libertarian phase even uh to my own embarrassment now um and my politics shifted and and I could just feel it that my relationships with colleagues were starting to fray people were Whispering you know I think rufos may be a conservative now you know very concerned about me um and then there was a kind of moment where I had to make a decision am I gonna engage in politics am I going to say what I think is true am I going to face the consequences and you know ultimately I said look I I was kind of turning 30 and I said it's either now or never I'm gonna kind of come out I'm gonna stake my claim I burned all of my relationships in the documentary world I lost funders I had people who had worked for me as contractors for years tell me that they couldn't work with me anymore and so the the documentary world was just a total dead end I mean what year was that oh this was probably like uh 2015 2016 uh when it started to change so so right at the as the kind of thing nobody no nobody can shun like uh like uh what would you call it a a burned leftist I mean look I I've tried to maintain a relatively balanced view of the excesses on both sides of the political Spectrum but one thing I have clearly experienced repeatedly is that the left will shun and exclude to a degree that's almost un it's almost unknown on the right I've never had anyone on the right that I've talked to refuse to talk to a hypothetical guest for example and I've had people on the left they just do that all the time and I don't I don't get that exactly I think maybe it's maybe it has to do with the association and personality between agreeableness and leftist proclivity so the Socialist types the lefties are technically more agreeable and I think maybe among agreeable people if you don't go along with the agreeable game you're much more likely to be categorized as a predator and I think it's also part partly an Institutional question so something like PBS something like the art world something like the cultural World certainly also the academic world these are artificial economies right they're propped up by the state they're propped up by philanthropic funding there are limited number of spots it's highly competitive it's a lot of people that are very credentialed very intelligent and they have to find strategies to fight it out for these limited resources they see them as zero-sum games whereas in corporations or entrepreneurship which are traditionally more kind of conservative or free market the idea is well we can create a company with two people and grow it to a hundred thousand people um there's a sense of expansion there's a sense of possibility okay well that's a good theory so you think if you view what you're doing as a zero-sum game there's always a rationale for exclusion of course yeah and and you're trying to move up a hierarchy and there's it's not competence that's rewarded it's not economic uh productivity that's rewarded um in in all of these places it's not even really an economic question anymore and and so you can critique marks I think that's good and fine and true but the real change on the left and I think this plays into both what we were talking about previously in this question is that they've moved from a unit of analysis or a basis of analysis of Economics a material basis to a metaphysics metaphysical basis on identity and that's very unstable and it's so unstable and then you have games that are not played on hey let's let's kind of advocate for wages or working conditions or or or or cash redistribution you're you're actually then jocking on the position of identity and so you have an artificial economic economically artificial institution limited positions highly ambitious people that are then jockeying for position based on identity I mean it's like that is a recipe for a real derivative game in some sense right so so it's already a derivative of reality when you're talking about money but when you're talking about identity you've you've moved one step further up the abstraction hierarchy like a financial derivative and so things get things get very unstable and and vacillate a tremendous amount I mean because the Marxist game as you pointed out for the longest time and then even the valid socialist game was essentially economic like the fundamental playing the fundamental Battlefield was you know do what slice of the pie does the working class get and certainly labor leaders and people like that who were genuine socialists in the English tradition rather than the Marxist tradition were doing what they could to be some of them at least to be an honest voice for the oppressed working class and also I think as some intelligent leftists still continue to do and I'm thinking about people like Russell Brand we're also pretty good voices to fight against the dangers of corporate gigantism and Regulatory capture which is something that well clearly needs to be addressed probably probably more now than it has been that has been necessary in the last 70 years because that's a real threat and so all right so now we've got some reasons for exclusion laid down so now okay so you announced yourself you come out of the closet so to speak as a more conservative thinker 2016 and 2017 that pretty much devastates your social community and I presume your livelihood at least as an NPR documentarist that's for sure and so then what happens well you know then I kind of had to scramble right and and uh you know is it difficult you know I have a a a family I'm you know starting to have kids and and and I'm kind of at this career Crossroads where I've kind of burned all of the bridges you know the kind of in of the past and then um I said all right well what can I do what am I good at what would actually excite me what what would be kind of something that I would want to pursue and I fell into uh more conservative circles I started reaching out to folks and then you know they were really welcome me with open arms they said oh you're a kind of you know a Defector from from the other side and in the conservative world this is a long tradition one of the one of my own intellectual Heroes James Burnham uh was a National Review writer professor of philosophy kind of Cold War uh one of the cold War's most trenchant conservative critics worked with uh Richard Nixon worked with uh McCarthy and uh and you know he was a he was formerly trotsky's a personal secretary in the United States and so we have this long tradition of defectors from the last moving rightward and and so I was welcome with open arms and I was provided some really great opportunities I said hey you know how to do reporting you know how to get on the ground why don't you do some research into the homelessness crisis in West Coast cities um I got connected with some of the magazines and Publications and then I I just my whole world opened up I felt like I had the freedom to think for the first time as an adult I felt like I didn't have to watch what I was saying isn't it so well I've experienced the same thing man because I spend a lot of time where working with Democrat uh back room Personnel over the last six or seven years and hoping to entice persuade the reasonable Democrats to draw a line between them and the radicals especially on the Dei front and uh and also to to uh well mostly that to to draw a line you know and with very little success but one of the things that constantly bothered me because I was also talking to Classic liberals and and people more on the right at that time was that whenever I was talking to even relatively moderate people on the left I had to watch what I was saying all the time yeah and like it look it's good to pay attention to what you say and to be careful but yeah I get damn sick damn quick of walking on eggshells when I've got something to say especially among hypothetical peers that are hypothetically working to solve a problem it's like I just want to say what I think and if you find that if that's going to disrupt our personal relationship it's like maybe I don't want to be around you because it's just too damn annoying and one of the things I have found it's been a very big surprise to me that I've ended up as a conservative spokesperson I am not a conservative person like I'm very high in trade openness although I've learned to be a traditionalist that's that was hard one knowledge I partly learned that because I learned that most social science interventions go dreadfully wrong I really learned about the iron law of unintended consequences yes but one things that has happened is that I found it way easier to talk to even fundamentalist Conservative Christian traditionalists than radicals on the left there's no comparison and that's a very strange thing it's not what I expected at all and I think that that is really where we've seen the the flip I mean uh you know for all of the excesses and problems I'm you know a Critic of kind of 1960s but you know they were authentic they were committed they had open expression they were trying to push boundaries and you kind of flip this on of its head once the left took institutional control um I mean it is the most restrictive the most limited the most restrained the most punishing Orthodoxy and then you get this point to the point where you have now hundreds of thousands of of kind of Dei agents left-wing bureaucrats enforcers of the Orthodoxy and they just repeat the same 10 points I've done reporting for now a few years on critical race theory gender ideology they inherit kind of 10 ideas they dumb them down they pass them through a bureaucratic euphemistic filter and and I mean they're like to decentralized propaganda Agents from Soviet times I mean it's like this is the party line we must say this you know you cannot say anything that would contradict the you know the great uh the great party line and and it's like once I ejected from that world once I uh opened up this new terrain and actually frankly once I moved out of a big a urban center in Seattle and moved out to the uh a smaller town it's like this is where a kind of actual free thinking actual um the feeling of Freedom the feeling of intellectual possibility um and I think one of the reasons that my work has been successful is because um I've been kind of liberated from that stifling Orthodoxy that cultural milieu that institutional pattern um and then you know I I see all of these folks attacking me you know you can't say this you can't do this you know you have to observe this the Atlantic wrote a piece uh recently that said it qualified uh endorsement of Christopher rufo but it was 90 qualifications and 10 endorsement because these folks on the center left they know they agree with me but they can't behave as I behave and and really that's because I'm much more free than they are um and I love that feeling I love that spirit I love fighting these fights with a sense of doing things that others cannot even contemplate doing because they risk their academic cinecurs or whatever yeah well that's that's the joy of having a free tongue man well you know it's also very perverse temperamentally eh because I looked a lot at what predicted political viewpoints from the temperamental and uh cognitive front because if you're looking at individual differences in in people's behavior at the psychological level you look at General cognitive ability and you look at personality those are very good powerful reliable valid predictors of individual difference in such things as opinion and the biggest predictor of liberal left belief is trait openness which is the creativity Dimension and what you would which is why for example leftist ideas are Rife in places like Hollywood but what's so bloody perverse about this is that people who are high in openness first of all all they really have to offer is the fact that they can think 10 different things at the same time that freedom of movement that's especially true with regards to artists that's all they have and then what you see on the left is this stifling Orthodoxy that makes art dull and predictable it reduces everything to these 10 axioms and it seems to fly completely in the face of what open People creative people would truly want and so I'm still puzzling through that I can't understand yet see it's it's partly that the open people don't want barriers to information flow away and so when they see conservatives putting up barriers of any type even barriers of category that that destabilizes them because the open types capitalize on free information flow but perversely that that rejection of the boundaries that conservatives put up has led to a a situation where well you didn't want any boundaries and now all you've got are boundaries around what you can say and think and do and I can't see how that can sustain itself for any length of time on the artistic front because well it'll just it'll do the whole Enterprise in but it's got it just stifle the hell out of creative producers yeah and I felt that in my time working in the documentary film world I would attend the conferences I would go to the festivals I would participate in the industry and and looking around and it's like these people no one says anything new the festival programmers are pure ideology you look at the catalog of films for any kind of A-list film festival in the last 10 years and it looks like a social justice syllabus it's you know uh the uh you know the the kind of transgender basket Weavers of Madagascar I mean it's like these things that are so Niche so absurd and then they're only propped up because again these are artificial economies you look at these Sundance award-winning films um they have all the prestige they win the institutional game but then you you put them on the marketplace you look at like an Amazon uh film rentals they have like three reviews that two stars nobody's watching this stuff nobody cares it has no actual organic audience and then one of the big distinctions that I see um is it's this kind of artificial culture versus a true organic culture and we've created an artificial culture that is high in openness maybe uh but really high in intellectualism and verbal ability and Machiavelli had the distinction he had two archetypes there's The Lion and the fox the foxes um highly intelligent adaptable open verbally very proficient the lion is strong tough setting standards kind of the strong quiet type and I I think that it's kind of a proxy maybe for for for for left and right and but the conservative movement needs people that have the more kind of fox attributes as well because look we're in a post-modern world we're in an information economy you have to to be able to do the ideological fights with a sense of uh uh of skill with a sense of sophistication with a sense of narrative um and so that's what I I think we need we need folks like that that also recognize the value of the kind of the the lion mindset which is saying we want to have standards we want to have institutions we want to transmit values from one generation to the next we want to appeal to human universals we want to respect our past and our culture um but we also have to kind of do battle in the world as it exists today and conservatives have been really frankly awful at that um they thought for many years oh well we're just going to say you know wave the flag and say America is great that's not enough we actually have to engage conservatives could leave it implicit right but a lot of what conservatism is about is what's implicit right and and because the conservative Mantra in some sense is rely on what's implicit rely on what everyone already accepts as self-evident and of value the problem now is that all of that is up for question including for example things as fundamental as what constitutes a woman and a man and so it means the conservatives have to make their ethos explicit and they have to start putting it forward as a vision and that's very hard for conservatives because by and large they're not Visionary because the Visionary types are the open types now you've seen this weird transgressive reversal on that front like one of the first things that really struck me as indicative of how upside down everything was was well first of all Rush Limbaugh when I first encountered him like 25 years ago I thought this guy is a comedian and he was a comedian and people took him dead seriously but he was a comedian he was a satirist and I thought how the hell did the conservatives get the satirist that's a very strange thing and he was unbelievably influential and then in more recent years you have these unbelievably strange occurrences like the Babylon bee it's like okay let me get this right you're conservative traditionalist Evangelical Christian and you're doing satire it's like where the hell are we because we're not in any world I understand but I think it is an indication of the the need well and you see the daily wire plus doing something like this too right they're trying they're starting to get interested in in the uh in the cultural milieu which is not the normal place that conservatives play because that's that's where the artists are and they tend to be on the left and so this is calling for a real radical reshaping even of how we conceptualize the political landscape at as level as fundamental as that of temperament itself it is true but at the same time I think that you know Aristophanes the the Greek satirist Greek humorist was a conservative right he was making fun of the kind of a very abstract folks he was making fun of uh the the the the philosophers of the time kind of lampooning them so there is a tradition but I think since the 1960s we've become so used to this idea that art can only be left-wing Free Speech can only be left wing uh Freedom can only be a left-wing value but it's really not the case historically and I think it's certainly not the case now actually they've taken all of those values and they've folded them in on themselves and so we have this euphemistic culture whether it's you know a kind of left-wing conception of Freedom or left-wing conception of diversity and inclusion you can go on down the line and you say hey wait a minute um you're not actually meaning what you say you mean all of these things have to be lampooned they have to be exposed they have to be ridiculed and that's why I think something like the Babylon B is successful I think you have more comedians actually the kind of most exciting and dynamic comedians of our time may not be conservatives but they're certainly lampooning that kind of left-wing Orthodoxy and so we're seeing the shifts the shift now and it's because the the left has institutional control look you know government agencies universities K-12 schools Prestige media organizations if you understand the culture and I think I've documented to this in my reporting over the last few years um you know this is pure left-wing ideology it's the kind of identity politics it's you know the Angela Davis style of activism it's kind of the the the the critical theory um uh a a style of assessing Society from Marcus and others this is the establishment and so as the the anti-establishment became the establishment really with the baby boomer generation um we live in a new world and conservatives unfortunately still act like you know the world is run by you know the the the guys sitting around the country club uh table uh that's not true at all the the world is run by you know the the PBS employees the NPR employees the New York Times employees Berkeley graduates Berkeley grads and and look I know these folks I have a good relationship with a lot of people in left-wing media which is surprising to folks but I've worked with them you know they've come to visit me at my home they've done profiles Etc I've talked to them on the phone for stories a lot of these folks actually agree with us they probably don't agree with my style they don't agree with my Approach they probably think it's a little bit Barbarian my my level of aggressive aggression and assertiveness and they they'll tell me you know behind the scenes behind closed doors you know you know saying you know I think you're right I think this stuff is crazy it's gone too far I've certainly went with my kids to be indoctrinated in this but I can't say anything because I have you know my position at the newspaper I have my position in Academia I'm coward is really the fundamental issue I think that's right say that with all due respect look I had a lot of clients who had to reorganize their lives because they were being tyrannized and they had to strategize about how to regain control of their tongue and their life but the idea that I agree with you but I just can't say anything it's like what do you mean just can't it's like you're sacrificing your soul on a day-to-day basis and the fact that five percent of the population who's like truly radically activists can control the whole damn show on the left because the 90 percent of people who have some sense won't say anything is not an excuse by any stretch of the imagination for their behavior and I know you're not making that excuse let's let's segue a bit here shall we perhaps and and start talking about um you're you're foray into the domain of critical race Theory the first thing we might want to do is uh let's play around with some definitions what do you think what and and this will get us more into the political discussion I want to have with you too critical race theory is a very difficult uh what would you say set of Concepts to nail down and I've kind of characterized that whole General domain me and others obviously as a a Pastiche of post-modernism and and Marxism and out of that comes an identity politics which is the Marxist experiment failed on the economic front and all the Marxist did was they performed a sleight of hand and transformed economic inequality and oppression into identity inequality and oppression and just went on with the same damn game and as far as I can tell CRT is just an offshoot of that just but you've delved into it with a fair bit of uh effort let's say and over a fairly long period of time so let's start by just talking about what what constitutes critical race Theory as far as you're concerned sure yeah I think it's actually pretty easy to Define I think there are three main Concepts you have the social analysis it's that the United States is a white supremacist country that uh promotes the concepts of freedom and equality but this is merely a smoke screen for naked racial domination second the doctrine of intersectionality says that the world can be divided between oppressor and oppressed but innovating from the Marxist economic axis they say no no it's actually an axis of identity predominantly race but also including gender and sexuality and then the third key component or idea is well what do you do to fix it uh they argue that the Constitutional protections of the First Amendment the 14th Amendment private property uh should be overridden should be suspended and then Society should engage in large-scale wealth seizure and redistribution along the axis of race until you have equal outcomes and so that's it uh it's really not that complicated sure they have citations yeah it's basically Marxism repackaged using ethnic racial and sexual identity regards to the notion that they the entire capitalist infrastructure should be demolished in wealth redistributed it's like well it's not the bourgeoisie and the proletariat it's whatever racial group or sexual group or ethnic group that you happen to place in the ascendancy that's right so and I think this is mostly due to French intellectual theorists in the 1970s who had to abandon their appalling allegiance to Marxism under the unbearable pressure of the evidence that all that ever produced was murderous outcomes and instead of learning their lesson deeply which they could have all they did was they did a slight sidestep Shuffle and produced all these appalling theories that the Americans mostly through Yale University in the English Department there by the way gravitated to like mad UCLA law schools have been at the Forefront of this too and that damn intersectional Theory to me as someone who's somewhat versed in statistics that's just a miracle of ignorant stupidity because all it is is the rediscovery of the interaction term so if you're trying to model a phenomenon you can use a linear combination of variables which just means you add them together and maybe weight them slightly differently but then you can also multiply them together now and then now it's an interaction term and so the idea would be well if you're if you're tall and uh big boned you're likely to be heavy and possibly Tall times big boned equals even heavier you could add an additional term and the idea this is the radical idea of the intersectionalists that well there's more than one form of Oppression operating simultaneously and the effect might be multiplicative it's like well Jesus could you come up with something more obvious than that and the answer is no and it's like why do you get tenure at UCLA in the law in the faculty of law for developing a theory of intersectionality when it's it's so bloody obvious from the basic perspective of primordial statistics that it goes without saying like that's that's supposed to be the intellectual contribution well you know if you're black you're oppressed Or Hispanic or whatever the hell it is Irish but man if you're a woman you're also oppressed and then well if you're an Irish woman I mean look at how oppressed you are multiplied by endless demented categories of identity it's such an intellectual it's so shallow intellectually it's such an appalling Marxist sleight of hand that it's it's crookedness and malevolence can hardly be overstated but I I think it's important that maybe I'll I'll disagree slightly I think that is right I think it was you know they base their their kind of their legitimacy not on the objective value of their ideas which they reject but on their positionality so intersectionality for example is promoted by a Kimberly Crenshaw a black woman and so she has Authority not based on the idea but based on her positionality and then she gives it a complex latinate term intersectionality which makes it seem uh maybe more sophisticated than it is but I think it's important the question of roots and I'd like to maybe push back as much as I would like to blame the French critical race theory is not based in in any meaningful Sense on the ideas of Foucault the ideas of the French deconstructionists I think if you look at queer Theory that's a hundred percent true the queer theorists themselves the founding generation in the 80s and 90s said explicitly Foucault is our lodestar his history of sexuality his idea of sexual transgression is our our founding principle but the the critical race Theory uh uh uh kind of Scholars are a homegrown in the United States phenomenon and they say it very clearly they actually lay out their intellectual lineage they take it from gramshi the kind of kind of marks on the axis of culture but really what it is it's repackaging the ideas of Angela Davis repackaging the ideas of the Black Panther Party black nationalist ideology and then repackaging uh identity politics based on the kombahi rivers statement and other kind of black feminist literature and so it it's coming from uh Marxism Marx's leninism black black nationalism and so this is the ideology that then they made a decision in the late 1980s as the as the Soviet Union was kind of uh just poised to collapse then it collapsed in the early 90s the critical race there said hey you know we can't be uh you know putting bandoliers across our shoulders and and and and wearing the the cool um uh the cool hats uh and promoting the Black Panther Party we have to take those ideas and then package them in euphemisms package them in intellectual jargon create the idea of intersectionality which is just a rehash of Angela Davis's uh women race in class from the the the the the the the the previous generation and then we have to seek legitimacy through the academy they did this very deliberately they said we need to get CRT Scholars to start taking over institutions using the politics of of identity to start vanquishing our opponents within the academy and asserting dominance for political activism they're very explicit about it they say we don't do scholarship we don't do objective research that is the kind of uh the the white male toolkit we do left-wing activism and we're going to legitimize our ideas through Elite institutions use the kind of manipulative strategies within the institution pioneered by Derek Bell and that's how we're going to gain power and that's how we can then filter our ideas from those Elite institutions down to K-12 schools to the point where you know you have first graders in Cupertino California for example getting the teachers and third graders rather dividing the class on the basis of intersectionality into oppressor and oppressed I mean that they did it and that's how the the kind of power maneuvering uh worked and and and so I would say in in relationship to your intellectual history so um we could put marks at the bottom in some ways although not only Marx and we could have the French deconstructionists emerge out of that and then the gramsite tradition emerged out of that too as somewhat separate streams in the case you're making is that the CRT stream is more properly identified with the gramsai sort of theorists and that's just to be perfectly reasonable I still think that what we're facing on the culture War Front is a Pastiche of post-modernism and Marxism and yes but there's certainly no reason for us to you know either further that conversation or to disagree um so let's talk about Derek Bell for a minute now do you want to point out some of his signal contributions to this entire mess yeah you know uh Derek Bell is a fascinating guy I did an entire section and a book that I'm writing that's going to come out this summer with harpercollins on Derek Bell and you know he's actually a pretty compelling biographical figure um he was uh uh you know the first in his family to go to college he got a degree a law degree he worked with the um uh nwabcp legal defense fund he he ran I think something like 300 anti-segregation cases in the Deep South and you know I mean really compelling guy who who I think fought the good fight at that time he went down into Mississippi organized uh you know black families got their kids uh across the color barrier really shut down the segregation uh policies of the time in the Deep South you know and really courageous person but then something in his psychology shifted and the great black Economist Thomas Soul describes it as you know he he he really abandoned those principles and then fought not for an equal Society but for a Revenge society that was Thomas soule's words and then he became famous by by promoting not a vision of racial progress racial integration kind of a moving past the racism of the past but he came up with this theory of racial pessimism saying that racism was the permanent and indestructible feature of American Life um he he spread these kind of conspiracy theories that the United States might be on the verge of what he called black genocide in the 1990s and then he became famous from this and so the incentive structure that fed Derek Bell's you know academic career really from the 90s uh to his death and in the uh around 2010 2012. um was that he was the kind of doomsayer um he said there could be no progress it was all an illusion the 14th Amendment the Constitution the Civil Rights Act the the Emancipation Proclamation all of that talks a good game but it's it's really a myth to uphold you know white supremacy and even the election of Barack Obama as he was an elderly man he said you know Barack Obama is the president of a white supremacist country nothing more and so he you see this this really um generation into kind of a uni-dimensional paranoia yeah and and he had a verbal tick towards the end of his life where he would say on interviews I might be racially parallel paranoid but and then finish his sentence and and so you see this this kind of really heroic figure um uh uh just descend into this pessimism cynicism fatalism and then he's rewarded by society and really predominantly white liberal Society um and and so he's this tragic figure in my book um not an evil man not even a bad man but I think a man who succumbed to uh uh kind of it to succumb to this this temptation of fatalism that I think then characterizes the second generation of Scholars that came uh beneath him they play cynical political games they're cynical about the United States and they cynically use their own identity as a substitute for their for kind of creative and and confident uh intellectual output right which which they also then decry as as like the markers for that creative competent output just as part of the um part of the white patriarchal power game like I've seen these charts recently laying out the uh the attributes of a white supremacist Society more or less on the temperamental front like punctuality for example and I read through those traits and I think this is so interesting because I know that low conscientiousness predicts leftist liberal View so it's high openness low conscientiousness and all the traits that are attributed to White patriarchy are the traits of conscientiousness it's so amusing and that conscientiousness by the way is the best temperamental predictor of life's success it's so second only to General cognitive ability and so but what's also interesting is there are absolutely no racial differences in the distribution of trait conscientiousness and so the claim that conscientious temperamental virtues are somehow white or supremacist or patriarchal is only the claim that conscientious temperamental traits are characteristic of success it's so interesting to see so and and it's deeply condescending to people operational I mean it's like it's insane and I think what what what the the actual the the essence of this point and the essence of that chart is that these people who are kind of left liberal Elites let's say they imagine themselves as the great kind of cosmopolitan and figures who have a wide understanding that that surpasses the backwards you know traditional American way of life these people are deeply parochial uh these people have never seen and traveled around the world it's like if I took uh that chart and went to Asia went to Latin America went to you know Lagos Nigeria where I've spent a significant amount of time and say hey look you know these are really white traits of showing up on time doing hard work self-efficacy I mean I would get slapped and rightfully so because uh you know this is actually racist uh it's it's kind of inadvertently racist and and it takes traits that are uh virtues these are virtues that that everyone can participate in and reduces them to a kind of race essentialism that I think betrays a total lack of curiosity and a lack of experience uh with the real world look I think if you're constantly harping about how anti-racist you are there's going to be a vicious internal reaction formation it isn't which is the you know the development of an opposing Viewpoint it isn't obvious to me at all that the racism in those charts is inadvertent it might not be conscious but it's definitely compensatory it's like well I'm so anti-racist well God I might as well be Mother Teresa it's like well yeah you're probably not and so that all that unacknowledged pathology that's still part and parcel of your world view is going to make itself manifest somewhere and how about in your accidental supposition that all traits of conscientiousness don't characterize black people how about that yeah dimwits so let's talk about Kimberly Crenshaw I read about the third of her I don't remember which book it was now and she had a very interesting discussion in there about the fact that there is evidence for example that black teenage girls get disciplined more harshly than white teenage girls and you know as far as I'm concerned that could easily be the case but I read this as an epidemiologist let's say I'm a psychologist I'm very interested in the multiplicity of causal Pathways leading towards a given outcome whatever it might be and it might be a differential School failure let's say among adolescents we could say adolescent girls say one subset of that is more stringently disciplined black girls now she puts her finger on a real problem but then she does what all these bloody radicals do is she attributes it to the same single cause she says well it's all systemic racism and I think well wait a second here first of all it's probably not all anything it's probably quite a few different complicated things here's one for example so black girls tend to hit puberty earlier than white girls it's a reliable finding and then fatherless girls tend to hit puberty earlier than girls with fathers and the difference there is about a year and no one knows why it's a very complicated problem and what that means is so imagine that your black girl without a father now you're going to hit puberty say around the age of nine or ten something like that and that might mean that by the time you're 11 you look 17. now one of the concepts there's two consequences of that one is you're a lot more physically intimidating if you get upset and number two you're a lot more likely to be held to a high standard of behavior like imagine 11 year old who looks nine compared to an 11 year old who looks 17. like at first glance who are you going to demand more of and also be more intimidated by by the way and so but Crenshaw she has no interest in that at all she does a perfectly good job of pointing out the problem and there's all sorts of problems in racial disparity with regards to outcome that permeate like every culture that's a real problem but then to reduce that to the same old trite formula to me indicates well the absolute shallowness of her scholarship which is really quite appalling All Things Considered but also this insistence on the radical side that you only need five explanatory principles to account for everything that's gone wrong with the entire world five they only need one I mean they they found their magic wand that's it yeah yeah yeah it's basically the assumption that power governments every human relationship and and the question is not you know the question even the language overrepresented and underrepresented is so misleading because it assumes that every distribution is going to be proportionate to the proportion the the percentage in the population and the but the question is not you know okay we have say a statistical reality that uh black students are are have more disciplinary proceedings against them in K-12 great but the real question is not is it proportionate to the number of the population the question is well is it proportionate to the the behavior and then once you start asking those questions you may get a different a different set of of equations a different set of assumptions and then you can say hey is there discrimination that's certainly a question worth asking you can control for other statistical variables variables and try to try to figure out what what percentage of or What proportion that has to do with it but it it's like um a a kind of statistical blindness an unwillingness to say is there um does behavior and consequences line up which is really the number one thing and also the thing that you can control because you you can actually say you know if I believe that my behavior will be met with consequences um and I also believe that I have agency over my own behavior not perfect agency not 100 but at least some control you're giving people a sense of what they can do but if you're Outsourcing it to say whatever have happens that is bad in your life it's the problem of the oppressor it's the problem of the yeah you know the white male the white male super the white male superstructure um you're creating also a sense of fatalism for people and I saw that so much in my reporting it's like you're not doing anyone every any favors by saying you know whatever you do Derek Derek Bell says this you know whatever you do you're always going to be you know uh you're always going to be disadvantaged you're always going to be punished you can never make it you can never be treated fairly tell that to the Nigerians yeah it doesn't seem to work very well on them they do perfectly well in the United States that's right yeah a whole host of racial groups I mean all of the the top performing ethnic groups in the United States are racial minorities and uh I think the question is well you know uh let's see what they're doing uh let's figure out what what cultural traits What Behavior what patterns what values that they that they they promote uh and let's let's copy them you know I I see that all the time I always try to look at different different people and say hmm this person seems to be doing you know better than I am in this in this Pursuit why um you know and and how can I emulate that how can I copy that how can I how can I learn from this um but but we have a kind of culture that says no no we we don't want to learn at all we just want to offload we want a scapegoat we want to create theories to excuse um any kind of uh uh sense of possibility for people and and to promote that to kids is really what pisses me off and look you're promoting kids into a worldview that is that that hates the United States that that that says you're going to be either an oppressor who should feel guilt and shame or a victim who should feel a sense of hopelessness and and and fatalism um and then you're you're giving kids no Pathway to uh achieve their potential and it's like this is left wing this is Progressive no no no this is not anything of the sort and I think that's why we have to push back to the maximum extent possible to say get this out of the classroom that okay now there now we can move into the more political realm now you've been working with the Florida government with fairly closely with DeSantis as I understand and you guys have started to legislate moves against well let's say critical race Theory just you don't walk us through that first tell me exactly what's going on I'd like to know what exactly is being done on the legislative and practical front in Florida and we've already outlined some of the thinking behind that and then let's delve into that a little bit yeah it's Florida but it's also actually now 22 States who've adopted policies to restrict not critical race Theory most of the almost all the legislation doesn't mention critical race Theory by name but it's restricting racial scapegoating race essentialism and race-based harassment so it's protecting students uh from really a violation of their civil rights and the legislation uh in in Florida and in many other states says look um you can't you can't promote the idea that one race is inherently Superior to another you can't promote the idea that a student should feel a sense of historical blood guilt because of his or her uh ancestry uh you can't say that one racial group is essentially oppressive in nature and so in essence it is recapitulating or really making more concrete and more specific prohibitions that are already uh in civil rights law from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it's responding to this specific problem because we we have it's rather it's offering this specific solution in response to a specific problem you have schools that are promoting a racial scapegoating to kids and look these are public schools these are kids that are in many cases compelled to be there by the law and then and then they're teaching other people's children without their consent without the consent of the governed that they are somehow evil or oppressive because of their skin color because of their ancestors and so um I've worked hard to just say you know what uh the first step in this reform initiative is just to say no you can't do that the people have what is that legislation what does that legislation look like and where as and is it aimed specifically at the K-12 system or does it also include higher ed and other institutions it depends on it depends on the state but you know my point of view and what I've worked on at Manhattan Institute with my colleagues on model policies is to say that in the K-12 environment the state the government the people have an absolute right um to create the curriculum to create uh inhibitions to create a a a core of ideas and values that are transmitted through the state from one generation to the next right from voters to to Children um and so I think that there is really and the Supreme Court has agreed uh you know Public School teachers are are state employees um and they do not have First Amendment rights in the classroom that's established Supreme Court precedent and the state already in every state sets the curriculum they say these These are the values of the of the state these are the the specific pedagogies that we're going to use these are the actual lessons and materials that we'll be promoting and so we know that we have a really absolute authority to design a curriculum that reflects the the the sentiments and reflects the will of the voters through their elected uh representatives in the legislature in higher ed it's a different story there is a bit more autonomy there's a bit more freedom in the classroom the the the the the uh jurisprudence the Supreme Court precedent uh precedence is a little bit more complicated so my view is saying hey we have an absolute right because these are kids these are not adults to to to to kind of shape what is transmitted in the classroom with very clear principles um I think it's less so in the in the higher education space my own preference is to say autonomy in the classroom but we have a absolute right to reshape the bureaucracy so those academic departments the Dei departments the diversity statements the kind of left-wing loyalty Oaths and what have you and so it's different in my view K-12 in the University but the the fundamental bottom line is this um you know the education system in the United States is not a free market the state controls 90 of K-12 and approximately 75 percent of the higher education Market it is a oligopoly it is a kind of quasi-monopoly um and the public which pays for it which Charters it has an absolute right to regulate restrain and limit their government uh and and so um I think we're on strong philosophical grounds we're on strong practical grounds and pragmatic grounds and we're on strong on the grounds of public opinion and I said I think that um uh the the the question is is you have left-wing ideological hegemony in our public institutions even in uh conservative States what can we do about it how can we actually push back how can we get some of these pseudo-scientific and and really divisive ideologies um out of our institutions uh before they really uh uh uh you know harm or really do do do a kind of uh educational damage uh to to our kids okay okay so so let me ask you a couple of questions on that front so the first is here's a mystery so people on the Centrist liberal front and on the classic conservative front the traditionalist conservative front um are concerned about institutional capture so I've thought this through where's the fulcrum point for institutional capture and as far as I can tell given that 50 of the typical State's budget is spent on education The Leverage point is capture of the education system and then you might ask well because that's 50 of all the money that's spent at the state level then you might ask well who's captured the education spending and the answer is well teachers and administrators that are associated with the public education system then you might ask well who's captured them and the answer to that is well the faculties of Education how well they have a monopolistic hammerlock on teacher certification and then the question is well why like the faculties of Education they produce the litter the the research literature produced by the faculties of Education in the last 50 years has had a devastating negative effect on public education in the U.S time and time again whole word reading learning styles the self-esteem movement multiple intelligences like you name it if the faculties of Education put it forward it was wrong scientifically and disastrous socially they attract terrible students unconscientious students most most particularly who are attracted by the uh what would the blandishments of being able to get a cynic cure position with plenty of vacation and a well-established pension without any academic Excellence whatsoever and they're woke to the hilt so why the hell have conservatives gone along with the game of allowing the faculties of Education to maintain a monopolistic hammerlock on teacher certification I don't understand it well you know I mean they had uh for for a long time but that's that's changed in Arizona and Florida and many other states they're revamping the certification I've worked with folks and I've always advocated to actually just get rid of that certification cartel altogether and and saying hey look if you have a bachelor's degree in physics uh you're qualified to teach physics at a at a high school level for example um and conservatives are doing that but the problem is that while that was the initial entry point and we know that from the literature of of of the critical pedagogist that was literally their plan they laid it out absolutely the 90s they implemented it they have you know the kind of dominance over that but well that was the Genesis or the origin it's almost you know and we should fix it yes but it's now a small part of the problem because you have the teaching core you have the teachers unions you have the administration you have the Dei bureaucrats you have the the actual pedagogical material that is created and so you can't simply say that was the Genesis of the problem we can go back and and solve the Genesis and everything else will evaporate you now have a multiplicity of of of kind of the the locus is not singular anymore of the problem and so we actually have to do a lot more and the biggest problem though even we're even worse than the the capture of the ed schools is that these are centralized bureaucracies that are in theory accountable to the Democratic votes of the people legislatures actually have oversight the big problem is that legislators have really done nothing and they've let these bureaucracies move anti-democratically to install this ideology look no none of the legislators in red States said we want to have mandatory Dei departments at all of our K-12 schools none of them voted for a critical race during the curriculum none of them voted for a radical gender theory in in Florida in in uh in Tennessee in Texas but the activists within the state sector moved against the Democratic will of the people uh without the consent of the government and installed them through a bureaucratic infiltration let's say and so if that is the status quo and I think it's undoubtedly it is I've done the reporting it's been documented over and over that's the actual question what do you do about that you have a a bureaucracy that has now gone totally Rogue it has overstepped its autonomy it has totally transgressed the values of the public it is it has acted without the consent of the legislature this is a political question and our friends in the center left um really what their aversion is to is to conflict uh they maintain this position as the enlightened Centrist they feel feel like if they explain it well enough they feel like if they go on a podcast they feel like if they if they can you know write a a jazzy paper that that the world will conform to their good thinking um that's never how it works you have people that their livelihoods now hundreds of thousands of people depends on pushing this ideology with Indians public institutions and so the question is what do you do in that case and the kind of classical liberal solution is a Dodge because what it does is it avoids the political nature of the question um these are government institutions these are institutions that are are created and funded by taxpayers and that are under the regulatory power of the legislature and so the legislature that is abdicated is now starting to move in I think you know through my work through Governor DeSantis or other state legislators they're now moving in to say hey wait a minute we've let this go go Rogue for too long we need to actually say these are political questions and they they by Nature by their very nature by their by their essential nature will require political Solutions not merely uh the kind of light touch um you know approach of people who think that um you know signing a letter an open letter is going to get the job done okay so let me let me push back as hard as I can against that please I I do want to I do want to get to the bottom of this as much as possible so okay it seems to me that the reason that the public education system worked as well as it did for as long as it did which wasn't that well but wasn't disastrous let's say was that you could make the assumption that the bulk of teachers and administrators first of all that the administrator teacher ratio wasn't observed the way it is now but also that the bulk of Administrators and teachers broadly shared the same set of values as the public that they were whose children they were educating and so the reason the system worked is because that shared value system actually was in place not because legislatures had insisted that the teachers teach something that was in keeping with the standards that obtained in the general public and now like your claim and I'm not disputing the claim at all is that the system has tilted insanely far to the left and that it's no longer in sync with general public sentiment and that the solution to that is intervention at the legislative level now I don't think it was legislative intervention that established the effective axioms of the education system to begin with no I I I I just I totally dispute that of course it was okay I mean look at the state government controls the curriculum the state government creates the institutions of public schools uh I mean it's like the the actual curricular materials yes it was consonant with the cultural values of the majority at the time uh yes it was uh uh perpetuated not through the letter of the law only but through the kind of invisible processes and agreements yeah and implicit cultural assumptions but look uh you know they also said these are our schools we have a pledge of allegiance we do X Y and Z these are the subject matters these are the textbooks that we choose and so at all we had a a kind of agreement with the legislative and then the implicit cultural um yeah but but you cannot deny that these were all initially legislative Creations I mean legislators spent a lot of their time uh school boards again these are elected kind of mini legislatures for for school districts they choose the tech textbook they choose the lesson plan they choose the start time every decision that they make politically which is again the ultimate authority over the public schools since they were created is a political decision right but it does rest on that concordance say it and and look again I I take very little issue with anything that you just claimed I think the central concern that has been bothering me is this is the concordance issue like it isn't obvious and this is also why I was concerned more about eradicating the teacher certification hammerlock by the faculties of education is that unless like it's very hard to legislate morality even within a system so for example and maybe we can walk through exactly how you're doing that like if there are legislative means for example to reduce the Dei bureaucracy how exactly is that going to play out like how do you identify the Dei proponents I mean some of them are going to have it in their name but lots of them aren't I don't understand how this is going to be implemented at the level of detail and how do you know that the players here aren't just going to shift the terminology on you sure I can get into that but I think that the presupposition there is that you're saying that it's hard to legislate morality but but but that's absurd it has always been in the western tradition the law sets the moral rules I mean that that's going from a kind of biblical basis to the founding fathers of the United States um you know they said that this the function of law is to establish you know of course limited government but also to establish uh to establish a moral framework with in which citizens can then live out their lives and you know the founding fathers were clear they said that the purpose of government the purpose of law is to allow people to pursue happiness not meaning a Libertarian vision of Happiness not licensed to do whatever they want but as George Washington said happiness and virtue they go together the Aristotelian idea of virtue and happiness in the American founding was was deeply United and so the purpose of law is to say you know don't kill don't steal don't do this those interdictions are essentially moral prohibitions to establish a moral framework but to the specific question is really a technical question how do you define Dei departments yeah you know look with Manhattan Institute I worked with a team of very smart lawyers from Harvard and Yale and other places we put together a model policy that does exactly that part of it is actually delineating what it is but but really what it is is saying these are the behaviors that we do not permit the government can no longer spend money on uh diversity statements which function of left-wing loyalty OS the government can no longer spend money on mandatory diversity training which functions as ideological indoctrination the government can no longer tip the scales on the basis of identity so it can't discriminate for or against individuals on the basis of their group identity and then the government can no longer spend money on these specific uh principles behaviors and actions uh that are that that constitute diversity equity and inclusion and so the lawyers spent a lot of time figuring out specifically what the what the transgression is all right well what do we not want uh what what actions are we seeing and yeah they can relabel they can move but ultimately um we we get past that linguistic shell game the left loves to change the terminology at a quick rate because their ideas underneath them are unpopular their their actions are unpopular their policies are unpopular so we actually don't don't operate at the at the level of just the linguistic shell we say what are the specific violations and so this is civil rights law right so the civil rights law has it kind of codifies prohibitions on racial discrimination well what's racial discrimination well we we've able we're I mean we're still working on it I don't think we defined it adequately but we're still working to figure out these ongoing questions but it should it it that is a kind of the a cause and I take your concern seriously but it really just means let's be very careful let's be very deliberate let's make sure that we're doing in a technical manner the right things but it doesn't undermine the actual fundamental principle at all it doesn't even touch it it's that these EI programs were not created democratically they violate the consent of the governed and the legislature the people through their elected representatives have an absolute right to restrain limit and regulate their government and and so sure we can debate the details uh if we can get the lawyers you've answered one of my concerns quite effectively I would say because what I was concerned about I think primarily was well the potential misuse of government intervention in systems that should be granted a certain amount of autonomy because you can see how that would go wrong but more particularly I was concerned that the definitional framework used to address concerns with Dei and CRT would remain at the level of abstraction and therefore become too amorphous and loose like if you've actually nailed it down to much more specific exemplars of behavior infection then you've actually differentiated the problem down to the appropriate micro level of analysis yes do you have any evidence that what you've been putting forward how do you how are you going to measure the success or failure of your of your legislative Venture well well you know you know I think that will ultimately measure the successor failure on uh can we can we get these things through the legislature can the bill that emerges and get signed by Governors around the country um is it does it is it kind of is it faithful to the vision that we've put out in our policy papers um and then you can actually just see the cultural change that that that Cascades down from the change of law you're going to see depart these bureaucratic departments get shut down uh I think that you're going to be able to measure uh the kind of jobs and initiatives that get closed and get removed from the University and then you're going to see very simple if you say no diversity statements are the universities doing diversity statements or not if you say no mandatory kind of race re-education training are they doing it or not if you say no racial discrimination against against individuals based on their identity categories um you can then see is is the is the University complying and so the compliance Quest question is not it is is is really um if we design a law that is successful if we restrict not just language but actual behavior um I think it'll be fairly easy to measure on the back end not without problems not without adjustments not without going back and and amending it is there an assessment and measurement strategy in place because one of the things I see constantly on the political front is that people put into place policies that are designed to produce a particular end in your case for example let's say reduction in number of bureaucrats who are employed by the Dei Dei or die bureaucracy but that there's never any real attempt to measure that to see if the Implement implemented policies produce their intended action and and and very little else let's say yeah yes I mean for sure and and what I've what I've proposed at new College of Florida where I'm now a trustee On The Board of Trustees um is that we're gonna I'm moving to abolish the diversity equity office to kind of just phase that out entirely to adopt these principles against diversity statements coercive training programs racial discrimination and then I'm also moving to create a very small office doesn't need to be huge but a a department or an office of equality Merit and colorblindness that says these are our positive principles we're going to actually have embedded in the in the law of the institution and the regular regulatory code of the institution we have to promote equality so equal treatment as individuals we have to promote Merit judging people not on the basis of identity but on their rigor of scholarship or Effectiveness or competence and we have to have colorblindness throughout the university and all of our processes and so by creating this small office I think in at new college is a small could be just one one person maybe two people tops we can then have reports to the Board of Trustees on a regular basis we can have investigations as necessary we can have compliance and and Regulatory rules to say hey look are we living up to our values not just of abolishing yeah that's the first step but actually presenting a framework of equality Merit and colorblindness consonant with civil rights law consonant with the 14th Amendment consonant with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and and that's going to be the values by which we govern this institution and we're going to have of course because it's a bureaucracy some level of compliance so that I get a report at the end of every quarter every year as a trustee hey this is where we're we're doing a good job this is where we might be falling short this is an update on how we're complying with these principles so there there are guidelines set forward by the American Psychological Association with regard to the assessment of Merit so people who are hiring are compelled by law particularly in the U.S to hire using measurement techniques that are demonstrably related to the job outcome desired and so there's actually technical ways of going about that and so and I know this literature quite well so you have to do a job analysis which is well exactly what are the functions that are required for someone in this position so for example for a researcher it might be uh papers published per year in journals above a certain threshold of quality um combined with number of courses taught combined with ratings by students and peers of the quality of those courses then you can establish a set of predictors that predict that outcome so for example for researchers it would be well if you want good scientific researchers one of the best things to analyze in a potential candidate for employment is number of Publications co-authored or authored as a graduate student during PhD training that would be research dossier then there'd be a statistical relationship between the number of papers published in graduate school and the eventual number of papers published as a full-fledged researcher and that's actually a technical definition of Merit and so then merit-based hiring would use processes would use measures of Behavioral and perhaps temperamental factors that were tightly tied statistically to the desired outcome that's a technical definition of Merit do you think that you have people in place who know the measurement literature well enough to actually come up with a definition of what constitutes Merit that isn't merely that doesn't merely fall prey let's say to the same semantic ambiguity that you might fall prey to if you were trying to abolish CRT rather than these behavioral measures that behavioral indicators that we talked about yeah I of course I I I I I I I'm very confident because look um you know academics are very smart academics are intelligent people if you set the standard hey we need to actually work on the objective categories of Merit this is the rubric this is how we judge candidates this is the process um you know it's certainly within realm of possibility and we know that because that's how it used to be but how it is now and I just finished I'm just finishing up doing a series of reports on these programs in Florida's public universities I I analyzed a document from uh the University of Central Florida it's called equity-based hiring uh uh or inclusion inclusive-based hiring and they say specifically Merit is a quote myth they say it's a harmful heuristic they say you can't be measuring people on Merit It's actually an oppressive structure and then in their documentation officially they say you have to uh measure people you have to recruit people on the basis of identity you have to filter people on the basis of of diversity statements so loyalty owes to left-wing ideology you have to Pepper the job description options with social justice buzzwords like race Equity social justice Etc and then at the end of the process you have to have a quota of at least one woman and one minority on the final selection for the job and if you can't get that race and sex quota you have to scrap the hiring process and start at the beginning and they have then guidance on on the metrics that they want to hit and so we have to choose as as the public as the as the ultimate authority over public institutions we have to choose do you want a hiring system based on on on on identity quotas and political litmus tests or do you want to have a hiring system based on Excellence of scholarship and demonstrable Merit and look people are smart they're adaptable if you set the standard they'll figure out ways to to meet it but right now we have the worst of Both Worlds we have officially in our law anti-discrimination but unofficially uh the de facto law of our institutions is explicit and purposeful race and sex discrimination yeah in service of left-wing ideology and so we have a very sin we have a very clear problem uh we actually have what is really at heart a violation of the very basic social compact that defines our our Democratic institutions I I mean you know John Locke would would his head would explode if you see if he saw what's happening you say this is a violation of our basic constitutional structure and the the Centrist position which is well you know we can't do anything don't get the legislature involved we the government should not interfere with the government is such an abdication that it actually enables tyranny because if the government is acting against the people without the consent of the people through their legislature years to pursue its own ideological ends that is the definition of tyranny and yeah it's a kind of soft equity-based tyranny but it's tyranny nonetheless and it undermines the basic structure of our democracy and I think Governor DeSantis what he's doing ultimately is he's restoring Public Authority over public institutions um all of the the BS about that this is a government ovary that's ridiculous the government determines the government you can't you know it's like saying the people have no authority to regulate the government I mean it it's so tyrannical it's so totalitarian it's like the the DeSantis move at heart the actual substantive core of it is reinvigorating the Democratic structures reinvigorating legislative oversight over public institutions and giving the people a voice in the constitution of of the institutions that teach their children I mean if if we cannot have that um uh I mean we should give up democracy has lost any kind of substantive meeting it's procedural and intellectual and kind of phantom democracy only well Christopher I'm going to leave you with that last word that's pretty damn good closing statement uh it was a did I persuade you though that I think that's the key question for me is uh are you sorry to support the legislation to abolish Dei abolish diversity statements abolish uh uh uh uh mandatory ideological training abolish racial discrimination in public universities do I have your support well look what I would say about our conversation today is that you addressed all the concerns that I had I wasn't doubtful about the necessity for what you were doing to begin with you know I was concerned about the level of analysis that was being uh utilized I was I was concerned that it might be too vague and that it could devolve into something like you know a conservative Witch Hunt on the right because it isn't necessarily the case that it's going to be you pursuing this in 10 years it could easily be someone who doesn't have anywhere near your intellectual capacity and so that bothered me it's not easy to put constraints around a set of ideas and I tried to torture you today as best I could on that front and I think you responded you know with exceptional detail and Clarity and so I'm feeling a hell of a lot better about the situation I don't have any questions left that I haven't asked you and that you didn't answer sufficiently so um and I didn't start this conversation as an opponent to what's been happening in Florida I started this conversation as a concerned person who has seen the cataclysmic effects of this radical leftist ideology especially in higher education but now increasingly in K through 12 and is is hoping on all fronts that something can be done about it and so I'm I'm much more what would you say uh convinced much more reassured that you and the people who are doing this have thought this through to the to the proper level of detail so and if I have other questions that pop up and no doubt there will be some then I'll be more than happy to you know let those be known I'd like to think about what I'm doing in this conversation as a benevolent critic you know I because this is so important to get this right that I don't want to see anybody slip up and you guys are taking very forthright action and hopefully there aren't any snakes lurking under the carpet right because I'm always looking for snakes lurking and lurking under the carpet and so far in this conversation today you haven't revealed any new snakes so that's pretty much how I look at that look at that situation so look we should we should wrap this up um we've gone for a requisite 90 minutes and like I said you you made a pretty damn compelling closing statement there I appreciate very much you taking the time to walk through this with me today and for you to share what you've been doing no so forth rightly with everybody who's listening and watching I'm sure there'll be plenty of people uh paying careful attention especially parents who should particularly pay attention to this conversation who are you know interested in what's happening in Florida and elsewhere but also leery about it and so my suspicions are they're going to feel a lot more confident about this attempt to restructure than they might have before the conversation so that's probably a success on your front I guess we'll see what the public commentary is like so I'd like to thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today to everybody who's watching and listening on YouTube and its Associated platforms thanks for your time and attention to the Daily wire plus people for facilitating this conversation that's much appreciated film crew here in Tulsa because that's where I am today who made this possible uh without any technical flaw or screw-up that's always much appreciated and Chris we're going to move over to the Daily wire plus platform now and I'm going to spend half an hour with you talking more autobiographically I'm interested in getting into a little bit more detail about how your your intellectual interests developed across time and I'm I'm thanks again for agreeing to talk to me it was a pleasure getting to know you a bit more hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,217,359

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: N3t5cpGZwik

Length: 99min 45sec (5985 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023