Trump's chief culture warrior

0:00I'm Noelle King, and today on Today Explained from Vox, I'm talking to conservative activist, writer, and provocateur Christopher Ruffo. Why? Because Chris Ruffo gets what he wants. From universities, from corporations, from President Trump. He wanted an end to DEI. He got it. We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government. He wanted the government to yank federal funding from universities unless they submitted to his demands. He got that too. He wanted an obscure academic legal theory to become a national boogeyman. Done.

0:39We have removed the poison of critical race theory from our public schools. He wanted Cracker Barrel to change its logo back. We could in fact break the barrel with just a small amount of effort. Since he's getting what he wants, we thought it was worth asking, what does he want now? Coming up, Chris Rufo's Cultural Revolution.

1:26This is Today Explained. Sure. Yeah, I'll give you the full bio. Christopher Rufo, writer, journalist, activist, senior fellow at Manhattan Institute, author of America's Cultural Revolution. I found America's Cultural Revolution, which was published in 2023, to be the clearest summation of your ideas. And I really actually liked the book. I saw some of what you described firsthand. I went from a rural public high school where America is mostly a good country, was kind of the ethos, to a quote unquote elite college. And I was really unmoored by the classroom focus on Marxism and critical whiteness studies and structural privilege.

2:08Some of it was very interesting, but some of it was like, what are you guys on? And in fact, I was very excited to graduate and get out into the real world and leave all of that behind. Right. But as I was reading your book, I see that your thesis is those theories followed me from college out into the real world. I didn't actually leave them behind. Give me the argument that you're making in the book. For a long time, the conservative critique of the universities was that college students were wasting their time on critical race Marxism and intersectional gender theory. And when they would graduate from college, they would go out into the world and find that they had been ill-equipped and they would have to quickly adapt to the quote-unquote real world.

2:52And in retrospect, that turned out to be a catastrophically wrongheaded theory because the opposite occurred. In fact, those college graduates took these bad ideas from the universities and then implanted them everywhere. So your rural high school, I'm not sure what state. New York. Rural New York is probably actually most certainly teaching those same theories that you had encountered in an elite private college a number of years ago. Those are now baked into the state curriculum, not only of states like New York and California and Oregon and Washington, where I am, but in states where you might not expect it.

3:30When you say critical race theory, what do you mean? And I should note the definition is contested. But what are you talking about? I don't think the definition is contested. I actually would say— Critical race theorists would probably disagree. But go ahead. Tell us what you mean. They wouldn't, though. I actually would take their definition at face value. The arguments are quite simple. And some of the key kind of stock phrases that we've heard over the last couple of years really emerge from critical race theory. The idea of systemic racism, the idea that the United States is a system of white supremacy, The idea that people of European descent suffer from conditions such as white fragility, white privilege, white psychopathology, and the idea of equity instead of equality, meaning different groups of people should be treated differently under law in order to achieve the equality of outcomes.

4:24Let's talk about the kind of counter-revolution that you're laying out in American institutions. The Trump administration is demanding that the Smithsonian museums make changes to their exhibits, citing, quote, improper ideology. So the administration released a list of things it found objectionable. One of them was a portrait of a father, a mother and two children crossing the border into South Texas. The artist is Rigoberto Gonzalez. Why, Chris, should Americans not look at that painting? Well, I mean, Americans can look at it. Certainly this artist. Why can't they look at it in the Smithsonian Museum, which is our American repository of culture?

5:03I think the framing of the question misses an essential point. I don't know. Is the artist—you tell me. Is the artist American or foreign national? I don't know. Why does that matter? Tell me. Well, I was going to say, if the artist is an American-born citizen, then, of course, that individual has a First Amendment right to paint whatever picture he would like, to exhibit it as he see fits. But it doesn't mean that he has a right to a public subsidy and to hang whatever picture he would like in the Smithsonian. And so the Smithsonian is a government-related institution. It's funded by federal taxpayers.

5:45And again, under Article II of the Constitution, The president has wide latitude as an executive to set the standards and to set really the rules of the road for government institutions in the best interest of the people. And what happens with a lot of these institutions, that they are totally captured by left wing ideologues. In that painting, for example, it's, you know, a very politically charged painting. It's not simply an aesthetic statement. It's art, Chris. I mean, you can't be shocked that there's. some political charge to a lot of art, right? What are we doing? No, I think that that's actually a terrible aesthetic misjudgment on your behalf, because actually great art is not highly polemical.

6:32And in fact, a highly polemical art is almost never great art. And so you need to have a kind of subtlety of expression, an expression that can't be immediately pigeonholed as a polemical or narrowly ideological statement in order to achieve a kind of aesthetic superiority that merits inclusion in one of our marquee artistic and cultural institutions. And so I think that this particular painting, if you were to ask me, I would say that it does not meet the basic aesthetic and artistic and cultural threshold to be included. uh and so i think you're not you're not an expert in art chris you're a guy who is an activist and you have a degree from i mean i'm an american i'm an american taxpayer i've studied art uh i've studied art all over the world uh i'm a appreciator of the arts and so certainly this is my opinion yes right so let's let's talk about how your opinion fits in with somebody who has let's say your opinion versus an American citizen with a background in art who feels exactly the opposite that you do.

7:45The question is, why does Chris Rufo... That's why we have an incredible system in our country called voting for president of the United States. And so when you vote for a conservative president of the United States, he has the full authority of the American people to turn the federal institutions in a more conservative direction. And in fact, the problem is precisely the opposite, as you're suggesting. The problem is that for multiple decades now, these institutions would run a monolithically left wing ideological line, whether a Democrat was in office or a Republican was in office. These are public institutions that have not been responsive to the public for many decades.

8:28And so Trump's correction is totally justified under the Constitution and is long overdue as a matter of democratic principle. You've talked a lot about how you want this country to go back to a kind of classical Western education that promotes critical thinking in the face of difficult ideas. Why would you support the erasure of art that challenges people to think about America? I think that's a very convenient euphemism. This is not art that challenges people. Actually, it's art that doesn't challenge people. This particular painting, which I can remember from some of the reporting, is so one-dimensional, is so shallow, is so narrowly polemical that it actually doesn't challenge any of the aesthetic or cultural faculties that we should be developing.

9:18According to you, I just got to step in and say it, like according to you. I mean, another person who loves art and has a background in art might feel very differently. They might, but they would be actually wrong. Oh, wow. And it's not just according to me, right? We actually have, you know, there are certain standards of aesthetics, of artistic production, of creativity that we've been, of course, debating over centuries, over millennia. Art is not just a matter of personal preference. It's not just a matter of he said, she said. But in fact, there are enduring artistic standards and traditions by which contemporary works can and should be measured.

10:00And that is precisely the role of the curators of culture. Yeah, the curators who put this painting in the Smithsonian. Right. People made this decision. But those are curators of an anti-culture. What's the anti-culture? Sorry. artistic and cultural institutions have really brought into being an artistic anti-culture, meaning a kind of nihilistic cultural expression that reduces art to politics, that reduces, you know, culture to negation, and that celebrates ugliness instead of beauty. And I think that this painting, which has drawn so much attention, is rightly in that tradition of anti-culture.

10:50Are President Trump's recent moves in the Smithsonian, for example, in education, for example, are they evidence that you have won your revolution? I think that we have certainly won an enormous victory. But the battle is not won. This is really the first part of the counterrevolution, and it's a generational project that will take many, many years to conclude. And so while we should certainly celebrate victory as it comes, we should have enough humility to remember that there are no permanent victories and victories can be undone in the blink of an eye.

11:34Writer and activist Chris Ruffo Coming up, we're going to the Cracker Barrel

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15:54This is Today Explained. We're back with Chris Ruffo. He's an activist and author of the book America's Cultural Revolution. Let's talk about one of your more recent countercultural revolution wins, and that is Cracker Barrel. So after the company changed its logo to remove Uncle Herschel, the elderly fellow on the logo, you wrote on Twitter, we must break the barrel. Why? Well, oh, that was a fun one. So Cracker Barrel was a lot of fun. That was a very interesting campaign. And look, on the surface, it's something that is admittedly a little ridiculous. and even my language about breaking the barrel should be taken with a tone of irony and humor because it's quite funny.

16:43Like, you know, why are we running a political campaign against a Southern-themed chain restaurant? You know, that seems like out of left field. But under the surface, there was something more serious happening that's important to understand. Cracker Barrel, of course, has a predominantly conservative customer base, right? That is the brand, that is the marketing, that is the customer experience. And yet at corporate headquarters, as my friend, the muckraking journalist Robbie Starbuck uncovered, at corporate headquarters, Cracker Barrel executives had gone full woke. They had embraced DEI, embraced pride programming, embraced gender neo-pronouns, embraced drag queens for kids, and really were indistinguishable from any of the other left -wing corporate executives that we've seen in recent years.

17:39that is, again, a huge distinction from their customer base. And so if our goal is to roll back woke ideologies in America's institutions, you want to start with institutions where you have the most leverage. And it was obvious because of this discrepancy between the executives and the customers at Cracker Barrel that we could, in fact, break the barrel with just a small amount of effort. And then the final point is that Cracker Barrel is a means to an end. Again, I've actually never been to Cracker Barrel. I'm not sure I would want to patronize Cracker Barrel. That's not my kind of food. But the idea is that Cracker Barrel is a controversy that if it can be won, and it was won, will send a signal to other corporate executives that if you embrace left-wing ideological causes, you're opening up significant risk to your company, to your brand favorability, and to your bottom line.

18:43Let's talk about Cracker Barrel's history, okay? And its rights, if it has any, as a private company. So Cracker Barrel came under scrutiny in the early 1990s after it fired gay employees. Then in the early 2000s, I think it was 2004, it settled a lawsuit in which the allegations were white employees were allowed to refuse to serve Black customers, diners were segregated based on race, and Black diners were served food from the trash 20, 21 years ago. So Cracker Barrel pivots and it says we're going to support pride. We're going to have a DEI program. Why can't a private company make that decision for itself?

19:19This is not a college, Chris. Your tax dollars are not going there. I think you're making two huge leaps and likely errors of fact. So certainly if that's true, I haven't read the lawsuit. I didn't read the settlement. But certainly if they were, for example, refusing to serve black customers, that's a violation of the Civil Rights Act. I'm glad to hear that Cracker Barrel paid a penalty for that and rectified its behavior. I think we can all agree that that is a violation of non-discrimination provisions. But you're assuming that somehow funding drag queens for kids rectifies racial discrimination at its stores in the 1990s.

20:02That seems like an enormous leap and that is not really justifiable or not explanatory of the behavior. And then your second thing is like, well, don't they have the right to support they, them pronouns for their employees? I mean, sure, they're allowed to do that. It's a private company. They can use they, them pronouns. They can use it, itself pronouns. They can use frog, frog, self pronouns for that matter. That's totally fine. But then, of course, it's my First Amendment right to highlight the fact that they're doing so and to issue a public criticism. And then, of course, it's investors' rights of their own property to sell shares of the company.

20:49Let's talk about your views on transgender people. In late August, you tweeted, quote, We should now put to rest the libertarian delusion that transgenderism is a matter of personal choice or live and let live. It's an ideology that has done grave damage to millions of Americans and has unleashed a nihilistic wave of violence on our society. Enough. How do you define transgenderism? Transgenderism is quite simple. It's an ideology that holds that men can become women and women can become men through the adoption of different gender pronouns, different personal dress and costume, puberty blockers, hormone drugs, and in many cases, genital surgeries.

21:35And this ideology is not just a kind of personal ideology, but it has the aspirations of annexing its position in the public square. And so claiming that, you know, so-called transgender people have an entitlement to publicly subsidized, you know, medical interventions, claiming that refusing to recognize the gender identity of so-called transgender people is a violation of civil rights law. and then lobbying for the kind of forcible ideological reproduction of the ideology within the institutions of public education, public health, public administration. And so that's how I would define the ideology.

22:25When you talk about trans people, you employ similar language to the critical whiteness people who say whiteness is an ideology. Whiteness should be abolished. Whiteness is evil. Now, you understandably dislike this language. White people are individuals and to reduce them to their skin color is, you know, it's nuts. Academics would say we're misunderstanding their point. But let's let's not care for a second what academics think. Are you aware that you're talking the same way about trans people as these people that you seem to really detest? I don't think I am at all. I think that's that's that's not an accurate or fair comparison.

23:01I don't think transgenderism is an ideology. Whiteness is an ideology. You're criticizing the ideology of transgenderism. It's obviously an ideology, right? Nobody is born transgender. Oh, well, I mean, you know, you are. You know, this is, again, this is an opinion and a belief. It's not an opinion. It's not a belief. No, no, even transgender activists don't believe that people are born transgender. I mean, it doesn't make any sense, right? And so I think that it's a total misnomer. I mean, total misnomer to say that, you know, that it's comparable, like transgender identity is comparable to racial identity.

23:39I think that's just a false comparison. Well, it leaves, the idea is it's leaving people out of the equation. It's leaving people out of the equation. Transgender people exist. I think about whiteness, it's not true at all. Yeah, that's not true. Do you believe that transgender people exist and have the right to exist? Look, I mean, again, these are like ideological questions that are like Zen koans of nihilism. That's not a real question. Yes, Chris, it is a real question. It is a real question. That's a question masked in a euphemism. So I'll answer it very clearly. Do you believe that transgender people exist?

24:14Sure, I believe that people who believe that they have, that their gender identity is distinct from their biological sex exist. Of course, obviously. Ultimately, it doesn't mean that what they're saying is true, because it's quite obvious. Men cannot become women, and women cannot become men. You wrote a book about smart people who came to believe that America was an evil place, that it was bad beyond redemption, and that it could really only be reformed if people moved to extremes. Some of their extremes were arguably absurd and un-American. Some of your extremes are arguably absurd and un-American.

25:00Name one. Name one. I don't have any extreme opinions, not one. None of the radicals that you profiled, Chris, were ever particularly embarrassed or sorry. This is a point in your book you kind of return to again and again. Do you think you ever will be? Well, no, again, I think the factual premise of many of your questions is like, is something hard to believe. What single position do I have is extreme? I actually think all of my positions are moderate, well-reasoned, in accordance with basic decency, and almost unremarkable. I find myself in this very odd position where I'm treated like a radical when, in fact, my positions are so moderate, so mainstream, so broadly supported across geography and time.

25:46I really am hoping you can tell me which one of my positions is so extreme. I'm going to let our listeners make that call for themselves. Let me do one last question, if I could. Critics sometimes stall when they're asked to provide a vision of a good society. You're a critic of what's been going on in America. What is yours? What does a good America look like to you? What I think we need to do relevant to our conversation is quite simple. We need to move to a standard of colorblind equality so that the government treats all individuals equally, regardless of ancestry. And we need to have a very clear eyed vision about what we do with our public institutions and to ensure that the public institutions always reflect the values of the public.

26:34And so I think if we stick with the American people, we stick with our constitution and we stick with the spirit of liberty and equality that was entrenched by our founders who pointed us to resolve the many challenges and shortcomings of history, we will continue to have the greatest country in the world. I know that the vast majority of the American people are with me, and I think we can all unite behind this agenda. Chris Ruffo is the author of America's Cultural Revolution. We'll put a link to the book in our show notes. Chris, thank you for coming on. Thank you.

27:17Today's team, Miles Bryan, Jolie Myers, Patrick Boyd, Adrian Lilly, and Laura Bullard. It's Today Explained. Thank you.