Christopher Rufo (3:56)

Yeah, 100% would agree with that. And look, I think we. We've had these, like, language debates for many years. And my sense of it is that after 2020, when woke really started to have an impact on the average person's daily life, I think we've more or less settled these debates. I think the public actually knows what WOKE is. The public, depending on how you measure it, rejects Woke ideas by 2 to 1, 4 to 1, 10 to 1 margins in some cases. And so what's been really interesting is that the same people who are simultaneously insisting woke is good, but we don't know what WOKE really means now seem to be running away from it altogether. That's a sign that at least in this intermediate period, we seem to have won, at least against this woke 1.0 formulation.

Michael Malice (4:50)

Let's talk about this, because I think that's a topic a lot of people are interested in, because certainly with the Trump election and winning the popular vote as well, it was a decisive victory against the kind of DI candidacy of Officer Harris, as many have characterized it. And I was looking at tea leaves, as I'm sure you were, about where the left, broadly speaking, and the Democratic Party are going. Nancy Pelosi, I bring this up all the time in her retirement video from her San Francisco constituency where she's not ready for election. She, even when discussing aids, didn't bring up the words LGBT or gay, but she talked about St. Francis, she talked about Veterans Day, how much she loves those. At the same time, you have people like James Talarico, who's a Democratic candidate for the Senate here, talking about how he's kind of skin suit Christian, talking about how much he loves trans kids. Enda Bashir, who's a red state governor who's considering running for president. He's talked about so called trans kids. Gavin Newsom has kind of with Charlie, the late Charlie Kirk walked back. Women and men's sport. Men and women's sports now seems to be reverting. I'm curious as to your perception of is woke dead or is it just sleeping?

Christopher Rufo (6:01)

Yeah, look, I mean, Marxism is the kind of best example of a zombie ideology. You can kill it, but it's never really dead and it will always come back. So you see this in cycles from the 19th century to the present, that these ideas kind of ebb and flow with public opinion, with social and material conditions, but they're never really abandoned and they're always at least the secret faith of the left. And so while James Talarico, the candidate in Texas, a lot of these quotations are a number of years old. These videos have been recycled to remind people of what he believes. He's very shrewdly and dishonestly now trying to pivot away from them. And so it came out that for example, a couple years ago in one of his state campaigns, he had said that his whole campaign was vegan and that they were not eating meat on the Talarico campaign. And then of course he puts out, you know, now he's under fire for this because people have remembered it. He puts out a photograph of himself, you know, eating like a rib or something. And so like it, you know, they, they run away when it's unpopular. But I think we all know it's really what they secretly believe and they haven't abandoned their beliefs at all.

Michael Malice (7:17)

Well, that's the big question, because there's two kind of schools of thought. Let's talk about specifically about Democratic politicians, right? There's two schools of thought. One is they're by and large like closet Marxists and they're biding their time and biting their tongue. And, you know, when they get enough numbers, you know, you're going to have this kind of Keir Starmer British dystopia. The other vision is that, okay, these are corporate party hacks. Corporations, you know, donate very heavily. Democratic party. It's hard to think of Joe Biden having, for example, a strong ideology, let alone being a committed Marxist. So that, as you said, they'll do WOKE because it appeals to their donors and activists, but they'll just happily throw it overboard when it doesn't serve their purpose anymore because they don't really have a governing worldview other than some vague sense of government control. Which of those do you think is truer?

Christopher Rufo (8:08)

I think they're both true. They're both Complimentary. And they coexist sometimes in unity, sometimes in tension. And so there is of course a more professional upper middle class kind of layer of Democratic Party officials and scholars and administrators and intellectuals. They are liberals with a small L. Some of them feel uncomfortable with the woke element or the harder Marxist element or active elements within their party. But the liberals always have the sneaking suspicion that they are just kind of the cowardly leadership class of these really truer ideas. And so they have this crisis of confidence where they're not able to fully resist or keep in check or kind of set boundaries around the party. And so it really depends, like how popular those far left ideas are. And then the liberals will kind of go with public opinions. During blm, they were, you know, kind of all in on BLM ideology. Now that that ideology is unpopular, it's a liability. They try to walk away from it, but they don't have it within their hearts to actually declare definitively with moral authority and moral conviction, we don't want this in our party. And so they're this kind of simultaneously the most professional but also the most malleable. And right now they sense that they have an opportunity to tack to the center. But I'm not sure that that's durable or totally in good faith.

Michael Malice (9:52)

Yeah, I don't think anything politicians do in good faith. And I don't know that they even have that luxury because if I'm every other year as a House member up for election or if I'm, you know, in the Senate, I, you know, have to be responsible, responsive, excuse me, to who the president is. There's only so much leeway I have. If I was a Democrat and I didn't think Trump should be impeached, I'd be out of office even if I was against him completely and vote against all his policies, that wouldn't be enough for the masses. And also I, you know, you saw Kyr Sinema and Joe Manchin, you know, when Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney buck the party and they fight the President, they have integrity, they're courageous. I mean, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin tack to the middle. They're traitors. And that's not what you voted in for. And how dare you. So there is still a big, you know, people in CRT talk about systemic power. There's an enormous amount of ingrained systemic power in the media pushing Americans in politics specifically towards the hard left.

Christopher Rufo (10:53)

Sure, yeah, I think that's true. But it is bound by public opinion. Right. So there is a calculation. So Talarico is campaigning as a, as an aw shucks Christian preacher with the Texas twang accent because he feels like that's the best path for him to win. And so they, they modulate their presentation, at least depending on political public opinion. But yeah, it does seem to always go left. It seems to be a never ending fight. And what I would say too, and this is particularly important given that we are in the second Trump administration. The people who run America's major institutions, whether it's the major media outlets, the major universities, the major government departments, these are all still uniformly left wing. Trump really hasn't done anything very, very little, and even that more or less unsuccessfully to change the composition of America's leadership class. And you know, with some small exceptions around the edges, that's the status quo that frankly, conservatives are going to have to deal with. And we haven't quite figured out, you know, how to successfully change that dynamic.

Michael Malice (12:05)

Well, I think you're being a little modest because this is the point where I kind of have to kiss your feet because you are not single handedly, but largely responsible for taking down a Harvard University president. Just like Elizabeth Warren, you have a scalp. And I would love to hear the story from your perspective how that happened because I think the idea was even 10 years ago, which isn't that long ago, that you had, these people are untouchable. Like, yeah, you can vote out some Democrats, some other, but Harvard, the New York Times, you know, they're so well fortified, there's no way some jerk like you or me with the keyboard is going to do anything about it and you prove them wrong. So I would love to hear that story.

Christopher Rufo (12:48)

Yeah, that, that was a lot of fun. And so this is a number of years ago. This was during the Biden years and it's pretty simple. It was old school gumshoe investigative reporting. And we had obtained a document that outlined very clearly that the Harvard president had plagiarized, you know, dozens and dozens of passages or you know, kind of constructions in her thesis. And then in conjunction with another reporter, Aaron Sabarium of the Washington Free Beacon, we discovered that she actually plagiarized something like 3/4 of all of her academic papers, at least in part. And so we kind of drummed up attention around this story. And look, if you're an academic, you're

Michael Malice (13:34)

going too fast because, like, dole this out for me because this is my ice cream. This, this document falls into your lap, right? Like you have the receipts. This isn't some, some, like, oh, there's some tweet from 10 years ago or a little clip out of context. This, this is something academia does still take seriously. This is your reputation, this is their reputation. You know your, if you're kind of getting a degree. So when you got this dropped in your lap, were you like Indiana Jones, like, holy crap, I'm looking at the ark.

Christopher Rufo (14:04)

Or were you like immediately? Yeah, immediately, yeah, it's like, oh boy. And of course, you know, I'm always assuming defensively that the tips or the leads people send me are false, right? So say, all right, well, let's verify that this is actually accurate. Because if it is accurate, this is a bombshell. So, you know, a lot of these academic papers you can't view. So we were like finding academic journals, we were buying individual papers for, you know, $49 a piece, you know, getting all the documents together. And then the lucky thing is you can just compare. You say, well, here's our thesis, which we have here are these papers. And these are just verbatim rip offs that are unquoted, uncited and unacknowledged. And so we just went through piece by piece to figure out, okay, where is she really stealing from? And then actually a friend of mine had a PDF copy of Harvard's student handbook from the time that she had published this thesis at Harvard. And the student handbook was very clear. If you commit plagiarism as a graduate student, it's the serious academic crime and the remedies are up to and including being expelled forever, just like you're getting nuked out of the program. And so the question is then as well, is the president of the university held to the same standard as students at the university? And that was ultimately the hypocrisy that over time, as we drummed up these stories in sequence, that was ultimately the hypocrisy that just was not tenable. And eventually the board was under such humiliating pressure from us, they told her, hey, you gotta resign, you gotta step down, you're done here. And just, we'll give you a kind of golden parachute, but if you don't step down, you know, we're going to get rid of you.

Michael Malice (15:57)

So did you dull these out piece by piece or did you do like a big drop and nuker.

Christopher Rufo (16:04)

We dropped this, the first story with just the thesis. Our colleague Aaron Sibarium dropped a subsequent story with additional examples from her academic work. And then we dropped a kind of contextual story. The other wrinkle here, which viewers may not remember or may not have known, is that she was touted as the kind of super scholar. She was also Harvard's first black woman president. And so she had built this kind of massive DEI system around her. And so she was. She was really, I mean, to. To the outside perception until this incident, she was considered untouchable from every angle. I mean, she was like a made woman in the mafia. You can't get rid of a Harvard president. You certainly can't get rid of Harvard's first black woman president.

Michael Malice (16:51)

Right.

Christopher Rufo (16:52)

That was the perception going into it. And so we knew it was going to be tough at the very outset.

Michael Malice (16:59)

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Christopher Rufo (19:33)

No, I was. I very much was. I mean, I was gunning for a resignation. I was calling for her resignation. I was telling the New York Times that I wanted to force her to resign. I mean, I was going. Going for the. For the crown here. And it's really interesting because to your point, though, about kind of invincibility, invulnerability, untouchability, I noticed something very interesting during this whole saga. So we dropped the story. The mainstream news ignored it for, I think, a week. So I'm hammering the New York Times, the Post, the Atlantic, cnn. I mean, I'm hammering all these news outlets to say, hey, this is the biggest academic scandal of the generation. You're ignoring it because it's an uncomfortable truth, but you are pathetic. You're abdicating your responsibility here as a news organization. Eventually, CNN covered it, the BBC covered it, then the New York Times covered it at length. And so once we started turning into those left wing outlets.

Michael Malice (20:33)

Yeah, yeah.

Christopher Rufo (20:34)

We started to see the pressure. And the president of Harvard, though, I'll tell you, Claudine Gay, this is what really shocked me. If I were designing, you know, Harvard is a storied institution, $50 billion under endowment, you know, thousands of the smartest, supposedly the smartest people in the country. Lawyers, consultants, media, you know, PR crisis firms. Yeah. Supreme. I mean, everything, Right. And you said these people, we're going up against an opponent that is very sophisticated. But the defense that she ran was so unbelievably bad. I'm thinking this whole time I'm telling my team, we're smashing this lady across the face with a tire iron. Metaphorically speaking, yes. And she's just taking it. They're not running a campaign. They're not running any defense. She's not. Not going into the media. They're not even running like a counter campaign to smear us. They just froze in the headlights. They gave one quote to the local paper, the Boston Globe, and then they just kind of. Kind of went into the fetal position and. And I. I was shocked. It's like they're not. They're not even defending themselves. And so I think what I concluded, and some insiders within the Harvard administration told me much the same, is that they're actually not used to getting any outside pressure.

Michael Malice (21:57)

Right.

Christopher Rufo (21:58)

And so if you attack them head on in a sophisticated way, and you have the goods, you have the receipts, they get so scared that they freeze. They don't know what to do. They don't have any actual political experience, and they're used to getting their asses kissed constantly by everybody and validated. And so that's it. So when we were able to kind of pull that away, I realized, oh, wow, these people are not as powerful as maybe you think they are. They're not as. They're certainly not as smart as they think they are. And in fact, they have vulnerabilities. But it just requires initiative from people on our side to go on the offense, which often doesn't happen.

Michael Malice (22:39)

I'm going to drop you one of my favorite quotes of mine, which I'm confident you'll agree with. Agree with the enemy. Class is not composed of impressive people. Because I'm confident if you and I sat down with her, we could have come up with a better counterpunch than what she did. We could say, hey, I screwed up the footnotes, but the research is sound. This is. I apologize. And I'm going to, you know, set a better example going forward. I'm going to set some task force at Harvard fighting off plagiarism. And thank you for bringing this to our attention. Harvard deserves the reputation it has, and I'm going to lead it to the next century on that higher caliber. And then you have the people, the minions tweeting that, oh, you're jealous. These people wish they were Ivy Leagues. They could never. His work would never cut it at our standards.

Christopher Rufo (23:32)

And.

Michael Malice (23:32)

And it gives her people like the Team Harvard grounds to circle the wagons around her.

Christopher Rufo (23:40)

That's Right. Yeah, that. Yeah, even that which you came up with off the cuff, you know, just kind of improvise would have been better than what they actually ended up doing. For sure. Yeah.

Michael Malice (23:50)

So what was the first break in the dam? Which organization were you like, holy crap, we got her of the left.

Christopher Rufo (23:59)

Well, a couple things happened. I mean, we just set up dominoes with the other kind of media outlets. But there was a point where the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Atlantic, basically all under duress, folded. And they said, this is actually just really embarrassing. This is way too far. We have to have some minimum standard. The Harvard president has got to go. And so once we were able to push it so far into the left camp, and, and look, and they just say, we're trying to defend this, I got the sense that they really wanted to defend her, but they looked at the totality of the evidence and they realized that they couldn't. And so it's, it's an interesting question. And we'll never really know the mechanics behind the scenes, but I was told from someone in a position to. To know when they, when the board of kind of the Harvard, the members of the Harvard Corporation, the kind of central board with governing authority, it was when they started to feel embarrassed and they started to lose reputation amongst their colleagues. That's when they knew, hey, we got to actually make a change here. And. But I would say, you know, even then they get. They bounce her as the president, but she still gets to be a full Harvard professor at $900,000 a year annual salary. And so even when they have to sacrifice one of their own, they never really do. So they always keep people around on the payroll. Interesting.

Michael Malice (25:32)

I did not know that. That is extremely interesting. I remember very vividly in 2024 when Biden had that disastrous debate and there were increasing calls for him to step down as the nominee, first and foremost, maybe not first, but foremost, Nancy Pelosi and many others kind of joining, taking him on one at a time. And you never had anyone from the corporate press ask, hey, once he did admit he's going to drop his nominee, why is this guy still president? There was none of this intellectual curiosity, like, well, if you're not good enough to run again for office, are you good enough to be president right now? They just didn't bother ask that question as the same thing here. It's like, okay, you're a plagiarist. You shouldn't be Harvard's president. How are you supposed to be a Harvard professor? Like, you would Think it applies to one, it's going to apply across. It's the same crime. You know what I mean?

Christopher Rufo (26:23)

What's amazing, though, is I just remembered this and thought about this in a while is this, the following semester, like, she goes. She, like, goes away in humiliation for a little while. She kind of retreats into the, you know, woods or whatever, metaphorically. But then she comes back the next semester and then she's teaching a class on, like, introductory research methods.

Michael Malice (26:41)

No, she's not.

Christopher Rufo (26:42)

Yes, she is. And it's like, wait a minute. This woman is obviously a catastrophically bad researcher. How is she? And this is like, almost again, I don't know the backstory, but it's almost like someone is trying to humiliate her further. They're like, you're going to teach intro research methods, including how to cite your sources. I thought that was so funny.

Michael Malice (27:03)

Rufa, I'm gonna push back on you. She's a great researcher. She didn't have to do any work. Everyone else did the work for her copy paste. I'm done. Let me go get a pizza.

Christopher Rufo (27:11)

She did it. Yeah, she did.

Michael Malice (27:13)

Has she addressed this in any way publicly since she was driven from office?

Christopher Rufo (27:19)

She did. She. She wrote a New York Times op ed after she resigned, and there was no contrition, no admission of significant, you know, academic fraud. And basically she called me and others racist. That is like, you know, the classic. She went back to the classic, make a kind of catastrophic mistake and then accuse your. Your opponents for who pointed out the mistake of being racist. That was her conclusion.

Michael Malice (27:46)

You could have taken my line from Rogan and said, ma', am, I wasn't being racist, I was being Ableist.

Christopher Rufo (27:54)

Yeah, exactly. That's a good one. Yeah.

Michael Malice (27:57)

Even in her, like, you know, worldview, how is it that you're necessarily being racist as opposed to being sexist? Like, if you're going to go down that road, what evidence does she have that she's going. You're going after for her race, not her gender, because.

Christopher Rufo (28:09)

Yeah, that's a good point. Well, I imagine she'd say it was both. Right. As Harvard's first black woman president, she was held to an unfair standard, et cetera, et cetera. But of course, that's also complete nonsense because if you look into the published academic works of prior Harvard presidents, and we actually did this just to see, out of curiosity, there's no evidence of plagiarism. So, you know, and then I'll tell you what we also did is we looked at some of Harvard. We took A random sample of Harvard's social science faculty, humanities faculty, and we did find additional instances of plagiarism, overwhelmingly from other black women. Even though we tested white men, white women, you know, and all the other major categories. We did find the highest preponderance of plagiarism with black women, and in particular, black women in kind of fields related to, you know, dei, African American studies, et cetera. We did a broad survey at Harvard and elsewhere, and we found statistical disparities that, again, you can read into it however you want. You can decide what's causation, correlation. But we did find, in fact, kind of racial. A significant racial disparity in plagiarism on race and gender.

Michael Malice (29:28)

John McWhorter, who's an amazing public intellectual, who was a leftist, he was a professor at Columbia, I believe. He wrote a great book called Losing the Race, and he's black. And part of the book, he talked. He was enraged at the double standards in academia based on a student's identity. So he would talk about. He'd give an assignment about, you know, something very broad, like, what'd you do this summer? You know, and. And kids would hand in this whole kind of essay or. Or like, where do you see yourself going in 50 years? Something like that, you know, and the black kids just had a piece of paper being like, oh, America's racist. And that sucks for me because I'm black. And he's just like, this is not collegiate level, let alone Columbia. And you kids are being given a huge disservice by this kind of social promotion instead of being held to the same standards. And in Roxane Gay's example, as you pointed out, not only is she held to the same standard as every other Harvard president, she's held to this. She should have been held to the same standard as literally every other Harvard student.

Christopher Rufo (30:26)

Yeah, that's right. And look, it doesn't happen at the very last moment, at the very top of the pyramid, but you get the sense, going back for her whole academic career, that she was never really a kind of highly qualified or highly skilled academic. And in fact, her publication record, I think she published in her whole career, she never published a book. And she had published something like 11 academic papers. And other scholars, like, if you go to Larry Summers or other former Harvard presidents, it's like they published 10 books. They published 150 papers. I remember there was another Harvard president who had published an equivalent amount of. In one year as Claudine Gay had published in her entire career. And you kind of get the sense you're like, everybody knows this is happening. Everyone can see this. Everybody knows the secret. But they've created a system where it is. It kind of maintains this elaborate falsehood that can never be questioned. And look, in the one hand, who cares, right? Most academic work doesn't matter anyway. But the problem is that it degrades the system as a whole. And so that's why we care, because it's unfair, it's unjust, and it degrades the quality of academic research writ large. And it causes everyone to start lying. And ultimately, if you have an institution that requires people to lie in one thing, they're going to start lying in everything else. And I think that's what we've seen.

Michael Malice (32:00)

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Christopher Rufo (34:26)

Yes, very much so. Look, and I've got a lot of friends who are professors and administrators at Harvard and other Ivy League institutions who are all very privately but very passionately cheering on this campaign and cheering on a number of the exposes I've done since then. But I've always, you know, felt some frustration, including with some very good people, because the frustration is, yes, thank you for cheering it on in private. But, you know, when are you going to cheer it on in public? You know, when are you going to, you know, kind of have some skin in the game and try to actually reform these institutions? Because what I've learned over the years, and this is doubly true now, even with the Trump administration in office, is that you can exert outside pressure and change incentives and topple leaders. But ultimately, if you want to have an institution that changes for the better in a long term manner, you have to have people within those institutions that take up the cause. And I've been somewhat disappointed over and over that the people who are most kind of best positioned, most capable, kind of most aligned just have been unable or unwilling or some combination of both of those to actually say, hey, you know, we're going to reform these institutions. We have to have a higher standard, we have to have a wider variety of viewpoints. We have to have new kind of sub institutions that bring back some rigor, some discussion, some pursuit of truth. And it just, I don't know if it's academics, I don't know if it's these particular institutions, but it hasn't happened yet. And even with the Trump administration, for the first part of the term, exerting additional pressure, it just hasn't come to bear.

Michael Malice (36:33)

Elena Kagan, was she from Harvard or from Yale? I forget. It was Harvard. Right?

Christopher Rufo (36:37)

Elena Kagan was from Harvard and she studied under and I believe edited some pieces by the founder or the kind of intellectual godfather of critical race theory, Derek Bell, during her time at Harvard Law School.

Michael Malice (36:54)

The reason I bring her up is I know for a fact, I know I said for a fact, when she was a dean of Harvard Law, she would bring in conservative speakers because her opinion was, look, if these are going to be Harvard trained lawyers, they really need to know what these arguments are going to look like and be prepared for them. Which one would think if you are preparing someone to go in that kind of field of combat, which is the courtroom, they should not be ambushed by views of the federal society, for example, which are extremely prominent and highly effective.

Christopher Rufo (37:25)

Yeah, I've heard the same. I think that's good. But I would also say that it's someone, you know, it's like we need to have, you know, kind of punching dummies. And the conservative is just someone who comes in every now and then to have, you know, to get beat up on, to represent, you know, a kind of practice sparring partner. You know, my view and the Harvard Law faculty, from what I understand from some people with familiarity, is like more skewed now than it has ever been. And so you have maybe one or two kind of remnants left. And look, I think that's bad. I think it's bad. Not in the same way that, you know, a racial disparity would be bad. Right. You could say, oh, there's, you know, there's no members of this race that could be bad or good depending on, on, on. Well, if there's, you know, if there are no, like white cornerbacks in the NFL, okay, fine, the black cornerbacks are out competing, the white cornerbacks. It's good in the sense that it's just increasing the average quality, speed capability of the cornerback.

Michael Malice (38:45)

Sure.

Christopher Rufo (38:47)

But I think actually conservative ideas are much more like a skill at being a quarterback than they are like a racial identity. That in fact, a lot of conservatives ideas are simply true. And so they should be represented not out of some sense of affirmative action, like race based affirmative action, but they should be representative because they are true. They reveal something about the world in a way that liberal ideas, which are also in part true. Right. Many liberal ideas are in part true, cannot represent, cannot grasp, cannot communicate. And so the disparity again, is not bad or good based on kind of quantifiable affirmative action grounds, but because I think it actually is very bad for students. And if students are not hearing from the great tradition of conservative ideas, it's an impoverished education from the jump.

Michael Malice (39:41)

And also, if you have a system where five or six Supreme Court justices hold a certain view, and this is a view you're completely on, you know, never heard, how are you going to argue in front of them? It's just insane not to know that audience. It's just enormous disservice. So a lot of the work you did, President Trump implemented in his first hundred days, which must have been kind of thrilling for you to kind of see happen. What are some of those kind of accomplishments or those moves that you think move the needle best in the correct direction?

Christopher Rufo (40:17)

Yeah, well, I'll tell you, during the transition, my number one focus was to, you know, support that effort, talk to policymakers, talk to individuals on the transition team. And I really, you know, kind of advocated to the best of my ability on a number of these issues. But in particular, probably the best example is on dei. And so I was able to, you know, provide some input, provide some background knowledge, provide even some language that was then, you know, kind of incorporated into some of the executive orders on day one and subsequently. And so there were a number of big wins. But I would say the administration deserves a lot of credit for a few of them. And the president in particular, they really did do a good job at abolishing DEI within the federal government, dismantling DEI departments, eliminating DEI occupations, kind of down, kind of dismantling DEI programs. And so they took that very seriously. They worked on implementation, and so they did a good job at just wiping out DEI within the federal government. They also had some really clever provisions that had been discussed in the first administration but finally implemented in the second that were trying to put pressure on outside institutions to tell them, in essence, hey, discriminating on the basis of race, which is what DEI does, is actually illegal under the Civil Rights Act. And if you want to treat all people equally, which is the cost of the kind of bare minimum of doing business with the government, you've got to get rid of them. Some corporations followed through, kind of eliminating most of their most egregious DEI programs. But, for example, universities and blue state school districts have not done that at all. And so there's still, you know, more work to be done.

Michael Malice (42:10)

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't appreciate to what extent sometimes these things give People an excuse to do what they wanted already and gives them a way to say, give them a way to save face. I'm thinking specifically, for example, when gay marriage became a more and more popular view in the populace and then you had conservatives or the Republicans, excuse me, I want to be clear who are like crap, my base wants one thing, it's going to cost me the general. What do I do? When the Supreme Court struck it down, they could be like, well, well, Supreme Court answered that. Let's, we can, we don't have to talk about it anymore. And a lot of these corporations who did feel that pressure to have that black square for blm, you know, once, like, oh, we don't have a choice. It's this evil President Trump. You know, the federal government's a huge source of our revenue. Oops, you know what I mean? Like they were more than happy to have that excuse to do what Trump wanted.

Christopher Rufo (43:01)

Yeah, I didn't. I think that's right. And certainly my reporting indicated that of all the sectors of American institutions, corporations were the institutions that were most likely to take action to eliminate dei. And if you think about it, it makes sense. You know, big corporations typically in American history, especially the kind of government related contractors, defense, et cetera, were like country club Republicans. That was the general culture in the Fortune 100. It went woke for a number of years. It seems to be now inching back towards the center. But ultimately, corporate executives are very practical people. They're profit driven. And I think most of them could see that these initiatives within their company were not adding to the bottom line. And in fact they were making doing business more difficult throughout the institution and

Michael Malice (43:57)

their legal liabilities because you're importing a populace who have been trained, not just minorities, I mean, specific type of people who have that mindset where anything is going to be a lawsuit and they're going to know who the call to have that lawyer be per diem, whatever it is. And that's very dangerous as well, because once you're branded with that brush, how are you going to defend yourself? Even the court of public opinion?

Christopher Rufo (44:23)

Yeah, it's true. And I've talked with some executives recently and you know, these issues are also tethered tightly to other interests. So unions, like labor unions often use and increasingly are using the threat of kind of bogus, kind of racial discrimination or sex based discrimination to unionize companies. And so they're using these kind of woke causes as a cudgel, a pretext and a rationalization to then, you know, kind of secure the bottom line for the unions, expand their membership, collect dues, et cetera. And so executives are now saying, you know, we can get sued, the unions are going to come after us, the blue state, you know, kind of machines will come after us. I think they're looking for a way out of all this. And the good news is that the federal pressures are certainly against dei. The bad news is that still in blue states, those state entities are still pushing very hard for it. So while I think the President has done a great job, this is by no means the end of the story. And in fact, we can't get complacent because we need to keep fighting.

Michael Malice (45:42)

I remember I was on Gutfeld last May, excuse me, March or April. So this is a few months after Trump's inaugurated and the people were saying that, oh, you know, the Democrats are never going to win again because everything they stand for is awful. And I was like, guys, it's not even the end of the first quarter. This is the oldest political party on earth. If you think it's a wrap, you're completely insane. And obviously since then I've been proven more than correct. I think trans kids is one of those issues under this broad umbrella where it's the most disparaging disparity between the populace and the intellectuals. I think it's like 90, 10 or some crazy number. What do you think is the biggest issue under this broad CRT umbrella where the people are on one side and the machine is on the other in terms of the disparity of popularity?

Christopher Rufo (46:33)

Yeah, I think you're probably right. Trans is certainly the biggest gap. But even if you ask voters do you want a race conscious society or a race kind of race based society, they'll tell you overwhelmingly by something like a 3 to 1 margin that they want a race neutral society or a colorblind society. And so the key idea of woke, which is to racialize everything, is just deeply unpopular across the board. I think the problem, and I'm wondering if what you think, but from my vantage point, the problem is that when you're in power, oftentimes the criticisms are the issues that are driving the discussion. And so it seems like the perception from the public is, hey, we've gotten rid of a lot of the kind of bad woke stuff. The Democrats are downplaying it and now they're running a campaign against Trump on what? On immigration, on the war on Israel, whatever it might be. And the indicators that I'm seeing, kind of true to historical cycles, would suggest that the Republicans are about to get just a bloodbath when the midterm elections roll around.

Michael Malice (47:45)

Well, I mean, the premise of my book Then youn Right, was that, you know, the, the specific groups that made up the Trump coalition had nothing in common other than hatred of progressivism, that these are not intellectually organic allies. They just hated somebody else more. And now that that somebody else has, I think it's easy for us sitting here in 2026 to forget how pervasive and annoying woke was. I recently saw a piece they're rebooting Baywatch, which was the lifeguard show. And one of the people auditioning was a girl in a wheelchair. And it's kind of like it was such beyond self parody at the time that we were sitting there thinking, like, how. And a lot of that kind of went away, but it's dormant. And I think to your point, once the Trump coalition splits and the Democrats, you don't see Hakeem Jeffries front and center like you did, you know, Biden. You don't see Chuck Schumer talking as much as he otherwise could. They're kind of, they're, they're fighting the Trump administration, his agenda to some extent, but they're also letting the Republicans have their circular firing squad, and they're just sitting back and waiting to kind of reap the spoils, which is a very smart strategy on their part. At the same time, once the Democrats start opening their mouths, I think it's this endless cycle. It's like, you vote in the Republicans. Oh, my God, what's the point? These guys are just like the left. I'm not going to vote again. The Democrats come in, oh, my God, the left has lost their minds. We got to vote Republican. And it's just an endless, endless loop. I'm old enough to have seen this, you know, time and time again, but in all fairness, I do think the median democratic policy of 2026 would have been unimaginable in many ways, 30 years ago.

Christopher Rufo (49:28)

Hi, I'm Juliet Cowley, a retired FBI profiler and host of the true crime podcast the Cons. Real FBI Profilers. If you're fascinated with true crime and criminal profiling, then join us as we discuss real cases and examine the behavior exhibited before, during, and after the commission of the crime. You can listen to the consult wherever you get your podcasts. It's as close as it gets to being in the room with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit.

Michael Malice (50:00)

Let's get back to the show.

Christopher Rufo (50:02)

I'm curious, what do you make of the, I mean, Trump in the election, his election campaign mobilized on podcasts, like, not necessarily political podcasts, but the kind of Rogan universe. A lot of those voices seem to be now turning hard against the gop. Like what, what is your read? You might have more familiarity with these circles than I do. I'm curious.

Michael Malice (50:26)

I think it was a rare moment for them to stick their necks out for, for a presidential candidate. You talk about Rogan, Andrew Schultz, Theo von, a lot of these other people. And I think it's easy for people to forget context. Kamala Harris was running in the context of the UK censoring free speech. There was explicit talk from her campaign and Tim Waltz about censoring, you know, dangerous ideas, so on and so forth. So from a podcast perspective, I gotta be for the other guy because you're going to put me out of a job. Besides the completely unconstitutional, immoral and horrific consequence of what you're advocating. But the same time, it's like if you're voting for the lesser of two evils. I think they also forgot 2020 when they ran the table against Trump. You know, just every issue was just like, he folded and it was a very, very dark year for America. So I think they're kind of, they don't want to be seen as partisan Republican hacks, because they're not. But I. So I think there's a little bit of buyer's remorse. But it's like when you endorse a politician, you know, Trump, the candidate is so much better than Trump the president. But at the same time, Trump the president, he doesn't have a majority in the House, a working majority. He's got a one seat majority. That's, you're going to get 218 people together agreeing a movie. That's not happening. You have the Republican establishment against him. There's only so much he can do. So I think he's being held a little bit to an unfair standard. And the question always has to be as compared to what and to whom?

Christopher Rufo (51:56)

Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, it's easy to forget how bad Kamala Harris was, how bad her policy proposals were, and just how unimaginably inept that campaign was. And Trump had some momentum. Trump had, of course, this, I think, like heroic, kind of visceral response to the bullet grazing his ear. It's like once that happens, it's like you kind of got to give the guy the win, you know, like this guy is out there standing up, getting shot through the ear. I mean, he, he, he doesn't have to be here. He could just be hanging out on the beach in Miami or whatever, Palm Beach. And then, you know, now we're a year plus into it and those feelings have started to fade. The inevitable reality that it's very difficult to govern has started to set in. And yeah, I'm, you know, I kind of as someone, look, I support the president. I want to see Republicans, all things considered, more than I want to see Democrats in office. But it does feel like, and I've been thinking a lot about this, the window for constructive action is vanishing quickly. And if the Democrats have a blowout victory in the midterms, which seems likely, it's going to be a very difficult two years. It's going to be very difficult for the president to put up wins. And so I'm always thinking, all right, how can we get as much of the agenda, as much of the good policy ideas that we want to see done? How can we get them done now? Because my anticipation is that you're going to immediately start seeing impeachments, investigations, recriminations, kind of splintering coalition. And I fear that it could get, you know, pretty dismal pretty quickly.

Michael Malice (53:50)

I am shocked and disappointed that Clarence Thomas has not decided to retire because

Christopher Rufo (53:54)

he just retire and get, get a, nominate, get a, get a kind of renomination quick.

Michael Malice (53:58)

He saw what happened with Ginsburg. He's no spring chicken. No disrespect to him. And there's no way. Well, I shouldn't say no way, but I would bet a lot of money that the Republicans are not going to pick up seats in the Senate. You already have Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins not being reliable votes for someone who would kind of spook the leftist. So that gets you to 51 already. So, you know, it's, it's really unfortunate that he hasn't, in my opinion, done the right thing.

Christopher Rufo (54:28)

Interesting. Yeah, I haven't thought about that. But yeah, if they lose the Senate, then it locks up all the Supreme Court nominations. Yeah, the Court. I mean, thank God for the Court. I mean, the Court, while not perfect, while it doesn't vote 100% as I would like it. You know, the reality is that the Court is a good bulwark and the Court is a good defense against the next Democratic administration because this is not going to be kind of MAGA administration forever. The chance that the Republican will lose in 28, you know, let's say it's a coin toss right now in 2023, you probably have, you know, worse than a coin toss if the Republican is elected. And so, you know, you have to kind of plan for defeat as well because you always want to stay in the game. You always want to secure the kind of long term future. And so if the court kind of shifts to the left over time, I think that's a big problem. I'm seeing it in my home state of Washington state. We have a kind of very far left court. It makes everything more difficult.

Michael Malice (55:36)

I would ask you that you refrain from using the word bulwark in a positive connotation on this show.

Christopher Rufo (55:41)

That's a fair. They've ruined it forever, haven't they?

Michael Malice (55:44)

That's not the only thing they've ruined. But yes, let's try to keep that word in a negative sense. I don't see the Senate being losable really unless it's some kind of 1994 style tsunami, because Ohio, North Carolina, I think is gone. Roy Cooper I think is going to win. So that's one. Ohio especially Vivek loses his seat, which I would bet he was going to lose the governor's seat. People might vote straight ticket and get the Democrat back in. He is. He'd been a senator there for many years. And Collins, I would never bet against her because in the last time, which was what, 20, 20, every single poll had her down and then she won by nine. Yeah, that still gets you to 50. So like I guess I would be the next one, but like it's really going to be tough for them to get to.

Christopher Rufo (56:31)

Do you think Vivek will lose the governor's race in Ohio? Interesting. Why? Why, why? What's your rationale?

Michael Malice (56:37)

I'm curious, because I think he is. Has no real resume. I don't think he's particularly good as a politician. I think people in Iowa have this sense that he's being like Hillary on them. Like the establishment is just picking this guy and you got to go with it. And that the. His opponent, I forget her name, she's been a politician there for many years and he just keeps putting his foot in his mouth and the social media really world really hates him.

Christopher Rufo (57:10)

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I think he. I've known Vivek for a number of years when he was just kind of getting into the political scene. We had done an event together in New York and you know, very, very smart, very high energy, you know, very, very verbally skilled, fluent. But yeah, I think you're right. I think he has. There may be. He maybe. He maybe creates an impression. Like he's kind of condescending to the Voter or doing the voter a favor by running for officers and look like, I don't have a politician personality. That's fine. You kind of have to know what you're optimized for. I feel like Vivek would be an incredible Cabinet secretary or an incredible chief of staff. But, yeah, I think the perception. He's going to have to get above the perception that he is kind of. Kind of looking down on the voter or kind of not familiar in a kind of. It's not familiar in a way that a politician, a good politician can evoke. I remember even when I was very young, I was something like, I don't know, sophomore in college, and Bill Clinton came to do a speech. And then we were, you know, saw his speech. He was great. And after the speech, we were all kind of waiting outside, and he came out on the steps and he was, you know, doing the thing where he was kind of touching people's heads and just saying hi and just looking at people shaking hands. And I remember the feeling. It's like, holy. This guy is like. You feel like you're. He. He's really. You feel like you're in the presence of someone who is. Just can connect with you. And it was actually an amazing, amazing instance for me of learning, like, this is a political gift that retail politics and. And, yeah, some. Not all have it. And I think that will be a kind of hard thing for him.

Michael Malice (59:14)

Yeah, I've had him on the show a couple times. He's a great talker. Master's tease. Are those Harvard or Yale? I'm forgetting. Do you know which one it is?

Christopher Rufo (59:24)

Where Vivek went?

Michael Malice (59:25)

No, where they have those Masters tees, where there's, like, the House master and he has little events. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Christopher Rufo (59:30)

I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah.

Michael Malice (59:32)

Okay, so I think it was Harvard. I don't remember if it was Harvard or. No, it must have been. It was Yale. Anyway, I went there and I've told this story before. I met George W. Bush's uncle HW's brother. I think it was Neil. And I came in there. This was 2008. I thought I was gonna be my smarmy self and make him look. That guy charmed the pants off me effortlessly. It was like some kind of Darth Vader with the lightsaber stuff. I'm tap dancing and he's just, like, smiling. And he was in Skull and Bones, which Everyone's. Harvard, Yale, that is. And. And I sat there and I'M like, oh, okay, Yale. It was Yale. This is a skill that people I know don't have, and I don't think Vivek has that. And, and this is how someone who talks like George Bush gets elected twice. Like, it's one thing in front of the tv, in person, you're like, oh, okay, I'm dealing with a different kind of entity.

Christopher Rufo (60:25)

And I'll tell you, and this may be a good kind of, we'll prognosticate a little bit, a good theme, a theme to kind of arrive to. But if we're looking at 20, 28, I think Republicans are really underestimating Gavin Newsom. And Newsom has this same skill. So I was talking with someone who has actually a significant conflict with the California state government. I can't say exactly what it is, but this is a high powered individual. He's been done extremely dirty by the state of California and he secures this kind of meeting to hopefully resolve this dispute. He's really kind of has some visceral anger towards Newsom. Newsom walks in the room, they've never met. Newsom, by the end of it, is hugging him, kind of high fiving with him, gets his cell phone number. And this individual who's a tough guy, it kind of goes out of the room bewildered. He's like, I went in hating this guy.

Michael Malice (61:27)

Yeah.

Christopher Rufo (61:27)

And then I'm going out of the room and this guy's like, now my best friend. He's like, I got completely snowed by this, this kind of, you know, man to man charisma. And I think conservatives, like, you know, we're like, oh, Newsom. They'll say, Newsom, such a dummy. Newsom got a, you know, this on his sat. It's like, that doesn't matter. We had George Bush as a president. He wasn't a genius. Newsom has this animal charisma that, look, he can do things politically that others cannot do because he has that X factor. And I, and I think that he is. Look, if I were to just say straight odds, I would say Newsom is the odds on favorite at this point to not only win the nomination, but to win the presidency in 2028.

Michael Malice (62:14)

The Republicans won. I keep saying this all the time. Trump beat Officer Harris by 1.5 points. The best Republican nominee in decades versus the worst Democratic nominee in decades. Plus, she had like a little over 100 days to run her campaign, which, how could you expect anyone to do that and have a good shot? 1.5 points. And no matter how dumb Newsom is or might be, or perceived to be. He will never be perceived as. As dumb as her. He's certainly clearly much more verbally agile than she is in other contexts. Whoever prepped her for that debate should get a medal because it was shocking that they got that performance out of her, something I'd ever seen from her before or since. But Newsom would be able to do what she did and then some. Plus, he's a lot better on the attack than she is, so. And I also think Vance or Rubio are clearly inferior candidates to Trump, the candidate. So if you got that one and a half point margin, that is. And people say, oh, the Electoral College, there's a very strong correlation between the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, so I would not count this guy out. And I'm sure plenty of people who sat on their hands and their paychecks, excuse me, their wallets, during the Kamala campaign would be more than happy to donate to Newsom. Here's the other thing. People are like, oh, well, he's gonna have to defend the la. You know, California, how he destroyed it. He would spin it. It's a great success story. You're being lied to by Fox News and Michael Malice and Chris Ruffo. It's actually great. You know, and you. And. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's. And look at the Trump administration. Where's the real disaster? We don't have oil fields on fire in California. Right.

Christopher Rufo (63:52)

It's. Yeah. Completely. Right. It's. He's just. You know, there's this. And there's a certain line that politicians cross where they're so brazen. Yeah. In a very cynical way. You almost have to admire it. It's bad, obviously, on a moral level, but just as a kind of a totally objective analysis of just the political instinct. Newsom can, Again, he can do things that others cannot do. He can just go for that, just kind of bowl over the reality of the moment to just say, no. No, actually, we're doing a great job in California. And so I wonder, you know, how that will play. And I tend to agree. And I think that, look, Trump. And we're seeing this with the Iran war. Trump has a. A complete magnetic lock on MAGA voters.

Michael Malice (64:49)

Yep.

Christopher Rufo (64:49)

They love Trump. They love Trump.

Michael Malice (64:53)

Yep.

Christopher Rufo (64:53)

They. They will run over broken glass for Trump. No other politician on the right or the left even has that kind of connection. And so I think that whether it's Vance or Rubio, both of whom I really admire, I think they're both very smart, very talented, good. You know, Good, good. They're not good political leaders. It's, you know, Trump. They don't have it. These are not Trump.

Michael Malice (65:17)

And to counter your point, all the. Here's my campaign slogan against Newsom. You ready? You put up his picture and you say, would you buy used car from this man?

Christopher Rufo (65:28)

You probably would, man. That's the thing.

Michael Malice (65:29)

You're kind of like, yeah, but not in the ad. Yeah.

Christopher Rufo (65:32)

In real life, you're the used car lot. You walk away. You just spent like, 28 grand on, like, a 2012, you know, Honda Fit. And you're like, I didn't even want to buy this car, but somehow I'm driving it away from the Lotus CD

Michael Malice (65:48)

player to be installed.

Christopher Rufo (65:51)

And he hit you with all the extras and the financing. The guy's good.

Michael Malice (65:56)

Folks, head over to malice.locals.com where Rufo answer questions from supporting listeners. Chris, we're running out of time. What has been your favorite part of this interview?

Christopher Rufo (66:05)

You know, I like that we tackled some of the old, old stories and kind of brought to my mind things I haven't thought of in a while. And. And then I'm. Yeah, I think I also am interested in. And this is a conversation we'll have to continue next time. It's like, all right, where are things actually going now? And then, what does a post trump GOP and a post trump America look like? I think we've raised some good questions, and time will tell.

Michael Malice (66:33)

You are welcome.

Christopher Rufo (66:46)

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