How the Radical Left Conquered Everything | Chris Rufo

I'm delighted to welcome you all to tonight's Conservative Book of the Year awards ceremony and my colleague Dan McCarthy has the lead and will be taking the lead for us, so before I hand it over to him, I'm going to introduce you. He is the isi VP for Collegiate Network, as well as the editor of isi's Modern Age Journal, which everyone has on their SE, and they just introduced and launched Modern Age a new website that you should check out at Modern Ag Journal. com and with that I'll hand it over to Dan, thank you for being here, thank you Tom and thank you for joining us tonight.

Isi has been educating for freedom on America's troubled campuses since 1953. Our founder, Frank Chodov, believed it was not enough to complain. on socialism and anti-Western ideology we have to teach the alternative the roots of our civilization the isi Henry and Anne Paluchi book award honors writers who have excelled in defining the crisis of our times and instructing us, in fact, reminding us of the solutions offered by the award This was made possible by the generous gifts of Henry and Anne Paluchi, two remarkable people who together became an extraordinary force. Anne Paluchi was educated at Barnard College and Columbia University, she taught at the City College of New York and became the first university research professor at St John's University. she in New York she was a scholar of the Renaissance theater of Aesthetics, she was an author and founder and president of the Council of National Literatures.

She also founded the CNL and her husband at the Henry Paluchi International Conference Center in New York. and gentle spirit Henry Paluchi graduated from the City College of New York served in the next US Air Force in World War II and later earned his doctorate at Columbia University a man of action and scholarship Professor Paluchi He was instrumental in the growth of the conservative party in New York as an academic he taught at Iona College Brooklyn College City College Columbia University and St John's University in New York We are grateful for the memory of the Uchis and for the presence of their friends and family tonight Senator Sim malti Claris sario Michael Michael Michelle and Azar Atura we are also very grateful for the support tonight from Athos, a powerful literary and advertising agency, and its co-founder Jonathan bitki.

Now let me tell you about our Honore, a man whose ideas and reporting are at the forefront. Vanguard of a counterrevolution against the

radical

s who have hijacked the institutions of our nation. Christopher Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the Critical Race Theory Initiative at the Manhattan Institute. He is a contributing editor to City Journal and a New York Times bestselling author. so we recognize tonight the cultural revolution of the United States how the

left

and the

radical

how the radical

left

conquered

all its research and activism exposing critical race theory have inspired a presidential executive order and legislation in more than 20 states such as A filmmaker for whom he has directed documentaries, PBS, Netflix, and international television, he has degrees from Georgetown University and Harvard, though in the latter case he certainly resents them and lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and three children.

Tonight he joins us here in the heart of the swamp in Washington. DC please welcome Chris Rufo thank you it's great to be here let's not drop the award we'll tear it up that would be a little embarrassing it's great to be here to be honored for a book this is my first book I've directed films. which is a much more active enterprise, you go to some forgotten territory, spend a year of your life observing something in nature and then spend time huddled in a dark room editing something into shape. On the contrary, the book is actually much easier. and so it's been fun writing this book, but I think I'd like to talk briefly tonight that, you know, a book can be dead or alive, there are many books that are dead spiritually or politically, even if they have some intellectual content, but What I tried to do with this book is make sure that it wasn't just geared towards good professionals, solid research, a good plot line, some. historical value but in reality it was oriented towards active political life eh, that's why the theme of the book is political life.

It is a story, I think, a very important story of the last half century of American political life that analyzes how a radical left-wing political movement that never achieved popularity that never achieved an electoral majority was able to conquer public and private institutions through political measures. extra-parliamentary and what impact that has had on us and that is why the story is a historical story that tells the story of this movement that tells the progression of ideas through institutions is a biographical story I tell the biographical story of four of the main intellectuals from this period, let's see if I remember, it's been a long time since I wrote this book U Herbert maruza Paulo frera Angela Davis and Derek Bell um for those of For those who are not familiar with them, Herbert Maruza was a critical theorist, one of the founders of the discipline of critical theory.

He was also the godfather of the new left in the late 1960s, both in the United States and in European capitals for many years. a brief Blaze of Glory, they were radical students carrying signs that said, you know, uh, Marx, ma maruza, um, those were the, you know, ser, the, the philosopher, the pen, the sword and the prophet, uh, That's how it was conceptualized. a period And if you read his work and study his life, you realize that the conceptual framework that he established in a relatively short period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, about 10 years, is still the dominant intellectual framework the left operates in today, whether you know it or not, many people don't know it.

Paulo FR was a Brazilian Marxist pedagogue. It turns out that he is also the third most cited author in all of the social sciences in the United States. In fact, he is quite influential if you think about it. know, he, he, for example, to give you an idea of ​​the policy of he called the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Cite the coolest solution of the century to give you an idea of ​​who his inspirations were. Angela Davis, of course, is the Black Panther Communist Party. US Party, a sort of 1960s ethno-Marxist radical, uh, that established a specifically ethnic radical political movement that was the precursor inspiration and carbon copy model of the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged half a century later under his tutelage, not only intellectually but directly. and if you read Angela Davis's work or if you read it summarized through my book, you will find that every phrase, every concept, every line of rhetoric, every political tactic, even every aesthetic reference to black lives they matter.

The movement that peaked in 2020 was established by Angela Davis in 1969 in the last uh uh, you know, the person on the list of infamy was Derek Bell, who was the founder or rather the godfather of critical theory of race, so if you look at this as a progression, um, you could see it starting with critical theory, then there's a kind of racial radicalism coalescing on the Harvard Law campus with Professor Derek Bell, who became a figure influential in bringing many of these ideas from the margins to the centers of power and he was also a university activist, many of the techniques that bureaucrats have used to gain power within, for example, universities or government agencies.

We now affectionately know it as Dei, diversity, equity and inclusion. Derrik Bell developed a lot of those techniques in the '80s and '90s. He created this kind of pseudo-radical pessimistic movement that held positions of power and prestige over time, but what I think is really interesting about all of these figures is not their intellectual work if you look at it purely abstractly with the exception of Maruza who is actually a heavyweight intellectual, um, there is something real, uh, even if you don't agree with it, you can't deny that it has a certain depth of thought, a serious scholar, the others are intellectual works, lacking, it is superficial in comparison, but What is interesting about them is that their intellectual work was oriented towards practical power;

It was an intellectual enterprise that had political practice incorporated and in reality they were willing to do the political work of taking those ideas to positions of authority to take hegemony over the institutions and here there were two phases in this revolution, the first not so successful , the second quite successful, the first was an explicit Marxist Leninist Guerrilla Warfare Revolution, the Black Panther Party, when it did not become radical enough, split into the Black Liberation Army. underground weather and this other network of movements um and for those of you, I know everyone here is under 50 um, but for those of us who are a little younger and maybe don't remember it um, I was actually surprised to understand it.

According to research, the intensity level of that period was something like more than 2,000 politically motivated bombings in the United States each year in the early 1970s. Dozens of airlines were hijacked each year, many of which They were for political reasons. agitation and some of these groups were murdering police officers in New York, Georgia and San Francisco, they were bombing the US capital, bombing the Pentagon, bombing police stations, um, and you know, assassinating judges , uh, in an extremely intense period and that and the theory was that we can. take from Ma's cultural revolution we can take from the Marxist Leninist gorillas of Central America we can adopt these tactics and make a revolution in the United States it was an illusion but for a moment they had some hope um and then maybe to give us hope you go from property bombings, assassinations, a kind of gorilla war, up to Richard Nixon's 49 state landslide in about two years, the political culture changed dramatically against this movement, but what happened next, the second phase of this campaign that was more successful was one that was more insidious.

It was not a long march that Chairman Mao made to the central highlands of China, where he regrouped and then destroyed the nationalists through physical violence. It was what they call what the radical German Marxist student Rudy Duka called the Long March through the institutions. This was a peaceful but subversive march. They knew very clearly that we will never gain an electoral majority in the west, especially in the United States. Carl Marx's proletariat, the factory workers in Detroit or the tire factory people in Tennessee or whatever. of the industrial workers were not interested in the revolution Herbert Maruza actually said that the proletarian in the United States is explicitly counterrevolutionary, they are not with us and instead of perhaps reconsidering their policy, he said, well, we need a revolution of the intellect, a revolution of the elites at the top level and then a revolution of the lumpin proletariat in Marxist terminology the people on the margins of society who can be motivated towards physical violence and physical pressure what we see today what is critical theory of Race is an academic discipline that has captured elite institutions with public funding even though in many cases the public never voted for these ideas to be installed, it's not just in California and New York, actually, you know, almost everywhere, it's in Florida, it's in Texas, well, we're dealing with that a little bit, uh, but uh. but the point is that these ideas proliferated and spread through institutions and the real question is how that's the question that I tried to answer in the book, that's the driving question that I think is important when you look at your opponent as your enemy in a certain successful language in the same game you are playing the worst response is to say Well, they are, they are, they are, they are bad, they are stupid, they don't know what they are doing.

It doesn't work, the better question is to ask how they did it and what you can learn from it and then how you can adjust your own policy to respond effectively, so if you read the book, there are two that I tried to put. two layers some people noticed I was very excited about it um but the explicit text is this story but the embedded text is a learning process teaching adaptation assimilation of ideas tactics strategies um because we are fighting in a different environment um if you watch a movie like Mr Smith Goes to Washington, does anyone know that movie, yeah, it's like we're way beyond that, you know, I mean a great movie, very sweet, very moving, um, but we're in trench after trench warfare at the graman style in which Mr.

Smith would be decapitated instantly, you know the poor bastard wouldn't stand a chance, so instead of listening to it with a sense of nostalgia for how things should be or lamenting that they aren't like that, don't They are as they are today. We have to fight in a better way and a big part of metime in the last few years, uh, or rather, during the year that I had to write this book, Jonathan negotiated a big contract for me, got a whole year to write it. book um they wanted to change it in about three months you know originally like Publishers uh uh uh I asked how long do some of the books take oh some of these books in three months like I can't do this in three months It seems impossible to get as much time as possible, right?

You know, but a lot of the time I spent writing this book, I think probably my habit was to get to the office at 8, you know, go on Twitter for about 90 minutes. uh, take a phone call, maybe write the book and then do other things at the end of the afternoon, but as I was writing this book I was thinking about these ideas, looking at these tactics, I was also adapting some of them into some of these very public fights in which I have been involved in over the last few years, starting for the first time.

Every year there is a theme that I stumble upon. the first year, 2021, was the fight against the 20 at the end of 2020, but actually 2021 was the fight against critical race theory, um, if you believe the New Yorker magazine, um, I'm the one what the activist said conservative who invented the conflict over critical race theory and and some of my friends said oh that's horrible that's dishonest um you know you didn't invent the conflict it was you know it's a real thing but in another sense it's not exactly wrong either there's a phenomenon that exists in the world but until you name it until you bring it into the public consciousness until you polarize it and until you turn it into a real political struggle, that is a process of invention in some ways, right, you have a conception of how the world is a conception of how you want the world to be. um, but that doesn't really matter until you take it off the page and into the political arena.

The next year I was doing some reporting on gender theory in schools, gender theory in hospitals exposing some of the um, I mean, kind of Aztec-level human sacrifice. that's happening in children's hospitals, you know, very dark. I did a story, for example, about a doctor in Portland, Oregon, who invented and used a child castration robot. If we like it, you think it's dystopian. You do not know. half of this actually gets a lot worse, and then last year my big campaign was against the eii bureaucracy, so I'd like to tell you a little bit about that campaign in more detail because it's the most recent one, um, and I .

I think it's relevant to this book, we're talking about a book, um, because again, off the page, I wrote the book two years ago about the creation of this Dei bureaucracy, about the threat of this Dei bureaucracy and last year after of the The book was finished, published. I set out to destroy it, that was my explicit goal, so in January of last year I submitted a policy paper with the Manhattan Institute to abolish the Dei bureaucracy and restore colorblind equality in America's institutions. I made an announcement with a very special person Governor Ronda Santis of the State of Florida, we held an event together where we presented the campaign to abolish, destroy and salt the Dei bureaucracy in all the state universities of the State of Florida, start there, start with the bravest leaders there are.

It's always a good place to start and then go state by state just eliminating this, restricting it, preventing it from consolidating further because you have this hegemony problem, you have a kind of ostensible political hegemony in the Florida supermajority. Majority Governor of Texas Governor God forbid you like South Dakota, you know it's huge, you know it's not even a super majority, it's whatever, it's a hyper majority, let's say, but why are your state universities run by Dei bureaucracies and promote race and gender? Theory: you have political control but your opponents have political hegemony, right, it's a different, different, different thing, when we announced this campaign it was denounced by everyone, you know, actually, like many people, this is an evil right-wing plot that You know what you should do.

Whatever it is, I don't know, I don't pay much attention to it, but you know it was seen as a fringe right-wing idea in the summer. The New York Times invited me to publish an opinion piece defending the evolution and conquest of the Dei bureaucracy. some territory uh and by the end of the year we had effectively begun the abolition process in I don't know five or six states taking territory changing institutions moving the law changing incentives creating space for our ideas to replace their ideas um and I think that last point that's important and This is actually the flaw of critical theories and the place where I think we can have the opportunity to overcome them, transcend them and truly replace them as The Guiding Philosophy.

The guiding ideology. Let's not give it too much credit, it's not a philosophy, but critical theories operate on the principle of denial, deconstruction, dismantling, whatever it is, they have these big Latin words, you know, some academics spend a lot of time thinking, you know? how can I say something? very simple, grab the thesaurus, let's find a way to sound smart when we say this, um, but really it all leads to the same thing, they think America is evil, they think our institutions are evil, they think our principles are evil , they think that the economic system is evil, they want to destroy it dot dot dot and then a utopia will spontaneously emerge.

That's kind of like the marusa literally says this and says, "I don't know what it's going to be like after, but after we destroy it." I think something great is going to happen and he was saying that after it was well known what had happened in the communist regimes of the 20th century, which made it a totally responsible position for International Relations, okay, conservatives, you can You may not like this, but at the beginning of the 20th century, 1910, you may almost like it. Forgive people, radical unions, you know, let's say you live in Russia in 1910, it's not exactly a great place to surf, you know, and you could say, well, maybe this ideology has a chance, maybe it's better .

I'm not saying that in the 1970s and 1980s, God forbid, in the 2000s. I mean, let's be realistic about this, but what we have to offer is something that goes beyond denial, it's a concrete principle, a set of principles that we can, we can govern ourselves, and we can borrow. our foundation, the principles that I think still work still offer us a more political kind of morality, uh uh, we found one that we can rebuild and really what I think is that the way I think about my work is, as Dan mentioned, it's the work of the counterrevolution and I I was recently reading Thomas Payne, you know Thomas Payne was not a conservative, um, but he had this beautiful line in a letter he wrote to a French minister.

He said that the American Revolution was not really a revolution, but a counterrevolution to regain lost rights. and freedoms, does that sound familiar in our current situation? The colonists who rebelled over tax law. This is like a heavy tax. What do you think was the tax rate they were sending to the king? to parliament it's 1 to 2% um, you know, they're like we're going to fight you to the death over a 1% tax. We have come, so we become so complacent. I'm from California, it's like 50%, we can make a deal there. but not a penny more than 50% um but I think we have to be very aggressive um I think we would have to learn from our enemies and then encourage our friends uh and what I try to wake up and do every day that I live a little town in Washington state that I don't live in, I say I live in Washington, they say, oh, what a neighborhood you know, do you know Georgetown or whatever, no, no, Washington state, then I'm very taken aback by the stairs, as if you lived where, but what.

What I try to wake up and do every day is put victories on the board because I believe that even a small victory opens up new possibilities. You learn something through the process of trying, maybe failing, but actually I think people say you learn more. Not from your failures, you learn more from your victories and victories create other opportunities, they have this beautiful effect where new veins of possibilities open up new contacts, new information, new resources, new people, um, and we need to increase the pace of our victories, you know, no We don't need five-year strategic plans, we need 50-day strategic plans Victory after Victory after Victory shows people that we may have a demoralized political movement and I think one of the most important things we can do is remoralize it. , I mean REM. moralize it in the sense that you don't know drag queens in kindergarten, that's one way to do it, but I really mean moral in the sense of remotiv people reminding them why we're fighting, reminding them what the problems are , they name the enemy and then call. them to defeat him, I think it is very possible, I think we are in a situation that is more dangerous than ever, but somehow we have enough base and enough chance of success that it is absolutely worth fighting for, so thank you for the award, thank you for coming and we would love to have the discussion and get some questions after the conversation, thank you, thank you Chris, those were wonderful comments and I really want to start where you.

We stopped talking about victories. Have we reached a turning point in the campaign to expose and defeat Dei's critical race theory and other things like that because we've seen these victories in Florida and several other states? Is the enemy now somewhat in retreat? They are there, at least advanced, arrested or perhaps gathering for a counteroffensive at some point, so in the ideal our Republic is supposed to be governed by majority opinion with some institutional limitations, checks and balances, etc., but the founders are actually pretty clear on this, you know, a republic, a democracy is essentially the rule of public opinion, Mavell even said it before that, but we're in a very strange position where you see this locally in Let's say, blue cities and you see this, more broadly, in the red states and then in our country, the public is against a kind of left-wing racialist ideology, the public is against the disruption of the public university system, the public It is against, you know, gender ideology and secrecy. childhood sexual transitions in schools look at any of the survey data, these are all 70% 80% problems, but they are not political, so for me the political work is twofold: one has to dominate public opinion , you have to create the language that you have to introduce into the media cycle and then you have to polarize a strong majority of the public in your favor because the politicians are behind in the indicators, the politicians feel comfortable, when It's a little bit safer overall, state legislators, especially, regulate.

You have to create the conditions so that they don't have courage, strength, principles, all these beautiful things, but in reality it is easier to do something than not to do it, so public opinion is, I think, the basis of this, but then there is a institutionality. problem I think that ideologically we have defeated these ideologies in the sense that if you look at the public polls we are in a strong position against them, so some say oh, so you know the awakening has peaked. Have I ever heard people say that stupidly? columnist Lang, wokeness is PE, we're at the peak of wokeness, you know, after wokeness, um, okay, yes, measured by public opinion, maybe it's at its peak, but not bureaucratically and administratively, when you have people whose now you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people whose livelihoods depend on promotion. these ideas in institutions from kindergarten to second school system Public university system Federal bureaucracy um when they have functional control over the institution the work is not done and mobilizing public opinion does not matter the next step, which is much more difficult although we are making progress there We are also having fun, actually changing the composition of the institutions, changing the leadership of the institutions and replacing the people in the institutions with different people with better ideas, that is much more difficult, so in a way, jokingly and in a way not. jokingly, let's say we need a counterrevolution like a pink slip, uh, we need to have pink paper printers at full production, uh, because ultimately these victories can only become real and meaningful if we return to almost loot style. system when we had control of the government of the political system we had control of the institutions and they advanced our principles, that for me is the most difficult struggle and I think that little by little we are trying to solve it, but it is far from it.

You know that your comments raised a curious paradox: we have many states in which, as you said, suchWe may even have a large majority of conservative legislators or legislators who consider themselves conservative but who are Republicans and yet we see that educational institutions are still dominated by the left in many cases. I also think that I'm a few years older than you and I think about the America that I grew up in, which was a much more conservative America than the one we have today and yet, somehow, a certain complacency or weakness on the part of that A stronger, more virtuous America opened the door to the madness we have seen in the last 20+ years.

I'm curious what you think has created this sense of complacency or this um. forgetfulness among so many conservative people towards the threat they face from a very radical revolutionary left. Well, I would like to do it with a little tongue and cheek, I would like to blame two groups of people on the right. uh, I'd like to blame the Baby Boomers, uh, and I'd like to blame the Libertarians, uh, you know, uh, uh, and I won't throw that out there. I'll explain why, um, the Baby Boomers inherited a world, uh, the conservative Baby Boomers, let's say.

We inherited a world in which we had an existential struggle with communism, we had defeated the Soviet Union, we had relegated it to some kind of forgotten evil period in history that could never be resurrected again and then people did a couple of things, they they withdrew from the economy. life running businesses making money they retired to maybe religious and spiritual life going to church taking care of the people around them good making money take care of your people these are good things but I think they abdicated from the Public Square they did not feel like they did they felt like the threat was over and they were able to relax Angela Davis, you know, all the people they like were still alive, you know, still pushing, they didn't take the defeat of the Soviet Union as a defeat, they took it as a temporary setback, the second group and I can say this because I used to be one of them, maybe I'm a libertarian, uh, uh, libertarians captured the kind of conservative mind with some really harmful ideas, institutional neutrality, if you think about it, I mean, oh, we just have to make sure That the institutions are neutral, you know, that's fine. right, I always ask you, you know, libertarians, you know, okay, that's a good idea, but help me here, name an institution in the history of humanity that has been neutral and it's very difficult to answer because of course it's impossible that institutions are governed according to a set of principles and according to a really supreme principle, politics is a competition so what is at the top administratively we like to have a president but also intellectually morally spiritually even what principle is the principle rector that guides everyone else, the left knows this Dei our institutions are governed by this trio of principles um, what is it for the right?

What do we offer you? Ask conservative college presidents, even conservatives, do you know what the Telos is? What is the final cause of the University? um raise money uh bu bu building new buildings, um, we have a great football team this year, you know, the trustees are very excited about this, institutional neutrality gets you there, institutional neutrality is the unilateral surrender of the UN, that's what it amounts to in practice, so you get conservatives who become the caretakers of their enemy institutions, you know, I'll be at the top, kind of a symbolic figure, um, but everyone underneath is operating with a different set of principles, so there's a whole series of them, but I think that's the most important one and then I like it. in education, um, two things that I think are like, oh my gosh, um, it's such a big problem, uh, we need to teach kids how to think, not what to think, hey, how is that even logically possible?

How do you teach a child to think without any content and then B, if you evaporate all kinds of content decisions, someone else will fill in the ones where you get Howard for your kindergarten class, you know he's not teaching to children and it is also a really irresponsible thing to do, children don't know anything about what you really have. teach them at least for a while what to think is important, this is the value that we're trying to pass on from one generation to the next and the other thing and this is kind of a Bush administration thing and then you know, uh and then , and then subtly, there is this kind of reduction of education to a materials science where the test score line goes up.

One problem is that the test score line never rises as if it had been completely flat for 50 years, but the biggest problem is not that that is the case. a horrible goal for education is to reduce it to the test score line, what you're basically doing is saying we want IQ to go up, you know, which is kind of, I mean, it's kind of uncomfortable to What people talk about, but it's also how to do it, that doesn't really make any sense. This seems like a bad goal. We don't know how to do it. The purpose of education if you go back to Aristotle's book eight of Aristotle's great political statement. about education is in a book called Politics that gives you an idea of ​​how it should be integrated and says something that is completely true: you must educate children in the political regime, you must form their character for the type of society you want.

Are we educating our children in a kind republican set of virtues, habits and principles? You don't sound like a crazy person if you say something like that, huh, and I think we've abdicated on those fronts from your comments. I have been reminded of a rather dark passage in Alexis Toi's Democracy in America, where he predicts that the path to what he calls democratic despotism, where people will voluntarily give up their culture, their freedom,

everything

to some centralized tutelary power, is going to end. . It comes about through what he calls individualism, which sounds like he's criticizing some kind of libertarians in some way, but really what he means is a retreat toward the healthy parts of life that nevertheless leave the public square and politics empty for people to concentrate on The family concentrates on religion, which is good, but to the extent that they withdraw from politics, they then leave politics to be colonized by the power of the despotism.

And I think you're absolutely right too that there's a way in which both the libertarian flaws and also the flaws of the Bame Boomers combined for a whole generation of conservatives, not just among the Boomers but perhaps even among the people of the Generation X like mine, my own generation, there was a feeling among conservatives that once the left was defeated. In the Cold War, once there were other things that stopped, you know, in individual battles, the natural course would reassert itself and people would return to the kind of environment, um, mabery, that had been imagined, you know, in one part previous United States and that was not the case, in fact, you know, just withdrawing from the Public Square and returning to private life, although you could have a nice gated community, you could have a nice, you know, your particular parish It could be fine, the institutions. of higher education, the policy institutions, the federal bureaucracy, all of that was being corrupted, weaponized and used against us and now we see what happened, with that being said, what are the role models or examples that you would consider as examples? ? who have managed to change things for the better, resisting revolutionary movements, who do you look to for historical or contemporary inspiration, historically and contemporary?

Well, I think you can, you can look at the foundation for some historical examples of IAL, absolutely um, and one thing that I do where I where I and this hits the topic that we're talking about we're talking about ideas and power the relationship between the two. tension between the two um there's a tendency I think among people like me who write for a living and think for a living and you know, people tied to the desk, there's this kind of vision of founders that you get that I see in set among many conservatives that is very optimistic, they were distant statesmen, above all, they ruled by the pen throughout the beginning and then you read about the biographies that you read about their lives and it's like no, these were rebels, you know, Samuel Adams, you know, had a trained mob of Liberty men who were tarring and feathering and chasing people. of the city and by force, you know, commanding ships, um, these were people who had the spirit of conflict, they understood politics in its most essential form, it is a form of conflict, so I think you know we would like to have always the conflict. of persuasion, that's the ideal form of conflict in a republic, the first language of the Republic is the language of persuasion, but we're not even really willing to do that, so I think that's one, certainly, inspiration, but then I think of other types of more practical methods.

I look to the left. I think there is probably no book more practically valuable than reading Antonio Grami. And in fact, if you read Grami, the surprising thing is that he sounds very conservative. did you read Grami talking about the importance of the family uh against the type of debauchery and dissolution um did you read Grami about humanistic education reduction of education moving education away from the monotony of training for a kind of mechanical materialist society and elevating the people through the great tradition of the West and you say my God, Antonio Gry is now a reactionary, you know, if I published this today, then, I think you have to look at the winners too, right, you know, as examples , so maybe it sounds kind. strange maybe it sounds a little weird and you have to separate the bad ideas obviously like you it's a selection process but look at the last century you have to study the winners and I think one thing I think about in this question right now it's uh, today the United States has a larger government measured as a percentage of GDP than communist China.

I lived in China, so I know it's not an exact comparison. They have problems. There are many more. We have a lot more freedoms here, but in an important sense, you know, we have a state bigger than communist China, you know, that should tell you where we are as a country and raise your thinking to a new level of seriousness, which surprised you most about study figures like Grami. or Sea crosses, what did you find in them that you perhaps didn't expect to find? You always know there is a type of genre. The book I wrote is not something new.

People have been talking about the Long March through the institutions. I've been talking about a phrase I don't use in the book deliberately called cultural Marxism. I didn't use it because it's a little inflated, it's a conflicting word. I didn't want you to know what aluminum foil is. Hat um, but then the new Republic published this massive article by Christopher Rufos, cultural Marxist conspiracy theory and

everything

about cultural Marxism and then I politely pointed out oh that's interesting, show me where in the text I call it cultural Marxism um , I think the lady was quite angry. uh, but uh, but whatever it is, it's not a new story, right, I think it's a deepening, I think it's grounded in a new way, but you get a certain genre of conservative book that treats these people as villains of one-dimensional evil cartoons, which was surprising. me and what I really try to do is look at it from another perspective, what made these people so fascinating, what made them so charismatic, what made them take people from Elite America and risk everything to fight for their ideals and me.

I think that's a much better way to approach it, so, um, I had left-wing Riders, uh, like from very left-wing magazines, you know, gosh, you know, I liked your book, you know, um, but uh, but I think that one thing you can do is dismiss People also like that you're going to spend a year of your time interacting with people's lives and thinking about them and reading about them. It's like you shouldn't hate them. Shouldn't you constantly dismiss them or have a sense of smugness about them? So you should see them in three-dimensional form and uh, I put myself in the place of these milu, right, I like, well, there is something here that is attractive, something here that is idealistic, something here that is utopian, something here that is inspiring, uh. and then of course they are like monsters, they are evil, their ideology is responsible for the death of many people, that is also the obvious point, but the less obvious point is that you know what was good about them and me.

I think that's something that fascinated me during the process, Chris. You'll be very amused to know that recently at Modern AG Journal.com we had an interview with left-wing feminist Naomi Wolf, who, you know, is somewhat unusual among feminists. These days, she is very critical of today's censorious and far-left tendencies and actually used the phrase cultural Marxism next time you know the new Republic wants to come after someone's phrase, they should leave Chris alone Rufo, can you, can you talk. about Naomi's wolves, so yeah, and that's something thatyou know, it's like cultural Marxism is his phrase, if you look at even academic scholarship in the 1990s, there's a Maruza scholar, I think he was at UCLA, a great resource, he published all of Marcus's works. collected works, letters, correspondence.

I drew quite a bit in this job. I don't remember the guy's name, but he's in the footnotes somewhere and I'm reading his articles and looking at them. He's like the son of a guy from 1995, he's left-handed. like you knew it was critical theory cultural marxism western marxism those were their categories and then they became some kind of nonsense uh oh it's a right-wing conspiracy theory it's an anti-semitic conspiracy theory it's like you're what you know I just pass a All I I I you probably know that I'm the only best-selling author who writes about critical race theory, so I know something about it.

I've sold more books than the critical race theorist, which is a great thing. um uh you know, but it's like it has nothing to do with heh, what are you guys crazy about? You know, this doesn't make any sense, but I think the important thing is that maybe there is an important lesson for all of us and maybe an important lesson to close and and give some reflection language matters language matters it is vitally important how we speak now you know um and it's kind of a test of character not a test of character in the test that kind of virtue but it's a kind of character rather that's a better way to put it we need sophisticated people who understand language that can make sense. , that has intellectual strength and that has emotional strength.

There is this idea that we should know conservative, as you have heard this, this is like neutrality. all these problems that I have, the only thing that drives me crazy is that you know, facts don't care about your feelings, you heard this, it's very cocky to say it, you know that and I love Ben Shapiro, he became famous for that and I. I saw Ben last night. I love Ben. I don't criticize him at all. He's a great communicator, but I think that's completely backwards. I think the facts really, I don't care about your feelings, no, yeah, the F, the fact, I don't care about your feelings much more, so what is it, you have it backwards.

Feelings don't care about your feelings. Your feelings don't care about the facts. Have you ever persuaded your wife through a rigorous IR logical presentation? Know? No, has, has, a car salesman, ever sold you a Ferrari, uh, getting on your nerves about the details of the piston construction or whatever, I don't know. I know the Ferrari gives you a feeling because it's a beautiful car and when you drive it you feel powerful and that's why we have to be contrary to this notion of having the strongest argument and the most logic, we have those things I think.

We need to have a language that moves people um uh language that ignites people um and a language that takes people out of the realm of passive existence and into politics which means conflict which means controversy um and what it means to fight temperamentally I like to fight uh it's very suitable for me, but we need more people who are willing to go out and fight these things and I think the Genesis of all this is strong and persuasive language and that's why it's a great honor I won a prize for a book. I put a lot of words in the book.

They cut about 40,000 words from the manuscript. It would have been even bigger, but I think this makes it very readable and I'm so It's an honor and I'm grateful to be recognized in this way and from some great competitors this year, and I really appreciate it, thank you Chris, so we have time to some audience Q&A sessions and there are a lot of questions, let's start down here with the gentleman up front and we have a microphone coming down and please identify yourself before you ask your question. Good evening William Kimman Compass Legal Group. Well, I'll get to the point.

I think that's the principle that I think we should learn from. in recent years and U the same line with Chris' work is that we cannot be afraid to use power, but I specifically want to ask an exercise of power. I'm really curious about Chris' opinion, the anti-Tik Tock bill to me is Hey, let's take this by the horns, let's exercise the power, but I think it's dividing the conservative movement a little bit, so I should know your opinion, Yeah. I did not read the bill, so I cannot comment specifically on the text. I don't know if it's well written, poorly written, that things do matter, but as a general principle, you know, this is another blind spot of the free market.

I'm a capitalist, you know, I like to get paid. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I like creating value in the world, but the idea that you can allow a foreign adversary unlimited access to your country, with no terms or conditions, no reciprocity, and no restrictions, is crazy. I lived in China for a while. year in 2008 2009 um and I noticed something very interesting Facebook I don't think Twitter was invented yet, but it existed like Facebook, there were other social media platforms, Myspace, there were other social media platforms that were popular in the United States and they were banned in China, but what the Chinese did was copy them.

I don't remember what it was called at the time, but you have a website that looks identical to Facebook, but it's a Chinese website that they like. You know, Massacre, the intellectual property, I mean, it's like. Rampant intellectual property theft. If you have an American company that is in China at the time, I think you have to give a Chinese partner a 51% stake, uh, 51%, why would they choose 51 and not 49? Oh, because then you have complete control over the company and So I think that even on the basis of the free market, even looking at Adam Smith, Adam Smith was a protectionist, but even if you say that free trade in general is good, you have the principles of Paro and, you know, Ricardo Ricard in economics, okay.

I agree, but you have to have some kind of reciprocity and if it's an adversary, first and foremost you need to protect your people, so, you know, I say just get rid of it, why not further What does the bill do? it has to be transferred to US ownership. I think it's some kind of joke. I've spent a year in China with the idea that they own Tik Tock and then if the accountants and lawyers change, you already know the address of the corporation. and the ownership structure that they're not going to have the same access is crazy, you have to be naive to think that they're going to have access to what's included in it, you know, um, and then, yeah, yeah, yeah, the argument is that the PCC can I don't have access to a platform that is on all of our phones.

You just have to say no more and then maybe say under conditions that you allow all of our social media apps to work in China. That seems to be a prudent middle ground. So I see a question from Michael Maybach and then we'll go to the front, so go ahead, thank you, thank you for doing this tonight, so I think one of the things that a lot of us run into given that we're in a presidential year we have to Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump and I'll be socializing with someone and suddenly we split into sides: are you against Trump or Biden? and these emotions come out on both sides and I say well what policies you want to talk about, it's very difficult to talk about policies, is it typical in the United States or are we in a position now where we just can't talk about policies because of personality, yeah Yes, no one, people don't care. about policies, they care about people's personalities, um drama, uh, and that's, look, that's it, I mean, and and you know, Trump has been a media star for 50 years, I mean, the guy is a phenomenon in that sense and is very polarizing for obvious reasons.

Um, but I don't know, I've managed to avoid those conversations. If I'm like on a plane and people ask me what I do, I say I run a private investigation company. You know, I made a couple of mistakes in the past. where, like, oh, I'm in politics, you know it's like I would never make that mistake again. avoid those conversations, don't get into those arguments, um and then surround yourself with friends, and that's the best way to do it, hello. I'm Bill Mower and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's 8th district and I have 23 seats that I'm unlikely to win, but I'm fighting the good fight.

I must say that I am a little older. to the Generation to us every day of the week and my question is, you know, thank you, thank you to isi for all the good work that you do, putting good ideas in the hands of the next generation, you know, and, thank you, thank you to Christopher for his his great job, you know, I love the fact that he wants to, not only be a warrior and burn the bridge between the left and the right, but to run over the bridge first and salt the earth on the left side, you know, but you already know.

The fact is we are losing today and we are losing today because we are not Ronald Reagan enough we are not optimistic we need optimistic leaders on the right what can be done to fix that? yeah, no, no, I don't agree, I actually disagree with almost everything you said um and I'll explain why um you know uh you assume we're the majority um I'm not sure that's the case as it was in In the Nixon era, Nixon gave a great speech about the silent majority, those who don't shout, those who don't shout, you know, I'm a Nixon superfan, I love Nixon, you know it was definitely true, so I'm not sure. . it's true today and then the idea that you know, you get in people's faces, stop being so polite, stop being silent.

I'm also not convinced that that's a good thing, um, you can be, you know, rude to people, you can attack people you can be vituperative towards. people, but if they control the institutions and have the power, you are not really doing anything, so don't confuse noise with effective political action. I'm almost never mean to people. I don't look for fights. I'm not involved in dramas. As much as I can, I try not to get too personal, although sometimes you know I'm tempted and I do it, it's a weakness, but I actually think that then you can descend into a kind of tabloid politics that we've seen many times. that lately, in reality, we have to be very lucid, very intelligent, very deliberate.

I think one of the best things about the right is also the standards, you know, maintaining some standards, to the extent that we can, and then I think. Optimism is also not necessary and maybe not even desirable, you know, I think if you know, I think it's a misinterpretation of rean. I mean, Reagan was like a flame-throwing radical, he wasn't above it all, you know, uh. the great communicator, I mean, you know, even conservatives didn't like him at the time, a lot of conservatives thought he was too extreme, too radical, too polarizing, so we've looked back, but I think we have people who are. .

In a sense, too optimistic, they become naive. His optimism taken to extremism becomes naive. So I think we need a balance between pessimism and optimism that is oriented towards seriousness of purpose, which seems to me to be something that is missing more than anything. sense of seriousness and understanding of the true nature of politics um uh and uh and I think look, the right shouting and seeing people's faces is always a loss for us, the left can burn down a city and the media will cover them. If there's a bad person in the crowd at a conservative rally or something, it bothers everyone, so I think we'd try to avoid it.

Answer a question to the woman in the back, yes, yes, oh, I'm sorry you have long hair. long hair, yeah, I can't wait to tell my parents about this, that's so funny, you look, you look, long hair as a person b. I just see long hair and assume yes and what your pronoun is. Okay, I'm just going to pretend not to. It happens, so okay, okay, let's get the goals out, um, anyway, I'm a big fan of yours. I'm probably the youngest person in the room. I'm only 18 years old. I am in the last year of high school.

Currently go to the old TC Williams across the river in Alexandria and it has been completely captured by, for lack of a better term, self-absorbed Marxist. I remember last year I was walking through the hallways at my school and like, um one of the teachers put a poster of one of the philosophers you mentioned, actually, Angela Davis on the wall. I'm like what you know, I was like this is America, why is this happening? And another example of this happened was you. you know um uh I was in geometry class and it was June last year of course um uh pride month uh Pride before fall and I remember my geometry teacher had put this whole thing like this whole milu of just U just rain, let's call it is rainbow content and I was thinking to myself, you know, I don't think transgenderism has anything to do with geometry.

I don't know what this is here, so my question is what would be your biggest advice for someone like me who is pretty much stuck in the public school system? I have another six months and then I'll be out, but what.Not six months, two and a half months. I keep losing track of time, but anyway, what would be your biggest effort? Some advice for someone like me who is in a public school, what can I do to reduce the suffering a little? Yeah, a couple of things and I think this is a great question and I'm actually very optimistic about it. young people I did an event two nights ago at a far-right AV on guard Art Space in New York City with hundreds of people, mostly young people with pseudonymous Twitter accounts and radical ideas, and it was galvanizing and it was like a scene.

In New York it's like a cool scene, you know? What's really interesting is that there is this phenomenon, if you look at the organizing principles of the left primarily based on race and gender, we have a kind of racial ideology, racial radicalism, racialist ideology and then we have a kind of gender ideology Gender theory type of non-binary queer trans identities Etc. This is like the first youth subculture in history that is not driven by young people but by adults. I mean, really, really, um, and that's why I think there's a rebellion in this country, if you look especially at young men, they're extremely frustrated with what's happening, they have this rebellious energy, um, and uh , please yourself, you know you are young, it is a time of rebellion and I would say organize a small group of people. having two friends three friends five friends 10 friends God forbid that's enough to create a BL block um a kind of ideological block uh within a small institution like a high school and then you don't have to put up with it anymore seriously and if the the teacher is talking, push him and then push, ask questions, ask difficult questions, this sounds bad and maybe not a conservative temperament, but I think it is justified in this case, embarrass your teacher in front of others, make sure do not do it. that again um I really think that um and uh and then they take the hits.

A lot of people say, oh well, I should just shut up and write the college paper that the professor wants to get an A on. Much more impressed with the kid who eats the sea and doesn't compromise his principles, so thank you sir, that one It was a great question, we're almost out of time, but the conversation will continue with Chris Rufo's work, including his next book and in the modernage pages on modern Ag journal.com and thank you all for coming tonight. I especially want to thank AOS PR for sponsoring tonight's event and also the Henry and Anne Paluchi Foundation for all their sponsorship and support of the Conservative Book of the Year Award. thank you

chris

, thank you