Critical Racists | Christopher Rufo | EP 280

They have those high-status positions. They're entrenched in their economic fortunes. They have economic security through the bureaucracy, through the tenure system, etc. So they're cynically pushing this narrative as a way to redistribute status and prestige, which is really what they crave. That's the real currency. That's the real redistribution.

Well, everyone craves that, Christopher, I would say, because there isn't anything that you have that's more valuable than your reputation. You trade on your reputation. People who have stored up genuine value in their reputation and who have been honest players and who know how to work and know how to share are much more likely to be rewarded with a deserved prestige. But the narcissists, the psychopaths, and the intellectual Machiavellians can parasitize that by making unwarranted moral claims and then saying about themselves that they are as good or better than the people they're criticizing. And because they have intellectual prowess, they're often able to out-argue the people who have accrued genuine moral virtue, that might be like the self-made working-class types who know what's right and who act out what's right, but who aren't as able to articulate it, which is a challenge on the conservative side.

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Hello everyone, I'm very pleased today to be talking with Mr. Christopher Rufo, who's emerged as a national and international class troublemaker, I would say, and policy advisor on the culture war front, especially in relationship to issues of public education and critical race theory, whatever that means. And both philosophically and politically, that's what we're going to delve into today.

Christopher is a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute. He's also a contributing editor at City Journal, where his writing explores a range of issues including critical race theory, homelessness, addiction, crime, and the decline of cities on America's west coast. Mr. Rufo also, as I said, became a focal point of attention on the culture war front for reasons we will discuss in this podcast. He recently launched a YouTube channel called Christopher Rufo Theory, concentrating on all these philosophical, political, and practical issues.

Thank you very much, Mr. Rufo, Christopher, for agreeing to talk to me today. It's a pleasure to be with you.

So let's start with a broad question. Who are you? What in the world are you up to? And why have people so suddenly, in some real sense, become interested? Why have you become a focal point of attention on these issues?

Sure. I think it's because I was really the first person to do the reporting, to actually substantiate the feeling that many people had, that our institutions had been captured by left-wing ideologies. And this has obviously been a kind of concern for many people for a long time, but for many years it felt like it was relegated to the university setting. And so conservatives could say, "Well, you know, there's something crazy going on at Vassar College; it doesn't affect me."

Then, after the death of George Floyd in 2020, it seemed like all of our institutions suddenly shifted overnight. So I did a series of reports on diversity training programs in the federal government that got the attention of then-President Trump. Then I shifted to looking at critical race theory implemented as a pedagogical approach in K-12 schools, which set off this massive response, or really revolt, amongst parents nationwide.

And now I'm focusing on gender ideology as well, looking at K-12 schools, government agencies, and even the Fortune 100 companies. And so what I think I've been able to do that's been able to galvanize attention is take these issues and establish a factual basis, saying this is what's happening, these are the documents, and then describing the origins, whether it's critical race theory or queer theory, in a way that the average person, a parent in a public school district for example, can start to then push back. And that's really been my goal.

I'm kind of an accidental activist; never set out to be an activist. But as it turns out, I'm kind of leading this fight in many ways, here in the United States.

So you think you were able to take these issues out of the purely academic realm, while they were moving out of the purely academic realm, to articulate what they are, to articulate people's concerns about that—parental concerns, specifically—and also to act as an advisor, let's say, and an educator on the political front? Does that seem about right?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think what I've been able to do, and it's actually been a really fascinating and rewarding process, is to kind of take my very small team and we run the whole gamut. So we start at the very beginning, which is always creating new information in the sense that we're fielding reports, we're talking to whistleblowers, we're authenticating documents, we're putting them on television, we're putting them on social media so people are aware of what's happening.

And then all of a sudden people said, "Well, how do we talk about this?" You know, whether it's people in Congress, you know, congressmen or state legislators or governors, "Hey, what's going on with critical race theory? What's the language I should be using? What can we do about it?" And then I started putting together those kind of memos in an advisory capacity, saying, "Hey, this is what's actually happening, this is what's going on beneath the surface, and this is what you can do about it."

Right, okay. So you're also detailing the way that this system of ideas, let's say—you're also detailing the way that this system of ideas is manifesting itself concretely in the educational establishment and in actual institutions, so it's not merely a theoretical discussion?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And there's a really important point on that distinction that I think is really critical. A lot of the debates that we've had in recent years kind of restrict themselves to that theoretical basis. It's almost like people who are playing politics, intellectuals, journalists are having an Oxford-style debate.

And there's this really, I think, an illusion that if you win the debate in the kind of marketplace of ideas, then your ideas will win. What I've done is I've exposed that that's actually not true; it's not how it works. It's really actually a harmful illusion because when you have bureaucrats who have a very specific ideology that control public resources, they control the curriculum, they control human resources departments or diversity, equity, and inclusion departments, even if you have the better ideas, they have the political power.

And so my big takeaway and my big call really to conservatives is to say, "Sure, having a stimulating intellectual discussion is important. I enjoy it; many people enjoy it. But we actually have to get down to that structural level of bureaucratic and political power."

And I was able to show through the reporting, "Hey, this is what they're implementing in schools; these are the people who are doing it, and these are people who have captured, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in public resources. And we should really focus the debate there if we want to have a chance to change this cultural pattern."

Okay, well I want to return to that because one of the—I'm going to play devil's advocate on the Kimberlé Crenshaw and the intersectionality CRT front—but I also want to have a discussion with you about the proper place of the war because one of the concerns I have about attempts to fight critical race theory at the practical and pragmatic level is that attempts to regulate or ban it—and I'm not saying this is happening, I'm saying it's a potential danger—attempts to regulate or ban it run into the potential problem of expanding the sensorial capacity of governments in relationship to educational institutions and the free flow of ideas.

And that when, especially when you're dealing with something that's as difficult to pin down and define, let's say, as critical race theory—because where's its boundaries—that poses a potential danger for the future. We don't want to establish government institutions that are heavy-handed in their sensorial capacity.

So we'll go back to that. Let's start, though, maybe we could start for the audience, and I'd like you to talk about definitions. So let's talk about four domains, okay? Perhaps we can try to intertangle all of them. What specifically is critical race theory? That's a very difficult thing to define. How is that related to queer theory, which is something that people know even less about, and why should we care? And then how do you think these are related to these broader issues of, say, post-modern philosophy and the Marxism that comes tagging along in its wake?

So let's start with CRT. What is CRT? How did you become aware of it? How should people understand it?

So I first became aware of critical race theory really working backwards. As I mentioned, I was doing this series of reports on these diversity training programs in the federal government. Once you look at enough of these documents, they're all the same. They recycle the same ten sets of concepts or so. And so I said, where does this come from? What is the origin of this theory?

And so I started working backwards, looking at the footnotes, looking at the suggested readings, and then really discovered over time the common intellectual framework is critical race theory. The definition is pretty simple: critical race theory maintains that the United States is a fundamentally racist country and that all of its institutions—from the Constitution to the law to the nuclear family to the social institutions, manners, and morals—preach the values of liberty and equality, but these are really just smoke screens for naked racial domination.

And so they look at the entirety of American history—from the Declaration to the Constitution, even to Abraham Lincoln and then to the Civil Rights Act—and they say it appears that there's racial progress; it appears that there's reconciliation. But that's an illusion; actually, it's just that power has become more sophisticated, more subtle, and more insidious.

And so you're starting from that point and then you're analyzing any social phenomenon and you're, you know, surprise surprise, discovering not only that it's a manifestation of racism, but they try to say, "We're going to give you tools to show exactly how that's true."

Okay, so who would you identify as, let's do this in two tiers: who are the main thinkers on the critical race theory front per se? And then who would you identify as the more fundamental sources of the ideas that are driving these ten common concepts, let's say, that are running through such phenomena as diversity training?

So who are the main critical race theorists?

Sure. So the critical race theory—the godfather of critical race theory was a Black Harvard law professor named Derrick Bell, who was hired as the first full-time Black law professor at Harvard in the late 1960s. And Bell is a really fascinating person. He set the tone of critical race theory. It's an ideology of extreme cynicism, a kind of negative philosophy—a kind of negation-based philosophy. And he cultivated a network of young students; he was a very charismatic figure, wrote a series of books—kind of allegorical books—talking about how racism was the permanent, indestructible, and overwhelming feature of the United States.

And this message had a lot of students, both at Harvard Law School and other law schools, other legal academies around the country. And some of those students came together in the late 1980s, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence—a number of other figures at that time came together really under his tutelage and then established critical race theory in the late 1980s. And then you see the kind of remarkable documentation that they've actually made themselves, talking about how they started in law schools, and then they went to public health, and sociology, and other academic departments, and then finally trickled into diversity training and K-12 pedagogy. And so that's the basic kind of ten-second lineage of where this comes from.

Okay, excellent. So now in terms of the intellectual influences: look, for everyone listening, when you try to analyze the operation of a set of ideas, you want to find out first who the current proponents are in the conversation that's going on now, but then you need to trace it back to deeper ideas and the philosophers—and sometimes the theologians even, depending on how deep you go—from whom those ideas flow.

In order to understand the entire structure of the system of ideas and its interrelationships so that you can understand its motivation and its nature, you have to delve deeper into the underlying history of the ideas. So we have Crenshaw, Matsuda, and Lawrence. Have I got that pronunciation right?

Yeah, Matsuda.

Matsuda, okay. And who would you say are their intellectual inspirations?

I would say there are really two key inspirations. One is Derrick Bell, and Derrick Bell's innovation was bringing this really acidic, this really kind of solvent political philosophy. He was the first person to really weaponize identity politics in the elite institution. He was famous not for his legal scholarship, but actually famous for his political and campus activism. You know, he would do things like write law review papers where he would fantasize about Black law professors and the president of his university getting assassinated, and then he would conduct these protests outside their office to kind of raise the pressure to hire specific left-wing radicals in the legal academy.

And so his students saw him not only as an intellectual inspiration, but also they said he's really tapping into the pragmatic politics. And so you have Derrick Bell in the legal tradition. The other person that I think is really essential for them, someone that they cite over and over in their big red book of critical race theory, is Antonio Gramsci.

And because what they wanted was not just Derrick Bell, who had this kind of cynical and pessimistic philosophy that didn't seem to have much practical application beyond the campus. And so they bring in Gramsci, of course, who talks about how in order to win the battle of ideas, in order to have influence over the economic and political base of a society, you want to infiltrate and then shift those mechanisms and institutions of cultural production and cultural patterning.

And so they take Derrick Bell, kind of a radical racialist philosophy; they take his identity politics and office politics and then they graft onto it this kind of Marxian or Gramscian anthropology and then also the Gramscian tactic of trying to then gain influence by getting into corporations, and to schools, and to other parts of the academy. And on that front, I think they've been remarkably successful.

Okay, so that's when it starts to sound conspiratorial. So now I want to do two things: I want to talk a little bit more about Gramsci, and I also want to talk about the relationship between, let's say, Derrick Bell, Antonio Gramsci, and the left wing. Because you make the case—and well, not only you, obviously—but the case is made quite continually that this is a left-wing movement. So why left? And who are the influences on that front—the left-wing influences—and how do you see all this developing in relationship to the ideas that people like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and Karl Marx have developed and put forward as well?

That would bring us in principle somewhat deeper. Can we start with Gramsci?

Yeah, we can start with Gramsci. I think Gramsci is very useful for, let's say, post-World War II left-wing intellectuals. And specifically, if you look at the history of the United States, you had a real boom in radical left-wing politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of the greatest representations, and something from which the critical race theorists explicitly draw from, is the Black nationalist movement.

So these were explicit Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionaries. They believed that they could change the entire structure of the United States through armed guerrilla warfare, specifically looking at urban centers on the west coast and the east coast, and this, of course, spectacularly crashed and burned.

And so the critical race theorists, they say we're inspired by the Black nationalist movements because we share, in some sense, the same goals. We want to have a kind of total overturning of society. We want to move away from capitalism. We want to move away from individual rights. We want to move away from an unfettered First Amendment free speech—that's Mari Matsuda's argument—and we want to have a kind of collectivist and racially egalitarian society in which the scales are balanced based on group identity.

But what they found and discovered is that, you know, throwing hand grenades at the police in Oakland, California is not going to overturn an advanced industrial society like the United States. And of course, these are people who are embedded in the most elite institutions in the United States, places most notably like Harvard Law School. And so, you know, a Harvard Law School student, and then professor, is unlikely to be winning in that way. So they said, what do we have?

Well, we have access to elite institutions. We have a way of playing institutional politics that we learned from Derrick Bell. You can essentially bully, shame, and pressure people using all of those tactics of identity politics to really get what you want. So why don't we just do that at scale? Why don't we use our position, our prestige, our institutional power within these places to then bring forth and legitimize some of those more radical ideas that you might get from, let's say, Eldridge Cleaver or Angela Davis in the 1960s, but we're going to take away the epithets and the profanities and the, you know, the calls to execute police officers.

We're going to make them respectable. We're going to give them a gloss of academic language, so taking those latinate words, those multi-syllabic words, making it sound very fancy, very respectable, very intellectually intimidating and then we're going to feed it through the system, through these transmission belts. And the critical race theorists themselves talk about this as they have their 10-year reunions. They actually interview each other and talk about the progress of their ideas.

So you can actually market decade by decade. And they say, you know, we started as a legal discipline, but actually our greatest strength is in education. And so they built up this entire pedagogy and so these are the ideas: systemic racism, whiteness, white privilege, intersectionality, etc. These kind of core set of ideas that are now ubiquitous, at one time were really marginal academic ideas, limited to just very few of these scholars and intellectuals.

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Okay, so now let's go under that again a bit and then we'll return to Gramsci, I think. So my understanding—please correct me—my understanding of the relationship between such ideas and the broader intellectual tradition focuses for me on Foucault, Derrida, and Marx. And so Derrida in particular based his philosophy, his post-modern philosophy, on the idea that there’s no uniting grand narrative. And if there is that grand narrative, it has been harnessed in the service of the kind of power and oppression that you described.

And Derrida described the West as "phallogocentric," centered on the idea of logic from the Greeks, let's say, in the Enlightenment tradition, and the idea of logos from the Judeo-Christian tradition, centering and privileging those concepts and, hypothetically, the people those concepts represented, which would have been males, particularly, and then secondarily, in some sense, white males. And part of what Derrida wanted to do—and Foucault as well, who had a similar theoretical framework—was to bring those ideas and people he regarded as unfairly marginalized by tyrannical systems of power to the center.

And that aligned, as far as I can tell, with the Marxist presupposition, and Derrida makes this explicit. And it’s not like it is common knowledge that Foucault was also radically leftist, as were so many French intellectuals of the time, is the Marxists had a doctrine that was very similar because they regarded the entire battleground of human history, let's say, and all the relations between individuals as characterized fundamentally by the expression of nothing but arbitrary power, including institutions like marriage, all economic institutions, and even friendship.

And Marx decried the oppressive relationship between the bourgeoisie, the upper ruling class, let's say, and the proletariat, the working class, and believed that when the revolution came, those who were unjustly oppressed in the name of power would take center stage. And so the post-modern and the neo-Marxist and the Marxist ideas could just collapse on top of each other. I think the French intellectuals of the 1970s did that in some sense and turned to ideas like the ones you're discussing consciously and purposefully because they also realized, as did the 1960s radicals, especially in the aftermath of Solzhenitsyn's revelations about the brutality of the Stalinist era, that a pure movement forward on the communist revolutionary front, let's say, just wasn't going to fly; it was no longer ethically tenable, but was also practically unachievable.

Now, is there anything in my derivation of the sources of these ideas to those sources that you think is incomplete or erroneous, that needs to be expanded or critiqued?

If you look at the lineage, this is a fascinating question on critical race theory. It's almost like an intellectual stew. If you read their big red book and some of the other minor books, they appeal to almost everyone. It's almost like they're agnostic: whatever left-wing revolutionary or deconstructionist thinkers, they're going to grab bits and pieces from all of them.

So they specifically appeal to post-modernism; they specifically appeal to Gramsci; they specifically appeal to Black nationalism; they specifically appeal to all these concepts. And in the early work, you sense that when they're kind of grasping for the post-modernist techniques, they're doing so almost out of a kind of fashionable pose or posture. I don't think that it's really essential to what they're doing, though, because I think if you look at queer theory, obviously Foucault, Derrida, post-modernism, it's essential—it’s a hundred percent of the intellectual lineage on the kind of axis of sex and gender.

But on the axis of race and specifically looking at the critical race theorists, I don't think that it's the essential or defining set of ideas. They may appeal to them because I think during the '90s that was really fashionable among intellectuals. You had to cite Foucault; you had to cite post-modernism; you had to call into question the existence of an objective or absolute truth or a grand narrative. There is a bit of that, but I think when critical race theory kind of brass tacks, when it comes down to it, it's much more a direct Marxist revolutionary, even almost a materialistic philosophy.

Because they take as the basis what they really want is a total leveling of society. And when they're grasping around for solutions, that's where I think you can really get to the crux of what critical race theory is: you take that old Marxist framework of oppressor and oppressed, a kind of war between the classes, you substitute racial categories for economic categories. So they say the history of the United States is not the history of the rich oppressing the poor, although it is in part, but it's really a history of whiteness and blackness, this almost metaphysical struggle between these two racial forces.

And so what do they want? What is—well, you kind of read, you say, okay, let's say we even buy into your premise, what would you want? They want to overturn capitalism. They really think of whiteness and property as synonymous and mutually reinforcing. So unless you have the equality of property, the equality of wealth, you're always going to have a kind of racially based inequality because into our system of rights, into our system of private property, into our system of free exchange is embedded a racialist, and really racially oppressive notion of whiteness. They're inseparable.

They also think that some of those key constitutional pillars or the key pillars of the Bill of Rights, such as free speech, encourages or allows racial domination. So you need to have really a regulator or a state power to suppress the speech of people who would use it to reinforce that system of racial domination. And even the 14th Amendment and then, to a lesser extent, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they say, no, no, a lot of hand waving. You know, Derrick Bell famously said that, you know, Lincoln didn't free the slaves in order to advance racial justice, and the 14th Amendment was really a kind of fake, a kind of a fake expression of equality— all the way leading up even to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to desegregation.

And so what do they want? They really want focused state power. They look to, for example, the decolonial, postcolonial regimes in Africa that seized land and wealth and then redistributed along racial lines; that was one of their inspirations in the 1990s. And so when you put all these elements together, you're really getting the end of the constitutional system because, look, if you don't have free speech, you don't have individual rights, you don't have equal protection under the law, those are just all masks for power, as you pointed out.

Okay, so let me make the counter-claim here for a minute, okay? And then we'll get into this in more detail. So I've read a fair bit of the 1619 Project book, actually I liked, and I was reviewing a fair bit of Kimberlé Crenshaw's work on intersectionality before I interviewed you today. And so let me push back as hard as I can on this. So the basic claim is that all of these institutions that are in some sense central to what has been described as the Western Enlightenment and also Judeo-Christian tradition, and put forth as moral virtue—a set of truly moral guidelines—is actually nothing but a front for the domination of a small number of individuals who you can usually characterize by both race and gender: race, gender, and sexual preference, let's say, white heterosexual males.

Now, it is the case that white heterosexual males occupy a disproportionate number of the most influential positions in society. It is also the case that racial minorities—and you could put sex minorities and sexual minorities in that same category—do tend to be overrepresented, let's say, at the bottom of the heap. And it is also the case that people who have positions of authority and power are likely to harness whatever they can philosophically and theologically, let's say, to buttress their claim that their occupation of those positions of power, authority, and privilege are justified, not only on pragmatic grounds, because they fought, let's say unfairly for what they have, but also on moral grounds.

And so why isn't it acceptable to swallow the radical leftist critique wholeheartedly and say, "Look, if you're not naive and you do know that power can corrupt and that power does corrupt and that many of our institutions are corrupt and that merit isn't the only basis upon which people progress, that it's reasonable to view the entire history, let's say, of Western civilization as the attempt to merely dominate and to use very elaborate structures of rationalization to provide a moral framework for nothing but that dominance"? That's basically the argument.

So what's wrong with that argument?

Sure, well, I mean, if we take a step back, in some ways I'm somewhat sympathetic to it. If you look at the history of civilizations, obviously a lot of the principles proposed or espoused by leading figures are rationalizations. There's a certain truth to that. This stuff is not totally bogus or totally out of left field. But the question is, okay, let's actually get down to the implementation. Let's get down into the practical unfolding of this historical experience.

You start from a position, a starting point, let's say, around the American founding where human slavery, for example, was universal throughout space and time up until that point. And the Declaration of Independence was a radical egalitarian document, an attempt to raise human civilization up from a kind of morass, up from a kind of world where this kind of domination was accepted. Did they transform every element in society in a single generation? No. But did they make significant progress towards those republican values that they espoused? Absolutely they did.

And so if you look at American history from that perspective where you have the tragic nature of man, the tragic nature of society, you have these people entering into a historical moment in which the world looked very bleak in a lot of ways, they're bringing that level of civilization, I think, undoubtedly upward.

And so you start from that premise where they see nothing but domination, they see nothing but negativity, nothing but a kind of parade of horrors. I think any honest looking at American history could say, absolutely we've had a real history of racial injustice, a real history that has to be grappled with. But if you put it in the context of the highest ideals—from the Declaration to the Constitution to the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and the actions of Lincoln—you can see this kind of rising level of always moving towards the completion of or the realization of those highest ideals.

So that's one thing. You look at it from a historical context. And then the second thing is you look at it in a comparative way where you say, okay, let's even grant you, let's say your argument is true: these are rationalizations used for domination. What other system would you suggest? What other country would you proffer as a better alternative? You know, I started my career as a documentary filmmaker, and so over that 10-15 years of my first part of my career I traveled to somewhere between 70 and 75 different countries around the world.

And so I got to see how pretty much all of the major population groups live, all of the major governing systems. And so I think we should be very careful when we say we're going to throw out the entire Western tradition, we're going to throw out the entire American tradition, we're going to throw out the entire system of capitalism, the entire system of constitutional government in pursuit of some vague and fuzzy utopia where we can really level society completely.

And I think you asked them, well, what countries do it better? What countries would you rather model your society on? And then you start to actually have a practical view.

So let me push back against that a little bit. Because I'm trying to do what I can to argue for the other side, let's say. So I might say, well, these Western countries that you point to as pillars of freedom and democracy and wealth and in terms of, let's say, the remediation of absolute privation—the reason that they're the reason that a small minority of people within them are hyper-successful is because they oppress and dominate the others in that society and siphon off excess resources from them in a manner that's akin to theft.

That's a Marxist perspective. And then, sure, the reason that the United States and Canada and Great Britain, let's say, are wealthy in the manner that they are has nothing to do with the essential virtues of capitalism and the free market, and everything with the fact that they took all the land from the Native Americans, that they've been colonial nations, that they've exploited the third world, and that they've diverted resources that should have been more equitably distributed across the world and within their own societies for the benefit of a very small number of people.

So that would be the counter position to the case that you were making.

Sure, and it kind of falls apart on really basic scrutiny. The id—you know, Marxists talk a lot about the distribution of resources. They never quite talk about the production of resources. And in fact, all of the Marxist systems throughout history, they're great at distribution, because when you have all of the guns, you can take things from one person and give them to another. They're really bad at production.

And so you have a kind of failure of production throughout the 20th century that was really catastrophic for tens of millions of people. The United States actually has created a system of production that has raised the basic level of standard of living beyond the wildest expectations of almost anyone a century ago. And it's not out of exploitation—it's actually out of cooperation. It's out of the division of labor. It's out of having a price mechanism where you can exchange your labor, you can exchange your time, you can exchange your cash, you can exchange other goods in a way that everyone is winning.

And so if you look at even, for example, to say, well, comparing it to the third world, if you look at the ancestry of all of the different populations in the United States—European Americans, African Americans, Latin Americans, etc., even down to the ethnic level—you know, being a European in the United States, you are much wealthier on average than being a European in Europe. And the same holds true from all the other populations.

And then this is the reason why people vote with their feet to come to the United States from all over the world. But it's also why when you ask people in survey data and even anecdotally, I think this is true, you know, across the board, people believe in the United States. And in fact, the only people who don't believe in the United States are left-wing whites that have high levels of education.

And so when you ask African Americans, when you ask Latinos, for example, you know, is the United States the greatest country in the world? People still say yes to a great extent. When you ask people if, if you work hard, can you still get ahead, that basic bedrock principle of the United States, they still say yes. Everyone except for people in the kind of upper crust of our elite institutions.

And the same thing holds true when you talk about critical race theory. The Manhattan Institute did a poll, for example, asking parents—white parents, black parents, Asian parents, Latino parents—do you think public schools should be teaching that the United States is systemically racist? Do you think public schools should be teaching the doctrine of white privilege? Every group, black, white, Asian, and Latino, they all said no. We don't want this in our schools.

And so the Marxists and then the critical race theorists have to develop this really sophisticated and almost absurd idea of false consciousness.

Yeah, they've internalized their oppression.

And they're saying, you know, the working class in the United States, the racial minority in the United States, all of the people who we know are oppressed—just as oppressed as they were under Jim Crow, just as oppressed as they were under slavery—they'd actually make this argument, which is just so absurd. They're really truly oppressed; they just don't know it.

And it's up to us to explain it to them. And even if they don't agree with us, we're going to change the entire society on their behalf. And so the really interesting thing, and I think the fatal kind of hypocrisy of critical race theory is that these are the most privileged people in the world, the most privileged people in human history, to a great extent—regardless of racial background—trying to impose their ideology on working-class people of all different racial backgrounds who reject it.

It's the same Marxist kind of jam that they get into. The proletariat, the working class, the racial minority doesn't want what they're selling. So they're just going to do it for them. I think it's kind of a reversal of their entire philosophy—it's a kind of imperial intellectual imperialism that they use the kind of coded language of racial categories, that's really been totally disconnected from the reality of even race in this country.

Yeah, well it's so annoying when the working class doesn't know what's best for them.

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And so let's take that apart in two ways. So one question might be, well, why is it the educated white upper class, so to speak—and I know this is more characteristic of white upper class women, by the way, than of men—why is it that they are the ones most likely to espouse these theories?

And I would say, and correct me if I'm wrong, there are perhaps two reasons for that: one is they will be the last people affected by the detrimental consequences of these theories because they're shielded from their effects; and number two, this is a deeper problem.

You know, every system—every economic system that human beings have ever invented, every system of trade, which allows for cooperation, let's say, and for us to benefit from the different abilities of other people—has also simultaneously produced inequality.

And inequality, although necessary and I would say for some reasons desirable, because there's no real difference, by the way, between inequality and diversity, it also does put a heavy load on the conscience of people. You know, if you're a San Francisco upper middle-class housewife, let's say, and you're walking down the street and you see it littered with homeless people, so to speak, who are suffering and who clearly are suffering and who clearly are marginalized and haven't been brought within the confines of the economic system for reasons that may be partly due to their own misbehavior, let's say, and inadequacies, but also partly because of sociological circumstances that were beyond their control.

It's very, very difficult not to feel that your privilege and status is in some sense undeserved and also a moral burden. And very tempting, therefore, to cheaply counterbalance that set of guilt with the proposition that not only are you in a dominant position, but you're also firmly and 100 percent on the side of the oppressed, which is something you see happening in Ivy League schools all the time.

And Rob Henderson, as you know, has described this proclivity as luxury beliefs, right? Is that you get to have your status, and then instead of doing what you should do to remediate the problems of the world with that status and privilege, you jump on the bandwagon of cheaply compassionate theories, and then you can have your cake—your moral cake—and eat it too.

I've been trying to parse out the psychological reasons why it is precisely those who are in these positions of vaunted privilege, let's say, who are more likely to have these revolutionary ideas. Do you have any further thoughts on that?

A couple of things. I mean, this is kind of a stock character in American history. If you look at the Weather Underground movement in the late '60s and early 1970s, which is really a kind of prototype for all the things we're seeing today, if you read their manifesto, Prairie Fire, and I highly recommend you read it, I read it last year and my eyes popped out of my head because it's all of the things that K-12 students are learning today—white privilege, anti-colonialism, kind of Marxist economics, etc.

That was, at that time, a radical fringe idea that has now moved into the mainstream. But you look at the backgrounds of all these people; they're all elites. They're all people who are the sons and daughters of bankers and politicians and wealthy people in New York City, wealthy people in San Francisco. They were living on houseboats in Marin while they were planting bombs in police stations.

And so you kind of say, well, what is the psychology here? What's happening? I think it's a couple of things. Certainly, it functions as a luxury belief to the extent that they're insulated from the consequences of those beliefs. I think we can't underestimate two things, however. One is that a lot of these people are just true believers. The people who are most fervent, if you're going to pick up a gun, for example, like Eric Mann did and shoot it into the window of a police station, you have to be deeply committed.

And I think you see that same spirit among people who are members of Antifa, people who are members of BLM. They are really just possessed by this idea. And I think there's a certain amount of attractiveness for people who are maybe bored, people who maybe feel resentful. They can fuel that resentment and that boredom into revolutionary action, and then they can take the mantle of romanticism. You know, they can be Che Guevara. I mean, that's a very attractive figure—unless you know anything about them.

You don’t even have to because you see the cool beret, you see the cool beard, you see the cool kind of high contrast print. And there's a sense of fulfillment, I think stemming from anger, resentment, a sense of guilt. You have this complex web of emotions that are then manipulated by media, manipulated by activists, manipulated by other leadership. And so there's that latent—I think there's also a sense among people, look, these are my peers. You know, I have a lead education; I've traveled in those circles; I've lived in those cities.

There's a sense, I think, among many of my peers—in a way, especially the ones who are left, and I was on the left for many years, kind of graduated rightward over time—there's a sense that they don't deserve it. There's a deep sense of inferiority.

Well maybe they don't, you know, because one—well, one open question—well, one there's an open question here on the guilt front. You know, there's a gospel discussion of the unequal distribution of talents, right? Because it's pretty clear that if you look at the world as it's presently constituted—and always has been—that, you know, some people are more beautiful than others, and some people are healthier, and some people are more intelligent, some people are more hardworking by nature, and sometimes some people are more creative and some people are more compassionate.

There's this massively unequal distribution of a priori resources, right? What you come into the world with—not what you deserve by dint of hard work—and then you might ask yourself, "Well, if you happen to be born," we'll use all the tropes, "white, rich, heterosexual, healthy, attractive" and you have all these benefits and privileges and the luxury of this, let's say, immense wealth that was gathered by your parents.

Why shouldn't you feel guilty about that? And then what—because look at all the people who don't have that, and it was just handed to you, it was just laid at your feet. And the answer that's put forward in the New Testament—and I don't like to refer to religious matters unless it's necessary—is that to those to whom much has been given, much will be asked. And so then you might say, well, if you have all this remarkable technological and economic privilege, much of which was unearned and even much of which, or some of which, was purchased at the cost of historical atrocity, what should you do?

And the answer is you should put yourself together so you're as good ethically as you are rich financially. But that's a heavy moral burden and a heavy burden of responsibility. And then I think you can take these cheap and uninformed routes out, and some of that's just based in miseducation and pure ignorance, so that you can accrue to yourself the moral virtue that's necessary to solve your conscience without having to do any of the real difficult work that making a full accounting of your talents and atoning for your privilege would actually require.

Yeah, I think that's 100% right. And I think that you have then a group of people—people, I mean, people who look like me, people who are my age—that are struggling to find an identity, struggling to find a structure, struggling to have a standard of living maybe better than their parents. And then even people who come from wealthy backgrounds, there’s a tremendous pressure, right? If you're born to that level of privilege, it's very high, it's very difficult to maybe exceed your family in the past, though we had a kind of paternal structure where you're saying, "Hey, even you're kind of a wayward son of a wealthy family, you have to come into the fold, you have to be a good steward of these resources, you have to, you know, build libraries, you have to build the opera house, you have to do great works that show that you can assume the responsibility of this wealth and prestige and then really provide it back to the community in a substantial way."

That's very difficult. It's much easier to, you know, put on the keffiyeh, march at a BLM protest, and then, you know, run a family foundation writing checks to a bunch of useless non-profits. You get the status, you get the prestige, you get the love, you get the identity as a kind of class traitor. But it's an adolescent posture of rebellion from a generation that refuses to grow up and become a father, let's say, or become a mother, become a kind of matriarch figure.

And so you have these permanent children that are in eternal revolution against their parents that for them are symbolically represented in this society, and they feel like they can stuff that feeling or satisfy that feeling with these kind of the sugar high of revolution by playacting. But it deals tremendous damage to real people. And you know, the reason I'm a conservative, as opposed to where I started 10-15 years ago as a kind of on the far left, is that I saw in the international context, in many places, what happens when these ideas take hold. But I also saw, even spent five years in three of America's poorest cities observing these communities. The theory of systemic racism, white privilege, intersectionality, etc., all the solutions that they proffer are very good if you want to achieve social status and position in an Ivy League university.

They're disastrous once they trickle down and are imposed on poor people of any racial background.

And so this feeling, this psychological profile, I think is one of the most important things of our time. I think that's why your work has been so successful and why people on the left have furiously kind of rejected it and furiously, like, in a deranged way lashed out against it because you're calling them to responsibility.

Yeah, I got a funny story for that, man. So, you know, I've had the misfortune to be invited to speak at universities, and I say misfortune because although some of the time that goes quite well, the most disastrous public events of my life have been on university campuses where I’m harassed by student radicals or literally accosted by them, yelled at by unbelievably narcissistic brats, generally harassed a lot by the administration for even daring to go to the damn university, having all sorts of obstacles put in my path when I agree to do so, and spending a lot of time and resources to speak to people who are often extremely narcissistic for very little effect.

Now, that's not always the case. I've had good experiences at Cambridge and at MIT and at Stanford most recently. And so it can work, but it often doesn't. And so the—I figured out a way to go to a university and have it work, and this is really quite funny. I figured this out about five years ago.

So imagine I'm invited to a university and I'm worried that there's going to be protests. And I worry because sometimes there are murderous people at those protests; it's no joke, and people get in my face and they threaten me and physically as well as psychologically. And I'm not afraid of that, but it makes me so angry that I'm afraid of my own anger in situations like that. I joke with my security people that half of the reason they're there is to stop me from attacking other people.

And I mean that—you know, it's a joke, but it's also not a joke. Anyway, I figured out very early that if I had a meeting at a university at eight o'clock in the morning, I'd never have a protester in sight because none of them had the bloody discipline to stick to their principles with enough, what would you say, assiduousness so that they would sacrifice their late-night drinking session the night before so they wouldn't be too hungover and bleary-eyed to come out and confront the, you know, the evil professor who is going to go out there and warp their compatriots.

And so the fact that I could circumvent the bloody activists by merely showing up early in the morning is a pretty fundamental indictment of the fundamental maturity of their motivation and also something that's blackly comical in the deepest possible sense. And the fact that these idiot professors on these left-wing campuses take the messianic delusions of these overgrown adolescents with some degree of seriousness, overlay that with compassion, and then invite them to become useless activists and thereby fulfill the moral demands that their own conscience puts on them is an unbelievably deep indication of the absolute moral bankruptcy of the modern university.

So I love it. And weak parents create narcissistic children, and so the administrator is the weak parent and the children are quite narcissistic. And you know this reminds me—your story reminds me of two things. One, you know, my dad was an immigrant from Italy, came over as a teenager with his family, very poor—had nothing. His father immediately died when they came over; my dad became the man of the household.

And he was a great athlete, a good student, got a scholarship, was living at home, and this was during the kind of 1960s-1970s Vietnam War protests, all of the kind of hippies and that kind of counterculture. And you know my dad got a scholarship to go to college, was working the whole time to support his mother, support his sister, kind of help the family.

And he says, you know, I see all these hippies, all the rich kids were the hippies and the protesters and the counterculture. He says, the working-class kids, you know, we had to get a job, we had to take things seriously, we had to show up to work.

And you know, it really is this kind of class inversion. It's this inversion of Marxism where our elites are the Marxist revolutionaries and our working-class people are our conservatives because they need that set of structures and values in order for them to have a dignified and meaningful life.

And so we have an elite class that wants to dissolve all of the social and economic structures that are providing the basis for stable lives at the bottom.

The second story I'm going to tell you is very interesting. My wife and I went to see you in Seattle, Washington a number of years ago at one of your speeches. Next to us was this kid, a young kid, maybe 25. We got to talking to him before the show, before you and Dave came on, and he said, you know, I drove an hour and a half; I drove from the kind of more rural area here in Washington state, and you know, my life was a mess a few years ago.

I was doing drugs, I was not showing up to work, I was waking up late, I was, you know, just couldn't quite get things together; I was anxious all the time. And I was on YouTube. I'm not much of a reader; you know, barely finished high school. And I listened to Jordan Peterson, I don't know how, and then piece by piece I started following those basic building blocks of his advice.

Now I'm working full-time; I've got a great job on a construction crew, I'm getting paid overtime. I wanted to hear him speak, and so for me it was a kind of remarkable example of this phenomenon where you have people in the country, especially younger people, especially people from a middle-class or working-class background, for whom the stakes are high.

If you screw up and you're from a working-class family, your life can be a disaster very quickly, and you're giving this kind of time-tested advice about how to grow up, how to take responsibility, and it makes a difference in people's lives.

And I think the reason why the left is so upset with you, maybe the reason they're so upset with me in the same token, is that they're trying to give advice to the working class that will end up destroying their lives. You're trying to give advice to working-class people that will make their lives better, and it exposes the fraudulence of their ideas. It exposes the hypocrisy of their position, and it really exposes the kind of vengeful heart of their ideology.

And to me, that's really what converted me out of the left. I can't spend any more time with these phony people, with these people who are the sons and daughters of immense privilege that are acting revolut—playing revolutionary, trying to impose a set of ideas that I know out of my own observation in all the countries around the world, as well as spending significant time in the poorest places in the United States, lead to nothing but disaster.

Well, don't forget death. It's not just disaster; it's torture and death, right? Wide scale economic failure, utter catastrophe.

Okay, so let's do this. Let's first of all throw out a compassionate rope to the narcissistic, messianic young people who are entranced by the universities because one of the things that I have learned as a university professor is if you take people who have some vengeful motivation and some resentment, let's say, to their parents, into broader society, and you say, "Well, look, things are corrupted by power," and you're going to feel oppressed, and that's the constant lot of mankind since the beginning of day one because history is anachronistic and out of date and there is an element of atrocity in it.

So you're going to have an antagonistic relationship to some degree with your past, but the appropriate thing to do with that is to put everything in its proper place and to realize that as an active moral agent you can remediate the sins of the past as a consequence of your ethical striving.

And if you introduce young people to that idea and show them a pathway forward that doesn't allow them to merely mask their new and hard-won cynicism, you know, they're no longer naive; they can see that the world has some problems.

And that can easily send them into a tailspin. You say, "Yeah, yeah, the problems are there, but they don't constitute the core central spirit, let's say, of mankind that the desire to dominate." Then you can set them on a more appropriate path.

And so these narcissistic young people bear some of the responsibility for their idiot revolutionary presumptions, but the fools and mountain banks and revengeful dimwits who educate them bear at least as much responsibility who miseducate them, who anti-educate them, who make them stupider and worse than they would have been had they not attended the institution at all, as well as picking $160,000 out of the pockets of their future earnings for the privilege of doing so, even while they didn't attend university during the COVID period, as we might point out.

And so having said that and putting the responsibility on the educators, especially the faculties of education, which are damned right to their core, I would also like to take some issue with this notion that power is the fundamental motivation that governs social interaction. So I want to just mention three facts, and then we can discuss them.

So first of all, there are a percentage of people who use power as their fundamental ethos in the governance of their social relations, and so psychopaths do that, and so do the dark triad types—Machiavellians and narcissists. And so the three of those make up the dark triad. And then you might ask yourself, well, if psychopaths wield power and that's their fundamental motivation and their ethos, how successful are they?

If our societies are basically dominated by power and power structures, then you'd expect the psychopathic types to thrive. And the data on that, anthropologically and psychologically, is quite clear. You get the cynics who say, "Well, all those who occupy the upper echelons of power and authority are psychopaths," but that's simply not true.

And the reason it's not true is because psychopathy is actually a very ineffective adaptive strategy, even biologically speaking. So being a psychopath means, if you're a male, that you can fool some of the girls some of the time with your pretensions to competence and power that are false, and now and then as a consequence, you can reproduce.

And that's how psychopathy propagates itself biologically. It’s not an effective reproductive strategy, but it doesn't have zero utility in some situations, so it can be exploited. But the anthropological and cross-cultural data show quite clearly that psychopathy rates vary between one and five percent, stabilize around three percent, so that if it falls to one percent, there's too few psychopaths and everybody falls asleep, and then the psychopaths can have full sway.

And they increase, but if it hits five percent, all the—and I would say tough men and women with an eye for deceit and malevolence—wake up and think, "Oh my God, look at all the psychopaths; we better do something about this," and they knock them back to three percent.

I should also point out that psychopaths, despite the common notion, cynical notion again, that they're hyper-successful, let's say in big business, are not successful at all because the clinical data shows very clearly that psychopaths betray their future selves just as badly as they betray other people.

And so it's a counterproductive adaptive strategy in iterative games. And it might be better than laying inert, castrated, so to speak, in your mother's basement till you’re 50, but it isn't a good pathway through life.

So that's number one. Power does not work as a motivation for mediating social relations. Just try using it on your wife constantly and see how far that gets you. Number two: let's make the case that it's power that propels animals upward in their social hierarchies, right? And so it's the dominant animal that achieves reproductive success, and maybe the cardinal example of that is among chimpanzees, where the alpha chimp, who's the roughest, toughest, dominating, oppressive, patriarchal male, gets access to all the females and rules with an iron fist, and that, by the way, is complete bloody rubbish.

It's not true. And Frans de Waal, the famous Dutch primatologist who's been studying chimpanzees with incredible perspicacity over the last 30 years, has demonstrated very clearly that sometimes even the alpha chimp, so to speak, is the smallest male in the troop who allies himself with powerful females and who is an exceptional peacemaker and extremely reciprocal, tit-for-tat, love thy neighbor as thyself in his relationships with his male friends.

And they have friendships that can span decades. And so the primate alpha is a coalition builder and a peacemaker, not dominant. And the ones who try to use dominance and sometimes succeed for short periods of time destabilize their whole societies and are likely to meet a brutal, vicious end at the hands of two or more chimps who they've unfortunately and dangerously subordinated.

So and then next, if that’s not enough, I did some work on the anthropology of the doctrine of the elders. So in many tribal and agricultural societies, there's this—what would you call?—proclivity for governance to devolve towards so-called elders. And they're often male, but not always because the wise females can play a role too.

And so then the question is, in these societies, cross-culturally, who’s elevated to the status of elder? And you might say, well, it's the roughest, toughest, most dominant, chimp-like, oppressive, patriarchal male. And that actually happens not to be the case at all.

And so what you do see is that productive males, who are older, so they have to be productive, who are simultaneously generous and reciprocal and are recognized as such in their communities, hold the status of authority and help govern properly.

And so we could say that there's no evidence whatsoever on the scientific or anthropological front that the doctrine that the prime human motivation for the construction of social relations is power.

And I would add to that further that if you think that power is the fundamental motivation of humankind, that is a confession, not an observation. And so look out for people who make that claim because they're making that claim to justify to themselves their own use of psychopathic and narcissistic social mediation strategies.

And so I don't see that the leftists who make the claim that power is the fundamental motivation have a shred of evidence on their side sociologically, scientifically, anthropologically, politically, economically, theologically, or ethically. And then we might add to that just in closing an observation that you already made, which is, okay, guys, if it's not capitalism, which, to be admitted, produces inequality just like every other bloody economic system we've ever created, then what is it?

And then the idea would be, well, it's the socialist utopia where everybody has what they need and does for others what they can, to paraphrase Marx's famous dicta. And you might say, well, when has that actually worked successfully and not resulted in absolute economic catastrophe and mass murder? And the answer is, well, pretty much never.

And then you say, well, doesn't that constitute evidence to invalidate your claim? And they say, well, you know, really the reason that the Marxist doctrines haven't worked is because they've never been implemented properly. And so what do you think about that claim? Is that fundamentally the doctrine is sound, but for whatever reason—maybe it's the machinations of evil capitalists and the reactionary tendency of oppressive patriarchs to scuttle the socialist enterprise, like we did by refusing to trade with Venezuela—and the actual reason why these egalitarian states never work isn't because of the doctrine but because of reaction from those who are putting forward traditional liberal and conservative views?

So what do you do about that claim?

I mean, it’s so absurd. You try something a thousand times, it never works. The evidence is in on Marxist economics. You look at even the theoretically Marxist states in the world today, specifically China. Even India, which had a kind of socialistic economy until 1990—all of these emerging economies that tried the socialist or even the kind of state Marxist systems, they've abandoned them to the point where actually, let's say China or Vietnam, that are still efficiently communist countries, have actually a lower rate of state expenditure as a percentage of GDP than the United States.

The United States is actually, in some measurements, more socialistic than the Marxist-Leninist or communist countries in the world. And so the evidence is in among anyone who's experienced a communist economy; they're all fleeing that system as fast as possible.

Well, let's elaborate on that for a moment because that's really accelerated since 1989 when the Wall fell. And the reason it's accelerated is because the communists aren't actively intermediating, let's say, in African economies to the degree that they were, and dementing people into adopting observed economic policies to impoverish their people.

And so what's been the consequence of that since the 1980s? And the answer is that as these great economies, China and India included, but also with Africa increasingly, have adapted themselves to free market policies and rule of law and respect for the integrity and dignity of the individual, what's happened is that we've seen an unprecedented expansion of general wealth all around the world.

And we've lifted more people out of poverty merely in the last 12 years than had been lifted out of poverty in the entire history of humankind before that at any given moment. And that's all a consequence. And then we could say, as to elaborate on your point, is that you look at China. So China was, is, and was a communist country, but the reason that China has leapt forward and is now becoming twice as rich, by the way, in terms of purchasing parity power, parity every seven years—twice as rich—is because they set up special economic zones that were basically predicated on the Hong Kong model.

Where they could leave the free enterprise types alone within the broader confines of the ethically appropriate communism. And those places took off like mad, which meant that as soon as you got the madmen and the resentful sons out of the way, that the essential conscientious striving and native intelligence of the Chinese population was able to manifest itself and turn that country from an impoverished and starving country, in many ways, into one of the world's industrial powerhouses. And that only took a couple of decades.

And so I've always thought when I hear these Marxist types claim that, you know, real Marxism has never been tried—that they think narcissistically something along the following lines, which is, well, you know, Stalin didn't do a very good job, and Lenin didn't do a very good job, and neither did Mao, and neither did Pol Pot.

And those are quite a few different cultures and situations, boys and girls, but if I would have been the tyrant in charge then with all my wisdom and my deep knowledge of Marxist doctrine, then the socialist utopia certainly would have come to fruition. And so there's a luciferian narcissism driving this activism that's almost, well, it's certainly ungodly in its magnitude.

And it pretty much goes all the way to the bottom. And even if that's not true of the individual holders of these luciferian vengeful ideas, it's definitely true of the pretensions of the system of ideas itself.

I think the China idea, the China example is very important and we have a rough analog here in the United States. So the question is, you've laid it out, I think everyone knows this. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, the sophisticated and honest Marxist intellectuals in the West, for example, Herbert Marcuse, in his book on Soviet Marxism, they admitted this. They said that this system does not work. It can't solve the production problem. It can't—it's revolved into bureaucratic tyranny and repression.

Then you have Solzhenitsyn; everyone knows this. Then you have the fall of communism where it was kind of the definitive explosion of this system. So the question then becomes, if everyone knows that this is how it works, everyone can observe it—everyone who's smart knows this already—why are they still promoting it?

And I think the reason is not because of some genuine conviction that, well, if only Trotsky had been given power, it would have worked out better. If only we can try it again, it would work out great this time. I don't think they believe that. And I actually don't think that deeply in their kind of heart of hearts they actually want to have a socialist or a communist economy because that would require them managing and running physical production, which for intellectuals is like, oh my gosh, get me out of a factory, I can't change a tire, just forget it.

And so what the actual kind of Gramscian adaptation is in a post-Soviet historical period is, we don't really want to take over the—you know, the die-cut tool factory in rural Michigan to create auto parts. We're not interested in that. We want to redistribute prestige and social status.

And so it's a real cynical game where they speak the language of Marxism; they speak the language of empowering the working class; they speak the language of material redistribution. But when it comes down to it, they don't really care. They know it wouldn't really work. And I think secretly they hope that it doesn't happen because they benefit from this incredible economic production because, again, they have those high-status positions.

They're entrenched in their economic fortunes. They have economic security through the bureaucracy, through the tenure system, etc. So they're cynically pushing this narrative as a way to redistribute status and prestige, which is really what they crave. That's the real currency. That's the real redistribution.

Well everyone craves that, everyone craves that, Christopher, I would say, because there isn't anything that you have that's more valuable than your reputation. You trade on your reputation. And if you're known by people as an honest and reciprocal player whose word is his bond and who will do what he says he will do, then everyone lines up to play with you and your economic viability is guaranteed.

And so what we're tempted by constantly is the is we're tempted by the strategy of accruing to ourselves false reputation. And it is a form of narcissism and Machiavellianism and psychopathy because what it means is that people who have stored up genuine value in their reputation and who have been honest players and who know how to work and know how to share are much more likely to be rewarded with a deserved prestige.

But the narcissists and the psychopaths and the intellectual Machiavellians can parasitize that by making unwarranted moral claims and then saying about themselves that they are as good or better than the people they're criticizing. And because they have intellectual prowess, they're often able to out-argue the people who have accrued genuine moral virtue, that might be like the self-made working-class types who know what's right and who act out what's right but who aren't as able to articulate it, which is a challenge on the conservative side.

So let's, if you don't mind, let's turn to a minute—well, in our remaining time for a minute—to what you've been doing more practically. And so a lot of this discussion has in fact been intellectual, and so let's nail it back down to the ground.

You've been working on the policy front in a variety of different states, most notably Florida, to push back practically against the inroads of the system of ideas that we've been discussing. And so tell me how that's come about, what it is, and what you think the advantages and pitfalls are.

Sure. Well, I think first of all, as I said at the outset, what we have to understand is that if you want to take the metaphor of production, there's kind of intellectual production right now that is now being dominated by a specific ideology and then using the transmission belt of the institutions in order to corrupt them, in order to achieve dominance over them—that was their strategy that they laid out in the early 1990s in critical race theory and queer theory, for example. I think the two most prominent theories that we're grappling with today, and they've achieved this.

And I think that there's a need and a genuine necessity for people to understand the theories at an intellectual or abstract level. A lot of the power, just as you've said, of these ideas is because they're intimidating for people who don't have a background in academia, a background in—understand the terminology or the concepts behind these ideas.

And so they'll be kind of bullied into submission in a way. But the key takeaway and the key thing I've been working on, I'm really trying to explain, is that when ideas—when ideology becomes attached to administrative power in a permanent and meaningful way, you have a revolution—that is the definition of a revolution. A kind of disruptive ideology achieves administrative and bureaucratic power.

So we're actually in those conditions today. We're in the midst of a soft, super-structural cultural revolution. And the goal for conservatives should be to sever that connection between those ideologies and bureaucratic power. You can't do that through mere persuasion. You can't do that through mere intellectual discussion or debate. You can't do that even by convincing a majority of the public, which in these cases we've already done, to agree with you, to share your point of view.

You actually have to say, "Hey, wait a minute; these ideas violate the basic values, the basic beliefs of the majority of the citizens in the republic who should then vote for legislators and encourage their legislators to use the democratic process in order to reform those systems and bureaucracies to align them more closely with the values and the true telos of the public whom they represent."

And so what I want to do is really start to outline specifically how we can do that—to say, "Hey, wait a minute; if you're in a red state, let's say—or even if you're in a supposedly purple state trending red like Florida—you don't have to be permanently subsidizing left-wing ideologies at every level of your government."

If you're a Republican president, for example, I've worked with President Trump on this, and I say, "Hey, wait a minute, why are you—why is the federal government, not through the—not through a legislative necessity or kind of a specific legislative priority or or requirement, but through the executive function spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year subsidizing critical race theory, subsidizing programs that promote those ideas, subsidizing grants and other funding mechanisms?"

How do you know?

Okay, so I'm listening to you and understanding your point. I worked as an academic and a researcher for many years, and one of the things that always disturbed me was when my research became subordinate to government demand. So, for example, I was working on assessing the onset of alcoholism in young men who didn't have alcoholic fathers or mothers, by the way, and I concentrated on young men because they're much more likely to become alcoholic.

And because if your mother was alcoholic, you might have fetal alcohol syndrome, and that would be an additional complicating factor in the research. And what happened was that partly because of diversity requirements—which the Clintons brought in—I was forced to include females in equal number in my studies, and I just simply couldn't do that because I couldn't include female alcoholics.

And so I just stopped doing it altogether, and my research lab, along with that of my mentor Robert Peel, had done some of the fundamental work in outlining the biological basis of the propensity for alcoholism.

So that was just scuttled. So I'm very afraid when I hear policymakers, including you, despite our agreement on the white grounds for our agreement, talk about how legislatures can now intervene, and I know they're doing that anyway, right? That—and that's part of your point—how they can intervene in terms of funding to stop subsidizing ideas that are deemed undesirable.

But you know that brings up—I don't say I have a solution to this, by the way, but it brings up the specter of producing a government bureaucracy who regards it as its mission to police intellectual content. So how do we thread that needle, do you think?

A couple different ways. First, I think you have to take a step back and really assess the status quo. There's this kind of, again, what I think of as a myth or a delusion among many of my friends, even on the center-right or maybe the libertarian right, where they say, "No, no, no, we don’t meddle with the government. We don’t meddle with the bureaucracy. We don’t meddle with public universities. That’s an infringement on, let’s so-called, academic freedom; that’s an infringement on the free market, etc."

But when you say, "We’re going to take a kind of non-interventionist approach in a government agency," that government agency will be filled by people who have vastly different values than you do, and they have no qualms about intervening.

So you seed the playing field. You seed the territory to your enemies. But even more broadly, at a very abstract level, at a general level, these are public institutions. These are institutions that are already chartered, governed, funded, and then administered by the government, by the people, by legislation.

And so the question is not do we want legislation and meddling, or do we not want it? That's an impossibility. The question is what are the ground rules, what are the guidelines, and what are the principles by which our public institutions should be governed?

And my argument is to say is to abdicate on that question—which is difficult; I agree with you, it's difficult. There can be overreach; there can be problems; it's very complicated. But to abdicate and to pretend that you don't have to answer that question is a recipe for guaranteed failure and the continued corruption of what we see in our institutions today.

And so the conservative or someone who wants to change these institutions has to recognize that these are fundamentally political questions. There's no abstract and totally disconnected intellectual freedom in the public university. You have intellectual freedom under the First Amendment as an individual citizen, but you don't have license to do whatever you want with a permanent taxpayer subsidy, even if you're violating the basic values and the spirit of the law, violating the letter of the law, violating the will of the voters through their state representatives.

And so while it is a difficult question, it's a question that we cannot refuse to answer. And in fact, we have to recognize that there will be a set of rules governing our public institutions. The question is who sets them and what will those rules be?

Oh, well, okay. So here's a counterexample, let's say. It's rather radical. So I've been speaking at some length recently with the president of Hillsdale College in Michigan, and Hillsdale is a conservative institution, I would say a traditional educational institution and one that's thriving and also offering, from what I can tell, a genuine education to its students in the deepest sense. And Larry Arnn