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The anti DEI MAGA activist Christopher Rufo
00:27:14
Chris Rufo has been at the heart of U.S culture wars.
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Host
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Host
it would be hard to find a campaigner who's done more to influence the cultural changes that Donald Trump has introduced at the White House than Chris Ruffo. He is perhaps the most influential activist on the MAGA right. He spent the last few years taking on particularly diversity initiatives in the U.S. including a campaign to oust the former Harvard president Claudine Gay, a campaign that was eventually successful. He is more though, than simply a MAGA activist. He is also a thinker about the future of the right and he is concerned about the direction of the movement and what will happen to it after Donald Trump leaves office. Welcome to AmericasT AmericasT AMERICAST from BBC News. You hear that sound? Oh, I think when I hear that sound it reminds me of money.
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Chris Ruffo
We didn't start this war, but under
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Host
President Trump we are finishing it.
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Ad Narrator
This is a big cover up and
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this administration is engaged in it.
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Chris Ruffo
This guy has Trump derangement syndrome. I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.
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Host
I am delighted to be joined by Chris Ruffo is on the line now. Chris, hello.
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Chris Ruffo
Good to be with you.
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Host
I want to start by getting you to lay out what the Chris Ruffo agenda is. What is the America that Chris Ruffo wants to see? What does it look like?
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Chris Ruffo
Well, there's a kind of near term answer and a longer term answer, but in the near term the campaigns that I've been working on for the last five or six years have been broadly categorized as anti woke. And so what I'd like to see is the dewokification of America. So getting rid of left wing racialist ideology within our institutions, dismantling the gender cult within our institutions, and moving America back towards those great principles of freedom, equality and the republic, and obviously diversity,
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Host
equity and inclusion this kind of catch all term that refers to efforts made not just in the public sector, but very much in the private sector as well. I suppose, as supporters of it would say equalize things. That is where you have set your sights in recent years.
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Chris Ruffo
Yeah, that's right. So I led the campaign to abolish dei. We did it in the state of Florida with Ron DeSantis. We did it then in 20 states around the country, red states. And then, of course, President Trump dismantled the DEI bureaucracy within the federal government on day one of his administration. But the question about equalizing or equality is really the key one. And as I see it, you can really have two principles of equality that are in tension with one another. You can have equal treatment as individuals, recognizing that that will result into disparate group outcomes, or you can have unequal treatment of individuals to try to equalize group outcomes. And so my reading of the history of our country, those deep principles of The Declaration, the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights act, it leads us to say that we reject equalizing different treatment of people based on their identity or ancestry. And we need to get back to treating people equally under the law, no matter their sex, et cetera.
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Host
I want to get to some of the counterarguments in just a second. But before we get there, how successful have you been? How much of this battle, this war, I suppose it is, have you successfully won? Do you think so?
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Chris Ruffo
I think we've defeated DEI ideologically as a matter of public opinion, but we haven't defeated DEI institutionally as a matter of policy, in particular in the private sector, in places like universities, which in the second Trump administration have changed the name of their diversity offices. They've tried to hide their discriminatory policies, but they haven't had the wholesale institutional gutting that I think needs to happen in order for us to move beyond this discriminatory racialist ideology.
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Host
How do you deal then with those who would say, we understand the outcome that you want? Chris RUFFO. But we think that to get to the outcome, which is everyone being able to flourish in a properly fair society, to get there, you are going to have to address the wrongs that were done through the many, many decades, the wrongs that have been done to groups of people in order to make sure that people from those groups have the same opportunities as everyone else. And that, and only that, is what DEI is about.
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Chris Ruffo
Well, I mean, it's a great story, right? And I would share some of the premises in the sense of acknowledging the history of racial injustice in the United States, obviously, slavery, segregation, these are ugly parts of American history. And thankfully, those principles that the founders laid down in the 1760s helped guide us towards transcending those systems. The question is what to do about it now. And I reject this idea that we are forever tethered towards treating people unequally because we treated people unequally in the past. And I actually think the system that is most just is, of course, to acknowledge the history of the United States, but. But then to move towards a system where everybody is treated equally as an individual. Everyone gets a fair shake. And I think more or less we're there in the sense that most Americans, and in particular Americans who run institutions, who dispense opportunities, who have large companies, truly want to do the right thing. They want to give people a fair shot. They want to give, you know, special or careful consideration to, say, job applicants who have emerged from difficult life circumstances, whatever racial background they might be. But the system that we have now is actually perversely not achieving that kind of story that the left would like to say. And in fact, you have someone like the former president of Harvard, Claudine Gay. And then, so you're asking, well, this person is racially black, of African descent, so maybe this person deserved some special treatment or special favors in her rise to the Harvard presidency. But then you realize, wait a minute, she's not the descendant of American slaves, she's Haitian by origin, and, and in Haiti, she's part of the kind of ruling class family. They're concrete magnates, they're mega millionaires, they're the most privileged people on the planet. She went to Phillips Exeter Academy and Stanford and Harvard. And so what actually ends up happening in this perverse system of DEI is that people who don't fit that category, that kind of category that they would like to have, you believe don't actually get the advantage. But people who are already in that privileged stratum kind of hoard the opportunities for themselves. And so even under dei's own terms, I think the system is entirely unjust.
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Host
Claudine Gay is a good example, though, of another justification that people give for dei, which is that you can't have an equal society if there aren't people at the top of it who look like you, who can enthuse you when you're young, whether you're a little girl or a little black girl perhaps, and you look and you see there aren't many university bosses who are black women. Well, suddenly there. There is one. And this idea that by having people in those positions who represent these groups, actually, that is working. Never mind the individual justice, it's working to make society better.
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Chris Ruffo
Yeah, I mean, again, it does feel like a nice story, but if you actually interrogate the specifics, it falls apart very quickly. And so we'll take Claudine Gay as an example. Under that kind of story that many people tell, you have to have representation. And Claudine Gay representing people of African descent at Harvard is a triumph because it shows to everyone else that African Americans, or black Americans more broadly, can occupy those positions at the highest stratum of academia. Look, all things being equal, fine. If someone truly has the merits, if someone is truly the best candidate, if someone is truly capable and qualified of leading these institutions, that person should not be held back, of course, by race. And in fact, what I discovered is that she had plagiarized her academic papers throughout her rise in academia. And so what you end up happening is not this triumphant story of representation, but you have the ugly story of dei, which is that DEI elevates people who are not equipped. And even if you are in favor of dei, you have to acknowledge that the ultimate story is that DEI unfairly elevates the incompetent. It's not a good story, no matter which camp you're in. And my solution, which is to say, elevate people purely based on their accomplishments and their. And their potentialities, would never get you that result. It would ensure that the people who rise to the top, whatever race they are, you know, deserve to be there.
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Host
I wonder if there is another issue, though, here, which is that if, as you claim, public opinion is on your side, how did all of this stuff come about? Where did it come from, if not the American people?
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Chris Ruffo
Yeah. It does, of course, originate in the popular politics of the mid-1960s. And so, as America was emerging from the system of segregation in the South, Congress, with bipartisan majority, passed the Civil Rights act of 1964, signed into law by American president Lyndon Johnson the following year. Johnson, I think, with good intentions, wanted to realize this vision of equal treatment under the law. But he also wanted to accelerate the progress for African Americans seeking employment, in this case, in the federal government. And so he passed it. He wrote an executive order beginning what was known at that time as affirmative action.
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Quote Speaker
But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying, now you are free to go where you want and do as you desire and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberating bringing up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others and still justly believe that you have been completely fair, essentially putting
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Chris Ruffo
the thumb on the scales to redress some of those historical wrongs. But affirmative action, even among supporters, was never supposed to be a permanent policy. And in fact, that's more or less what it turned out to be for the next 60 plus years. And it expanded at each turn. And affirmative action then became dei, which was a vision as we have to have this until all outcomes are equalized throughout society so that everyone is a kind of rubber stamp image of, of everyone else. And of course that's impossible. Different groups have different cultures, different aptitudes, different behaviors at the, at the mean, you know, averaging them out. And so you have this permanent system of racial discrimination. And fortunately, President Trump rescinded that executive order that has been in place since, since 1965 and saying, you know, even the proponents of affirmative action said it was a temporary measure to kind of get the, get the process of racial progress going. America doesn't need it. There's not widespread discrimination. In fact, we've had widespread anti white discrimination in the United States, in the public and private sector now for decades.
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Host
Really?
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Quote Speaker
Really.
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Host
Would you go so far as to say that? Because that's an interesting one. Is it? Because a lot of people say of all of this, well, it's just white people trying to keep the privileges that they've always had. You would go so far as to say, would you, that white people in modern America are persecuted?
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Chris Ruffo
I think persecuted is probably a little bit strong as a verb, but I would say that they have faced systemic anti white discrimination. And I've documented this with hundreds of stories in universities, in government, in schools and corporations, in NGOs, virtually every kind of institution in the United States and every Fortune 500 company I did a report on this, had adopted in the period after 2020 discriminatory policies, explicitly discriminatory against whites in favor of other groups. And look, whites are not victims, Whites are not oppressed. Whites are not persecuted. I think that is too far, but it is without a doubt. Institutions have been systematically anti white as a matter of policy.
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Host
Do you have a feeling now when you look at universities in particular, that a corner has been turned?
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Chris Ruffo
I think a small corner has been turned, yes. And you know, I have good contacts at high level administration and many universities around the country. And certainly the universities have felt the pressure, they've felt the sting. They are admitting, at least quietly, that they went way too far in the period after 2020. And universities are adapting to the new reality of public opinion and administration. They're dismantling some of their programs at the edges. But my fear, and of course, acknowledging that there are many great people in the White House doing good work, my fear is that the universities are now chastened. They're not expressing as volubly their core ideologies, critical race theory, gender ideology, et cetera, but fundamentally, they haven't changed, and fundamentally they won't change until the structure of the university itself feels an enormous amount of pressure. And unfortunately, after some very bold moves in the first hundred days of the Trump administration, that initiative seems to have come grinding to a halt. And I'm not optimistic about its chances or prospects, especially as we approach the midterms.
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Host
One of the things that really interests me about you, Chris, and I've followed what you've been saying online and the various outlets that you have in the last few years, is that you're obviously critical of the Democrats, and we've just heard you being critical of Democrats, and you believe a kind of set of things that I think fit you into a kind of broader club, as it were, but you're not always fully signed up to everything that that club believes in. And so much of politics, American policy in particular at the moment, is kind of this sense of you're either in or you're out, isn't it? And when it comes to the broader right, I'm really interested by the way in which you see, I think I'm right in saying you can tell me what you really think, that the differences between those on the online right who are kind of crazier and those who are less crazy, and I suppose those who are non political and those who are political, tell us about that.
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Chris Ruffo
Look, it's a basic question of principle and character in my mind. And so I have what I believe. Of course, it changes over time, sometimes slowly, sometimes more quickly. But I try to understand what are my principles, and then I try to advance my principles through the political process and then hopefully into the laws and institutions of the United States. And in many cases, I'm able to persuade people who already mostly agree with me. That's happened with governors and legislators, the president of the United States on critical race theory, gender ideology, dei, higher education reform. But there are, of course, places where my principles come into conflict with certain factions on the right. And in my view, the honorable thing is to actually then hash it out and try to persuade people to your side and Try to point out or even marginalize those who you believe are doing damage to the overall cause. And in this case we can talk specifics. There are parts of the right that have gone full bore, especially over the past year, into conspiracy, into antisemitism, into this kind of self perpetuating online radicalism. I don't think that's a productive way. I've kind of stepped out against some of these ideas, some of these personalities, and that's how it should be. And in fact, we've learned this lesson over the last 10 years on the left. If you let the radicals take over, you don't draw a line, you don't protect the institutions, you don't make sure that you're being a productive political movement, you're going to run yourself into the ground. And so I'm happy to fight on principle in any direction and I'm happy to suffer the consequences one way or another, because that's what politics is about. And if you're just, you know, putting your finger up into the wind and following any popular thing, I think that that reflects poorly on your character.
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Host
But, but, so that's you. But does the movement more generally have to do something, have to think more deeply about where it goes? And I'm thinking, you know, people have heard of Candace Owens, obviously Tucker Carlson in recent years has, has gone into this area. There are other kind of very big figures, aren't there, on the right. Does the Republican Party, do you think, in the run up to the next presidential election, say, have to be clearer about what is and what isn't acceptable, as you say you are, personally?
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Chris Ruffo
Yeah, I think, yes. I think the whole ecosystem of the right, the media, figures, the think tanks, the political operations, have to resolve this question. There's no ignoring it. There's no running away from it. It is a question that is out there. It has to be discussed. But there's two reasons for optimism from my point of view. The first reason is historical. This impulse has always been there on the ride. And if you look at the example of Richard Nixon, who ran for president and governor and president and president again, you know, between the 50s and the 70s, a large span of time, one of the questions he had to deal with was how to engage with the John Birch Society, which had some of that paranoid conspiratorial temperature.
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Host
Yeah, just explain what the John Birch Society was, because that's a really interesting analogy, but just tell us a bit more about it.
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Chris Ruffo
The John Birch Society was a more radical right wing social movement that had huge membership and enthusiasm in the United States. And they believed that, you know, Eisenhower was part of a communist infiltration. They believed that communists were putting fluoride in the water to, as part of a scheme to subvert the United States. But they had this kind of conspiratorial ferment. And Nixon was able to subtly sideline the worst tendencies and the worst leadership of the organization, while welcoming in the rank and file members of the organization who might have been generally right, generally patriotic, generally good hearted, but had been mistaken on one policy or another. And so Nixon was able to thread the needle in a very sophisticated way. And I see the same thing happening right now, institutionally, on the right, behind the scenes. The leaders of the Republican Party, leaders of our institutions, leaders, leaders of our media corporations, we're all talking with one another about this problem, trying to figure out how to sideline some of the worst and most self destructive tendencies, but bringing along the people who again, are otherwise good people who might be simply misled. And so I think that's gonna be the tactic moving forward. We've done it in the past, I think we can do it again.
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Host
I don't think Donald Trump's going to be part of that, is he? I mean, you're not suggesting that he is, I guess, but. But this is what comes after Trump.
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Chris Ruffo
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, it feels like there's never going to be an after Trump because Trump is such a huge personality. I think even in his post presidency he will likely draw serious attention. And so I actually think that Trump will be important. I think Marco Rubio is kind of now representing a more establishment. And then JD Vance is representing the politics of trying to thread the needle in a Nixonian way to say, hey, we need to have a big tent, we need to have everyone on board, but we also need to enact the policies that we were elected to enact. And so it will be very interesting to see how these personalities, maybe a few others, Ron DeSantis, of course, I think is on the sidelines, waiting and seeing what happens. It's going to be a fight for the future of the conservative movement and all of these personalities are gonna be vying for it. And I'm excited just as someone who loves politics, who loves the game, even if some of these trends are disturbing to me, I'm very excited for the future to see what happens.
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Host
But it's interesting, you are saying very clearly that the way to get to the future and to get to a Republican future and future Republican presidencies, et Cetera, is not to pander to those on the fringes, the online fringes of the right. You're very certain about that.
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Chris Ruffo
I think that's right. Although I would nuance it in a kind of Nixonian manner. You don't want to pander to their worst tendencies. You actually want to draw a hard line. For example, there's a conspiracy theory by Candace Owens and others that Israel assassinated Charlie Kirk. This is kind of factually totally untethered from reality. It's harmful to the political cause of the right more broadly. It degrades the ability of people who listen to these ideas to actually think clearly, think effectively. And so for something like that, you have to draw a hard line and you have to say, these people are out of the circle, these people are, who are, who are promoting these kind of ideologies have to be relegated to the sidelines. But then you also have to say, and try to bring on board perhaps millions of people who have indulged or been duped into believing some of these ideas. And so you have to say, look, if you're curious about these ideas, if you believe this, here's the truth, here's a better way, here's how to be more effective. And so you have to simultaneously sideline the kind of poisonous peddlers of these ideas while giving an off ramp to everyday people who might tune in for 30 minutes every night to their favorite YouTube channels or Twitter feeds or whatever it might be. And you have to actually bring those people along and you have to say in this Nixonian way, your ideas are wrong, but you may not, but you're not a bad person, you're one of us. Your intentions are good, you're a patriot. Here's a better way. And I think you have to do both. You can't simply condemn everyone as evil or deluded or stupid. You have to give people a path towards achieving the things that they really want in life. And if you can demonstrate a way for people to be effective, I think you undercut the, the, the attraction of those conspiracy theories and you give people a better way.
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Host
Slightly sideline point, but it's fascinating to hear you use the term Nixonian in such a positive way. He's having quite a moment at the moment, isn't he? On the American right.
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Chris Ruffo
Look, I've been so called Nixon maxing for a long time. It's been a lonely couple years advocating for a renaissance of Richard Nixon. A couple years ago I was on the Bill Maher show and I told the mostly liberal LA audience that President Nixon would be vindicated by 2030. They laughed, they hissed, they booed. But now, just this week, you had an article in the Wall Street Journal that Gen Z is embracing Nixon mania. And so I do feel like as one of the people in this movement of Nixon supporters, Nixon fans, we're starting to really rehabilitate Richard Nixon, who was one of our great presidents, our great personalities, our great Americans. And we are, we are looking at Nixon in a new light and we're loving what we're seeing.
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Host
Such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for sparing us the time and let's hope we can talk to you again. Well, certainly before the next presidential election, if you can spare us the time because it is so fascinating and it's going to be fascinating to see on both sides of the aisle, as it were, the Republican and Democrat, where we end up after the midterms, I guess.
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Chris Ruffo
Yeah, it's going to be fascinating. I appreciate your time as well.
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Host
Okay. Before we go, it is worth remembering that the situation with Claudine Gay played out in the fallout from the October 7 murders in Israel and the subsequent criticism that universities in America, at least some of them, were not handling antisemitism on their campuses as well as they should. It was criticism of the way that the university bosses, including Claudine Gay, responded to those concerns, as well as the plagiarism allegations that were made by Chris Ruffo, that ultimately actually led her to stand down as Harvard president. This was at the start of 2024. At the time, she said resigning would allow Harvard to focus on the institution rather than any individuals. She also said she'd been subjected to personal threats and racial animus in the buildup to her resignation. Harvard didn't explicitly reference the plagiarism allegations at the time of her resignation, but they said Claudine Gay had acknowledged what they call missteps and she'd taken responsibility for those. They also condemned what they called racist vitriol that had been aimed at her. We've reached out to Harvard. We've also reached out to her for comment. And if they do talk about it, well, we'll be sure to get back to to you with what they say. That's it for now. Bye bye. Thank you for listening to another episode. If you liked what you heard, why not subscribe to AmericaSt on BBC Sounds or indeed wherever you get your podcasts. That way you will be notified every time we publish a new episode. We also want to hear your thoughts, your feedback, questions, anecdotes ideas so do keep them coming in. We do look at every single bit of correspondence that we get. So you can email us americastbc.co.uk the WhatsApp is 443-301-239480 and you can get involved in the AmericasT Discord server. The link for that is in the description and you can also watch us on YouTube. You just search for ameracast. Until next time. Bye bye.
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