Christopher Rufo
Appearances
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
Yeah, it's been a spectacular week. And we've been working on this campaign to abolish DEI, to reform higher education, to get rid of trans ideology in America's institutions for five years. And it feels like a point of culmination. And I spent the interim after the president's electoral victory, before he took office,
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
trying to talk to people, trying to get organized, trying to set the stage for reform. And they've taken everything to the next level. I mean, the sheer scope and scale of what the president has done and what his admin members have done. This is a totally different administration than Trump 1.0. It's probably the most effective first week of a presidency in my lifetime.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
And I know for a fact that there's more to come.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
Yeah, that's right. And I think this has been a learning process for me and for the right as a movement. I think it started with President Trump's executive order banning critical race theory in late 2020. Then the shift of politics went to Florida. Governor DeSantis really took anti-woke ideas and figured out how to turn them into anti-woke policies and administration.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
And then this learning over the last four years has prepared Trump's team. And look, these are people who have spent the last few years waiting for this day, waiting for this moment. I was in policy planning sessions three years ago where they were talking about slicing Lyndon Johnson's executive order 11246 on affirmative action. And this comes such a long way.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
So we're now in the implementation phase. And I think that this is just the beginning.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
And while, yes, executive orders can come and go, I think there will be a legislative component coming in the next few months to try to entrench some of these ideas, entrench some of these policies through the legislature, through Congress, so that they're perhaps more permanent and certainly more difficult to overturn in the future.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
Yeah, it's really good executive management. And I think that story in particular, this idea that you could send an email to all federal employees saying, respond to this email with resign in the subject line and you're gone, is something that was unimaginable, not just in Trump's first term, but really in the first term of any previous president. And I think this is really...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
the stroke of Elon Musk's influence. This is the kind of thing that Elon Musk demonstrated when he took over Twitter. He fired 80% of the staff and improved the product. They're taking that ethos into the Oval Office and into the White House. This is part of the New Right Coalition. They've brought in some of the tech leaders, There's, of course, squabbling on issues.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
Tech leaders want concessions on, for example, H1B visas. But on the bright side of this partnership where we can all agree is a kind of ruthless administration, downsizing the government, going after the deep state, dismantling the permanent bureaucracy.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
And that's something that I think really requires an audacious kind of leadership that Musk has demonstrated and now Trump has learned from and is demonstrating in government.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
Yeah, that's part of the process. And I watched this up close in Florida as we were doing some reforms in K through 12 schools and higher education in Florida. There were so many instances of malicious compliance from school administrators, school librarians, university officials. And I think that the governor, Governor DeSantis, developed a pretty strong formula.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
It was to reiterate the principle, to have his rapid response communications team rebut the errors and lies and manipulations in real time, and then really just bulldoze through. Because he told me something very interesting one time as we were reforming one of the universities. He said, look, You're going to get a thousand negative news articles. And I have your back.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
This is the right thing to do. And the voters can see through this. You just have to stand tough. And that's exactly what he did. He won reelection by 20 points. And I think his model of how to handle malicious compliance is the right one. I would only add one small addition that I think could be relevant to the Trump administration.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
Find the individuals who are responsible for malicious compliance, terminate their employment, and make them an example so that you disincentivize malicious compliance further down the line.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
This is important because the federal government is so large, even a single instance of malicious compliance can deal damage, and you need to really reset the incentives so that people not only follow the executive orders, but they do so in good faith.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
Yeah, I think, look, I think the president has made incredible progress on DEI. He's going to be opening up investigations into discriminatory DEI programs at companies, school districts, universities. And so I think that the abolished DEI movement is in really good shape. Where I think we can make sustained progress that will require more than an executive order is in higher education reform.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
Look, America spends billions of dollars a year subsidizing monolithically left-wing universities that produce these ideologies.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
And so I think that we need to have the Department of Education team, once we have the confirmation of Secretary McMahon, I think we really need to start working together to reform higher education, to put pressure on these institutions, not only through policy, but financial pressure, and pressure on how status and prestige are distributed within the higher education world.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2129 - Did DEI Cause the DC Crash?!
We have to incentivize scholarship, disincentivize left-wing activism. And I think that we can do this through the various carrots and sticks that the Secretary of Education has available. This is something I'm going to be working on moving forward. And I think the time and the moment is right.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
There are, you know, each of these equity centers received an $8 million grant from the Biden-Harris administration. And when you look at their organizational charts, they essentially support, you know, a dozen or two dozen left-wing race and gender activists who are in charge of advising thousands of public school districts each of these centers.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
And so these are very important nodes in a larger system to indoctrinate American kids and to harvest up taxpayer money in service of this left-wing ideology. All, I remind you, under the guise of the Civil Rights Act itself. And so what's important is to expose exactly what this means in practice. And these people are not subtle in their language.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
It's very clear what they're trying to communicate. But for many years, no one was looking. And so my job is try to expose it, to bring it to public attention and then to bring it to the attention of the Doge boys who are in the Department of Education building right now looking through contracts to terminate.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
And this organization that that that hosted this seminar that you're rolling the clips from has now had all federal funding revoked moving forward.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
No, it sounds absurd, but you're not missing anything. That is exactly what they're saying. They're saying that actually decriminalizing and destigmatizing sex work for black transgender children is the new noble calling. And look, that's certainly opinion that you can have protected by the First Amendment. I disagree. I'm sure that you disagree.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
But the important thing here is that this is being subsidized by federal taxpayers. So every taxi driver, line cook and electrician around the country that's working hard to feed their family is actually chipping in for this idea that we should destigmatize sex work for children. It is so outrageous that it's almost hard to believe it's true.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
Yeah, that's right. And look, the coinage is unique and funny. It's called adultism. But the idea is actually a very old left-wing idea. If you study the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, one of the key tactics from the Chinese Communist Party was to radicalize children and to turn them against their parents. And so you had mobs of kids that were being radicalized by communist teachers.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
that were then going door to door, tearing down houses, pulling people out of their homes, stuffing their mouths with dirt, bashing them over the head with rocks. And so while it can appear to be a kind of trivial idea, adultism, there is a rich history of this. And the basic mechanism is one that is very dangerous.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
When you get the government in between the parents and children, history suggests that terrible things can happen.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
Yeah. And my favorite part is that the beginning, it says, according to research. But if you actually take a look at the research, you dig into the footnotes, it is like the most shockingly, or maybe not shockingly, shoddy garbage imaginable. And yet this idea that babies kind of come out of the womb with a clan hood is just so farcical and ridiculous. And yet,
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
It's captured the minds of people with PhDs. These people who run these programs are PhDs, mostly in education. And so I think that is the perfect example of someone completely suspending their common sense, suspending any experience of children. Children are incredible at that age. Uh, they're, they're, they're open to so many different people. They're open to everything. Um, uh,
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
But also how ideology can really poison you. And so the story is not really about these education centers themselves. They should be gone and they will be gone. But the story is that we have an educational class in this country that is susceptible to this ideological poison and then becomes fanatical about it when they press it onto our kids. That's the most important thing.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
And so wherever you are in the country, if you're in a red state, if you're in Tennessee or Florida or Idaho, you're not safe from these ideologies because these centers and these national ideologies are trying to find a foothold everywhere.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
Yeah, that's right. And there are already encouraging signs. Of course, Elon's Doge team is going in and eliminating contracts. But the president has greater ambitions. He's called for the abolition of the Department of Education. There is a lot of debate over how he can do that, how far he can take executive action, where he'll need the legislature to actually come through.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
But there's really a simple three-part plan. You spin off the federal financial aid for universities into a separate portfolio that you can then privatize down the line. You continue to spend the money for K-12 schools, special ed, lunch programs by directly block-granting it to the states, so states have greater oversight over how those dollars are used.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
And then you just absolutely crush, demolish, and then salt over all of the quote unquote research, which is really just ideological production. And then you never look back because there is no good that's happening from these programs. You can save the programs that for now are gonna have to be passed through, but we cannot let this survive another four years.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
It survived under Trump, it survived under Bush, it survived under Reagan. Now is the time Americans are finally aware of what's happening with public schools and these left-wing ideologies. We have to capitalize on the momentum and actually get this job done.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
So my team has spent the last two months really pouring over all of the various nooks and crannies, sub-departments and grantees of the Department of Education. This is an institution that spends billions of dollars every year, and it functions in essence as a left-wing patronage machine.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
And so I started dropping clips, now that Linda McMahon is in her confirmation hearings to become the secretary, to show the extent of the ideological corruption. And This is the Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo-style narrative that is being pushed by thousands of employees associated with the department. They're saying America is fundamentally racist.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
They're saying that all white people function as white supremacists. They're saying that you have to give up your power, privilege, and resources to the oppressed. All of the narratives that we've seen over the last four years, this is a major point of focus for the department, regardless of who's in office.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
It's really interesting. These were centers that were established by legislation all the way back in the 1960s to provide a colorblind equality in education, a kind of noble principle. But as with much of our civil rights apparatus, it's been hijacked by the radical left and these education centers that receive millions of dollars in public funds.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
They're in charge of advising public school districts, not just in blue states, but in all 50 states. They've been captured by left wing radicals who are promoting the Black Lives Matter agenda, who are describing the education system as a concentration camp.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2139 - SHOCKING Tapes: Department of Education Pushes SEX WORK FOR CHILDREN
And in one of the clips that you have today, even made the absurd argument that babies are racist, especially white babies become racist before they can even talk.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And so, look, reforming institutions, you have to deal with three things. The raw material of politics is money, power, and status. And so as I run campaigns, for example, the successful campaign to oust the president of Harvard University at the beginning of last year, that's what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about how can we take away their money? How can we take away their power?
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
How can we take away their status? to the point that we're causing so much pain to the decision makers, in this case, the members of the Harvard Corporation, so that they have to change.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Yeah. So there's a short term answer and there's a long term answer. In the short term, I'd like to see the abolition of discriminatory DEI programs. I'd like to see colorblind admissions and a requirement that the universities publish disaggregated admissions and class rank data at the end of each year. So that you can see it for yourself.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Yeah, so that American taxpayers can have at least a proxy to determine whether or not universities are in the ballpark. of colorblind admissions. I'd like to see an overhaul of university hiring so that you have more philosophical balance on the faculty and you have an end to, again, kind of illegal discrimination in hiring and promotions. I think also standards of civil discourse.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
So for example, there should be significant federal financial penalties for any university that allows masked protesters to take over campus spaces, to any university that allows building occupations, illegal encampments, the disruption of the educational program, or violence as we've seen, for example, in the wake of the Hamas terror attack against Israel.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Deplatforming and shouting down speakers, that kind of thing. There should be strict penalties for that because we can't have a good university system without basic standards of civil discourse.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Yeah, I mean, look, universities are ultimately going to have to decide what they put into the course catalog. I don't think that the federal government should be micromanaging academic offerings to that extent. I think that's counterproductive. I think it's getting too far into the weeds.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
It's a little bit nuanced. So what I would say from the federal government perspective, the most successful policy reform areas are on university administration. That's where we have the most public support. That's where we have the most legal authority. That's where we have really the most kind of defensible territory for engaging in these reforms.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
That said, I think universities have to reform policy. the structure of their departments. They have to reform their course offerings. And as a trustee at the New College of Florida, which is one of the public universities in the state of Florida. Right. Governor Ron DeSantis asked you to be on the board. That's right. And so we did these administrative reforms. We fired the president.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
We got rid of the provost. We turned over the whole administration. We abolished the DEI department. We implemented a policy of colorblind equality. All of those reforms, I think, are much needed. But we went further than that, and I think with good reason. And we looked at our course offerings. We looked at our departments.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And we did a systematic study to just say, hey, which programs and departments are offering students a good value? Which programs and departments are oriented towards truth rather than ideology? And we concluded that our gender studies program did not meet any of those basic thresholds. And so we abolished the department, which established a new precedent.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And so I'd like to see some targeted defunding of compromised and non-scholarly academic departments, projects, research grants. We've seen that happening through Doge, and I'd like to see that become systematized throughout the federal government.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
I mean, Princeton has decided to take hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, but that taxpayer money comes with basic terms and conditions, basic rights and responsibilities. And so the federal government is well within its right to say, we're not going to keep cutting you a blank check unless you meet certain basic standards and requirements that
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
are necessary for the good stewardship of these public dollars. And so Princeton had a choice many years ago to accept government money with the inevitable reciprocal responsibilities or to refuse government money and to maintain its academic independence and its academic freedom.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Hillsdale College, where I'm a distinguished fellow, decided to reject public funding so that it could maintain its institutional independence. Princeton is at liberty to make the same choice, to refuse taxpayer money and then to not have to negotiate with the taxpayers through the democratically elected administration to come to mutually beneficial and mutually agreeable terms.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Well, they were all given the binary choice. They all can accept public funds or they can not accept public funds, and they still have that choice available. Forgo public funding. and gain more academic independence. But the president of Princeton wants to have it both ways. He wants to have all of the entitlements without any of the responsibilities.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And so that's the mark of someone that is not looking at this in a mature way, but looking at this, I think, in a very greedy and very self-serving way. I think the president and the secretary of education should be fully ready
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
to say, if you don't want to make a deal, as you actually said, for the public good, I hope that the administration is ready to terminate that funding, not just on a temporary basis, but on a permanent basis. I think that's when you get a cascade effect. You're going to see other institutions recalculating in a very healthy way.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Yeah, I mean, it has been a journey. And some of the moments in the past few months have had a surreal feeling. I've been working on these issues for five years. At the beginning, it felt like I was the only one fighting. And now, fast forward five years, some of the ideas that I had cobbled together suddenly... become reality. They become policy.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Well, so I actually would agree in part that, yes, obviously it is not practicable and probably not desirable for universities to say, hey, we're going to have kind of an ideological quota to have balance, to have every point of view represented, to have every religion. I mean, I would like to have a greater kind of philosophical balance.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
But what I'm not calling for is like a one-to-one parody or that it has to reflect the particular political ideologies of the public. I don't think that that is the best way to do it. So that's why I say I agree in part. But what I don't agree on, the lesson of the last few years is that the university's
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
have not developed a sufficient and robust internal controls, internal critics, internal challenges. And even at Princeton, for example, I actually know quite a few members of the Princeton faculty, some of whom are conservatives who are essentially in hiding
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Because the culture and the administration and the system of rewards and punishments are so openly and irrationally hostile to anyone that contradicts this kind of elite left-wing consensus that they don't even feel comfortable stating their opinions in public. And so that's not a university. That's not academic freedom. That's not a culture of civil debate. And so I don't take his word for it.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Either he doesn't know what's happening on his own campus, which is bad, or he does know and he's using this kind of misdirection, positing elite left wing ideals while doing the kind of cynical work of institutional management.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
They affect billions of dollars in the flow of funds. And so that's a great feeling. I think as an activist, there's really nothing better than seeing the ideas that you fought for against the odds triumph and become reality.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
But again, this shows the remarkable level of egotism and entitlement. What do you mean? He's taking money from taxpayers. You have a reciprocal obligation to taxpayers. This idea that I can enter into contract with you, you can pay me hundreds of millions of dollars. And then I say, I'm not going to do anything in a reciprocal manner to meet my basic responsibilities is not academic independence.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
You know, that's kind of an academic entitlement. And what I would say also is this, the political right has figured out how to use leverage effectively. The president of Harvard is gone. The president of Penn is gone. The president of Columbia is gone. That's a pretty good track record. That's three for three. You know, that's a hat trick right off the bat. Is that a threat? I mean, seriously.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
That's up for interpretation. But what I would say is that if it's not a threat, and it could be, it's just a demonstration of the facts. And the facts are that the political right has a greater understanding of institutional politics than at any time in the past half century. And we've demonstrated willingness to not only talk about, but to use the power to advance the public good.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And we're not going to be intimidated or hamstrung or let around.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Well, the idea that I'm, you know, an equal power to, you know, the universities, which have collectively hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under management. They have, you know, lawyers and PR firms and lobbyists and other agents. But you just described the power that you have discovered online. to rebalance those dynamics. That's right. But it's a power, again, from leverage.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And so keep the context in mind is important. But the second question is, how do I know that I'm not abusing that power? It's a great question. It's an important question. But what I always have done, and I'm continuing to do,
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
is i'm always measuring the work that i do first against conscience right to make sure that my own moral intuitions my own moral sense keeps me in in check but because we live in a democratic society we have a constitutional republic i also want to make sure that the policies that i'm advancing also have broad support from the american people and so The president won the election.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
He has the democratic mandate. These ideas have broad public support, and I think they meet the test of conscience. Got it.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
What would that be? I mean, no, I think that would also be a success. And that's what's, I think, very... But how would that be a success? Because right now, the calculation for university presidents is in the back of their minds, they're thinking the administration might fold. But if the administration doesn't fold, I think we are entering a more serious politics.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And so if, let's say, Princeton very rashly says we're not going to reform our institution, we're not going to implement these much needed policies. No more federal funding. I'm fine with that. That's their decision. That's fine. But I also wouldn't see that as a loss of all of the leverage points. The finances are one leverage point.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
But as I told you earlier, money, power, and status are the three predominant raw materials in this kind of activism. And we would still have other ways to pressure these places and to push through reforms.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
I don't think that's accurate. Look, Princeton could raise private dollars to pay for whatever research they're doing.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Well, it could happen to a larger number of universities. But what we're seeing right now is, in fact, a prototype of that strategy. And if you take Columbia University as really the first trial of this strategy, we've seen an enormous payoff.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And so what I'd like to see and why this is a medium and long-term goal is I'd like to see that prototype industrialized and applied to all of the universities as a sector. All of them.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And I would like to see, in addition, a modification in about $120 to $150 billion a year from federal taxpayers to universities used as leverage to extract significant reforms and to reduce the size of the sector itself. I think that is what is coming. It's going to come either through the market mechanisms, but I think it could come even faster with good policy.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Yeah, well, I mean, even in my own personal experience, I entered my university education with a far left mindset and politics. Yeah, how far left? You know, very far left. You know, I grew up, my kind of formative political education was from my... family in Italy. And my family in Italy is all unreconstructed communists.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
So my first exposure to political literature was in my aunt's house in Rome and browsing through her collected works of Lenin. And so I grew up very committed to left-wing politics, getting out of high school, wanting to be in politics, going to Georgetown in DC for that reason.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
But the kind of ideals that I had built up in my head as a young person through my own study and experience and conversations, once they made contact with the reality of left-wing politics in elite university kind of milieu, Everything just shattered. It broke apart. And what I found is that in America, left-wing politics is an elite venture geared towards social status.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
It's not a popular venture geared towards the material or psychic well-being of the average citizen. And that led to a question saying, all right, well, this doesn't feel right. This seems empty. This seems cynical. And so what I decided was that I wanted to actually get a political education outside the university context, outside the academic context.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And what I figured out was that producing documentary films was a good way to actually get out and see the world. So I did that for about 10 years with the idea of really just kind of testing my own ideas and my own questions against reality. And so I decided to make a film about three of America's forgotten cities, Youngstown, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee, and Stockton, California.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
really three of the poorest, most violent, most destitute, and most forgotten places in America. And this is now about 10 years ago. And having actually spent three years in the field, in jails and prisons, in public housing projects, in abandoned steel mills, meeting people, understanding how the government operated in those communities.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
That's when I really had my total crisis of confidence in not just this kind of revolutionary cause play on campus, but actually the fundamental principles of the great society itself. And at that point, I thought that the idea of the post-war left was could not withstand any scrutiny.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And I think the reason that you get people retreating to campus is because their policies can only survive in that hothouse environment. And if you actually escape that hothouse and you get into the actual real places that were supposed to be helped, you find that those policies can't be defended.
The Daily
The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Yeah, rotten, you know, absolutely corrupted. The entire project
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
project of the American government since the mid-1960s has been very self-consciously an attempt to recruit the so-called best and brightest from the Ivy League universities and to have them cook up policy ideas that will then be imposed on the rest of the country in the name of equality, in the name of justice, in the name of all of these kind of high values. But
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
What I learned through my experience in higher education and then my experience spending a number of years in American communities, especially poor American communities, is that that project has failed.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Yeah, I think those are really good snapshot statistics. And conservative academics have been talking about some of these broader trends for many decades. The long march through the institutions, the capture of the humanities, the extreme left-wing bias of university departments. What I think happened that was a decisive change was really in 2020, following the death of George Floyd. And
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
All of a sudden, those ideas and that structure, that language, those symbols, those narratives, those arguments, they escaped the laboratory of academia and were then imposed throughout society via all of the surrounding institutions. And so it was in your kids' school curriculum. It was in your work's HR training. It was in your television news program.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And you have this sudden coherence of a replacement narrative about America, about our history, about our people, about our culture, about our politics. And so when you have this kind of ideology that had been, again, cooking in the universities for a long time, Americans could kind of ignore it. Say, well, that's just the faculty at X, Y, and Z university.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
That's just in some obscure academic texts. But once it propagated, and had become really ubiquitous within America's institutions. That's when things shifted for most people. That's when there was an opening for some actual reform and change and discussion beyond what had become kind of a ghettoized discussion in the kind of intellectual right.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
We were able to actually bring these ideas and critiques into the mainstream in a way that had never been possible before.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Yeah, I mean, of course, right? I mean, you know, cancer is organic. Obviously, like these are all human processes. So if you ask people, did they feel that way, especially at the time, I think most of the people who were showing up for protests would say yes. And, you know, the truth is that you have a kernel of truth in a lot of these protests.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
You have what I think are some honest emotions at the heart of these protests. But none of these kind of elite left-wing initiatives come close to even identifying or offering even a plausible remedy for those problems.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
You know, take Harvard. Harvard's DEI departments have been engaged in a level of race-based hostility, scapegoating, demonization that, in my view, constitute a violation of federal civil rights law.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
Sure. You have discriminatory admissions. So at Harvard analyzing at Harvard. Yeah. You have, you know, penalizing individuals because of their ancestry and you have them doing that in a systematic way. You have discriminatory hiring and promotions, hiring and promoting people on the basis of race and punishing members of certain racial groups simply because of who their parents were.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
And you also have the ideological component coming from the DEI departments, coming from HR that speak of so-called whiteness as a pathology, as a kind of mark, as kind of stigmata that is not just at Harvard, but at many universities. Then the question is, well, how have they been getting away with it for so long? And the answer is that they've never been held to account before.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
They paid no price for this kind of racialist discrimination. And so they continued to do so.
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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
You know, for a simple reason, because money talks and because fear is a great motivator. nice words pleasing sounds promises to change all of those you know very pleasant and non-confrontational proposals regarding academia have not worked but what we've seen in dramatic fashion in recent months is that the other approach actually works much better