Christopher Rufo & How The Radical Left Conquered Everything
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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News. I hope that you will check out all of our podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to this one, of course, wherever you get your podcasts, and I hope that you will share it with a friend if you find it of interest. In today's conversation, we will be talking to one of the more controversial activists who is present in our politics today,

trying to shift the narrative and certainly an active participant in the conversations of the day. Chris Ruffo, he is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the head of an operation there that is really focused on critical race theory, CRT, as well.

it is called across the country. He's also someone who's very prominent because of his association with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, where he has played a number of different roles, including advising him on a number of matters related to education policy. But we're talking to him today because he has a new book, America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Christopher Ruffo is a very interesting person, and I had a

delightful conversation with him. He's someone I don't know that well personally, but I find him very interesting because of the way that he has shifted the narrative and also because of the way that he talks about the approach that he uses, very open and sharing the kind of tactics that he uses to shift the way that we talk about certain subjects. Christopher Rufo, coming up next.

From the Fox News Podcast Network. Hey there, it's me, Kennedy. Make sure to check out my podcast, Kennedy Saves the World. It is five days a week, every week. Download and listen at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you listen to your favorite podcast.

Chris Ruffo, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. It's great to be with you. I want to talk to you about your new book, but also I want to talk to you about a number of other things. And so I first have to ask you this question. Do you believe that the left gives you the right amount of blame for

for your activities or should they blame you more or less? Well, that's a complex question. There's a couple of ways to look at it. I mean, certainly they blame me for many things that I am responsible for, like bringing critical race theory to public attention. Other things that I'm not responsible for, other connections they make that are totally absurd. But, you know, I kind of found one thing. Which is by osmosis. You know, they say, ah,

He's, ah, Rufo. It's him. You know, he's the force behind all of this. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of the, yeah, they think they present me as this like puppet master that's pulling all the strings. And it's so funny because I have a very small team. I live out in Washington state in the middle of nowhere and,

And so I take it as an implicit compliment. And then I also have learned how to have fun with my image in the opposition press. It's something that I kind of play with and cultivate as, as some people might do, you know, train sets in their basement. It's something that I enjoy as kind of a diversion or, or an entertainment. It's fun to see me in the New York times and other publications. So, uh,

I'm not asking you to in any way, you know, lift the curtain and show show people, you know, what's behind it. But does it give you some gratification that the assumption on the part of many figures on the left, certainly within the commentariat, is is that you have a role, a behind the scenes role in so many of these different things, whether that's actually true or not?

Yeah, no, I love that. And I certainly don't ever dissuade anyone from making that point. I think it's good for my own mystique. But, you know, in all seriousness, though, you know, I think what I've been able to be successful with is to establish new narratives in the public discourse and do it in a way that can't be easily dismissed or discredited or kind of delegated out of the conversation.

And so I always think it's good. I always love to tangle with the opposition press to get my narrative, my work, my reporting into their camp, into their side of the debate, because I think ultimately we have the better story to tell. We have the more persuasive story to tell. And even the people, the kind of New York Times commentary or the comment section of the New York Times, you find it actually interesting.

And oftentimes at odds with the editorial page and in agreement with a more conservative position. So I think that we just have to make the case and we have to make it, you know, without apology. So I want to talk to you a little bit about that approach that you have. It seems to me that one of the things that you have done best during the course of your career is be very frank and honest with people about what you're doing.

That you will just say out loud, we are going to redefine these terms according to what we believe they actually should be interpreted as meaning. We're not going to accept a left-driven frame of these terms. Instead, we are going to reframe them according to both what you believe, but also what you believe to be politically advantageous in order to define what extremism really looks like within these spaces.

You've done that repeatedly and you've done it without, I would say, any particular guile. It's almost anti-Straussian in a way to sort of say, you know, hey, I'm going to redefine this term and you're not going to like what's at the end of it. You know, whether that be, you know, particular aspects as it relates to education. But I think one, you know, example that is not sort of part of what you've done is that the right has essentially redefined defunding the police as

To mean what it sounds like in very blunt terms, you know, and the left is left scrambling to sort of say, well, we don't really mean defund the police. We mean, you know, direct funding in different directions and going toward these different things versus, you know, the police and they're left scrambling.

That's not one you're responsible for, to my knowledge. But it is something that I think is consistent with you basically don't accept the leftist definition of their own terms. Instead, you approach them as something to be challenged and something to be redefined. To me, that's something that is pretty unique on the right. It's at odds with basically what we've seen in the last several decades of people

When political leaders or policy leaders or commentators were doing battle within these spaces, they were so often, myself included, I would say, accepting the terms that the left offered them and then debating them on that basis, as opposed to challenging the underlying basis of those terms themselves. Talk to me about where that revelation came from for you personally and how you've applied it.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really, really important. And the lesson that I've learned is that when you debate within your opponent's vocabulary or conceptual frame or set of linguistic references and terms, you're guaranteed to lose. You know, you're essentially playing blackjack at the casino and the house always wins.

And so what I think is important for conservatives, knowing that we are actually outside the established discourse, the discourse is shaped by the left to such a degree that it's almost invisible.

We actually have to raise it to the level of visibility, raise it to the level of consciousness, and then fight a meta-political battle against it, meaning kind of not taking the status quo as a given, as a set of terms that is naturally occurring, but to actually say, no, no, no, we're going to have a fight about politics before we have a political fight. And so...

You know, I've been knocked many times for, you know, they say you're like an anime character. You know, you say I'm going to do this move and then you bust out the move. You're not allowed to do that. You're like a villain in a Bond movie. You can't do that. But I think the reason why it's been successful and why I continue to do it, I actually did it by accident the first time. I didn't really mean for it to kind of gain any attention. When was that?

On critical race theory, I kind of said, hey, here's the strategy in deep in a comment section. And then it kind of took off. And I said, oh, man, at first I was a little bit embarrassed. Like, oh, man, they've got me talking strategy. And then I realized, wait a minute, this is actually great because now we're having a debate about the debate. We're having a debate about the language. And I decided, wow, this is actually really fun personally. But also I think it's actually really helpful politically because we're

We're having a debate about the frame. And when you have a debate about the frame, you have a chance to replace your opponent's frame with your own and then force your ideas, your language, your conceptual terms onto your opponents and making them defend. So whether it's defund the police, critical race theory, DEI, all of these terms that we can use, appropriate, facilitate,

fill them with a different set of connotations and then throw back into our opponent's territory. I think that that is a really effective way to do it. And this thing I haven't done as much of, but really want to start doing in the coming years is,

Also giving our ideas a better language, giving our principles refreshed vocabulary, making sure that our frame in a positive sense, the things that connect us together as conservatives, as the political right, as even Republicans in the partisan realm, giving all of us a better set of, a better vocabulary with which to communicate our deepest principles. And so I think that, yeah,

well, it's fun to attack and maybe I'm kind of born to attack, you know, born to, you know, kind of mix it up in that way. I really think ultimately we also need something better. And so we have to be able to do that with our own, you know, deepest convictions. What was the first thing you read, particularly if it was a non-political thing, that gave you this understanding of the power of language?

Oh, man. I mean, you know, you could go way back. I mean, I think for myself, just as you're thinking about it, I remember reading the Wizard of Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin. And there's a concept in that book that you do not have power over a thing until you know its name. Its true name gives you the power over that thing. And obviously, it's a fantasy realm thing.

uh no offense jk rowling ripped off a bunch of the different attributes of it leguin is better but anyway it's it's just that i remember that idea and reading that when i was like nine or ten years old like it there's an there's an equivalent when it comes to the political realm which is to sort of say the the true identification of this thing you know that

is revelatory, but also honest, and that the average person views as being honest is incredibly powerful. And when it came to the critical race theory side of this, when that redefinition or that definition came into the conversation of the 2021 gubernatorial race here in my home state of Virginia, it immediately put the people who were backers of it back on their heels.

Yeah.

What are you talking about? This is suffused with throughout this curriculum. You know, it's it's it's like saying, you know, you're not teaching some specific thing, but it is literally undergirding everything that you're teaching them. And that was something that was, I think, very revelatory for the average voter that that says, you know, hey, look, I'm not.

I'm not reading all these fancy books. I'm not engaged in all these fancy arguments. But I can understand when you're telling my child that they are a permanent victim who needs to view the world through a hierarchy of victimhood, that that's something that I don't believe in and they shouldn't believe in.

Yeah. And I think that it also underscores the point that you can't just have language. I mean, you need language. It's an essential component. How you use words to persuade is a real political skill. But you also need to have evidence because people can sense when the language is manipulative and not referring to something real.

But in that case, you know, in my reporting, certainly I was exposing, you know, hundreds of pages of documents of evidence about CRT in classrooms. Then parents started sharing it on their own social media. They had, you know, visual evidence. And I think that that was really the moment where the debate really shifted because a parent could say, well, look at this exercise. It's a white privilege exercise.

You're telling my kid to step forward or backward based on his ancestry, and you're giving moral weight to people who step in one direction instead of the other. And it's right here. It's on the piece of paper with my kid's teacher's name on it. And so when we started to accumulate the visual evidence, you had a visual evidentiary argument, you had a persuasive verbal argument, and then you had, I think,

a real emotional argument that exploded at those school board meetings where people were then using their own human presence. They were speaking into the microphone at these meetings. There was drama, there was tension, and they let their feelings out saying, "Hey, this is how this stuff makes me feel. This is why I feel it's wrong." And so

You had almost, you know, going back to Aristotle, you had the three modes of rhetoric and you had them all kind of converging a little bit in this really, really incredible moment. And, you know, the left-wing critique was that it was all astroturf, Koch-funded, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

Which was absurd because the Koch network actually came out and said, no, no, no, we don't support getting rid of CRT, A. But then B, it's like I wish we had some astroturf network behind us. We're just doing this spontaneously. But please, lefties, if you know any billionaires wanting to write a check, send them my way.

So let's talk about your critics for a moment. Some of who are funded by the Koch Network. Peace be upon them. The thing that I think is so interesting is that

You have critics from all sides. You've critics on the left. Obviously, you hate you. You have critics from the kind of American liberal holdout section. You know, the the Bill Maher, you know, Barry Weiss. I kind of think of them as being in the same spectrum, you know, spectrum kind of of area where they think that, you know, they like a lot of what you do, but they think that you might go too far or, you know, they question your methods and.

And then you have a lot of critics who are in the kind of the it seems unfair to call them libertarian because I actually don't think a lot of true libertarians are mad at you because so much of what you're doing is fighting against government indoctrination. And that's something that libertarians are naturally opposed to.

But there seems to be this faction of sort of secular libertarianism and that overlaps bizarrely with like Nikki Haley and people like that, where they're uncomfortable with the idea that the state in response to concerns of parents.

would alter curriculum according to their local priorities or what they believe that their children ought to be taught. Personally, this is the attitude of criticism of you that I understand the least because it doesn't make any sense to me. It's localism. It's all – I mean, this is the way that America works. You know, it's – you know, it's –

We can complain about what the parents on the local school boards in San Francisco want to teach their kids. It's not going to make any difference. And you can, on the flip side, complain about what local school boards in Florida want to teach their kids. It's not going to make any difference. It is up to them to decide what their kids are being taught. And that's a good thing about America. I don't get why people are suddenly mad at this. I'd like to hear your response, particularly to that last faction.

And I don't know if you see it slightly differently or if you have a more complex or complete understanding of the philosophy involved. But why are the Reason magazine folks and the Nikki Haley types mad at you basically for what you're doing in this? And I realize I'm painting with a broad brush. Sure. No, no. To me, it's the most frustrating element. I know why left-wingers oppose what I do.

I know why some libertarians on kind of classical libertarian grounds oppose what I do, but they're kind of center-right. There's kind of a heavy overlap, maybe some of the never-Trump crowd, maybe some of the old-line center-right crowd. But their argument is absurd for a number of reasons, even on their own principles, I would argue. So what they're saying is that Rufo wants the government – Rufo wants to pass legislation –

to regulate the curriculum that is transmitted to children through the public schools. And they say that that's illegitimate because it's government interference, it's overreach, it's a form of censorship, it's meddling with the curriculum.

But then I say, well, wait a minute. The people elect legislators. The K-12 schools are a state-run monopoly. Legislators already, the status quo is they have control over the curriculum. And they're trying to modify the curriculum in order to make it reflect the values of their voters. And in a sense, what we have is

the people are regulating their government. And so the argument from the Nikki Haley types is like, well, that's illegitimate. It's like, wait a minute. So you're arguing in a sense that the people have no right to regulate the public schools, meaning the people do not have a right to regulate their own government. And so it's like, it's actual, they pay for, they pay for this. And they have every constitutional right, every right to legislate. And I think what it is, is that

In the Reagan years, the effective rhetorical line was the government is the problem. I agree. The government is often the problem. It should be a lot smaller across the board. I'm a universal school choice fanatic. I love it. That's what I want to see. But in the meantime, when approximately 90% of K-12 students in our country go to government schools, a.k.a. public schools...

We have a duty to make sure the curriculum is guiding them towards citizenship, towards knowledge, towards the true, the good, and the beautiful, towards the values of their parents. So it's like they're kind of –

Their minds turned off in 88 maybe. And the idea of using the government to transmit values even in the public school system is uncomfortable for them. But I don't think they've thought it through. I actually think – I think it's worse than that, Chris. And I'll say this and you don't – I hope you agree with me but you don't have to.

There was that comment from Paul Ryan a couple of weeks ago on CBS where he was asked about culture war issues. And he said, I'm not a culture war guy. These issues are divisive, et cetera, et cetera. And I wrote a piece of The Spectator about this because I like Paul Ryan. I feel like I might be the only guy left who likes Paul Ryan sometimes. But I really do. The point that I was making was that you realize the vast majority of people

Yes.

they're sending their kids to these public schools because they can't afford them to send it to send them to private schools because we don't have universal school choice because we don't have the ability to give them those kinds of resources now. And is that the ideal? Of course it is. But until the point where that is a reality, we are dealing with, as you said, a situation where the overwhelming majority of students are going to be going through these public school processes. And we should be on the side of parents who want to see their kids in

And so because of that, we should use the tools to battle back against that. It just seems...

It seems very straightforward to me, and I don't understand why many Republican leaders and right-wing thinkers find it problematic. It's ludicrous.

Yeah. And it's such an abdication of leadership, statesmanship. I mean, we need leaders in education that give students the best possible curriculum for their development as human beings and citizens educated into our political regime, the republic. And these guys, it's like,

You know, I'm sorry, but I care more about whether my kid is being taught race hatred and gender pseudoscience in school every day for eight hours than the capital gains tax rate for hedge funds. I mean, look, I'm a free marketeer. I support the free market. But let's be real. The free market is a means to an end.

The free market is not an end in itself. The free market creates a good standard of living, creates economic opportunity, creates abundance, creates wealth. 100%, let's do it.

But if that's at the cost of just abdicating on every cultural issue, no thank you. Ultimately, we have a society and a culture, not just an economy. And so I just think that these guys, they feel like it's easy for them to talk economics, for them to talk about Hayek and Friedman and everyone and do the Austrian economics thing. That's comfortable for them to go into a

you know, an event in DC or New York or San Francisco. And, you know, I'm a, I'm a cool guy. I just love the free market. But we have to be confident to go into the lion's den and say, Hey,

Public schools transitioning other people's kids without the consent or even knowledge of their parents is dead wrong, and I'm going to fight you about it. And so that's the spirit that I think we need. And while I agree with Paul Ryan on many issues, actually, you and I probably agree on, look, entitlement reform and some government spending, et cetera, et cetera, which he didn't achieve in his tenure. But

In theory, I agree. I'm still on board. But come on, you have to fight with two hands. We're given two hands for a reason, and these guys want to get out there and throw haymakers with one hand. It's just not going to work. I also love the – I mean, no offense again to Paul, but I made the point that –

Anybody who talks about culture war issues as divisive doesn't understand that actually they're less divisive in average polling than Medicare reform. That's true. We have better numbers. We have better numbers on those issues. But also, I mean, I like fantasy books. I liked The Fountainhead and I liked Atlas Shrugged. I like drawing the symbol of the dollar in the air.

But I like the Chronicles of Narnia too. So maybe let's do a little bit of both here. So the thing, you mentioned the trans agenda. I do want to get to that. But before we get off this sort of this right criticism of you, it seems to me that one of the things that is at the center of this tension is how does the right figure out how to use government power in a way that will not also be used against the American rights interests

When the left inevitably seizes power again, you have this pendulum swing back. And so, you know, whether it's from the secular libertarians or whether it's from the, you know, never Trumpish, I don't even consider them Republicans anymore. I mean, they're just so off the rails, but like, you know, whatever the argument is, they'll say something. Well, just wait until they use that against you. Yeah.

Usually my response to that is, well, they're using against us now. So let's consider the alternative. But there's another element of this too, which is that when I hear that, what I actually hear is, okay, well, there are two alternatives here. Either you set the goal of smaller government or

which we've shown time and again, Republicans are so unwilling to fight for. If they do, they tie their hands behind their back or something like that. It just doesn't seem to be a realistic goal. Or you allow me to use the tools that are at hand to try to achieve better outcomes. And so it's kind of a, if you rewind the clock to something that's a little less controversial in the grand scheme of things, it's sort of saying,

If we're going to have a welfare system, we're going to have certain expectations about work. You know, if we're going to have, you know, a system that is going to reward people in some ways that they don't actually deserve, then what we're going to try to do is drive them toward the working experience and then eventually to get them out of it, you know, as opposed to eradicating the program entirely, which is preferable in the aggregate, but it's unlikely to be achieved politically.

To me, there's no real difference. It basically takes you back to kind of that Gingrich 94-96 argument that says, okay, well, we're not going to get rid of this welfare system. We're not going to get rid of TANF. We're not going to get rid of these things. Can we at least make sure that these food stamps aren't all being used for buying sugary soda? And so let's take some baby steps toward this thing. And that to me is actually more rational than...

Then the opposite, because it seems like they're they're arguing this in this fantasy land where we're going to be able to get rid of these authorities. And you are actually dealing in the reality of these authorities are going to exist. So we have to deal with them as they are.

A hundred percent. That's exactly right. And that's actually a really good analogy I hadn't thought of. I'm going to pose that to someone next time they make that point. Say, well, you think we should get rid of the 1990s welfare reform and work incentives because that's meddling in a program rather than abolishing it? They'll get real uncomfortable at that point. And they say, no, no, no. We've read our Charles Murray. We like the reforms. But I think the point that I always think about is

The United States has a larger public sector, meaning as a percentage of GDP, government is greater than in communist China. So communist China...

measured as a percentage of GDP and public expenditure has a smaller government than the United States. It's misleading because they have public-private partnerships, but as a metaphor, it still stands. And so your question is to our friends in the kind of conservative crowd that we're talking about is,

do you think you have a better chance of repealing the entire 20th century? Or do you think that you have a better chance at shaping and providing leadership for existing institutions in a way that makes them better and more reflective of your values? And so just on pragmatic grounds, I think we have to do that. And look, we will have even, look, I'd love to see a universal school choice. I've fought for it. I've supported it. We're seeing it in states.

But even in those states, we're going to have a very large, dominant public school system. So the question is not an either or. The question is a both and. And I like the conservative leaders. And even someone who I think has done a great job is former governor. You termed out Doug Ducey in Arizona. You know, Governor Ducey is he's he's he's in the kind of Nikki Haley sphere in some ways. Yeah, he's a very pro-business guy.

Yeah.

That to me is such the right combination coming from a very reasonable, very, you know, very humble kind of servant leader type. It doesn't need to be Trump. You know, it's like Trump touched CRT. I think that's probably a lot of the reason why these people are uncomfortable. But it's like, no, no, no. We need to have our great leaders like the governors out there that are not natural culture warriors, bomb throwers.

and get them on board in the way like Doug Ducey did to say, you know what, we can really do it all. We need to make incremental improvements to all of our systems here. In terms of your personal experience, how much time did you spend in Berkeley? I'm not sure I know. Did you grow up there? What was your experience there? Yeah, I grew up in Sacramento and I lived for, I don't know, maybe four or five years in Berkeley and Oakland. I lived for a year down in LA. Are you a fan of all the teams out there?

I, you know, I'm not a sports guy. I'll, I'll, I'll be honest. You know, I, I did go to a couple of A's games, but you know, just for the hell of it when they were, you know, like on Wednesdays for like six bucks, you know, but yeah, I was, I was hoping it would be, it would be a very based thing for you to be a Sacramento Kings fan, but I won't explain why that is. So the, the, did that experience help you understand the left?

For sure. Yeah. And I'll tell you, though, and I think that this is something that might be surprising is I lived in Berkeley and Oakland, the East Bay from, I don't know, kind of the 2010s, the early 2010s, late 2000s, early 2010s. And yes, I mean, you know, it's a famously left wing environment, but I found it to be

Pretty reasonable, pretty tolerant, pretty open, you know, not really kind of caught in an ideological fervor. But then when I moved to Seattle over the last six or seven years that I was there up until 2020, I

Things really changed. They really shifted. Something happened. There was this more fanatical element that took hold. And then, of course, we saw it come to its full expression in the George Floyd riots of 2020. And so I have this maybe even a naive notion of kind of the hippies and burnouts and flower children of the left.

As a segment of the population that I grew up around, that I admired grudgingly in some ways, but felt like I could have open communication with even beyond disagreement. That disappeared by 2020. Does that also explain the appeal of RFK?

For sure it does. All those people, it's the Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Glenn Greenwald, you know, that lane of people. I think the anti-establishment left, the free speech left, the kind of true hippie left, you

I mean, you know, they're kind of coming up from an LSD trip. Yeah, that's right. You know, they're kind of coming to from an ayahuasca ceremony. And they're like, man, bro, what happened? What happened here? We have these, you know, fanatics on this one and this side. We're going to tune into Greenwald and Russell Brand, you know.

And I have a soft spot for those folks. I know these people. I live with these people. And so – Well, the way that I put it is, look, I understand you're dealing with some real challenges on the left. You have to choose between –

an absolutely crazy person who thinks that, you know, wifi might cause cancer. And then it's totally sane and not senile person who thinks you can cut off your penis and become a woman. So, you know, just like pick your poison there, man. You know, who is actually crazy in this conversation? That's right. It's interesting to me too, though, in terms of your personal experience,

I don't want to pride. So, so feel free to say you just don't want to answer, but yeah,

I have two young daughters. One's about to be three, the other's five months. And having children has changed dramatically, I would say, my attitude toward public school education and the like. Because what I've seen is how that kind of flows even into the private experience. And a lot of the things that come from that influence the private experience.

You know, we haven't had to send them to, you know, or send my daughter to, you know, a quote unquote real school yet. You know, it's all, you know, that preschool kind of weirdness. But it's something that definitely changed. It changed my priority list. You know, I still have pretty much the same priorities, but it upped that significantly. What has that experience been like for you? And, you know, how do you think about it in terms of your own family experience? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's had a profound influence on my own experience and my own thinking and then also my own decisions in life. And, you know, I attended public schools, K through 12, California, when I was growing up and, you know, for better or for worse. And

And we started our own oldest son in public school in Seattle, good neighborhood, high scores. We did the kind of, you know, bougie, you know, neighborhood shopping for the schools process. And in kindergarten, it was fine, you know, okay, a little loopy. And then it started to see, I started to see the policy really impacted. So the first thing was that

There were just homeless encampments 100 yards away from the school, maybe 50 or 60 people living in tents, doing drugs. I go to the school and I say, hey, we've got to get rid of this. I mean this is insane. This is a danger to these kids. And they're like, well, you know, we're not going to really do anything. Okay, all right. This is a little concerning to me.

Then it started to be a little bit of the lessons as we got older, some of the kids' behavior problems. You see kids going just absolutely nuts in the classroom, no standards of discipline.

And then I started to see even in like first grade, some of the, my son's little classmates were already starting to do gender transitions, you know? And, and it was just, I mean, and it was just getting worse and worse and worse as they got older, as they became more mature. And so we hit the eject button. We moved out way to a small town. Now we have our kids in a, in a totally different style of, of education system. And, and,

Look, it matters. That's the thing. I mean, it has an enormous influence on your kids where you send them and also the community. And so even on something that's more trivial, like let's say cell phones, right?

We had a policy, hey, our kids don't have cell phones. They don't have personal devices. It's a hard no. As my oldest was in fifth grade, sixth grade, he was the only kid in one of the schools with no cell phone. It was really a kind of a problem. As we've switched schools, found the right fit for us, none of the other kids have it. And so he's just like everyone else and it disappeared. He doesn't even care about it anymore.

And so it's the peer norms, it's the parent norms, it's the curriculum. I mean, it's very challenging. I think that when my parents were my age, you know, and thinking we're right, they say, well, good public school in the suburbs, send them, you know, job done, no problem. That's not the reality anymore. I think you have to be much more careful. Sort of policy, just it's not, it doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't exist anymore. And that's something fundamentally, I think,

you know, on the base level, Republican politicians in particular, but politicians in general, they don't understand that. You know, they're still kind of stuck in this past where they assume that that's something that's good and okay and just automatic. And I think that for elder millennials like me, you know, for people who are kind of going through this, they're looking at it and they're like, this is a world that doesn't exist anymore. I can't just assume that this is going to be good.

And I think that's true of a lot of immigrant families as well, you know, in a way that is kind of shocking to them. I do want to, with the time we have left, ask you a couple of questions. Little devil's advocate. I are you a significant player in a college that is on the opposite side of the country from you? Yeah.

I'm asking this question on behalf of Katie Herzog and all of those other category of people. Sure. So, yeah, I was appointed by Governor DeSantis to the Board of Trustees of the New College of Florida. And he appointed a new board majority, you know, of which I was, you know, one member.

And he gave us a mission. He says, this is a, the Florida's smallest public university. It's been struggling for decades. It's the lowest performing university in our system. It's also super lefty. It's also notoriously the most left-wing gender activist university in

It's two-thirds female students, almost all female administrators, highly imbalanced demographically, and 50% plus identify as trans, non-binary, and other kind of boutique genders and identities. And he said, you know, the legislature wants to shut this college down and just defund it and abolish it.

We have a different idea. We're going to recapture it. We're going to bring in all new leadership. We're going to bring in a new curriculum. We're going to recruit a stronger student body. We're going to rebalance the student body. And we're going to make this a classical liberal arts university. The chief of staff kind of famously said that a kind of a Hillsdale of the South. Yeah.

And so I think the question is, well, you asked as well, why you, you know, well, I've been working with the governor on CRT, on university reform, on gender in schools for a number of years. I think he's appreciated my work there. And I think also on a pragmatic sense, I'm very honest about this.

is he wanted to have someone on the board that could bring a little bit of media firepower and a little bit of narrative capacity to make sure that we were representing the school and fighting about the school in the public debate in a savvy and sophisticated and persuasive way. And so, you know, and I'll be very honest, I kind of like...

I kind of decided in experimentation, it's like I'm going to be the kind of

the vanguard voice on this project, really pushing hard, really, really kind of stepping into the breach and then providing my colleagues that are PhDs and academic administrators and college professors, provide them a little bit of space and a little bit of cover so they can do some of the more detailed academic work. You would stand at the Overton window just by being part of it.

No, no. We took a kind of battering ram and smashed the Overton window down. I mean, really, we changed the whole structure. I mean, we changed the whole structure because, look, the left has done a long march to the institutions for more than a half century where they've captured every university in the United States with very few exceptions. Conservatives have never successfully countered that with an academic recapture mission.

And so we're doing that for the first time at New College. We've been successful in the first 120 days. And I think in the next four years, as we recompose the whole university, we're going to see something quite different and a model for other states. So that's actually the next question is, what are your measures of success?

It's a couple grounds. So, you know, first off, I think the immediate measure of success that we're working with is really an input question. The president has recently announced that we're going to have the largest incoming class in New College in the university's entire history.

Enrollment was dwindling, was a huge problem for the legislature. And now all of a sudden, within just a few months, we have the largest incoming class. We've recruited people to this new vision, this new mission. The second elements are a little more intangible. We're bringing in a new core curriculum based on the classical Western tradition. Students will come in and have a core in Greek, Roman, starting at the Greeks and the Romans, going through all the great works of Western literature.

We're bringing in – I'm hoping we can bring in 25 or 30 new professors that are really committed to the classical liberal arts, similar to the kind of professors that you might find at a Hillsdale or a St. John's or another classical university. And then I think over time, we're going to be really shifting the metrics that actually the state of Florida provides.

We want to have students that don't drop out. They actually succeed. They get their degree in four years. They get employment. They get good jobs. And more importantly, they have those intangible skills that are really incubated in the classical liberal arts. They can answer the great questions about life. And so I think we're going to be successful on all of those fronts. Of course, it will take a little bit of time.

But just immediately, I mean, the 90-day transformation, we've already seen a reversal in some of the trends that had been plaguing this university for decades. Well, I think, look, it's a noble goal. And one of the things that I think is very true is that if you are a right-of-center parent, you basically are stuck in a situation where you say you're going to go to big state

Or you're going to go to this handful of institutions that we can have any faith in that you're going to learn anything good in terms of philosophy or the liberal arts. That list has been very short for a very long time. And I mean, you know, as, as,

You know, I went to William and Mary. I went, you know, my sister went to UVA. My brother went to George Mason. My little sister went to University of Richmond. We kind of maxed out the old dominion experience, you know, and my parents are Virginia Tech grads. So it's, you know, we kind of we got a good perspective on what's here and what's here was OK, but.

but it certainly was not what I think we would have hoped for. And getting to look at some of the curriculum when it comes to, you know, Hillsdale and Grove city and, you know, even, but even, I mean, institutions that I think people had a lot of, people had a lot of hope for Baylor, you know, back in the day, you know, and people had a lot of hope for, you know, other institutions that have tried to do this. So, you know, I wish you good luck with it. I just feel like it's going to be one of these things that it's just such a challenge to try to maintain and,

And the effort is so, so well-funded and so well-efforted against you that it's a real challenge. Last question. Obviously, you are associated most closely with the campaign of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, when it comes to his political efforts. I'm not asking you to speak as a representative of his campaign. But what I would ask is this. How can you tell the difference between someone who's serious about

about the culture war and someone who just demagogues on the culture war as a politician? I mean, that's the easiest question to answer. You inspect their results

And so in a political sense, you look at what they have done, what they have changed, the laws that they have signed. And that to me is the greatest difference between Governor DeSantis, why I just enthusiastically support him, and so many other politicians that it seems like they want to ride the outrage about the M&Ms and get a tweet, maybe get a hit, a media hit, and then chitter chatter about it.

But when I first met Governor DeSantis, I flew down with him in the governor's plane from Tallahassee to a bill launch or a legislative launch and started doing some small talk. And it's kind of like, well, he's not too interested. And then we started talking policy. And he just lights up.

And he just goes, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I mean, he's talking at a hundred miles an hour. He say, Hey, this is the institution. This is the law. This is how we can change it. These are the boards where we need to get better people. This is the kind of policy I think would really shift university governance. This is how we can get better, you know, academics and professors teaching these kinds of ideas. And it's, and it's, and I really realized like, okay, I've talked to a lot of politicians as you have, it's like,

This guy knows exactly how power works, how institutions work, how law works. And he doesn't just want to ride the media cycle to get some clicks. He wants to change the institutions for a generation.

And so that was really the moment where I said, you know, I am going to do everything in my power to help his efforts in the state of Florida. And look, I mean, the results speak for themselves. Ban CRT in schools, ban gender theory in schools, ban the sexual, the sexual surgical procedures and hormone procedures for minors everywhere. Reform the universities, recapture the university in the attempt to turn it into a classical liberal arts university.

Nobody has done more anywhere, period, to actually change the institutions. And I just think that if conservatives, if we want to have our ideas thrive, if we want to have our kids thrive, if we want to have our country thrive, we need to have someone with that level of sophistication and that level of understanding.

delivering results. And so I'm not on the campaign. I'm not a partisan in this sense, but from my own perspective, the things that I care about, I'm so impressed and I wish him immense success in the coming months. Chris Ruffo, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Thank you. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.

One thing that I find interesting about Chris Ruffo is that he has odd enemies. There are certain people who really like what he's doing. I think that he certainly has a lot of appeal to the kind of Joe Rogan, Elon Musk kind of

set of people who really want to expose what they believe is a very skewed approach to history. Philip Magnus, someone who's written for Reason Magazine and other libertarian publications, is certainly someone who's in kind of that same lane, as well as a lot of the folks who are at Law and Liberty, but also people on the left, including even socialists who've been critical of the 1619 Project and the like.

So it's very interesting to me to see reflected in the reviews of this book a real animosity toward Christopher Ruffo from a lot of people who you might assume would be on his same side of the aisle, particularly a lot of secular libertarians. And if I can go a step further, secular libertarians without children in school are

This is something that really sticks out to me about the criticisms that are brought against him. If you are kind of a Christian libertarian, Ron Paul type, Rand Paul and the rest, if you are a homeschooler or someone who has kids of schooling age who would otherwise be put into public schools, one of the big reasons that you might choose to take a different path

is because of the education that they were receiving. And certainly we saw the explosion of homeschoolers during the pandemic in a way that seemed to shock a lot of people. And something, by the way, a trend that virtually none of the secular libertarians have written about, which I also find of interest. The Reason magazine, which is perhaps the font of this, really has been quite critical of Ruffo and Ruffo.

It seems to me it's probably coming from a perspective that views him as some kind of book banner or idea banner, someone who is chasing down leftist literature and that kind of thing, trying to remove it from the shelves. From my perspective, I just don't get that at all. I mean, my daughters are not yet at the age where they have to go to these public schools.

But if they were, and if many of these books were on the curriculum or were on the shelves for them to partake of, I would have the same issues that someone like Rufo has. And I believe myself to be as much a free speech zealot as anybody else.

The point is not that removing these books or shifting them to a different shelf bans them. Quite the contrary. It's simply saying, if this book stays on this shelf, we might have a push to ban it because the things that are included in them are not appropriate for children to read. I had a very open approach from my parents when I was growing up when it came to checking out books from the library. I could check out anything.

And while they were quite restrictive when it came to video content and R-rated movies and things like that, they really did give me the run of the library when it came to checking things out. I have a distinct memory of when I was a child checking out a book about the Holocaust. And I was reading it, of all places, at a soccer game, like some kind of athletic competition that my sister was participating in when I was a kid.

And another parent looked at what I was reading and got somewhat upset about it and flagged it to my parents, basically the idea being that they weren't paying attention. And my father disputed him and just basically waved him off and said, no, no, he's old enough to understand what this is about.

And to me, that's something that invests a lot of faith in the kids and it's not right for every kid or not every parent is going to come to that conclusion. But that's the one that my parents came to. And I don't regret it for a second. I think it was the right choice.

And when it comes to these types of books, however, I do not think that ripping away the authority of parents to know what their children are learning, to see what they are reading, and then to judge as a community, is this something that we want our seven, eight, nine-year-olds to be able to have access to? Or do we think that as a general rule, it's better to wait until they're 12, 13, or 14? And that to me is something that is the essence of local control, of localism.

of faith in the people to make determinations for themselves. And when libertarians or self-styled libertarians weigh in and say, that's book banning, that's anti-free speech, my response to them would be,

You are doing something no different than the radical left that declares that all children belong to the community, that it is the community that should determine how they are raised as opposed to their parents. It is an inherently leftist, collectivist message that is at odds with everything about liberty. And I'm happy to debate anybody on that point anytime, anywhere.

I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech Podcast. We will be back soon to dive back into the fray. Listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.

Jason in the House, the Jason Chaffetz podcast. Dive deeper than the headlines and the party lines as I take on American life, politics and entertainment. Subscribe now on Fox News podcast dot com or wherever you download podcasts.