Socialism Likely to Win in the Short Term, But There's a Catch | Christopher Rufo

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1:18Try today for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Seems like the big shift on the left over the last two years has been moving from culture to economic. I think the kind of woke ideology related to race and gender, for example, has lost a lot of steam. The left has a talent for metamorphosizing. Issues of Israel-Palestine, issues of affordability and inflation are really what is driving this new wave of left-wing activism. You have my commitment, you have my word, and together on June 24th, we're going to win this race so that next year we freeze the rent. Even someone like Zoran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, you notice during his campaign, it was laser focused on issues related to economy, billionaires, Gaza, and that was enough to get him over the finish line.

2:09Despite a terrible evidence base for something like rent control, rent control is actually very popular. if you poll voters, especially in these big municipalities with high rents. And so there's a lot of work to be done on the right to persuade people to think more clearly and more effectively about how the economy works. You know, we've been doing this reporting in California. It's kind of amazing because you have open air s**t markets that have been decriminalized and for all intents and purposes legalized. California is giving free solar panels to illegal aliens, free s**t change surgeries to transgender migrants from Latin America.

2:42What they're doing is like a house of horrors that once you enter is so far beyond what you could imagine. I think someone like Candice is actually very intelligent. But there is a limit on that kind of personality. That personality eventually burns out. When you saw that Candice Owens was getting 5 million views per YouTube video, were you strong enough to resist the temptation to lobotomize yourself for clicks? Were you strong enough to resist it when it was most tempting? How afraid are you that there won't really be two years left? Because if the Republicans lose the midterms, Trump is lame duck, likely impeached.

3:19Potentially, there's really three months left.

3:29All right, I've been informed. I'm Dave Rubin, and this is The Rubin Report. And joining me today is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Christopher Rufo, welcome back to the Rubin Report. It's good to be with you. I called you Christopher, but it's Chris, really. Does anyone call you Christopher? I guess your parents probably call you Christopher still. My mother, my wife, you know, others. Yeah, that's about it. Just people trying to control you. All right, Chris Rufo, it is good to see you, my friend.

4:03It's been a while since I've had you on. You fair to say you are like the you're the giant slayer when it comes to what's going on with the left these days, huh? Yeah, well, I appreciate that. And it's been interesting. It seems like the politics has shifted very quickly since Trump came back into power at the beginning of last year. And so it's a question of adaptation. And so my own work, I've been kind of moving in different directions. I'm focusing a lot on California right now. But yeah, many giants have been slayed and it seems like unfortunately they keep popping up. So some slaying maybe in the future as well.

4:45So, all right, we're going to talk about the left. We're also going to talk about some wackiness on the right. And you've had to do some slaying in that department as well. But let's start with the left stuff. It seems to me that right now where we're at is that the woke thing is sort of morphing into its final stage, which is this sort of commie Islamist amalgamation. Like we're almost in that thing having fully burst forth. Do you think that that is a fair assessment? Yeah, I think that's right. And it seems like the big shift on the left over the last two years has been moving from culture to economics.

5:29And I think the kind of woke ideology related to race and gender, for example, has lost a lot of steam. It's severely underwater as a matter of public opinion. And the left has a talent for metamorphosizing. And that's what we're seeing now. And issues of Israel-Palestine, issues of affordability and inflation are really what is driving this new wave of left-wing activism. And even someone like Zoran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, who had previously, you know, repeated all of those woke slogans from the George Floyd years. You notice during his campaign, he kept his mouth tightly shut in all of that kind of rhetoric and was laser focused on issues related to economy, billionaires, Gaza.

6:18And that was enough to get him over the finish line. All right. So let's pause on the Israel, Gaza, Hamas, whatever you quote unquote Palestine stuff for just a moment. The economics shift. Do you see this as their sort of most obvious cynical ploy? That's kind of what I see it as in that I agree with you. They've sort of realized the branding around gender and race. It's just old. It's not quite working. You can't beat so many people in submission with that anymore. that then the easiest one to hit people with is, oh, those are the bad guys because they've got more than you. It's sort of the most dim-witted, obvious thing to gin up the bass.

6:55Is that roughly how you see it? Not exactly, actually, because they could have done that two years ago, five years ago, or prior to that. And so it always - Well, I think they needed to soften brains first with some of the other stuff. Okay, maybe that's true. But I think actually a good way to look at it in addition to that is it's smart politics because it does touch on an underlying problem that people feel. And so most of politics is identifying a problem, channeling the public emotion, splitting between, you know, the good and the bad, creating a story with drama. And while I don't think their economics is sound, the fact is during the Biden years, continuing into the first part of the Trump term, inflation is a huge problem.

7:47We printed tons of money. Everything is more expensive. Housing feels impossible for many people. And so they're they're they're taking what is a real serious economic issue that has real pain and public sentiment. And then they're layering on their socialist economic narrative, which, again, doesn't work. It's the math doesn't pencil out. But they're taking their political agenda and they're matching it to public sentiment. And so far, the right hasn't figured out how to respond very well. And consequently, the left is able to mobilize a huge number of people on this economic anxiety, economic fear, economic pain.

8:28So if you were advising people on the right, because I think most people watching this probably agree with you. It's like, where is the better messaging? Yeah, we can say capitalism is better. We can all argue for free markets. It doesn't have like the emotional thing that they've got on the left, which is their, you know, the bad guys over there. I mean, what type of messaging do you think Trump should be doing that he isn't? Is it just Trump? Is it the administration all the way down? I mean, what else could be done to explain to people that, I don't know, capitalism is pretty okay? or just some solution to any of the things you just mentioned?

9:02Well, I think part of the, so there's a problem and then maybe there's a potential solution. The problem is that Trump has really muddied the waters as well on issues of economy. So Trump is not a doctrinaire, Milton Friedman style, free market, supply side guy. You know, he's kind of protectionist related to trade. He's certainly, you know, pressed for lower interest rates, which would lead to inflation. He hasn't done anything to cut spending. In fact, he's increased spending, especially military spending. And so they can't make those traditional supply-side economic arguments. And I think consequently, and look, some of them are, some tariffs I think is actually fine.

9:45There's a good argument for that, especially for issues of national security and otherwise. But you have a muddied economic picture on the right. No one is quite sure what the right's economic arguments are. And I just don't think that replaying Milton Friedman clips 24-7 is really going to get people. And the reality is that I think the right needs to come up with real answers to some of these real problems. So get out of the economic theory, supply and demand curves, and actually get into these issues of college, college tuition, housing, groceries, and remember to always bring those economic arguments, which I still think are correct, to the tangible issues that people understand.

10:30Because if you're talking about the elasticity of demand, you're going to lose people to say groceries are expensive. We're going to pay for them for you. And so they have to figure out how to make an economic argument that actually speaks to the economic framing that most people understand their lives through. So to the extent that's right, I mean, why do you think they haven't done that? I mean, look, they've tried. And so you have this interesting thing where you have our you have supply side efforts to deregulate industry. The Trump administration has done a good job trying to go after needless regulation.

11:06That's good. You have the one big, beautiful bill which tried to reduce taxes, so put more money back in people's pockets. But then you have the Trump administration, you know, kind of playing into the populist sentiment with executive actions like we want to prevent Blackstone or BlackRock or Black whatever from buying single family homes. And it's like, well, you look at the math, it's like it's a tiny fraction of homes that are being bought by these massive private equity firms. It's not clear that it would actually make any meaningful difference, if a positive difference at all. And so I think they're not quite committed, A, and then B, they don't actually know what to do in some sense because economic policy is really difficult.

11:51And if your problem is inflation, you have to raise interest rates. Well, if you raise interest rates, it causes macroeconomic problems in housing. You could have another recession. You have political considerations going into the midterms. Now, with our foreign policy, it looks like a spike in gas prices. So economics is tough. And for better or for worse, unlike the Reagan term where you had Paul Volcker come in and kill inflation by jacking up interest rates and engineering a small recession, there's really no appetite for that on the right, really no appetite for that in the country. And so we've had this very strange for my entire adult life, post-college life, since the Great Recession of 2008, 2009, we've been in a bull market.

12:38If I have if they have from memory the numbers right, maybe the longest bull market in the modern period. And it seems like everyone wants to keep it going and nobody's willing to do what it what it might take in order to deal with some of these fundamentals. So to that point, I mean, do you think that we are just at the version or we're at the stage of the narrative where the communists might just get some more major wins? That we just might be in the place where, as you talk about, they've marched through the institutions, they've set up their foot soldiers. They seem to, they have like a little bit of, it's gross to us, but like they've got some of the cool factor in, you know, culture wise that it might just be their moment.

13:21Yeah, it's going to be their moment with some qualifications. It will be their moment in a limited number of geographic areas. So where they can actually have functional power, not just having five seats among, you know, among 400 and so, you know, representatives in Congress, but actually they can have operational control over, say, a municipality, like a majority on the city council in New York or Minneapolis or San Francisco. or LA. That's kind of where they're putting in most of their energy. I think, look, like something in LA, you have a communist versus a communist running for mayor of Los Angeles.

14:00So the communists are likely to win. And despite a terrible evidence base for something like rent control, rent control is actually very popular if you poll voters, especially in these big municipalities with high rents. They like rent control, even though it's economically nonsensical. And so there's a lot of work to be done on the right to persuade people to think more clearly and more effectively about how the economy works. And the right has just not made those arguments for a very long time. The heyday of Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell, you know, clips still circulate of these two guys, but they don't hit like they did even in the early 2000s, mid 2000s.

14:46And so the right is going to have to relearn economic arguments and then apply them in an economic moment that is quite distinct. But to answer your question, yes, I think we're going to see more victories. Because look, if the median home price is more than a million dollars in Los Angeles or $2 million in San Francisco, and then the voting demographics are such that you have a lot of single under 40s that have no obligations besides doing politics. You're going to have a lot of organized people that are going to defeat a small number of disorganized people. And look, as we've seen, these policies eventually do damage, but the delay or the lag on the timeline is such that they're not going to deal damage that's perceptible to people for a long time.

15:38and therefore they have a runway, let's say, where they can take control of these municipalities, shovel out millions and hundreds of millions of dollars in cash to all their friends, to all their NGOs, and then at that point hope that the voters don't catch on to what's happening. So do you think it'll be something like the cities, mostly Democrat-controlled cities, but blue cities will just be hyper-controlled and go the way of communism or socialism, whatever you want to call it, and that basically the rest of the country, that the more rural areas and suburban areas, that will be the last bastions of freedom.

16:14So we'll just sort of have two different countries, sometimes even within the same state. Yeah. And this is not a new process for American life. So in the 1960s, you had a similar situation unfold in Detroit. And so Detroit had a number of race riots in the 40s and then in the 60s. There was a heavy political conflict where you had unions and civil rights groups and corporations that were duking it out. And then at some point when the left really won major control over the city of Detroit, they put in a mayor named Coleman Young, who's an incredible character, was like that era's version of a BLM activist.

16:55There's a video. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. Clip of him broadcasting in from an interview in Hawaii for whatever reason.

17:30And he says at some point, and we're going to, you know, language warning, he says, he answers the interview cause. He says, Aloha, motherfuckers. It's just an amazing, like, this is the mayor of the richest city in the United States. And in the late 50s, the richest city in the world. Fast forward, when the version of kind of proto-BLM movement takes over Detroit. Fast forward 50 years, and it goes from being the wealthiest city on planet Earth, more or less, give or take, to one of the poorest cities in the United States. And so this politics does have an impact, but it can it can unfortunately it can proceed over a much longer time horizon than we than we expect.

18:09And so I'm kind of bearish on a lot of these cities. I think it's going to get more unpleasant and then they're going to start trying to harvest cash from its wealthiest people. And look, I was in California recently and I talked to some of our friends of ours who are, let's say, in the upper, upper, upper income bracket. And they say that about 70 percent of billionaires in California, for example, are already making exit plans or at least have a backup plan. And capital can move. You know, it's not a Ford factory. It's not a million square feet building, you know, the Caprice Classic for Chevrolet or whatever.

18:45No, actually, these are software companies and finance companies, and they can move. And so I think we're going to see flight of capital, flight of talent if these socialist takeovers continue. Do you think we know what the floor is with these cities? You've been writing a lot over the last couple of weeks about what's going on in Cali with these open air sex markets. And when I saw your piece on it, I was like, of course, of course this is happening. Like, of course, suddenly there'll be prostitutes on every corner and there's already drugs on every corner. And it's just like obvious. Do you think I'd like you to talk a little bit about what's going on with these sex markets.

19:21But also, like, what do you think that floor actually looks like? Or is there no floor there? There's no floor. Well, there is a floor, but the floor is so many feet underground that it is not perceptible and it's barely imaginable. it can get so much worse. And in fact, I tell people things are going okay right now. Things are going pretty well and it can get so much. You have no idea how much worse it can really get. But yeah, we've been doing this reporting in California. It's kind of amazing because you have open air sex markets that have been decriminalized and for all intents and purposes legalized.

19:57You have women in kind of bathing suits, strolling the streets, selling themselves for cash. You have Gavin Newsom's California budget where, you know, perhaps up to a hundred billion dollars a year is just being stolen and huge numbers, huge billions of dollars being sent overseas. California is giving free solar panels to illegal aliens, free sex change surgeries to transgender migrants from Latin America. I mean, what they're doing is like a house of horrors that once you enter is so far beyond what you could imagine, that some of these things almost seem like they're not real. And then you look through the documents and lo and behold, they're quite real.

20:38And so what I think, what I've learned about California, and as ex-Californians, you and I can perhaps understand this, California voters just either don't know what's happening or they just can't process it. So they have to just deny its existence. And that force of denial is extremely strong. And I think it's going to take a lot of work to break through that kind of psychological barrier that's been erected over the brains of so many Californians. For the purposes of algorithmic and monetization reasons, I will not mention, although you have written about it, the price breakdown of what these prostitutes are charging for what, because it's here, but I'll just let people, we'll link to your piece and people can figure that out if they want to visit Cali.

21:27Let's talk, before we do some of the stuff on the right, let's talk a little bit about what has become the sort of catch-all for everybody on the left, this thing that has morphed into the number one thing for them, which is quote unquote Palestine. It has combined the Marxists and the communists and the jihadis and the gender furry queer people and all of these things. How did this happen? Well, this is an incredible thing once again, where just like Coleman Young and the proto BLM takeover of Detroit, you have a proto, you know, free Palestine movement in the 1960s in the West, in Europe and in the United States.

22:05And what you had at that time were left wing communist radicals from the United States, from Western Europe, that they said that in order to achieve revolution in the West, You needed to achieve revolution everywhere. They identified the Palestinians as the kind of uber oppressed of the world. And they actually, in many cases, flew to Arab Muslim North Africa to make common cause with the old PLO, which was the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They planned terrorist attacks. They planned atrocities in Europe. They planned the kind of liberation of the Palestinian people. And the idea was that communism was the layer or the kind of flag layer that would unite all of these disparate revolutionary movements.

22:50And so when you look at the free Palestine movement with the keffias and the costumes and the chants, none of this is new. they've been doing this for 60, 70 years and they're just reviving it, uh, cynically reviving it or rather opportunistically reviving it because this conflict is back in the news. But if we read history or watch great films, like car, there's a Carlos miniseries that touches on this. It's a great film. Um, you'll realize, okay, we've been through this before and these people in a way are just LARPing. And I have like a strange respect for the radicals in the 60s where at least they were going and training on weapons and building bombs and, you know, being real terrorists.

23:36It's like strange new respect for these people because what we have now is like LARPers and college kids at, you know, at the Princeton undergraduate quadrangle, setting up matching tents that were bought for them by some NGO. It's less heroic. It's a total, it's a total LARP. It's a total, you know, civil war reenactment kind of enterprise. And I just find it so, so pathetic. It's really hard to put into words. What do you think we should be doing on the funding side of this in that, yes, they are not paying for these things. It's largely coordinated. We know what's going on with the NGOs, et cetera, et cetera.

24:14It seems like we just are not, I would say the administration is simply not doing enough on this. I know there are some investigations, but it's still happening. Well, some of it, so you have to figure it out. You have to figure out the two pathways. So some of this is legal, First Amendment protected, political, intellectual, journalistic activities. So people have a right to protest. People have a right to agitate for causes. But people don't have a right to, for example, deprive others of their civil rights. They don't have a right to trespass on private property or disrupt the function of a university.

24:50And they certainly don't have a right to occupy buildings, to commit acts of vandalism or provide material support for terrorism. And so in that second category, the administration has a number of ongoing investigations. They're trying to disrupt the flow of funds. And I think what another significant thing they're doing is they're requiring 501c3 organizations to provide greater granularity of detail related to their financing and related to so-called fiscal sponsorships, where they serve as a pass-through for other entities. And if the IRS, and we know Scott Besant, amazing leader of the Treasury Department, I know that they're looking into this.

25:30That's publicly available. And if they can get that information, they can use a lot of that information to strip these organizations of their 501c3 status and in some cases initiate prosecutions. And so we need to see that. And again, separating out protected activity from unprotected activity. We always recommend protected activity here. But if you are breaking the law, you need to see consequences. And my only fear is that we're running out of time. There's two years left. We have to get some of these groups off the board. We have to see people, you know, mugshots, and we have to see people suffer the consequences.

26:09How afraid are you that there won't really be two years left because if the Republicans lose the midterms, Trump is lame duck, likely impeached. You know, even the Republicans start jumping ship that in essence, we'd like to believe there's two and a half years left, but that potentially there's really three months left. Yeah, I'm not too worried about it because he has all the personnel in place in the executive branch. And so he's got people that are staffing the administration. He's got two years left in his presidential term. He might be impeached in the House, but he won't be convicted in the Senate.