← Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Anti-D.E.I. Crusader Who Wants to Dismantle the Department of Education
01:04:41
Christopher Rufo brought the term "critical race theory" into mainstream conversation. Now, the anti-DEI activist is bringing his critiques of education to the White House. In this episode, Ross explores Rufo's mission to make universities feel "existential terror."
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- [00:00]
Ross Douthat
The last thing you want to hear when you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options. Which is why with USAA auto insurance, you'll get great service that is easy and reliable, all at the touch of a button. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply. Hey listeners, it's Ross Douthit. We're hard at work developing my new show, which is going to be called Interesting Times, a reference to the curse disguised as a blessing, or. Or maybe the blessing disguised as a curse. May you live in interesting times, which we are. And our first few episodes will be coming out soon. But before then, I wanted to reshare the interviews that started it all, a set of conversations that attempt to map out the new political order with some of the people at the forefront. So enjoy and please subscribe to Interesting Times wherever you get your podcasts from New York Times Opinion. I'm Ross Douthit. So this week we're going to talk about DEI diversity, equity and inclusion. A vision of social justice that took elite America and all its institutions by storm during Donald Trump's first term. And a vision, as almost everyone has noticed, that is now in full scale retreat. In part, that's because of the actions of the Trump White House itself, which is doing everything it can to eradicate the DEI programs and initiatives that proliferated inside the federal bureaucracy over the last 10 years. But it's not just the Trump White House. Companies like Google and Walmart and Paramount and Bank of America are also shedding diversity related efforts that they had celebrated just a few short years ago. And even universities, a bastion of progressive ideology, are suddenly backing away a bit or treading carefully. Almost all of this shift happened because of the work of just one man, arguably the most important activist in American politics since the days of Ralph Nader and Phyllis Schlafly. That man is our guest today, Christopher Ruffo, and we're going to be talking to him about how he won for now, what it means for the second Trump administration, and what his vision is for America after dei. Chris Ruffo, welcome to the show.
- [02:42]
Christopher Rufo
It's good to be with you.
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Ross Douthat
So I imagine that a big part of our audience first heard of you around the same time that they first heard the term critical race theory, an academic term of art that your activism successfully adapted and used to frame, really the whole DEI debate. And we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the Trump administration, a lot of other stuff, but I want to understand first how you became yourself, how you became the Activist. So you grew up in Northern California and you live in the Pacific Northwest now. And these are not the big hotbeds of right wing activism and conservative opinion. So I'm wondering, first of all, were you always some kind of conservative?
- [03:33]
Christopher Rufo
No, not at all. I started as a young man, very much on the left, even the far left. My family members on my father's side in particular are very far left, unreconstructed communists in Italy. And so my politics.
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Ross Douthat
So real communists, not Bay Area communists, like correct?
- [03:56]
Christopher Rufo
Yeah, cultural communists, but actual economic card carrying party member communists. And so that was the politics that I inherited growing up. And it's interesting because California, you're right now, is not a hotbed of America's right wing, but it actually produced, I would say, the best 20th century conservative leaders. And so my own experience actually marches totally at odds with the historical experience of the state. I started out left, moved right, whereas the state was much more right wing in the past and moved left.
- [04:31]
Ross Douthat
And you were a documentary filmmaker, how did you get into that?
- [04:35]
Christopher Rufo
It got into that right after school. I graduated from university in 2006, and then I took a job doing production for a small ramshackle company, had a chance to travel around the world, and then started producing my own films in my mid-20s and did that for another, you know, five or 10 years.
- [04:56]
Ross Douthat
So talk about your view of politics back then and you can maybe think of yourself as a documentary filmmaker, right? Use that lens on American politics in the early 2010s.
- [05:09]
Christopher Rufo
Yeah, it's really interesting. And actually the work I was doing in the documentaries at that time was not political. It's more social, cultural, human interest stories. But the industry itself was hyper political. And what we now think of as wokeness or left wing race and gender ideology was already kind of the dominant system of beliefs in the documentary world in the late 2000s, early 2000s. And look, the documentary world is not a business, but really it survives on the prestige of philanthropic institutions that provide grant funding. And so I don't know if it's that that kind of economy attracts left wing people or if left wing people produce that kind of economy. I don't know how that might tease out, but it really did raise red flags. You know, I had been rejected for some grants and then told explicitly this is grant restricted only for minorities and women. It's like, oh, interesting, that's quite odd. That doesn't seem, you know, fair, but okay, you kind of deal with it and figure out alternative opportunities. And I remember, you know, Joking with the producer of mine says, we really need to get this grant. We're going to mark you down as bisexual. That will give us the edge that is needed in order to compete in this new IDE identity landscape. You know, we didn't actually do it. It was more just a joke. But the joke became very real. And certainly after 2020, when I moved into politics, journalism, and then activism, that ethos that had been really just at the kind of margins of American avant garde cultural institutions had captured all of the major institutions.
- [06:59]
Ross Douthat
And so was there a moment of radicalization then? What changes on the left from your perspective in 2018 through 2020? What. What is. And we're coming around obviously to DEI and critical race theory and so on. But give me a concrete take on that shift, what that means.
- [07:20]
Christopher Rufo
Yeah, you see it really from 2014 to 2020, slowly building. After the Great Recession was over and The Occupy Wall Street 99% and narratives had subsided. The narratives that were really gaining energy and traction were all related to race and sexuality. You could see the local kind of BLM chapters or racial justice activists gaining power. And then all of a sudden, in 2020, these movements that had been building just kind of catapulted into prominence. And the moments that could say are points of radicalization for me were all in the wake of George Floyd 2020 observing and even doing on the ground reporting in Seattle. And the politics of that time that I felt encapsulated in a very small scale. The entire derangement that would then happen everywhere was in the couple week period of the Chass, if you remember, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone 2020 riots. The mayor of Seattle instructs the police department in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, famously the most left wing neighborhood, to abandon their actual department building and then cede multiple blocks of territory to the left wing radicals. They've taken over territory, they've declared it an autonomous zone. They've rewritten all of the laws and the rules, and then it all goes into an immediate and calamitous decomposition. They invited all of the homeless from Seattle to set up camp. I mean, all. All of the kind of academic theories were put into this little miniature model of governance. And what happens? Vandalism, crime, destruction, chaos. And then people start getting killed. You have this autonomous zone in the name of black liberation. And who ends up getting murdered? Young black kids, including a young boy. And I interviewed this boy's father as part of the reporting I was doing. And it was this kind of, you know, this poetic miniature and accelerated timeline of this is what happens when you give kind of governing power to these ideas ends in heartbreak, disaster, destruction, or.
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Ross Douthat
It ends in employee retraining seminars. Right? Well, because I mean, look, you're taking, and I agree this is one of the most extreme manifestations of left wing radicalism. Right? But that was not the case that people were for the most part setting up those kind of armed camps. Right. It was mostly the case that you had various kinds of self conscious or unselfconscious ideological indoctrination as part of the ordinary work of a university or a big corporation and so on. When we talk about wokeness as a phenomenon, most Americans who experienced it, experienced it that way, right?
- [10:16]
Christopher Rufo
Yes. But I think that the comparison is actually really important because the two and a half weeks of Chaz, the autonomous zone, it's the same story as what happened over a five year time horizon in America's institutions. As a metaphor, they're really the same process. And so the reporting that I did, that really took off. And this was something that was surprising to me. I was working on homelessness, I was working on local issues. That was my first foray into this world. But I did get a tip from a City of Seattle employee who sent me documents from their race and social justice initiative, kind of HR training on race and social justice. It was, you know, white privilege, white fragility, systemic racism, unconscious bias, disparate impact. It was Ibram, Kendi, Robin D'Angelo, the leading lights of the George Floyd moment. And they were doing it in the city of Seattle in a racially segregated manner. And I thought it was gonna be a one off story. But what happened was really interesting. It not only took off publicly, but I started getting leaks and materials from dozens and then hundreds and then thousands of other places around the country. And so the opportunity presented itself to say, oh, this is a really interesting thread, gonna chase this threat and see where it leads. And I think now in retrospect, it led to the. You could call it anti woke, you could call it a backlash, you could call it a conservative counter revolution. It really set the stage. But to me again, it is a reaction to what was happening that in my view was a kind of derangement that people are, even people who participated in it, I think are now embarrassed to admit their participation in the past.
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Ross Douthat
But one of the things you did from the start was naming it, right? Trying to associate the specific term critical race theory with all of these elements of left wing, left leaning ideology. And it's an interesting phenomenon, the whole thing, because almost Everyone at this point agrees that there was a big ideological shift in American institutions in the period you're describing. No one has ever sort of quite had a consensus on what to call it, in part because the terms that activists often used, like anti racist, were terms that their critics weren't likely to use. Because you don't want to sort of concede the argument that one side is the anti racist side. But you get social justice, you get wokeness, you get conservatives using the phrase cultural Marxism. Why did you decide that critical race theory, which is, you know, an academic term of art for a particular discipline and way of looking at the world, was the right term to use? And what does that term mean from your perspective?
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Christopher Rufo
Sure. I mean, the simplest reason is that because it was correct. I mean, what I did at that time was try to figure out, okay, well, where does this ideology come from? Because what I was seeing was essentially boilerplate coming from all different corners of American society, from big companies, HR programs, to universities, kind of humanities labs, to public schools, to all these places. And in every case, I could trace it back just looking at the footnotes, doing the reading, kind of doing the homework, say, well, this all seems to come from a discipline of critical race studies, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and the universities have formalized it under these disciplines and sub disciplines. And so I thought it was actually initially, actually the least loaded and the most accurate way of framing it. But as we started fighting it out, I realized that, in a sense, by accident, it was also the most rhetorically effective framing, because, as you said, it was not an obvious pejorative, because it was the name that these folks gave to their own discipline, but it had the connotations that could then be really loaded with maximum political energy and used as a focal point. And then it gave us a concept that we could use to political ends.
- [14:43]
Ross Douthat
Is there a form of critical race theory that you take seriously?
- [14:46]
Christopher Rufo
Because, seriously.
- [14:48]
Ross Douthat
Well, I mean, seriously, as, you know, obviously you are, as an activist, America's leading critic of critical race theory. Right. But so if you said to me 10 years ago, before we entered fully into this era, what is critical race theory all about, I probably would have said something like, well, you know, it's a view that racism isn't just about personal animus. Right. It's about structural realities, impersonal realities, and, and that you have aspects of American society handed down from slavery and Jim Crow that still affect America today that we should take seriously. And that's a left of center view, but it's one that I, as a conservative, would have said, I take that view seriously. I don't always agree with it, but it makes some reasonable points. And it also seems to me that there's a difference between that view and holding seminars organized around a kind of psychological retraining of white people to get at the core of their sort of personal racial guilt and racial animus and so on. So I guess, yeah. I'm wondering, do you think structural racism exists as a category that's worth describing?
- [15:56]
Christopher Rufo
Yeah, it's a good question, but I think that your description is euphemistic because if you actually read the critical race theory literature, it is Ibram Kendi and Robin Diangelo and all of the excesses of left wing racialism. You have arguments for seizing land and wealth and redistributing it along racial lines. You have these long kind of pseudoscientific studies about racial microaggressions and kind of ferreting out racism in the subconscious of white people. You have the whole concept of whiteness itself, which is, you know, reducing race to a kind of an evil essence and then trying to create re education programs to erase and replace so called whiteness. I mean, it's all there. It was all there in the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s. It was just not taken seriously for a good reason beyond the academic circles. And so the criticism that I got at the beginning was, oh, we just want to talk about the legacy of redlining and Jim Crow. And like you, great, we should talk about that. That's totally fair. We had systemic racial discrimination in this country for a very long time. It's had an effect on how our society has developed. It's had negative consequences for the people who were on the receiving end of that discrimination. There's a reasonable argument to be had there. I'm happy to have that. I'm not a. You know, we solved the problem in 1964 and now everyone has to shut up forever. There is a strain of conservatism that takes that tack. I don't. But it's totally at odds with the actual substance of not only the, say, WOKE movement, BLM movement, but even the kind of supposedly reasonable underpinnings of the theory itself.
- [17:46]
Ross Douthat
That's really interesting and I want to come back to those questions, but let's sort of move forward toward the present. Right? It seems to me at least like wokeness or whatever you want to call it, whatever term you want to use peaked probably in 2021, maybe in 2022. And then your Activism began to create a backlash and public opinion started to turn, institutions started to shift. And in that sense, I think it was really in retreat well before Donald Trump's reelection campaign even really started.
- [18:17]
Christopher Rufo
Yes.
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Ross Douthat
Is that how you see it?
- [18:19]
Christopher Rufo
I think that's right. I think probably 2021 was at the fever pitch. 2022 was still relatively strong in the spring of that year. And then I think that the political turn was the DeSantis reelection in 2022. Because, look, the key political figure in the kind of war on woke was Ron DeSantis. And they said, oh, you can't fight Disney, you can't fight gender, you can't fight crt, you can't abolish dei, you can't take over a public university, you're going to pay a price. And then he wins by 20 points was for me an indicator that the political calculus was changing. And certainly I felt safer operating and taking bigger risks in 2022 and 2023 than in the years prior. But it was still by no means assured. And I think that had Kamala Harris won in 2024, we would be having a very different conversation right now.
- [19:13]
Ross Douthat
Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.
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- [20:19]
Ross Douthat
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- [20:32]
Christopher Rufo
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- [20:47]
Ross Douthat
So let's have the conversation about Donald Trump and his administration. Right, which is Trump administration is formally aligned with your strategy and goals, at least to some extent, and is applying some kind of anti DEI effort across all federal agencies. What do you think of the progress of that effort from your perspective as an activist?
- [21:10]
Christopher Rufo
Well, look, I laid out in the transition period a counter revolution blueprint that outlined my strategy for how the President and the administration could take decisive action in the war against these left wing ideologies. And to my great enjoyment, five out of the six of the recommendations, the ones that I can remember off the top of my head, have been put into action, some even more aggressively than I thought was likely or even possible at the time. And we have now the beginnings of a very successful administration on these questions. And the action on DEI was perfect, fantastic, strong, decisive. Abolishing the DEI departments in all of the federal government, but then taking the second step, which I recommended and they've followed up on, which is to say if you are a federal contractor or you receive federal funding, the prohibition on DEI also extends to you institutionally, because we've determined that it's a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And so they're pushing that pressure outward to all of the institutions in American society, stripping the left wing patronage from the federal government. The first Trump administration was funding tens of billions of dollars a year towards left wing causes. And I remember I was in the White House in October of 2020, and one of the discussions we were having was, you know, look at all this money that is going to left wing NGOs, left wing academic research, left wing activism. How can we actually just stop the flow of funding completely? And it was an idea that seemed impossible at the time. A lot of moving parts, a lot of chaos, a lot of conflict and drama. Four years later, the same people are now back in the White House, ruthlessly going through the budget line by line and actually eliminating left wing waste, fraud and abuse, patronage. And so, look, I think that we're now six weeks in, more or less. The opening salvos have been very strong. And I think that it's time now to try to push deeper and try to go after some of those more systematic reforms that are possible, but will take a lot of follow through.
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Ross Douthat
All right, so let's talk about the plan of action you've just sketched, starting with civil rights. Because one of the things the Trump administration has done is rolling back the affirmative action executive orders that go back to Lyndon Johnson, that involve essentially advantages for minority contractors with the federal government that are sort of considered the point of origin of modern affirmative action programs. And these are things that past Republican presidents haven't touched. This is sort of not just the rollback, but the actual kind of counter revolution. So I'm assuming that you obviously support those moves. I guess my question is, what aspects of the post 64 Civil rights bureaucracy do you support?
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Christopher Rufo
Yeah, no, it's a great question. And this is. Look, this is a real tension on the right, and I'm very cognizant of this tension. You have two competing schools. There are Some on the right that have the kind of Christopher Caldwell thesis that the Civil act is really a second Constitution. It's usurped authority over the original Constitution, it's created this regime of kind of state intrusion on private life, social life, civic life, et cetera. I mean, that's, as a factual matter, true. And so what I think the President has done that is salutary, at least as an opening step, is to say we're going to try to do what not only other Republican presidents haven't touched, but they've actually assented to, agreed to, expanded and strengthened President Nixon, expanded the affirmative action programs of President Johnson. And kind of all the way down the line, you see this consensus because Republicans have been so scared of anything involving civil rights, race, sexuality, that they have, you know, I think, been kind of pressured or in some cases, hoodwinked into expanding this regime that we're talking about.
- [25:32]
Ross Douthat
Well, but just to pause, it's also that corporate America, at a certain point somewhere in the 1970s, decided that certain kinds of diversity programs were good for business. So my sense is that, for instance, in the Reagan era, there was a sense that, in fact, Republicans would lose support from parts of big business if they went hard after affirmative action. Part of the post civil rights consensus, I think, that Republicans at least partially embraced a certain point, was the idea that there were sort of modest forms of diversification initiatives. Right. That were good for American society. And the language and arguments that are being used right now around those are basically to say, as you just said, right. That they are in fact in tension with the original vision, or at least the letter of the law, of the Civil Rights act, because they discriminate against white Americans. Right?
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Christopher Rufo
Sure, yeah. Whites and Asian Americans.
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Ross Douthat
Right. In college applications.
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Christopher Rufo
Yeah. Which was not the case in the 70s and 80s because the Asian population was so small. But certainly now is the case. But look, I think you may be overestimating the support in corporate America. I think it was really just a kind of concession. They said, all right, well, this is the tax that we pay. And to bring up this issue or to kind of politicize this issue, there's probably more cost or risk than benefit. And so it was a tacit acceptance of. All right, well, we are just 10 years out of the Jim Crow era. Some restitution, some transition is good. And even the Supreme Court says, well, you have this kind of affirmative action is probably a violation of the, if not the letter of the spirit of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights act, but it's a transition Period. That we'll have to accommodate, and then eventually we'll let it go. That was the common argument. But I think that there are really two avenues forward for the right. There is one avenue that is the most kind of radical libertarian. The argument would be that the Civil Rights act is a fundamental infringement on civil liberties and freedom of association, freedom of speech, and therefore it, you know, requires abolition. The second argument, and the argument that I favor, is to say, no, the right needs to have its own interpretation of civil rights law, and it needs to take over enforcement of civil rights law to have essentially an alternative vision that is, in my view, better grounded in the Constitution and the law. To say that we need to have a kind of spartan system of colorblind equality. There is no reward or punishment based on ancestry. And if you do that in admissions, hiring, promotions, contracting, you should pay just as heavy a price as if someone was segregating the lunch counters in the past. And I think my position in 20, 20, 21 is now the majority position on the right with almost no exceptions.
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Ross Douthat
Yeah, I think that's right.
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Christopher Rufo
But I think the left is gonna have to face this because they're gonna have to say, do you wanna have a kind of colorblind equality or do you wanna have this system of racial spoils, racial favoritism, racial discrimination? And my goal moving forward is to push that debate as far leftward as I can so that the establishment liberals versus the kind of race radicals, they're going to have to fight it out eventually. And I'd like to see that the establishment liberals win this fight.
- [29:07]
Ross Douthat
But from the point of view of, let's say, the establishment liberals, like, whether you're in corporate America or whether you're running a major American university or any of these kind of things, when you're dealing with, I think, issues of elite formation, there's always going to be an interest in a diverse, multiracial, multicultural society, in having diverse representation in important slots. And you see this obviously even in Republican cabinets and so on. Right. I think that to some degree I agree with you. It may not put a fundamental limit on how far the right wants to go in sort of sweeping all affirmative action programs away. I think at the very least, though, it puts a pretty hard limit on how far you could get sort of the center left establishment to go along with your argument. I think, like, if you're running a major American corporation, I think there's always going to be a world in which you're going to want to find some way to take racial diversity and representation into account. Don't you think that's true?
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Christopher Rufo
I don't think so. I don't think that that's the case. And I frankly don't think that that's how the majority of the population thinks. Yes, in elite institutions, people have been conditioned to think in those terms, but I actually don't think, I think.
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Ross Douthat
Well, wait, wait a minute. I think. Just stick with politics for a minute. Right? Representation in politics is a completely normal part of American politics. Long before you get to the age of affirmative action. Right. It's always been the case. You're like, you're trying to pick a vice president and you're trying to balance the country regionally. You have. And all the way down. I know this is an overused example, right, but all the way down to Antonin Scalia, the great conservative jurist who was picked not only as the first Italian American on the court, but that was a consideration. I don't see how you do away with those kind of considerations.
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Christopher Rufo
Yeah, well, I think that, I think two things. One is, look, I don't think that people genuinely care about precise mathematical representation across every institution.
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Ross Douthat
I completely agree with that.
- [31:17]
Christopher Rufo
Like, I'm happy that, you know, I think most people accept that when they go to the nail salon and it's being run by almost all Vietnamese people, they're fine with that. When you go to a kind of programming floor, it's mostly East Asian and South Asian males and white males, like, or, you know, let's say athletes. Okay, Most, they're gonna have heavily black representation in the NBA. Like the world is complicated and most people have a sense of different groups, different cultures have different priorities, different interests, different talents. And they don't mathematically graph themselves in an artificial way onto every institution. And that's okay. As long as there's a sense that people are being treated fairly. As long as a sense that there's a path to advancement to people who merit advancement. And look, we're talking about perception. And I think that there is even on the right. I think this is true. You've been around right leaning institutions as longer than I have. People do have a sense of thinking about this question of representation that you're bringing up. I think that's fine. It's a fine gut check. I think it's a normal reaction. And I think there's something to be said about that. The Scalia example, perhaps, you know, I think Scalia absolutely gets it on the merits. But you're making the argument, okay, there's perhaps some conflict representation he absolutely does. But there is balancing all of these questions.
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Ross Douthat
Right?
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Christopher Rufo
Okay, yeah. That's a natural human thing. But what is? I think the proper approach for that is to kind of submerge it and obscure it. It's something that may be happening at the margins that maybe people have some heightened sensitivity to, but we don't talk about it. It's kind of done with the appearance that it's not being done is the most humane, the most effective, and I think the most honorable way to do something like that. But what we have is the opposite. We have, like, insane hatred written into the operating manual of our universities. It's like we have to get rid of all that. And then if there's some kind of subtle, marginal, tacit kind of representation, provided that everyone meets the threshold of excellence, I think almost everyone can live with that. That's fine. But what we have is so far from that, that almost seems like a nice dream to have in relation to what we have in real life.
- [33:34]
Ross Douthat
Right. I guess all I'm saying is I'll hear a lot from populist conservatives like, oh, Ronald Reagan was gutless, George H.W. bush was a coward. Trump is doing all these things that they could have done and should have. Right. And my sense, as someone who grew up in 1990s America. Right. Is that part of the reason that they didn't try to sweep away affirmative action was because it was widely perceived as a version of what you are conceding is sort of a natural part of elite formation and construction. You know, again, like, I work in journalism, My wife works in journalism. You run a big city newspaper. The city is heavily African American. You have an awful lot of white reporters. Are you going to want to hire an extra African American reporter? Of course you are. Right. I think a lot of Americans, including Republicans, perceived that as sort of the way the system already worked and as a thing that was then upset by wokeness by the shift in the 2010s. And so I agree with you that there is this kind of split on the right. About, like, how far back are you going? And some people think this was all built into the Civil Rights act itself. And you're in the position of saying if we properly interpret the Civil Rights act, then it will sort of grow back on the excesses of affirmative action. I'm just sort of curious where the stable equilibrium is. Is it 1997, or is it a little bit more anti affirmative action than that?
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Christopher Rufo
Yeah, this is a really important debate on the right. And I have, of course, people to My right that say, no, no, the Civil Rights act is a problem. It has to get repealed.
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Ross Douthat
Right. I think we can both agree that the Civil Rights act is very unlikely to be repealed.
- [35:20]
Christopher Rufo
That is the first point saying, all right, well, this is a non starter, so your point gets you nowhere. I actually think that there's a way to not go backward. The question shouldn't be, do we go back to 1997, to 1965 or to 1963. I think we have an opportunity to go forward to say, hey, what? Look, we've had this experiment with affirmative action that metamorphosized into woke ideology, into dei, into rampant discrimination that rewards and punishes people based on their ancestry. We're done with that. We're going to reinterpret the law so that we have, for the first time ever, simple, strategic, colorblind equality through all of our institutions. And if you want to have a government that enforces civil rights laws, we need to have a government that enforces civil rights laws for everyone, not just the favored groups, but for every individual.
- [36:17]
Ross Douthat
Right.
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Christopher Rufo
And so what does that look like? Looks like what the Trump administration is doing to say, hey, anti white bigotry should face just as severe a sanction as anti black bigotry. And yet you only see the institutions practicing one of those.
- [36:32]
Ross Douthat
But you're still gonna.
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Christopher Rufo
True colorblind equality requires equal enforcement.
- [36:36]
Ross Douthat
Right? Okay. But on that point, you're still, if you're the Trump administration, you're still gonna have to make choices about lawsuits and enforcement. All of the kind of choices that liberals have been making in the past around, where are you going after a company. Right. Like, what is the standard of racial discrimination that you use? Right. And you're going to have universities that say, okay, we're in compliance with the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action. And you can tell that we're in compliance because the white and Asian share of our student body went up by 3 or 4% and the African American and Hispanic share went down by 3 or 4%. But someone in the civil rights bureaucracy now, it's going to be a fan of, you know, Christopher Ruffo rather than a critical race theorist. Let's say. Right. Is going to have to decide, okay, this percentage change signals continued anti white discrimination. And that percentage change signals what you're conceding is always going to happen a little bit of normal. You know, we're trying to balance the class. We don't want to have a racial monoculture. Right. You're still going to have a government Bureaucrat under your ideal system now, a conservative bureaucrat deciding where is the line between normal racial balancing and racial discrimination, that that decision point doesn't go away.
- [38:01]
Christopher Rufo
Correct? Yeah. And it cannot go away as long as you have a Civil Rights Act.
- [38:06]
Ross Douthat
Right.
- [38:06]
Christopher Rufo
And so my argument is conservatives have to live with the status quo and to do the best that we can with that status quo and therefore need an alternative policy. But there's an interesting wrinkle here that I think is really important. You know, first. Yes. I think the Trump administration should take a maximalist approach. I think they should say if you have discriminatory DEI programs, if you have discriminatory admissions procedures or discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, you'll be stripped of federal funding, which in a sense means bankruptcy for many universities. And they should do it. They should actually follow through on the threat in at least one symbolic fight. That then changes the incentives everywhere and sends people scrambling to comply with the law. But the question that I think you're raising, or about to raise is another good one to say, well, what happens if Harvard's admissions numbers change dramatically and fewer black or Hispanic students are admitted to X, Y or Z University? You may see some recomposition of the numbers.
- [39:12]
Ross Douthat
Well, wait, you have to see recomposition of the numbers. If the critique of all these programs, the whole point is that these schools don't have meritocratic admissions. They don't have colorblind admissions. If they had colorblind admissions, the numbers would look quite different, right?
- [39:27]
Christopher Rufo
Yes. As a whole, I mean, the top university may be able to reach the threshold, but even going down a few, you're gonna have that going down more, you're gonna have it even more dramatically. I mean, the first off, the answer is quite simple, is to say you either have meritocratic admissions or you don't, and you live with the consequences. But there's another actual conservators so eager to solve that problem in theory that they forget an important lesson. That is a problem that our opponents will have. I mean, if our opponents are, let's say, administration of elite universities, I consider those people my political opponents. You create a problem for them, they have to explain why the numbers have changed. They have to either defend the previous system or defend the current system. But one thing I think is a really important political lesson is never solve your opponent's problems for them. Certainly don't solve them in advance. You create a standard, you enforce the standard, and then let them grapple with the outcomes. That, to me, seems the best course of action. And then as they adapt, then our position can adapt in response.
- [40:32]
Ross Douthat
I agree. I guess all I'm stressing is when you say create the standard and enforce the standard, the question of enforcement is your problem. Right. It will be the Trump administration's problem. And there will have to be a set of decisions made about what kind of recomposition of student bodies suggests a good faith move away from racial preferences and what doesn't. And I'm just arguing that it is inherently a gray area to some degree.
- [41:04]
Christopher Rufo
Yeah, I think there's perhaps some gray, like all things, but I think it's less than maybe you're suggesting here. And I think that there's two things that we could do to help solve this problem or help even just to reveal the problem. The first is that every university that receives federal funding should be required to publish disaggregated data for race, sex, gpa, SAT scores, and then class rank at the back end. Publish your numbers, make them available so that if there is the appearance that there is a large, say, disparity in SAT scores and GPA based on groups and admissions, you then create the opening for a public inquiry. I think that's a really good way where increased transparency could lead to kind of automatic accountability. Right. And the other thing that's really important is that admissions is like, important, but I would put it down a couple rungs from the most important related to discrimination, et cetera. I think the DEI bureaucracies are a much more fruitful line of attack, and I think we start there because you're creating a culture that is the problem beyond just the mathematical problem of admissions and statistics and SAT scores.
- [42:19]
Ross Douthat
All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. Auto insurance can all seem the same until it comes time to use it. So don't get stuck paying more for less coverage. Switch to USA Auto Insurance and you could start saving money in no time. Get a quote. Today, restrictions apply.
- [43:00]
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- [43:41]
Ross Douthat
All right, so you mentioned the idea of people in the Trump administration going line by line through grants and programs that are essentially grants to left wing ideological organizations. However, take the biggest thing the Trump administration has put on the chopping block. Right. It's been usaid, which absolutely contains many programs that fit the description that you've offered. It also contains a lot of other programs. Right. I think it's fairly hard to argue that pepfar, the program that tries to ameliorate AIDS and HIV in Africa, should be seen primarily as just funding for left wing groups, or for that matter, a kind of DEI program. And so the approach the Trump administration has taken there has been less a kind of line by line, we're eliminating specific programs and more a much broader. We consider this whole effort sort of ideologically rotten, and therefore we are cutting programs generally. There's a similar question with the Department of Education, where the Department of Education contains within it grants and programs that absolutely fit the description of what you're criticizing. It also does a lot of other stuff, right?
- [44:58]
Christopher Rufo
Yeah.
- [44:58]
Ross Douthat
So to what extent does it make sense and is it defensible for the Trump administration to be essentially shuttering departments or collapsing departments in an effort to get at dei?
- [45:11]
Christopher Rufo
Yeah. Let me take the example of Department of Education. I know it much better than I do USAID and PEPFAR and AIDS in Africa, which is not in my area of expertise at all. So what's happening at the Department of Education, what should happen at the Department of Education rather, is a USAID style dismantling. But what I would recommend in particular for that institution is to bracket out those programs that are worthwhile, that are politically popular, that are going to be very difficult to cut even if you wanted to do so. And so with Department of Education, I look at it as three buckets. You have, you know, $120 billion a year, more or less, of federal financial aid for colleges and universities, student loans, student grants, et cetera. I think that number should be reduced over time. I think that the assets, the kind of loan asset portfolio, should be spun off and privatized. But in the immediate blitz, I think you have to say the student loan programs will not change. It'll be spun off into its own independent agency. And then you can implement the particular reforms, reductions, privatization down the line. The second area that I think you have to continue or kind of safeguard is specialized K through 12 funding, low income school districts, special ed programs. These are very politically popular. And you say, hey, we're not. We're going to actually keep this the same or slightly increase it, and we're going to block grant it to the states so that it can be better utilized for local conditions. And the people who actually run the education systems, the third bucket, which is numerically smaller than K12 aid and federal financial aid, is everything else that the department does. The ideological programs, the grants for critical race theory and gender ideology and liberatory pedagogy, whatever you may have, all of that needs to just be burned to the ground. I mean, really, truly, it needs to be gutted and dismantled. And so what you have at the end is something that is simpler, that is reduced to the essential components, and that that can be parceled out and decentralized so that the power is not within the kind of very, very far left leaning administration of the Department of Education, but it's simply granted out to the states so that Governor DeSantis can take that money and do do something better than, you know, for example, Governor Newsom.
- [47:44]
Ross Douthat
Okay, here's, here's what I understand.
- [47:45]
Christopher Rufo
That to me seems defensible.
- [47:47]
Ross Douthat
All right, good, good. So here's what I don't understand about this plan. The Trump administration is in charge of the Department of Education. The administrators of the Department of Education are appointed by the Trump administration. Obviously, the Trump administration wants to claim increased authority to hire and fire and so on, but we'll take that as a given for the perspective of this conversation. Right. Why do you need to. I mean, first of all, it's not even clear that you can legally abolish the Department of Education without congressional action. Right. But why would you even want to? Why wouldn't you just say, we're going to have a Department of Education, it's going to do the things that you yourself have described as the biggest financial portion of what it does, right? From special ed student loans and so on. We're going to continue to do educational research of various kinds, longitudinal research. I personally know more than a handful of center right wonks who are very happy to do educational research that is not woke or progressive or ideological. Right. And maybe we're just going to purge the ideological programs that you describe or maybe we're going to sort of substitute some other set of right leaning programs. Why wouldn't you want to just run the actual bureaucracy? Especially since, yes, if you block grant things to the states, some things will go to Ron DeSantis in Florida and to sort of conservative leaning state governments. But it's not like the educational bureaucracy in the states is super right wing. And obviously there are plenty of straightforward blue states where block granting to the states leads to policies that you Christopher Rufo would never support in a million years. Right. So what is the gain to conservatism of doing away with this major tool for federal influence over education policy?
- [49:40]
Christopher Rufo
Yeah, I mean, look, the gain, or the, rather the problem and the potential gain is this. The strategy you're outlining is a strategy that we've already been doing. I've done reporting on some of the grantees, NGOs and other institutions that are almost entirely or entirely funded by the Department of Education. They're kind of monolithically left wing. And as I've done this reporting and brought it to public attention, contracts have been cut for, you know, dozens of these NGOs, which would effectively cripple them moving forward. And the total amount of funding for these programs that has been cut by the DOGE team at Department of Education is now more than a billion dollars. And so, yes, what you're saying is, you know, to kind of.
- [50:23]
Ross Douthat
I'm saying you could declare victory and you still have the Department of Education doing the popular things it does. We all know that most education is funded at the local level in the US So you're not actually talking about a huge problem.
- [50:38]
Christopher Rufo
Here's the problem, though. It's very easy to cut external contracts, external funding, et cetera. It's very difficult to take an institution and the kind of permanent bureaucracy of that institution and to change its culture. I think that at usaid, from what I've read, but I know for a fact that at Department of Education, replacing the management at the building does not really replace the broader culture. And a cabinet secretary in the first Trump administration told me an interesting story. This person said to me, had a meeting with some of the career staff. The permanent staff in this agency wasn't Department of Ed. And the career staff was not complying with what this person was trying to do, was running circles around him. They couldn't get anything done. And eventually said, just tell me what the deal is. Just level with me, what's the deal? And the career staff said, we know that we're going to be here in four years or eight years or 12 years or 16 years. And we know that you're going to be gone in two years or six years, whatever it might be. And so you have a system that is unaccountable. And when the culture of that system and the vast bulk of the bureaucracy of that system is captured, you get the status quo. From the first Trump administration, which was Department of Education was radically left wing funding, only radical left wing causes. And I just think that there has to be a kind of binary choice. Agency by agency, can this agency be reformed or can this agency only be abolished or dismantled to the maximum extent permissible by law? I think Department of Education is in the latter camp. FBI, I think FBI could be maybe reformed. Other agencies can be perhaps reformed. But Department of Education in my view, is beyond reform. And so you have to spin off, liquidate, terminate and abolish to the furthest extent you can by law, while maintaining your political viability and your statutory compliance for those things that are essential, that are required by law and that are politically popular. You always want to maintain the popularity, but can you.
- [52:54]
Ross Douthat
But this just seems, it just seems weird to me. First of all, put it this way, Chris. If you can't find enough right leaning or centrist people to staff a stripped down and slimmer Department of Education to affect American education in the way you want, how are you ever gonna find enough personnel to do it at the state level? I mean, a big reason that American education writ large is left leaning is that many, many people who go into it are left leaning. You and I know this very well. Some of my best friends are left leaning graduates of America's many fine educational schools. And it just seems like it's sort of preemptive despair on the part of conservatives to say, well, we have political control over this agency that has a certain kind of influence over American education and we're just gonna give it up because we can't find enough people. Like, you're assuming a capacity to fire people, right?
- [53:51]
Christopher Rufo
Yes.
- [53:52]
Ross Douthat
But you don't assume any capacity to hire new people.
- [53:55]
Christopher Rufo
Well, this gets to another point, and maybe I can answer your question more effectively from the other side. You're asking essentially, well, why can't you just replace the bad folks with the good folks?
- [54:05]
Ross Douthat
Well, just to be clear, you are, you are advocating eliminating all of the people who you think are sort of irredeemably left wing. Right.
- [54:15]
Christopher Rufo
But I think that the answer, like.
- [54:16]
Ross Douthat
They will not have jobs anymore.
- [54:18]
Christopher Rufo
The unfortunate answer, yes. I mean, they're redeemable as people, but they don't. Aren't entitled to lifetime federal employment with no accountability.
- [54:27]
Ross Douthat
But absolutely, I'm not making a case, I'm not making a moral case for their right to a job. I'm saying. You're arguing, you're saying we can fire them.
- [54:38]
Christopher Rufo
Yeah, I believe that to be true as part of overall reorganization.
- [54:42]
Ross Douthat
Right.
- [54:42]
Christopher Rufo
But I think the other problem that you're identifying is one that I take seriously. And the unfortunate answer is no, conservatives cannot fully staff The Department of Education conservatives cannot fully compete for, you know, education grants for, you know, university level research programs. No, conservatives can't do any of those things. And so we have to figure out what can we do? Where can we have leverage? Where can we take over or recapture an institution? And if we can't do those things, which things we have to shut down. Shutting things down is actually a very effective strategy. But you're not, and I think would be an effective strategy in this regard.
- [55:21]
Ross Douthat
But you're not. So. But you're not actually shutting down the schools themselves. Right. Americans are going to continue to want to send their kids to colleges and universities. I agree with you that if you asked me tomorrow to staff all of America's colleges and universities with people whose politics are in the Venn diagram, between the two of us, I could do it. That's right. But there's no solution where conservatives are like, oh, we don't have enough academics. I guess we're gonna close down the American university system. And if that were our policy, it would be extremely unpopular, right?
- [55:56]
Christopher Rufo
Well, no, I would take issue for two reasons. One is that we can do that at the state level. I mean, Governor DeSantis has done it in Florida. Governors in Ohio and Arizona and Tennessee have opened up conservative research institutions within their flagship state universities. And then other affiliated state universities.
- [56:15]
Ross Douthat
Yes, they have set up small. I agree. They have set up small institutes. And that is a great start.
- [56:21]
Christopher Rufo
I think it's very important. It opens up the possibility for growth, even in theory, geometric growth in the future. But I actually think that your other point is not quite right. And I actually think that the corrective that is required is not to say, oh, we're going to shut down all the universities. Yeah, that's not possible. But I think with, by spinning off, privatizing and then reforming the student loan programs, I think that you could, by a degree or two degrees of separation, put the university sector as a whole into a significant recession. And I think that would be a very salutary thing. I think that putting the universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets, into a greater competitive market pressure would discipline them in a way that you could not get through administrative oversight with 150 extra Department of Ed bureaucrats. And a medium term goal, maybe longer term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in kind of an existential terror to say, oh, unless we change what we're doing, we're not going to be able to meet our budget for the year, we're going to have to wind certain things down and then make the universities make those hard decisions.
- [57:51]
Ross Douthat
So let's end there. What is it in fact, that you want them to do besides get rid of dei? Right. You're on the board of the New College of Florida, which Ron DeSantis took over. So you're involved in curricular debates. Right. Like, what is the alternative curriculum? Part of the appeal, I think, of everything associated with DEI was that it offered itself up to left of center people as a narrative about America, a very critical narrative, obviously a narrative that said America was unjust, but a powerful one for a 21st century diverse society and so on. Is there a conservative version of that? What affirmative things would you want to see elite or non elite schools doing when it comes to teaching about American history? Teaching about America right now?
- [58:45]
Christopher Rufo
Yeah. And I think that's what we're cobbling together at New College of Florida. I think it's also what some of the reforms in Florida have been designed to do in the other state universities. I mean, look, some students, our universities are no longer liberal arts universities. There's these kind of mega complexes that have scientific arms, research arms, financial arms. But if we're talking about just the humanities, I think we need a total overturning of the ideology of the humanities and a return to the classical understanding of humanities, of course, adapted for modern conditions, popularized for those large state universities. But you can have a classical liberal arts curriculum that takes the ideology out. And what we're doing at New College is reintroducing the eternal human questions. So in our New College mission statement, which we revised, was essentially, it's a community of scholars and learners that have a shared commitment to a culture of civil debate and inquiry leading towards the true, the good and the beautiful, and continuing the great tradition of the Western civilization that has provided us with these opportunities. And so that is kind of big, overarching message.
- [60:02]
Ross Douthat
And then on the secondary level about America though, Right. So I'm a fan of classical education. I think the rise of the classical school movement in America is one of the healthiest signs in our culture. At the same time, when I look at those programs, I'm not talking about New College in particular. Right. But they tend to be, they're very great books heavy. They're really good at sort of figuring out the right balance of the ancient Greeks and the medievals and the Renaissance and so on. But so much of the debate around critical race theory and DEI and everything else is about the story we tell about America. Yes, but there is a kind of conservative, patriotic education that you and I both encountered that has a certain kind of sterility to it. Right. It's like the founders are awesome and Lincoln perfects it, and then you needed Martin Luther King to finish things off. Right. But that's like the story we're telling. Right. And I feel like America is a big. It's a big, complicated, messy society. And I feel like certain versions of that kind of conservative, patriotic education, they don't feel sort of as deep and rich as America deserves. So a macro question is, can conservatism become less superficial? And then the particular thing is like just to pick up points some of your critics tend to make. Right. If you are setting out to sort of eliminate crt, critical race theory as sort of an ideological influence on education, what does that mean for the professor at New College who wants to assign TA Nehisi Coates. Right. Who wants to assign sort of figures who are associated with radicalism and wokeness as part of the American story? What do conservatives think about radicalism? And can conservatives figure out how to teach about radicalism?
- [61:50]
Christopher Rufo
Yeah, we actually did this at New College. We had the satirist, Andrew Doyle, who was the artist behind the Titiana McGrath Satire Handle on Twitter. And so he taught a course this past winter looking at exactly what we're talking about, the war surrounding woke ideology. And his approach, I think, was the right approach. He paired TA Nehisi Coates with my book. He paired Ibram Kendi with Eric Kaufman, the conservative social scientist. And so what they did was they had a kind of a grappling with this phenomenon of the last 10 years and providing the best arguments from both of the major sides or traditions, and then and trying to relate them to these enduring human questions. Does this get us closer to justice? Does this interpretation of American history, does it get us closer to the truth? And these great questions where you're not just having a kind of narrow ideological debate, but you're trying to guide people to the right answer. And so I think that is a really good way to do it. If you wanted to answer that particular question, your other critique is important. Look, I mean, the patriotic education from a lot of these conservative organizations is sterile, one dimensional, jingoistic. You need to have something better. Conservatives need a more arresting, a more sophisticated, a more complex story that we tell about the country that still captures the essence of the goodness of this country, the genius of this country, the talent and virtue of the people of this country. And I think that that is a story that is absolutely possible to be told. And then administratively, you can reorganize the institutions around that fundamental narrative. Gender studies is out, DEI is out. A more complex history is in. Andrew Doyle's course on War of Woke is in. And then you go forward from there. And so in that sense, I think that you have to have a strong alternative to present. I think it's not there yet. We haven't done so in a way as big, as sophisticated, as glossy as our opponents. But I think that it can be done and it will be done in the future.
- [64:13]
Ross Douthat
All right, last question. You're in charge of a curriculum. Let's say you have to include one author who you think students can read and benefit from reading who you are opposed to. Who do you pick?
- [64:26]
Christopher Rufo
Oh, I think that without a doubt Herbert Marcuse, the New Left philosopher who was the leading philosophical intellectual light of the New Left in the late 60s, early 70s. I think you have to read Marcuse for catastrophic errors in judgment, for a kind of repulsive politics in outcome. There are certain insights that can be salvaged from his work. And it's certainly the most brilliant and rich defense of left wing ideologies that have been on the rise in the last half century. And I think that's very valuable work that could be taken seriously. And I've benefited from reading Marcuse.
- [65:09]
Ross Douthat
All right, we're going to leave you planning the Herbert Marcuse Seminar at New College in Florida. Chris. Rufus, thanks so much for joining me.
- [65:16]
Christopher Rufo
Thank you.
- [65:44]
Ross Douthat
This episode was produced by Sofia Alvarez Boyd, Elisa Gutierrez and Andrea Batanzos. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary, Marge Lacher and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amen Sahota and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie Rose Strasser.
- [66:30]
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