Oh, I'm sorry. You got this meeting room for Okay, the somebody
came into the room ask not what your country can do for you, as
what you can do for your country, mister gerbachofw tear down this wall.
It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylyx.
Today we talk about what needs to be done with Christopher Rufo, so let's
efrasos a podcast. We also cannot and do not discount the possibility that HAMAS
or another foreign terrorist organization may exploit the current conflict to conduct attacks here on
our own soil. And so today I am proud to announce the Biden Harris
administration will develop our nation's first national strategy to counter Islamophobia. Welcome everybody.
This is the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lylyx here in Minneapolis, recently graced
by Joe Biden. Peter Robinson is in California. Long, I believe is
somewhere in the East Coast. We got the whole country covered here, gentlemen,
how are you today? Well, I'm fine, James, thank you
for asking well and Peter, Aside from the disintegration of the entire of all
that we cherish. I'm perfectly well, lovely sunny day here in California.
We're expecting a high of seventy seven. It's amazing how pleasantly life this would
it have been like this in about the year four hundred three, Senators get
together in Rome and say, well, shall we stroll? Oh? Yes,
yes, the barbarians are proceeding down the peninsula, but they've crossed the
po But let's stroll over to the baths of Caracul and have a nat or
shall we? Yeah? Yeah, well, yeah, on a cheerful note,
we proceed. I mean, it's a sort of incremental, small,
little deconstruction of the world in which we know, which has been going on
a pace as long as I can recall, with fits and starts, and
with the spasmodic jerks back to the proper directions, and probably who you call
them, spasmodic jerk It was my I was gonna introduce you thusly yeah,
so yes, well, I do well. I do not share Peter's Roman
analogy completely. I understand it, and it would have been you know,
we always think that Rome fell in a day, the whole thing just collapsed.
No, I know, it took an awful long time, and a
choice survived for another thousand years over in the Eastern part where they still had
the arraignments of But there we go again, there we go, bringing the
Roman Empire back. Now, what's going on? Which blinds us sometimes to
the uniqueness of our situation? And Rob wants to burst in, so well
I just burst Yeah, sorry, Oh but I see I think you said.
Uh, I get it. I don't disagree. I can't argue that
anything that's going on right now is good. But but things are still worldwide
better than they've ever been. It is the idea that we are I mean
this is Look, people aren't better. People are still just evil little monsters
who will do unspeakable things to each other if given half a chance, and
if like they're able to somehow be coddled and encouraged to do so. Right,
But they've always been that way. It seems that I just feel,
before we lapse into the decline of the world and of the world despair,
things are still pretty good now. I'm not saying we should be sanguine about
it and complacent, but things are still pretty good. Go back to the
last war in the Middle East in seventy three, not the last, but
go back to that one. Would you rather be back in nineteen seventy three,
with a complete with a demoralized domestic political situation, with energy shocks,
with the idea that we're going to run out of oil in ten years,
with the Soviet Union looming around the globe? You want that? No,
I was there in seventy three. It was horrible, it was dreadful,
and we are in so many better ways today. I think it would were
then. I mean, yes, there's been a loss of lots of stuff,
But no, I'm with rob and that's one of the things that keeps
you moving forward, and keeps you optimistic, and keeps you fighting good always
you just lie down and die. Yeah, I'm not saying there's not a
fight to be had. There's definitely a fight to be had, and there
will be many, many more fights. But it feels to me like there's
I don't know, there's a lower tolerance for blunder than there ever was.
Lower tolerance meaning we respond to terrible mistakes and terrible outrages much more quickly.
So I don't know. I mean, look again, I'm not I'm not
trying to be a polyanny here. But I think when you face things like
this, there are times when you face a disasters like are unfolding in the
world and you think, well, whatever we've been doing, it must be
wrong. We must change. But there are also times when you face disasters
like this in the world and you think, well, look, people are
still the same, and maybe we just need to redouble our efforts to bring
certain parts of the world back into civilization, to redouble our efforts to connect
people through commerce and trade, to redouble our efforts to make sure that we
have a very strong, safe, powerful country that is a beacon to the
world. All those things. I don't know, but we're called to do
those things rather than I think calls a sort of you know, dig a
hole and jump in it. Possibly, although that hole is looking very appealing.
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more, and we think Express vpn responsoring this the Ricaget podcast, May I
rise to speak on behalf of disaster. Although I can't, I am convinced
that I read it somewhere in Jacques Maritain, the French philosopher and theologian,
that because the world is fallen, rob listen to this, because this will
this is well. You can raise this at the Yale Divinity School. Because
we live in a fallen world. But because the world has been redeemed and
both of these are working there without in history, things are getting better and
worse at the same time. All the time, I think I thought that
was just a profound insight. But I have never since been able to find
it again, So I couldn't have made it up in any of it.
So nineteen seventy three, didn't we have the feeling? Nixon gets forced out
of office in seventy three, But didn't we have the first of all,
the American family was far more intact. Public schools still functioned relatively well.
The number of people in the country illegally was surely well below a million in
those days. And I have the h Well, you tell me what you
think, what it felt like to you, if you can remember it at
all? What was I was? I guess I was in junior high.
But when Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford took over, and Ford gave that speech
in the East Room of the White House, saying our long national nightmare is
over, it did feel as though the nightmare was over. It felt as
though there was a strong, normal country that suddenly awoke from the nightmare.
We went back to normal, and normal was really pretty solid, stable,
reliable, and in all kinds of ways. The things are. Economically,
of course, we're all richer, We're all dramatically richer. Communications tech all
that has happened, But at the same time, the American family is disintegrated.
It feels to me as though the most important things are weaker today than
they were in nineteen seventy three. Can I argue this in detail? No,
I can't rebuttal while you're done. I guess by rebuttal, I don't
really have a rebuttal. I mean all those indexes in disease you say are
true. I mean things are getting worse in a lot of ways. Overall
in the globe, people are richer. I mean in the sense that they're
not starving to death, which is a which is not nothing after all,
not nothing, And it is it. It was one hundred percent the cause
or the effect of global capitalism, without any doubt. And it was one
hundred percent the pro capitalist, pro growth policies of Ronald Reagan market Thatcher,
without any doubt, buttressed by a whole bunch of like smart eggheads, but
essentially two very powerful political figures who managed to marshal political coalitions in a you
know, gwobbly way as they always are, and to make these arguments like
you know, I guess what I would say is the problem with despair is
it seems to suggest that this is fate, And I don't think it's yes,
no, no, I with you there completely. We did not in
nineteen seventy three have an example of renewal as we would have in the eighties.
What do you call, Jimmy Carter? Oh, no, I guess
we did not. I mean, the decline seemed to inevitable. The decline
seemed permanent, it seemed manageable. We would just slowly slide down into,
you know, a state in which we had less and things were less and
things were uglier, but we'd muddle along. The idea of triumphalism was out
of the question, the idea of beating the Soviet Union was out of the
question. So we you know, and and those were often criticized. Those
of us who look back to the healthy on days of Reaganist Maximus and think
that we're you know, we're always criticized for yes, I know, things
are different. Ronald Reagan would probably was not the perfect god that people are
making him not to be. He wouldn't win today, et cetera. I
get that, I get that, But the example is there, and the
strings that he plucked are still waiting, you can still feel them resonating silently
in the culture and vibrations you do there. I agree, I also feel
I also feel that that part of the part of what I think, what
we're experiencing. And the more I look at it, and this is my
lens, so everybody's got their own, right, but I look at it
and I think a lot of these problems that we face as a nation domestically
are the product of a kind of a lazy affluence. When you get really,
really rich and you have a nine nine thousand channels, like the schools
are fine, what they can teach where they want. Well, you when
everybody sort of seems to be essentially rich and indolent enough to be worried about
their exquisite little mental health issues, that naturally ends up being people doing some
really bizarre things to their you know, hormonal systems and their genitalia. I
mean, and I'm not approving of it, but these seems this seems like
the the what is the number one the number one health issue in America right
now is obesity? If you had gone back to even to recently, is
nineteen sixty and said to something answer says, to guess what in the future
poor people are gonna be fat? Well, you would have thought, my
god, this's fantastic, What an amazing society you must have because poor people
are fat. And so I don't know. Some of this stuff feels like
just wau redouble luxury beliefs, but also just just decadence and richness. And
you know that has to be corrected, and I think it's in a certain
places it's going to be corrected. And in certain I mean I think I
think there's going to be a big correction in what we expect from our major
American venerable institutions, which are really our higher our institutions of higher learning.
I mean, nobody, nobody comes to the United States to go to high
school, but everybody wants to come to United States go to college, and
that that's a reason for that. And if we want to continue that brand
excellence, we're going to have to work harder at it. And we've seen
the revelation of a large amount of cultural row at the universities over the events
transpiring in the Middle East. Talked about this last week, But it'd be
fun to talk to somebody who really is on this subject a lot more than
us who makes it a part of his work and his Uh, he's with
us. Christopher Rufo. Yeah, we finally got him, isn't that?
Great? Senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor for City Journal to
write some pieces that are just cracking Good Reads, board member for the New
College of Florida, and author of the New York Times bestseller America's Cultural Revolution,
The Radical Left Conquered Everything. Chris, thanks for joining us today.
Hey, good morning, good morning. Great to have you the podcast.
Followed you on Twitter for long time, read your stuff in City Journal,
and don't know really where to start before we get all of the media issues,
which I'm sure Rob and Peter want to do a little background on you.
You were a documentary filmmaker before you do what you did. Now,
explain how you made that a little transition and what kind of documentaries you were
doing. Yeah, that's right. I spent more than ten years as a
documentary film producer and director. I did three films for PBS. I sold
the film to Netflix now about ten years ago, and so that was the
beginning of my career. Kind of looking back, it was a good way
to travel around the world, have a wide range of experiences. But when
I hit thirty, in my kind of mid early to mid thirties, I
was looking for something a bit different and found myself wanting to get into politics.
And the skills of a documentary filmmaker are not transferable everywhere, but they
are transferable to doing writing and reporting, and especially some kind of on the
ground reporting. And that's how I got into my foot in the door in
the political world. Good thing you did that, because otherwise you would have
ended up like Rob Long. Yeah, exactly, Chris, you are the
first person I have ever encountered who wanted to go from filmmaking to writing.
I yeah, really writers who constantly dream of Hollywood making movies. All right,
Hey, well yeah, I'll explain that. Yeah. I mean,
you know the problem with the problem with filmmaking, And I don't know if
Rob feels the same way, but for me, it was I found myself
spending so much time worrying about financing, distribution, marketing, business management,
you know, payroll. I mean, I found myself really functioning more in
business capacity to the vast majority of my time, and less and less in
a creative capacity. And then you have a huge overhead just to get projects
off the ground. Whereas you can send a tweet, you can send a
substack, you can write a piece for City Journal quickly, you don't have
to take three years to do it, and you can get involved in a
very immediate way and see kind of a direct cause and effect. And so
for me it was I got to focus more on the actual substance of the
work. There was an immediate impact. And I also felt less lonely because
making a documentary you dig yourself into a hole for a few years, and
it's I think psychologically quite quite challenging for someone like me who's more extroverted by
nature. Hey, Chris, I could everybody wants to talk to you.
I'm talking fast just to jam in My one question here the question of questions
in education, in higher education that Rob said just a moment before you came
on. Nobody comes to this country to go to high school, but even
now all the world wants to come here to go to American universities. So
here are the questions. One, how can the great universities be all that
bad if all the world is still trying to get into them? Two?
Among US conservatives, the debate goes back and forth and back and forth,
smash and destroy and burn and salt the earth with the great institutions and create
entirely new ones. Joe Lonzil's attempting this with the University of Texas at Austin,
or reform the institutions that we already have. And you are right in
the middle of a spectacularly interesting story to me, which is taking place in
Florida. And there you are with an established public university, which means,
of course that it has all the pathologies. And you're on the board saying
you, you, you, and you you're fired. Here's what we're going
to do with this play. So tell us about that, and tell us
what conclusions what you've learned about higher education more generally. Sure, yeah,
so yeah, I'll take your questions in order. I mean, look,
how is it that the American universities have seemingly gone insane and yet they maintain
their status, their prestige, and their competitiness globally. Part of that is
just because they are established brands. I mean, these universities are three four
hundred years old. They have, especially in the nineteenth century the twentieth century,
these enormous reputations they've accumulated a massive amount of capital, and they still
serve the basic function of the post war elite university, which is to give
you a calling card that will get you in the door anywhere. And so
Harvard can still do that even if they have a large number of professors who
are cheering on Hamas. However, over time the reputation degrades, and I
think we're seeing that slowly. And the other thing is, look, we
have the same number of elite East Coast universities as we did two hundred years
ago, but we have three hundred and fifty million people in our country now.
So so in a sense, the supply has stayed more or less the
same, while the demand has increased many folds. So they're in a very
enviable position. So the question of well, what do we do about it?
Do we this the kind of smash and burn or reform? You know,
I hear conservatives say, oh, don't go to college, you know,
raise the ivy leagues, et cetera, et cetera. This is such
a fatalistic position. It's a it's a pure cope as we're as we say
now, because you cannot you know, you cannot get rid of these institutions
that have, you know, one hundred billion dollar endowments. They're not going
anywhere, and so it's pure fantasy to think that you could get rid of
them. And it's pure fatalism to say don't go to college. The fact
is is that college degree is more important than ever. You can't have a
modern political movement without a high number of lawyers, a high number of humanities
experts, a high number of people who are verbally fluent and have the credentials
that are required in a modern technological society. So I think the idea that
somehow will become a nation ruled by electricians and plumbers and pipefitters might be attractive
in the abstract, but it's totally unrealistic. And so what we have,
what we're faced with is either to build and compete or to kind of capture
and reform. I think we need to do both. I'm involved, of
course, in this recapturing effort at the University of Florida, and the basic
premise there is public universe. Cities and conservative states should not be domains of
total lunatic left wing hegemony, and we should use political power to make sure
that public institutions reflect the values of the public. That's the simple rule.
It's in total alignment with the founder's vision. It's in total alignment with Jefferson's
vision that he established University of Virginia with. And it is, and it
is unfortunately at odds with even conservatives, who, by a libertarian style delusion,
have come to the conclusion that any interference with the government by the people
is illegitimate, this inversion of our true principles. And so I'm fighting against
the left on this, obviously, because they're very mad that we've gotten rid
of gender studies and we're booting out all of these left wing idelogs. But
I'm also in the fight with the right, with some elements of the right
that have bought into these kind of neutral fantasies that don't ever materialize in the
real world. Hey, Chris, thanks for joining us. But you're also
in a big fight with the market place. I mean, here's my example.
I walked down Fifth Avenue or along Canal Street, and people are spread
out blankets and is selling fake Gucci handbags and fake Louis Wutan whatever tote bags.
And everybody knows they're fake, but they look good, so you give
them the guy twenty bucks and you walk down the street with a fancy brand
and people like that right, and nobody really says, let me see that
bag. The stitching isn't really right, right, So aren't you? Isn't
your biggest problem? Not the politics, and not the not the state governments,
and not even woe culture, But isn't your problem that people up for
a good while from now, despite my prediction, despite what's happening on the
campus, in relationship and in response to Hamas attacks in Israel, despite all
that, they still want that juicy, juicy brand. They still want to
have a Stanford diploma or a Yale diploma or Harvard diploma or Prince diploma or
some other prestigious university. And they don't really care, right. I mean,
I just won't take the woke classes, but I still want that Harvard
degree. I still want to walk down the street with my Gucci handbag,
even though I know it's meaning full disclosure. Rob is speaking to you from
New Haven, Connecticut. Yeah, so I'm here the belly of the beast.
So I'm but isn't that your biggest the biggest mountain for you to climb?
How are you going to do that. I think it's an inevitability though,
and I think we have to take it as at least in the short
and medium term, how it's going to be. And so, look,
you know, if your child gets into Harvard, even if you're a conservative,
you send your child to Harvard because you know that's going to be an
entry way for his or her life going forward. You know, I have
some of some of the fancy degrees. You know, certainly it's my miliu
as well. And so I think that, look, there's going to be
a kind of hierarchy of status and prestige. It's going to be dominated by
the oldest, most established brands. And so we have to do one of
two things either or rather one of two things, or maybe both of two
things. You have to steadily put pressure on the brand and and threaten the
brand and degrade the brand through strategic attacks on these institutions, while at the
same time you enter those institutions you you you, and then you force changes
on those institutions from within. And so look, hey, that's Marxism.
That's a that's a that's a page right out of Marx. It's a page
out of gram She absolutely who I think that the right should read. I
just actually finished some some reviewing of notes of Graham she yesterday, and uh,
there's a lot to learn, and uh, and and how economy and
culture work, how institutions function, how values are transmitted. Uh, could
could you know kind of kind of orthodox libertarian postwar conservatism is not enough,
And so we have to understand how culture works, how status works, how
rank works, how institutions work. And and I think that for better or
worse. And I think actually for better, because look, I mean the
other argument of well, why can't we just get rid of these universities is
because we're conservatives. The universities are the crowning achievements of the West. We've
had a thousand years of modern universities in Europe and the United States. We
need to make them. Reorient them back towards the true, the good,
and the beautiful. Reorient them towards producing great citizens and great statesmen. I
think it's still too early to abandon hope. Well, I agree, But
when you were speaking, it occurred to me that the institute of the big
academic institutions are like cruise ships in the middle of the ocean with three thousand
people toiling away down in the steerage in the rest, and then the elites
up at the top driving the whole thing. And changing the direction of that
cruise ship consists of infiltrating it somehow, like in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean, getting our people into the positions to be able to turn it into
the opposite direction, which is impossible without some sort of you know, armed
paratrop things. How do you get into the levels of institutions and make the
change, because they seem to be staffed with people who are institutionally and intellectually
and dispositionally disinclined to do anything but push a particular viewpoint of Western civilization.
I mean, it's incremental, it has to be. But I mean we're
talking a fifty year project, a long march to the institutions as they had.
It seems that that's the only way to do it, and it doesn't
seem like we have fifty years. Yeah, I mean, look, it's
very difficult. Yes, it's a long term project. I think in the
short term what we want to do is put extreme pressure on these institutions,
and so I think we can do that reputationally. Certainly, they're self immolating
right now. In that regard with the support for the most I think you
can also put political pressure. You restrict the flow of government back dollars and
student loans to universities, put them into a financial crisis where they have to
start making decisions that are in conformity with reality. I think you also have
a conservative Department of Justice in a future administration launch an investigation on a violation
of civil rights for affirmative action, and every Ivy League university embarrass them,
shame them, put pressure on them, find them, exert massive amounts of
reputational damage as necessary and as possible. And then at the same time we
we actually retreat back to institutions that we can control. And so this means
the great private colleges like Hillsdale College with which I'm affiliated, But it also
means having state legislatures recapture small state universities and red states and turn them into
a recruiting ground. To do two things which will eventually feed into you know,
kind of the Harvardales and Princes of the world is get great conservative professors.
So conservatives want to go into academia and have a job at the end
of it and have those professors recruit conservative graduate students who can produce academic work
and who can be prepared to enter academia at a higher level over time.
You know, my own personal goal is to create the conditions where we can
hire one hundred tenure track conservative professors in state universities around the country. I
think a thousand of these professors will make an enormous difference, and it's certainly
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I just told the guys I had one question on our slack Chat, but
I really have three, but the two ones are small. I just want
to say about Hillsdale. Hills is a really good example. Every every student
we've ever talked to from Hillsdale either an in turn help us out here at
Ricoget. They're all to the to a person, incredibly bright but also incredibly
worldly and sophisticated. So the idea sort of the idea that like a conservative
place is sort of like a kind of a backwater Bible college where the kids
don't know anything, and are you protest against Beatles lyrics? It's just not.
It's just the kind of a caricature of the left media. It has
never been our experience. And I would just say, if anybody's looking to
hire somebody in media and the Hillsdale students in front of you hired that person
because I uniformed me, they're great. The second thing I would just say
is I ask a question, ten years now, what do you think is
going to be? What do you think we'll look back on and think this
was the most damaging thing that happened to the brand prestige of these fancy places.
Was it the slow creeping outrage from out minority groups against affirmative action and
their slow legal battles, or was it this white hot insanity we've seen for
the past two or three weeks. Which one do you think is gonna end
up? I mean, we're not looking for the headshot. It won't be
one. Which one do you think is really going to be really going to
hurt? You know? I think that I think that what we've seen the
last few weeks is a news cycle that may or may not sustain over the
long term. I think that the kind of racial discrimination affirmative action questions is
a huge problem that has a kind of structural power, It has legs that
will be a burden for them over the long term. And I think that
you know, look, I think that the general decline in merit in quality
in scholarship is something that we have to continuously highlight over time, because you
know, they don't make Harvard professors like they used to. You know,
you know, we don't have the Man's fields and the band field retire and
the greats at our universities like we did in the ivys in the mid century,
or even even the James Burnhams, who is a course a professor at
NYU. I mean I think that it provides us, though, an opportunity
to take the greatest minds of rising generations and train them in alternative institutions and
then try to create mechanisms of legitimation and prestige for those individuals, because look,
an open conservative is unlikely to get a spot in the graduate program at
Yale or well, well that's not actually true. Uh, Yale's slightly different.
We've had some we've had some folks there, but you know, we're
not gonna get Yeah, we're gonna get not gonna get big numbers in many
programs. But that actually provides a market opportunity for these other institutions because there
are a lot of a lot of young people who are are are academically inclined,
are brilliant, have high potential, that don't see a pathway. And
so to the extent that we can create an alternative pathway and then we can
see things that that that actually uh that that these that these individuals actually exceed
the scholars at their peer institutions, or rather their their superior institutions. I
think that's a good thing. Chris, Chris, you're talking, you're talking
about pathways and culture and academic excellence, nonsense. Here's what it comes down
to. Money. Money. During the Cold War, the federal government began
funding research at universities. Look at any major Universe city, including those with
gigantic endowments of five to forty billion dollars, federal money is a major part
of their budget, every single one of them. The Cold War is long
gone. Universities are at odds with well, at least there are at odds
with what Republicans with what half the country, with the values and interests and
aims and ideals of half of the country. Dude, you need to get
a Republican administration elected with backing in the House and Senate and change this game.
They no longer get to rely on vast outlays of research money automatically right,
one hundred percent. Actually, In fact, I just tweeted yesterday that
the one goal for the right must be to severely reduce the flow of government
backed money to these universities, whether they're through direct expenditures, whether they're through
research grants, or whether they're through federally guaranteed student loans, and put them
into an economic crisis where they actually have to make these decisions and retrench on
some of the ideological programs in the interest of more substance programs. And you
know, none other than Elon Musk jumped in the comments agreeing with this idea.
And so I think that's exactly right. And you know, in many
ways, Peter in at least one important way America lost the Cold War.
And I know people don't like to hear that, but we adopted some of
the kind of other side of the coin, of the kind of materialist conception
of society, as are Marxist enemies with this kind of purely economic libertarian theory
on our side, but both are reducible to a kind of crude materialistic view
of the world. And so yes, I think you're right. We cannot
merely just funnel keep funneling money into institutions that that are are against the kind
of common enterprise in the United States. But I think it also is going
to require some change in thinking on the right where we have to kind of
rebalance our philosophical portfolio, our categories of ideas to say that, actually,
you know, what culture matters, and we cannot just rely on, you
know, Austrian economics as a solution to cultural problems. I have one one
one agenda item for you for the next administration. First, put Rob Long
in charge of the National Endowment for the Arts. Yeah, and that will
instantly cause such outrage that the administration will be able to abolish the whole damn
thing. I give you that one for free, Chris. That is one
Senate hearing. I would like to I guess I would like to attend.
I like to watch. I don't know how i'd watch it, can I
can? I I s just be a little because what the different talk about
the right and what the right strategy should be, and you shout of you
mapped out a strategy that seemed extremely extremely Marxist to me, which is which
is not, by the way, criticism of it. I remember when Obama
was president, the people would like sneer, people in the right with sneer
and say, oh yeah, community organizer in chief like that. Like he
didn't win fifty three percent of the popular vote and a smashing popular vote victory
and wasn't a popular president and didn't have I mean he squandered it, but
he thank god, but he didn't. The guy was a successful politician.
He won two terms. Right, and so the idea of like sneering at
him, is like, well, why don't you actually pay attention to what
he did and see if there's something that we can do on our side to
follow that playbook? Right, I mean, everybody's playing the same game.
The right seems to have adopted the worst aspects and the most futile and infantile
aspects of the left. You know, the victimhood, crying victimhood all the
time, all the whining, and the nutty, elaborate conspiracy theories that unify
the world against us, all that nonsense that people on the left have been
pumping into their directly into their veins for thirty forty fifty years, instead of
the more disciplined slow march, you know, bit by bit by bit movement.
I mean, if you look at the culture in America and political culture
in America since Lyndon Johnson's victory in sixty four, it has moved steadily right
now. You know, Reagan slowed it down, but it was I'm sorry,
steadily left. I mean, Reagan slowed it down, but it kept
kind of moving left. Whatever plan they were marching under, it was a
very effective plan. And our side seems to be obsessed with Twitter and h
trolling and trivial, the worst, most trivial and least effective and efficient aspects
of the left. I mean, am I just being mean? No,
it's it's a huge problem. And I think that there are a number of
dead ends on the right that I'm seeing more and more. You have a
kind of right wing right wing racialism, which is a kind of inverse of
the left wing identity politics that is gaining some traction. You have a right
wing conspiratorialism. This is kind of the Alex Jones fantasyland QAnon that draws a
kind of actually a significant amount of energy. And then you have this kind
of general inferiority complex on the right, which is, you know, don't
go to college, don't do X, Y and z, it's totally hopeless,
that the deck is stacked against us, and all of it, the
common denominator is a sense of inferiority, a lack of a sense of agency,
and then really a an abdication of responsibility. And so the right that
I would like to see is an elite right. It's a highly educated right.
It's a professional managerial right, a right wing political movement that can actually
get into offices of power and responsibly wield power to advance the overall philosophical project.
And you know, I've worked with Governor DeSantis over the last few years
on a number of initiatives in Florida, and it's like, we have we
have the guy. You know, it's like this guy is I mean,
I'll tell you you know, I was on the plane with him the first
time I met him, and I was trying to make small talk with him,
and I was just getting no response. Like you know, you talk
to people, you try oh yeah, blah blah blah blah. And it's
like, oh man, I got to change tac here. This guy is
not interested in the small talk. And so we started talking about policy and
he lit up started talking a mile a minute about this is how we changed
the institutions, the laws, the appointment procedures, this is the kind of
programs we need, this is the law that has to change. We got
to talk to these legislators. I mean, he had the entire playbook in
his mind, and he knew how to ruthlessly pursue it. He knew how
to change laws and institutions, he knew what the goal was. He efficiently
got it done. And so I think he you know, for me,
for whatever limitations he had, we are all human, we have limitations.
He's a model of a ruthlessly effective operator, who knows the goal, who
knows the means, who knows how to get it done. And so the
question is really for Republican primary vowners, do you want that or do you
want the guy, the other guy and the Unfortunately, and I kind of
I struggle with this. I try not to get too involved in the partisan
politics, but it looks like they don't want that, and I think that
it's a huge problem that we're facing. And so, you know, I
don't know. You guys told me you have more kind of a longer arc
of observation, but this to me no right way of putting it. That's
a very point. You missed it the beginning at the top of the podcast
arc at the top of the podcast. You missed the fact that we were
on balance. We said, yes, the world is crumbling, but it's
still got another thousand years, So we do take the long view of it,
that's for sure. The question is in getting it all back. I
mean, I agree with what Peter was saying earlier about defunding these things,
and if I was a politician, I would make a point of point out
that I am defunding the social services and social science SORR, the social sciences
which are neither, and that we're not going to spend an awful lot of
money crafting and conjuring ridiculous theories of intersectional behavior in order to explain humanity.
Did that you know you want to pay for that? Go right ahead.
But I would also find that it was not just necessary to restore the university.
It was necessary to restore the cities. And that seemed that would seem
to be a big part of a substantial Republican agenda. And it's hard to
sell to some people because they don't live there. They live in the burbs,
they never go into the cities. They don't like the cities, they
don't like the people who are there, so why should they care? But
we all should care because the health and strength of our core cities is one
of those things that carries the country forward. And we all remember that we
reclaimed them, we we won, we got New York back. I live
in a city here that would that bounced back before the riots. Is that
something that that the right should actually make a point of or should we just
say nope, you guys, you major problem. You you you lie in
your burning feces soaked, needle strewn bed. Well, I think a bit
of both. I mean, in a kind of immediate rhetorical sense, the
images from America's major cities, the kind of collapse of of urban life is
kind of rhetorically effective for motivating suburban voters along the axis of fear. But
I think ultimately the responsible kind of governing strategy has to be to present an
opportunity to restore our great cities, because, as you say, you know
the great cities are. It's our country, it's our shared shared enterprise.
And so look, I think we need to reopen and dramatically expand the asylums
or what we're once called the asylums, kind of psychiatric impatient lockdown facilities.
We reduce the capacity by about ninety five percent since the mid nineteen fifties.
We need to increase the capacity by an order of magnitude. You can't have
people suffering from schizophrenia, drug addiction, alcoholism just on the streets. And
that's a federal policy that needs to change. And you have to support law
enforcement. You have to remind people of the broken Windows theory that of course
was essential in bringing back New York. And so I think to the extent
that, you know, local policy makers have a tougher time, but federal
policy makers even there is intersection here. And so yeah, I think,
you know, nobody likes to see this. It's demoralize in you know,
they used to run Soviet propaganda about the nasty inner cities and you know,
the homeless and the tents in places. I mean, it's a kind of
mark of national shame and embarrassment. And so while in the short term it
may be rhetorically advantags is to point out who's the responsible for it, in
the long term, what I think we really need to do is actually have
the kind of restoration of authority, meaning kind of the restoration of the archetypal
father figure. That's what seems to me to be lacking in public life at
all levels. It will be done. It has to be done. We
know what needs to be done. It's just that we lack the will to
do it. Or in an addition, we have an ideological cohort that is
determined not to do anything either because they like the example of failed capitalism,
healthscape or because they have a financial stake in the institutions that supposedly served these
people, or both. But it can't go on forever. Anything that can't
go on forever won't as they say, so it will happen. The question
is whether it's a draconian purge or whether it's a compassionate one. But the
last thing I want to ask you is, when we were talking before about
coming up with the institutions producing voices intellectual spirits that can animate the age,
do we still have the position of the public and intellectual anymore? Or has
that been just distributed to Twitter and or or worse yet, eclipsed by TikTok,
which uses ingenious, chattiest algorithms to shape the American mind. Is that
where the public intellectual eventually ends up? Because I mean, your work on
Twitter, and I don't mean to demean it, but it's it's great,
and I think you accomplish more there than you would showing up on a Sunday
chat show or you know, the dreaded Saturday afternoon local access show where somebody
tells us what needs to be done. Has happened with television back in the
fifties and sixties, that is that. Where is that the new intellectual battlefield?
Then yeah, it absolutely, it absolutely is. I think that in
my experience, having done you know, prestige shows, having been you know,
profiled, and all the you know big you know, big glossy magazines,
having done cable news, having done social media, having done YouTube,
I mean, I have kind of experimented with all the different media. I
think Twitter is right now the most important and shaping the narrative of kind of
public life and proposing ideas, in persuading people and especially people in media,
politics, people in positions of power. I found it to be an extraordinarily
powerful tool. But I wouldn't despair about that. I mean, I think
it is the reality, so we deal with it. But I actually think
it's a net benefit for the right. And in my experience, the left
dominates high cost of production, high prestige media, but the right has an
enormous advantage in low cost, low cost of production media. So you know,
the radio was dominated by the right, and similarly, I think social
media is it actually favors the right, and it distributes, it distributes the
means of communication to a wider base. And I think it also of course
allows a demogogic kind of element, right, I mean, Trump was the
great tweeter in a very demogogic kind of kind of ancient Greek kind of way.
But that's not necessarily bad because the political rights only advantage institutionally is that
we have political power. We don't have cultural power, we don't have institutional
power, we don't have academic power. But what do we have, Well,
we have the chance at political power in states and occasionally in the federal
government. And so I think that it is a way to directly translate public
sentiment where we can actually mobilize seventy percent majorities on an issue by issue basis
and then turn that into an actual concrete political program. That's how I try
to use it. And it's been successful, you know, you know,
very successful. It's like, you know, even the beginning of the year
in January, I said, I'm going to try to abolish DEI bureaucracies in
the public universities in Florida and Texas. Okay. Then I met with the
leaders in those states. Then I released a series of investigative reports showing the
public what the problem was, starting on Twitter, going to Fox News,
and then by the summertime, both states had abolished all their DEI bureaucracies in
every public university. And so I think that there is a playbook that we
can use that does not go into the rabbit hole of the fever swamp,
you know, QAnon kind of trash that you see, unfortunately, but that
appeals to an elite audience and uses Twitter's power to achieve actual tangible outcomes.
Hey, Chris in the slack channel, have been told to ask you a
closer. Good luck. I'm going to ask you a big of it.
But first of all, a compliment. First of all, a compliment.
You're good on Twitter, and you're good on Fox News. But I wasn't
sure you knew enough or were articulate or poised enough to speak at length?
Was I ever mistaken? You're good at length too, And I can tell
speaking of long arc because Rob and I have known each other a long time,
I can tell that you've impressed Rob as much as you've impressed me.
That actually is not a good sign. No, so somehow, Yeah,
so you gotta go back, you gotta figure this out. That's a mistake.
Here's my attempt at a closer Speaking of long arcs Ross Dow that uses
the term zombie Reaganism. Kevin Roberts tod AEI said, we we what was
it that AI something about we need to know what time it is in America?
This is now the new catch a new catchphrase, Vivec said in one
of the debates too. I think it was to Mike Pence. He said,
in effect, you're too old, fair enough, that's a line of
attack. But he also said, it's not mourning again in America. So
you've got this kind of attack on Reagan and on the eighties on our side.
And to me, it could be one of two things, maybe some
combination. But I remember back when I was close, closer to close to
your age, young Democrats were sick of here about FDR and part of it,
and it was just generational. It was come on, it's our turn
now, it's that that we need, we need new heroes. Let's move
on to the next year. So that could be what's happening that just that
ross now that you've it's just time for a new generation to take its place.
And talking about Reagan doesn't help that I can get under completely. But
the notion that somehow Reagan was mistaken or adapting the ideals and principles of limited
government. A strong America is no, would would not would not fit,
would not do that. We need new policies, we need we need to
begin with an industrial policy. Uh, free markets are not are no longer
adequate. We need to take the government and use it for our side,
just the way the Democrats use it for their side. So can you explain
this to me to at your generation, among your friends, that bright guys
with whom you move, does Reagan need to be recaptured or forgotten? Well,
that's a great question. It's quite interesting. You know, I'm an
admirer of Ronald Reagan's. One of my most important mentors is George Gilder,
the great writer, who was of course influential during Reagan's presidency. But there's
two things happening. One is that you know, Reagan was an outsider.
Reagan was very much a disruptor within the conservative movement. And so I think
that as Reaganism has become an ossified ideology that I think actually is not representative
of actual Reagan's spirit, which was very much in line with with with what
I believe. I think that's part of it. But I think the biggest,
the biggest dynamic that that can explain this for me, and and and
I take a slightly different view. I don't trash Reagan. I think Reagan
was the perfect man for the job, perfect man for the time, and
an inspiration to this day. But what's happened is that conservatives for about one
hundred years have promised to reduce the size of government so small that it could
be drowned in a bathtub and in the words of Grover Norquist. But in
fact today we have a larger state sector on a on a percentage of GDP
basis than communist China. And so that promise has failed for now a full
century. And so my interpretation is it is naive to say we need to
get back to, you know, a tiny state, night watchman state.
Uh and and and and any meddling with the apparatus of government is leftist,
is Marxist, as socialist. We don't do that. And so to me
it is a an actual abdication of responsibility because we have a massive state.
We have a public K through twelve schools ninety percent market dominance, we have
public universities seventy five percent market dominance. We have an actual, you know,
government sector that is about you know, forty percent of our economy.
And so the question is not do we agree that we should reduce the size
of government. I agree with that. I would love to see it in
half, in quarter. I mean, I'd love to see it reduced significantly.
But until we do that, I think we have a responsibility to govern,
and so we cannot merely say, you know, we're giving up a
governing public schools, public universities, the institutions of culture and knowledge formation,
and so limited government is in a way a cop out argument at this point.
It doesn't actually address the real status quo and the real crisis right now.
And so I think we have and I think it's consistent with the founders.
The Founders, you know, said very very very clearly the state has
a role in shaping the manners and morals of society, and I think that
we need to do it prudently. We need to do it with an eye
towards, of course, reducing the size of government. But we actually have
to take ownership of our institutions. And it is totally well within the constitutional
tradition as well as the conservative tradition to say that if we're going to have
public schools, public universities, and public sector. We should have them represent,
reflect and promote our values. I don't think that's a transgression of Reaganism.
I don't think that's a transgression of our culture. More broadly, No,
it's very pragmatic, and in the sense of the universities and those elements
where the government intersects with people in a formative fashion, I would say yes,
But also part of me wants to say, hold on a second.
Here. It's like saying, well, we've built this vast and intrusive,
tentacular state. The problem is that the wrong people are running it. I
think it's possible to do both. It's possible to say that in the social
aspects where government interacts with people, we can be more instructive and uplifting in
Pro America and the rest of it. But in the areas where the government
is constantly peaking and peering and inserting itself and fixing and regulating and funding or
not funding, that we should still be saying this needs to be less of
I mean, it's the Augustine thing. I know it make me pure,
but not yet. But we can say both. We can pitch both messages,
I think, without losing a new audience, and we tell people,
yeah, I agree, I believe in both. But I think that Look,
the status quo right now is a tragic one. We are inheriting a
state and society that is not ideal that we don't know how to fix.
And you know, James Burnham has been writing about this or not anymore,
but James Burrem had been writing about this many many years ago. The problem
has not changed. And so we live in this tragic condition where we're inheriting
a system of government that is a vast departure from our founding, a vast
departure from our ideals. And yet I think we are required summoned to what
Maxidaber called an ethic of responsibility. We have to choose among these all these
you know, kind of terrible uh, these kind of terrible choices, and
use the kind of prudent calculation based on what is the best outcome given an
imperfect set of means available. That's kind of the best that I think we
can do. I hope my microphone is picking up the sirens that wailed past
my building as you said that, because it adds no divergency. Christ it
has been great to talk to you. Good luck, good hunting, good
victories to come, and you know we'd like to talk to you again a
little bit further down anytime. Thank you so much, Thank you so much,
thanks for showing up. All Right, as I mentioned it before,
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that was grand. You guys feel revived? Do you feel hopeful looking at
hearing voices and perspectives such as that coming from somebody who's not from our generation
or my generation. Yeah, look he's in the fight. Yes, that's
exactly you know, in a way, we don't have to You don't have
to accept everyone's global strategy to accept their choice. They're on the ground tactics
right if you start, I mean, because you can never really if this.
If you start a school or reform a school in Florida and it works,
you may not have to worry about the larger issue. Those other people
will also get in the boat and row with you. You know, small
change. Small successes sort of lead people to sort of copycap, which I
think is always a good thing. So I mean being in the fight,
though, I think is important and I think what I like about it.
We said, so you have to be in the pool in order to fight.
You can't just stand outside of it and cavel and point. You have
to actually do some heavy lifting. So yep, yeah, and that's why
we're here every week talking. Yeah, I like to say so. I
feel the phrase you're not allowed to say is that there's too many chiefs,
not enough Indians. There's too many pundits and commentators, and there are not
enough people doing starting schools. That's true. Well before we go, and
we are going to go because I we have things to do. One last
exit question. Ron DeSantis has banned PHAMAS groups from Florida campuses. Do you
think that this is an overreach? If you think this is a sign of
the First Amendment violations, of being First Amendment rights being violated, of freedom
of association being put on the trash ep of history, et cetera, et
cetera, or is this a reminder that perhaps this is going to come whether
we like it or not. I don't know, I remember that. I'm
just throwing it out to you. I just I haven't read that story,
so I don't know. I mean, clearly, he's not saying you're not
allowed to express certain points of views on Florida campuses, because that would be
a direct violation of the First Amendment. But what I have noticed, it's
not going reported particularly, but I've noticed it in part here at Stanford that
the pro Hamas groups tend to attract a lot of people from outside the campus.
People are showing up from outside. Now again, I don't know what
the law is in Florida, but if what he's saying is under certain circumstances,
outsiders are not permitted on the University of Florida. You can't send money,
you can't fundraise for Hamas, which I think is probably a reasonable thing
to do. Okay, a lawyer, but it would seem to me that
being able to fundraise for a group that has been designated as a terrorist organization
is probably not something you have to be doing when you're in college that way.
But when it comes to fundraising for a good organization, we are all
about that, and that's why ricochet dot Com is here to serve you by
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It feels like, gentlemen, have a great week, and we'll convene here
next with with more and haven't. I have no idea what we'll be talking
about, only that I'm going to enjoy listening to what you guys and our
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