Limiting 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.

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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 depend on pushing this ideology within the public institutions. These are government institutions. These are institutions that 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 Rogue for too long. We need to actually say these are political questions." And they, by nature, by their very nature, by their essential nature, will require political solutions, not merely the kind of light touch approach of people who think that signing an open letter is going to get the job done.

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Thank you. Hello everyone! I have the opportunity today to speak with one of Florida's leading troublemakers, you might say, Christopher Rufo. 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.

So I've been watching the goings-on in Florida with a great amount of interest, and I have a lot of questions. I'm going to try to push Mr. Rufo, Chris, as hard as I can today in a friendly manner because I want to get to the bottom of all of this to the degree that that's possible. 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 excesses on the more conservative and traditionalist sides.

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 really looking forward to this.

Yeah, likewise! 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. You kind of sprang onto the scene at least insofar 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. Now you seem to be pretty integrally involved in Governor DeSantis of Florida's strategic moves forward on the education reform front.

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 a lot of the folks in the conservative world or the conservative movement. You know, I grew up as a kind of a young man of the left. That was my politics, kind of hard left politics. As a teenager, my family members were kind of in a long tradition of a kind of left-wing and even kind of Marxist and Communist activism. 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.

I started working in the conservative world, started doing journalism, and then of course I think sprung onto the scene, as you said, with my work exposing critical race theory first in government then in K-12 schools. I think part of my background that has maybe even helped make me successful in this is that I know how the left thinks intimately. And I don't think that's true for my opponents. I don't think that they know how the right thinks. I don't think they know how conservatives think. They don't think the right does think.

Yeah, that's right. I get there was a great line I think from that conservatism is a series of irritable gestures, you know, right? So condescending. I think that, you know, while you could let that bother you or you could let that 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. And then they look at us just like we're barbarians at the gate.

So, it's fun. Even playing that role a little bit, kind of leaning into it with a wink, playing the barbarian, for me has been quite entertaining and quite amusing.

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So let's go back to the first part of the biographical discussion. There, you said that you were hard left as a teenager and came from a pretty hard left family. It's definitely the case there's a famous line, I don't remember who said it, that, you know, if you're a teenager with a heart, you're left-leaning; you're a liberal or a socialist. If you're an adult with a brain, you're traditionalist or conservative.

I think there's some real truth in that. Also, partly, and this has to do with 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.

Conservatives have done a dreadful job of that, I would say, and liberals as well, for like the true liberals, not the leftist type. So when you were a kid, a teenager, what do you think was specifically attractive to you, both personally 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.

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 restraint, duty, obligation. And when you're 13, that's not exactly something that is going to inspire you. And at the same time, I think that I grew up in California, in Sacramento. And the kind of mythology around the University of Berkeley, the Free Speech movement, some of those great 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 visit the campus at Berkeley and kind of be really wide-eyed and amazed at 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 kind of long lectures when we would go back and visit, you know, the thought of Lenin, the thought of Marx, the thought of Gramsci. They approached it from a theoretical basis that was, to me at the time, very attractive because it was putting an intellectual frame to politics.

And so, 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 its due. So the first issue is the pervasive reality of the unequal distribution of both talent and wealth.

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, makes 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 planets, very few planets, have almost all the planetary mass. And that also applies to stars; it applies to your blood 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 in the hands of a very small number of people is also real.

But, number one, it can't be attributed to capitalism because every economic system that humans have ever 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 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 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 a very difficult problem to solve, and the solutions are complex. But then, you know, you can be Che 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-old 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 five years actually working on a documentary for PBS 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, really trying to understand this question: What is driving inequality? What does inequality look like? What does the phenomenon reveal about itself?

And the answer was actually really my political turning point, the completion of my political education. It's looking at it and saying, “Hey, wait a minute! 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, is one that actually is a complex social story.

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. You look at the social pathologies, you know, from depression, anxiety, to drug addiction, alcoholism. And then you look at the collapse of community institutions—so those mediating 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. The ultimate irony that I discovered was that in a place like Memphis, they’re spending, 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 enough to have a median standard of living, and yet you have a complete social disaster through it.

What that taught me was you have to look at the society, you have to look at cultural factors, 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. It cannot solve problems that are human, cultural, spiritual in nature.

At that point, the left-wing narrative on inequality, those simple stories, I mean, just could not meet the standard of reality that I saw and lived with for three years.

Well, you know, 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 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 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 worshipping 13-year-old could assume, but 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. For almost all of human history, we had produced very little per capita. And so with capitalist production, which is presupposed in the Marxist economic analysis, I mean, this is a miracle.

The fact that we have the standard of living that we have, the fact that we've been able to reduce extreme poverty globally 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, I mean, that is a miracle. I mean, it's a miracle of human invention.

And so I think that at the same time, you feel a sense of guilt 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.

To dovetail on what you were saying, it's like, I've spent time in these poor neighborhoods, and then I found myself, you know, you'd see people at like 1 AM, just like huge groups of people partying, fighting. You'd see spikes in violence on a monthly cadence.

I remember talking to someone and saying, "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, you know, arrests, violence, etc.

And 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, 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. I think especially in the United States, that cultural net has really been shredded, 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 historical record and then studying it kind of empirically, looking at it face to face, poverty is much worse now even though you have a higher median income.

So we have this paradox where we have actual material wealth, poor people in the United States are richer than almost every other group globally, and yet the experience is much worse. And 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 in maybe a developing country, buffeted from some of these things, or poor in the United States, which, in many cases, is like a hellscape - you know, violence, addiction, mental illness, kind of shredded social net.

And these aren't easy questions. And 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 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 services 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 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 very skeptical about the moral certainty that the leftists, who are hypothetically on the side of the poor, bring to the table with regard to arguments all the time.

It's like, “Well, 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 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 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 liberal or conservative circles at that point? I mean you must kind of be now at a loss for a while, given that your worldview had come under assault under the brutal lessons of reality.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, these are documentaries for PBS, and I was kind of moving to the center, moving to the right. I went through kind of a libertarian phase even, to my own embarrassment now.

And my politics shifted, and I could just feel it that my relationships with colleagues were starting to fray. People were whispering. You know, I think Rufo may be a conservative now, you know, very concerned about me. And then there was a kind of moment where I had to make a decision.

Am I going to 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 was kind of turning 30, and I said, it's either now or never. I'm going to kind of come out. I'm going to 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 documentary world was just a total dead end.

I mean, what year was that?

Oh, this was probably like 2015, 2016 when it started to change.

So, right at the, as the kind of thing... Nobody can shun like what would you call it, a burned leftist?

I mean, look, 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 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 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 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."

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 you're trying to move up a hierarchy. It's not competence that's rewarded; it's not economic productivity that's rewarded in all of these places. It's not even really an economic question anymore.

And so you can critique Marx, 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 metaphysical basis on identity.

And that's very unstable. It's so unstable. And then you have games that are not played on, "Hey, let's kind of advocate for wages or working conditions or cash redistribution." 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, it's already derivative of reality when you're talking about money, but when you're talking about identity, you've moved one step further up the abstraction hierarchy, like a financial derivative. And so things get very unstable, and they 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. 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, were also pretty good voices to fight against the dangers of corporate gigantism and regulatory capture, which is something that clearly needs to be addressed, probably more now than it has been necessary in the last 70 years because that's a real threat.

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, you know, is it difficult? You know, I have a family; I'm starting to have kids, and I'm kind of at this career crossroads where I've kind of burned all of the bridges, you know, the kind of end of the past.

And then I said, "All right, well, what can I do? What am I good at? What would actually excite me? What would be kind of something that I would want to pursue?" I fell into more conservative circles.

I started reaching out to folks, and you know, they were really welcome me with open arms. They said, "Oh, you're a defector from the other side." And in the conservative world, this is a long tradition. One of my intellectual heroes, James Burnham, was a National Review writer, professor of philosophy, kind of one of the Cold War's most trenchant conservative critics, worked with Richard Nixon, worked with McCarthy.

And, you know, he was formerly Trotsky's personal secretary in the United States. We have this long tradition of defectors from the left moving rightward, and so I was welcomed 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?" I got connected with some of the magazines and publications, and then 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 working with Democrat, backroom personnel over the last six or seven years, hoping to entice, persuade the reasonable Democrats to draw a line between them and the radicals, especially on the DEI front.

And also to, well, mostly that—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 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 was hard-won 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 thing that's 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 flip. I mean, for all of the excesses and problems, I'm, you know, a critic of kind of the 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.

I mean, it is the most restrictive, the most limited, the most restrained, the most punishing orthodoxy. And then you get to this point to the point where you have now hundreds of thousands of kind of DEI agents, left-wing bureaucrats, enforcers of the orthodoxy, and they just repeat the same ten points.

I've done reporting for now a few years on critical race theory, gender ideology. They inherit kind of ten ideas, they dumb them down, they pass them through a bureaucratic euphemistic filter. And I mean, they're like decentralized propaganda agents from Soviet times.

I mean, it's like this is the party line; we must say this; you cannot say anything that would contradict the great party line. And it's like once I ejected from that world, once I opened up this new terrain—and actually, frankly, once I moved out of a big urban center in Seattle and moved out to a smaller town—it's like this is where a kind of actual free thinking, actual...

The feeling of freedom, the feeling of intellectual possibility. I think one of the reasons that my work has been successful is because I've been kind of liberated from that stifling orthodoxy, that cultural milieu, that institutional pattern.

And then, you know, I see all of these folks attacking me; you know you can't say this, you can't do this, you have to observe this. The Atlantic wrote a piece recently that said it qualified endorsement of Christopher Rufo, but it was 90 qualifications and ten endorsements. Because these folks on the center-left, they know they agree with me, but they can't behave as I behave.

And really, that's because I'm much more free than they are. 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 sinecures or whatever.

Yeah, well that's the joy of having a free tongue, man.

Well, you know, it's also very perverse temperamentally. Because I looked a lot at what predicted political viewpoints from the temperamental and cognitive front, because if you're looking at individual differences 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 ten 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 ten 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 partly that the open people don't want barriers to information flow, right? And so when they see conservatives putting up barriers of any type—even barriers of category—that destabilizes them, because the open types capitalize on free information flow, but perversely, that rejection of the boundaries that conservatives put up has led to 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 do the whole enterprise in, but it's got to 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 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 ten years and it looks like a social justice syllabus. It's, you know, 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, they have all the prestige; they win the institutional game. But then you put them on the marketplace; you look at like an Amazon 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 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, but really high in intellectualism and verbal ability.

Machiavelli had the distinction; he had two archetypes: there's the lion and the fox. The fox is highly intelligent, adaptable, open, verbally very proficient. The lion is strong, tough, setting standards, kind of the strong, quiet type.

I think that it's kind of a proxy, maybe for the left and right. 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 be able to do the ideological fights with a sense of skill, with a sense of sophistication, with a sense of narrative. So that's what I think we need. We need folks like that that also recognize the value of the kind of 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. 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.

They thought for many years, “Oh, well, we're just going to 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 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.

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—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 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 the cultural milieu— which is not the normal place that conservatives play, because 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 a level as fundamental as that of temperament itself.

It is true, but at the same time, I think that, you know, Aristophanes, the Greek satirist, Greek humorist, was a conservative, right? He was making fun of the kind of very abstract folks; he was making fun of 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, 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 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! 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 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 this in my reporting over the last few years, 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 critical theory, a style of assessing society from Marx and others. This is the establishment.

And so, as the anti-establishment became the establishment really with the baby boomer generation, we live in a new world. And conservatives, unfortunately, still act like, you know, the world is run by, you know, the guys sitting around the country club table.

That's not true at all. The world is run by, you know, the PBS employees, the NPR employees, the New York Times employees, Berkeley graduates.

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 level of aggression and assertiveness.

They'll tell me, you know, behind the scenes, behind closed doors, 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 my position at the newspaper; I have my position in academia."

I'm cowardice, 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 is 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 segue a bit here, shall we? Perhaps and start talking about your foray into the domain of critical race theory. The first thing we might want to do is let’s play around with some definitions. What do you think?

And this will get us more into the political discussion I want to have with you too. Critical race theory is a very difficult, 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 pastiche of post-modernism and Marxism, and out of that comes an identity politics.

Which is the Marxist experiment—failed on the economic front, and all the Marxists 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. But you've delved into it with a fair bit of effort, let’s say, and over a fairly long period of time.

So let's start by just talking about 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 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, 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? They argue that the constitutional protections of the First Amendment, the 14th Amendment, private property 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. 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 and 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. 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.

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 the idea would be, well, if you're tall and 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 faculty for developing a theory of intersectionality when it's so bloody obvious from the basic perspective of primordial statistics that it goes without saying?

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 appalling Marxist sleight of hand that it's crookedness and malevolence can hardly be overstated.

But I think it's important that maybe I'll disagree slightly. I think that is right; I think it was, you know, they base their legitimacy not on the objective value of their ideas, which they reject, but on their positionality.

So intersectionality, for example, is promoted by 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 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 any meaningful sense on the ideas of Foucault or 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 founding principle.

But the critical race theory 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 Gramsci, the 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 identity politics based on the Combahee River's statement and other kind of black feminist literature. And so it's coming from Marxism, Marxism’s Leninism, black nationalism.

And so this is the ideology that then they made a decision in the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union was kind of just poised to collapse—then it collapsed in the early 90s. The critical race theorists said, "Hey, you know, we can't be putting bandoliers across our shoulders and wearing the cool hats 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 Women, Race, and Class from 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 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 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 have first-graders in Cupertino, California, for example, getting the teachers and third-graders rather dividing the class on the basis of intersectionality into oppressors and oppressed.

I mean, they did it, and that's how the kind of power maneuvering worked.

And so I would say in relationship to your intellectual history, so we could put Marx at the bottom in some ways, although not only Marx, and we could have the French deconstructionists emerge out of that, and then the Gramscian tradition emerge 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 Gramsci 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 further that conversation or to disagree.

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, Derek Bell is a fascinating guy. I did an entire section in 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.

He was, you know, the first in his family to go to college; he got a law degree. He worked with the NAACP legal defense fund. He ran, I think, something like 300 anti-segregation cases in the Deep South.

And, you know, I mean, really a compelling guy who I think fought the good fight at that time; he went down into Mississippi, organized, you know, black families, got their kids across the color barrier, really shut down the segregation 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 Sowell describes it as, you know, he really abandoned those principles and then fought not for an equal society but for a revenge society—those were Thomas Sowell's words.

And then he became famous 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.

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 to his death around 2010-2012 was that he was the kind of doomsayer.

He said there could be no progress; it was all an illusion. The 14th Amendment, the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act, the Emancipation Proclamation—all of that talks a good game, but it's really a myth to uphold, you know, white supremacy.

And you see this really generation into a kind of unidimensional paranoia. And he had a verbal tick towards the end of his life where he would say in interviews, "I might be racially paranoid, but ...," and then finish his sentence.

And, and so you see this kind of really heroic figure just descend into this pessimism, cynicism, fatalism. And then he's rewarded by society, and really predominantly white liberal society.

And so he's this tragic figure in my book—not an evil man, not even a bad man. But I think a man who succumbed to a kind of to succumb to this this temptation of fatalism that I think then characterizes the second generation of scholars that came 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 kind of creative and confident intellectual output.

Right, which they also then decry as like the markers for that creative competent output just as part of the white patriarchal power game.

Like I've seen these charts recently laying out 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 views.

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 it's deeply condescending to people operational. I mean it's like, it's insane!

And I think what the actual—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 figures who have a wide understanding that that surpasses the backwards, you know, traditional American way of life.

These people are deeply parochial. These people have never seen and traveled around the world. It's like if I took that chart and went to Asia, went to Latin America, went to Lagos, Nigeria, where I've spent a significant amount of time, and said, "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, you know, this is actually racist. It's kind of inadvertently racist. And it takes traits that are virtues—these are virtues 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 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 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 worldview 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 a 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: 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 you're a 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 an 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 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 found their magic wand—that's it!

Yeah, it's basically the assumption that power governs every human relationship, 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 percentage in the population.

But the question is not, you know, okay, we have, say, a statistical reality that black students 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 behavior?

And then once you start asking those questions, you may get a different set 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 and try to figure out what percentage of or what proportion that has to do with it.

But it's like a kind of statistical blindness, and unwillingness to say, does behavior and consequences line up? Which is really the number one thing, and also the thing that you can control.

Because you can actually say, you know, if I believe that my behavior will be met with consequences, and I also believe that I have agency over my own behavior—not perfect agency, not 100 percent—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 happens that is bad in your life, it's the problem of the oppressor, it's the problem of the white male, the white male superstructure, 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 any favors by saying, you know, whatever you do—Derek Bell says this, you know, whatever you do, 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! A whole host of racial groups. I mean, all of the top-performing ethnic groups in the United States are racial minorities.

And I think the question is, well, you know, let's see what they're doing. Let's figure out what cultural traits, what behavior, what patterns, what values that they promote—and let's copy them!

You know, I see that all the time. I always try to look at different people and say, "Hmm, this person seems to be doing better than I am in this pursuit. Why? You know, and how can I emulate that? How can I copy that? How can I learn from this?"

But we have a kind of culture that says, "No, no, we don’t want to learn at all. We just want to offload; we want a scapegoat! We want to create theories to excuse any kind of sense of possibility for people."

And to promote that to kids is really what pisses me off.

And look, you're promoting kids into a worldview that hates the United States, 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 fatalism.

And then you're giving kids no pathway to 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.

Okay, now we can move into the more political realm. Now you've been working with the Florida government 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 have 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 from really a violation of their civil rights. And the legislation in Florida, and in many other states, says, "Look, 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 ancestry. 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 in civil rights law from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And it's responding to this specific problem because we have—it’s rather—it’s offering this specific solution in response to a specific problem.

You have schools that are promoting 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 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 I've worked hard to just say, you know what, the first step in this reform initiative is just to say, no, you can't do that.

What does that legislation look like, and where is it aimed? Specifically, at the K-12 system, or does it also include higher ed and other institutions?

It depends on the state, but my point of view, and what I've worked on with 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 to create the curriculum, to create inhibitions, to create a core of ideas and values that are transmitted through the state from one generation to the next, right?

From voters to children. And so, I think that there is really—and the Supreme Court has agreed; public school teachers are state employees, and they do not have First Amendment rights in the classroom. That's established Supreme Court precedent.

The state already in every state sets the curriculum. They say, "These are the values of the state. These are 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 sentiments and reflects the will of the voters through their elected 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 jurisprudence, the Supreme Court precedent 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 kind of shape what is transmitted in the classroom with very clear principles.

I think it's less so in the higher education space. My own preference is to say autonomy in the classroom, but we have an 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 fundamental bottom line is this. You know, the education system in the United States is not a free market. The state controls 90 percent of K-12 and approximately 75 percent of the higher education market.

It is a oligopoly. It is a kind of quasi-monopoly. And the public, which pays for it, which charters it, has an absolute right to regulate, restrain, and limit their government.

And so 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 the question is that you have left-wing ideological hegemony in our public institutions, even in conservative states.

What can we do about it? How can we actually push back? How can we get some of these pseudo-scientific and really divisive ideologies out of our institutions before they really harm or really do a kind of educational damage to our kids?

Okay, okay. 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, traditionalist conservative front, 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 percent 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 percent 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 literature.

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.

They attract terrible students, unconscientious students most particularly, who are attracted by the, what would the blandishments of being able to get a sinecure 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, for a long time—but 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 saying, hey, look, if you have a bachelor's degree in physics, you're qualified to teach physics at a high school level for example.

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 the critical pedagogist, that was literally their plan—they laid it out absolutely in the 90s; they implemented it, they have 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 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 solve the genesis and everything else will evaporate.

You now have a multiplicity of kind of the locus is not singular anymore of the problem. And so we actually have to do a lot more.

And the biggest problem, though, is even worse than 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, 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 theory curriculum; none of them voted for a radical gender theory in Florida, in Tennessee, in Texas.

But the activists within the state sector moved against the democratic will of the people 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 bureaucracy that has now gone totally rogue; it has overstepped its autonomy; it has totally transgressed the values of the public. It has acted without the consent of the legislature.

This is a political question, and our friends in the center-left really what their aversion is to is to conflict. They maintain this position as the enlightened centrist. They feel like if they explain it well enough, they feel like if they go on a podcast, they feel like if they can, you know, write a jazzy paper that the world will conform to their good thinking.

That's never how it works. You have people that their livelihoods, now hundreds of thousands of people depend on pushing this ideology within these 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.

These are government institutions. These are institutions that are created and funded by taxpayers and that are under the regulatory power of the legislature.

And so the legislature that has 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 rogue for too long.

We need to actually say these are political questions, and they, by nature, by their very nature will require political solutions, not merely the kind of light touch approach of people who think that, you know, signing a letter, an open letter, is going to get the job done."

Okay, so let me push back as hard as I can against that, please. 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 totally dispute that, of course it was! I mean, look at—you look at the state government controls the curriculum! The state government creates the institutions of public schools. I mean it’s like the actual curricular materials, yes, it was consonant with the cultural values of the majority at the time. Yes, it was perpetuated not through the letter of the law only but through the kind of invisible processes and agreements—the implicit cultural assumptions.

But look, 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 all we had a kind of agreement with the legislative, and then the implicit cultural—yeah, but you cannot deny that these were all initially legislative creations.

I mean legislators spent a lot of their time—school boards, again, these are