Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show your home for open, honest and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show today on the program. Jodi Shaw and Christopher Rufo. These two are warriors in a very uncomfortable space, and that is the critical race theory that is being shoved down our throats collectively as a people in our universities, in our K through 12 schools in corporate America and elsewhere.

And it isn't easy to stand up and say, no, no, this is itself racist. But both of them have been doing it, Jodi, in her own personal circumstance at Smith College, and Chris, on a more macro level, across many schools and colleges, and now he is organizing a real response, a real fight back.

And so they're both here to talk about their circumstances, Jodi, I don't know if you guys remember this. I remember Glenn Lowry. He was on the program praising her.

We talked about her video, but she she seems kind of understated and, I don't know, just sort of sweet. And she works at Smith and she's essentially an administrative assistant there and decided to speak out against the constant, constant shaming of white employees, assumptions about white people and black people based on their pigmentation. And she was a one woman push back, wishing she spoke up and made national headlines doing it. And now we'll tell you the consequences.

And Chris was a liberal who kind of got pulled into this by some whistleblowers who turned into thousands of whistleblowers and now is running point on how we push back against this nonsense, divisive ideology. So you'll hear from both of them in just one second. But first, I have got to talk to you about paint your life. Do you remember paint your life dotcom. I mentioned them. There are new sponsor. I was like, OK, we'll do it together.

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Thrilled you are here. Thank you so much for having me, Megan. So I was sitting at home.

It was an evening in October, in bed at night, you know, just surfing the net on my phone and up popped an article with links to your video. And I'm like, I was kind of tired, whatever I click on it. Well, I mean, I watched the whole thing twice. I made my husband Doug watch the whole thing twice. I was like, who is this heroine?

Who not only did you choose to speak out against basically racism, you know, they used to be called reverse racism. I just think it's plain old fashioned racism at Smith against you, this forcing of critical race theory down your throats at every turn.

But you found the perfect words. Did you write out. We'll get to what you said in one second, but did you write it out because what you said was so spot on and you said it so perfectly?

Oh, thank you, Megan. Yeah, I did write out a list. I wrote out a list of things I, I wanted.

And it was actually at the end of a long was more like a 40 minute video. And then I thought I'd gone through it a few times, quite angrily actually.

And then I just decided, you know, I'm just going to ask for what I want. And I so turned out just to be ten minutes and it turned out to be quite calm. In the end, I decided that what what am I hoping to accomplish here? I just want to rail at Smith College or do I want to make a good faith effort to open dialogue? And I decided that's what I wanted to do. And so I just stuck to it was it was really just a list I was improvising around.

Part of its brilliance was how calm it was if you had been angrier, you know how it is, especially as a woman, you would have been too easily dismissed as an hysteric or, you know, the angrier you are, the more people think you've got some agenda. You were so measured, so matter of fact. And all I could think when you were talking about the things they were doing to you is if you were black and you were saying these things, Smith College would be on every newspaper in the country for its racism.

But that's the interesting thing about what's happening right now, is racism against people who aren't in traditionally marginal marginalized groups is is it gets a shoulder shrug even though it's just as unlawful.

Yeah, that's I'm really glad you said that, Megan, because that has been demonstrated over and over at Smith. I mean, I exhausted all internal remedies. And one of the things I did was to file an internal complaint. And literally when I went to file the complaint, the person who has a JD who is in charge of processing the complaints asked me. She seemed incredulous to me and she asked me, do you believe in white privilege? It was almost like she couldn't believe that I was filing a complaint as a white person.

And she told me a number of things, like the Civil Rights Act was created for traditionally marginalized groups.

And I'm going to need to hire an outside investigator because I do not have expertise in this area.

And when I asked her to explain what she meant, she said, well, it's different because you're white, meaning she doesn't have to, quote unquote, reverse racism, which I later found out is not actually a legal term.

And she's 100 percent right. Exactly. She's 100 percent wrong. Just I want to make this clear at the beginning of the podcast that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title seven of the Civil Rights Act, protects individuals from employment discrimination on the basis of race and color, as well as national origin, sex, religion, title seven. I am quoting now from the EEOC website. You don't have to take Megan Kelley's word for it. Title seven prohibits race or color discrimination against all persons, including Caucasians, and quote, There is no doubt that you may not discriminate against white people because of their color either under the equal protection clause of the Constitution, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and typically under various state and local statutes that get passed preventing race discrimination.

So it is no answer to a complaint to say, but you're white and it's not an assertion of white privilege for you to say, I feel I am being treated differently because I have white skin. So let's just back up. Let's just back up and I'm going to get to your letter and, you know, you read it.

So I have some sound bites that I want our audience to hear them. But can we just talk about how long you've been working at Smith? Let's just set it up for the audience, how you went to Smith and then how long had you been working there and and in what capacity?

So I graduated from Smith in ninety three and then lived in various parts of the country, mostly New York City, and moved back up here in twenty seventeen to western Massachusetts and started working at Smith in September or October of twenty seventeen. So I've been at Smith for three, you know three and a quarter years now. And you will stay in the library? Yeah, I started off in the library is a temporary librarian, so I was an outreach and engagement librarian.

I was hired for my engagement skills and kind of community building and outreach. And yeah, then I moved into residence life. And part of moving into residence life was because of a situation that happened in the library. That was kind of the first thing that happened to me. That was pretty blatant discrimination. So let's start there. Let's start there. That's the first incident when I understand you were a candidate for a higher position in the library staff.

So what happened? So, I mean, really, I think and I I think it's really important to provide the backdrop of a situation that happened on July 30, first about a month before the situation in the library. So a black student accused a white staff member, a custodian of racially motivated incidents. She was in a house that was not open to students at the time. It was, in fact, being used just for it was during the summer.

And so the houses that Smith were students normally reside, get used for summer programs. And this particular house is being used for children's program. So all the staff had to have Corri checks, you know, background checks, that kind of thing. And so she wandered in at lunch and she wasn't supposed to be there. But the the dining staff allowed her to be there because they had ah, they're already accustomed to the school not backing them up if they enforce certain rules in the dining hall.

And she she ended up moving into the living room and a custodial staff were told, if you see something, say something, no matter how insignificant. That's kind of the conventional wisdom at that time. And she it was hard to see her. The the custodian was had, I think had bad eyesight. There's a whole story around that. And so she she made a Facebook post. So talk about the the disparity in reporting. She she made a couple paragraph Facebook post and the college immediately sprung into action.

She made a Facebook post saying this was racially motivated. This person called campus police on me just because I'm black and this is wrong. And the college hired an outside investigator and I think they generated almost two hundred pages of a very thorough investigation, which concluded there was no there was not a racially motivated incident. However, they maintained this narrative that it was they implemented programs, initiatives, discussions, dialogues all around the systemic racism because the students said this is another example in a long line of systemic racism.

I have suffered as a student at Smith, although when you read the investigative report, she was unable to provide other examples and they state that in the report.

So this is the backdrop.

You now have a campus that's hyper, hyper aware and and of race. Right. And that we have a big problem of systemic racism on campus at Smith, all the newspapers, this was in all the newspapers, the situation so cut to one month later.

Just just if I can just interrupt, when was this what was the date that we're talking about here live? Thirty first. Twenty eighteen. OK, so long before the George Floyd thing. Yes, yes. OK, ok, keep going.

I had been working on an orientation presentation for six hundred first year students. It had already been approved. It was going to involve a rap and some people. Oh that's so cheesy rap in the library. Well I had been asked to to quote do something crazy. Please do not get up there and do a slide show about the boring card catalogue I have. And I have a musical background. I'm very creative person. Whether or not one thinks it's cheesy cheeses.

Europe is beside the point. And I worked really hard on this. I had musicians from town. I had a sound person, anyone who's produced an event of that magnitude for six hundred people in a concert hall. I was the point person. So it's a big it's a big event. So I worked all all summer on it. The budget was approved. Everything was fine. The July thirty first twenty eighteen event happened. So the campus was kind of roiling from that.

And so about a month later, it was within a week of the orientation that I was supposed to do for these students. My supervisor took me aside.

He said, you can't do the the rap. And so I said, why? And he said, Because you're white. Laeter Those are the literal words.

So I asked him I said, So if I were a student, sorry, if I were a person of color, would it be OK? And I didn't specify what color, which I think is interesting. And he said, yes, he didn't even hesitate. Yes, that would be OK. So clearly the problem wasn't that it was a rap, it wasn't the format. The problem was that I was not a person of color, apparently any other color.

The problem is that I was white and this was memorialized in an email. And so that was quite crushing to me because I was a temporary employee at the time. I was up for a position and this would have been kind of a big coup if I pulled it off, which I which I really think I would have, I would have been able to pull it off quite successfully. That's my opinion. And so that was an employment opportunity that was denied to me.

You wrote. Or I don't remember where I saw this, maybe it was in the video, but I know you said you felt shame after that. I mean, I don't want to gloss over how something like that makes you feel such a disappointment. I can't do my thing. This feels unfair.

But you had effectively been shamed that your idea was inappropriate.

Yeah, I did feel ashamed. I felt, oh, gosh, I felt so many things. I, I felt ashamed that there was a void because at the time I was I was on board with this. You know, systemic racism is bad and it's a real problem. And I have white privilege. You know, I had all these voices in my head and I thought, oh, jeez, like, was I really off the mark? Was I being culturally insensitive, cultural, cultural appropriation?

And then I had another voice that was telling me, no, you know, this is this is racial discrimination. But it was I mean, the way it was done without any hesitation at all, memorialized in an email backed up by the dean, I really didn't know. I thought, is it racial? Maybe it's not, you know.

Right. So you're you're proceeding in good faith. Like, I'm open minded. I want to be sensitive. You know, I'm going to think about it. And this is like the beginning of things starting to turn you. So you go to the dean of the library to say, hey, I guess I can't do this. And I was told the quote was, how you respond to this. Jody will show us your resourcefulness and resiliency in light of your candidacy for the full time position.

Yeah, yeah. I think yeah, that was really the whole bottom dropped out and I thought, oh my gosh, I don't I don't know if I can stay in this environment. Yeah, because those are the top really the dean of the libraries. I remember telling my former supervisor that the person who hired me, who was no longer there, and she said it made her feel nauseous. What do you think the dean was trying to say was really trying to say?

Oh, I I think it was a veiled threat, you know, if you do not go along with this racially discriminatory behavior we have just placed upon you, then you will not be considered for this job. It was kind of like you go along with this, be quiet. And it was it was horrible. I mean, there's no other way to describe it. I was in complete turmoil. I did go to H.R., I talked to H.R., talked to the ombudsman.

Nobody said, Smith, that I spoke to, aside from colleagues whispering on the side, told me, you know, maybe you should file a complaint. This this really feels like a threat or this feels like racial discrimination. I was not you know, it was just that that's, you know, going out. Yes.

Either way, I mean, it's like even if if you really want to get into it, of course, there have been plenty of very famous and successful white rappers. So, you know, if you really want to do a tit for tat on their argument, you could have gone there. It's it's not it's not a medium completely dominated. I mean, it's majority, I would say people of color, but not all of so it kind of falls apart the more you probe it.

But in any event, no one had any desire to be sensitive to you.

Right. Right. As a white person, I was thinking about that last night, making about the rap thing. A lot of people pointed that out on the YouTube comments while Eminem and Macklemore, it's it's also it was there were they were talking about cultural appropriation, too. That was in the email. And isn't I mean, rap is part of my culture. I listen to rap. So doesn't that mean it's part of my culture, but something that's in my life that I listen to?

It seems like it's part of American culture rap.

I guarantee you as a white person saying this to you, was it was it. Yes. All of the direct discrimination I have encountered at Smith has been other white people as far as I am really.

Just so so you fit, you're intimidated, you've been shamed, and then you decide you're going to take a different job.

You're going to you're not going to go for the promotion. You've effectively been told how that's going to work out.

You go and take a job, I guess, as an administrative assistant. And that's when the second incident took place. Do I have it right? That's correct.

And in the background, a whole lot of other incidents were taking place across campus to other people and more and more programs and things for white ways, for white people to talk about whiteness and so on and so forth. So I took a job as providing administrative support in the Department of President's life and thinking that maybe if I get away from the academic side, there would be less like it would be less racially tense and so much about race. And boy, was I wrong.

I didn't know this because I'm new to higher education. But the residents life departments often have code. You know, they they do a curriculum and it's just very grounded in this kind of social justice, critical social justice. And so I learned that it was required of me to attend staff meetings where I needed to discuss my identity and those kinds of topics. And so I thought, well, I'll just keep my head down and go along with it.

You know, it really had nothing. I could not see the connection to my job. My job at that point was very nuts and bolts. There was no wasn't like the library. There's no instruction going on. I wasn't teaching, just helping students get lock changes and ID cards there. There was some student contact, but it it didn't feel. The social justice stuff in Wroclaw is a whole story unto itself, but regardless, I. I was mandated to attend a professional development retreat in January of twenty twenty.

And so I started getting nervous about that because by now I'm a very and some other things have happened on campus. I'm really not comfortable talking about my race at work. And I've learned that it's a very performative endeavor. These discussions and these trainings and initiatives very performative. They feel fake. And I, I just. Is the phrase I don't suffer fools gladly.

I just think it's very hard for me to go along with something that we're pretending to be really having an authentic discussion about race when really it's just it feels like theater.

Well, and think about it. If you used a different sort of form here, if they said we have to do this with gender and you must sit there and talk about all of the ways in which being a woman has affected your life, the implication would be negatively and for a man positively and everything. So I'm being told I have to sit in my workplace and I'm going to talk about my lady parts. And I got to talk about my menstrual cycle and all the ways in which my sex and attention by men like I don't want to talk about that now.

No one should be able to force me talk about my lady parts at the workplace. That would be obvious. But when it comes to race, they feel very emboldened to make you make you talk about your pigmentation, something which is also an immutable characteristic. You have no control over it. That's why it's protected by the law. Yes, that is why it's protected. Exactly. So you had to go to a three day retreat, I'm told. Yeah, it was a three day retreat.

The first day was really focused on identity, which I knew meant race in my mind, which it did pretty much turn out to be. Yeah. And and so I went and I actually approached my director about a month before and I said, you know, I'm not comfortable discussing my race. And I think I said I'm not comfortable discussing my race or any other protected characteristic at work. And she said, no problem. Just just say that at the meeting to say you're uncomfortable.

So I thought, OK, great. So I went to the meeting and, you know, the the hired facilitators who presumably have authority in this area asked us to discuss. I'm paraphrasing. Please talk about your understanding about your race culture as if they are one and the same in the context of your childhood years or your your adolescent years.

There was it was like a three part question. So everyone went around the room and did so. And I was the last person to respond. And I said, I'm not comfortable talking about that at work. And so later in the presentation, one of the facilitators said, I want to be clear that any white person who expresses any discomfort in discussing their race when asked to I believe she said that you might you might feel like you want to comfort them because they seem uncomfortable but don't because what they're doing is they're displaying white fragility and it's a power play.

OMG, yeah. So when you say that, it seems like, OK, that kind of stinks. But I cannot tell you the feeling of sitting there with your coworkers and effectively having your feelings that your honest feelings that you just expressed of discomfort being framed as an act of aggression because of your color. And I, I often wonder if my skin or any other color and I had said, you know, I'm uncomfortable discussing that. The implication is that that would not happen because she said, as she said, this only applies to white people.

The way she stated it made it seem like it only applies to white people should that for white people. So I don't I think if I had been a black person or Latino, like, I would have not if I had said I am not comfortable discussing race at work, I probably they would have been like, OK, fine, because it's not a power play.

Meanwhile, you've been told to do it by your supervisor. It's completely out of line and but in line with the way these training sessions go down. I mean, I, I have a friend who went through one of these sessions at school here in New York, and she sat for two full days and listened to the black instructor shame the white people in the room for their white privilege. And they're white, you know, racism and. On the third day, she ginned up the confidence to say something like, well, you know, sometimes the shoes on the other foot and I have felt uncomfortable situations, whatever.

She tried to just push back a little and was shamed, was shamed. She felt completely attacked by the instructor, by other people in the class, because the whole thing is built on the notion that white people may not speak. The only not even I'm sorry is an appropriate thing to say that they'll tell you it's not our obligation, make you feel better. We don't have any obligation to take your apology. So there's just no good way out of it for a person who feels uncomfortable.

So. So when it's over, that's when you you thought you did file a complaint? Yes, I did.

I decided, OK, now I think it was because at that point I realized one. Now we're using shame as a tool to compel behavior. It wasn't just we're not just talking about suppression of speech. Right. We're talking about now public shaming is being used to try to compel me to say certain words. And I thought now, now I it's been made clear to me I can no longer just abstain, like even at that point, even just calling in sick on a day that I knew there was going to be training.

I now I knew that would be framed or could be framed as an act of aggression, because essentially, as my colleagues have been instructed to do, to frame anything kind of abstaining or not participating as an act of aggression. So, yes, that's when I decided to file a complaint. I and I went to the the EEO compliance officer on campus, and that's when she asked me, do you believe in white privilege? And this law was created to protect traditionally marginalized groups.

And I need to hire an outside investigator because I do not have expertise in this kind of discrimination, meaning I love that she was the EEO compliance officer and did not understand me.

She should just read their website.

So, you know, I had to work that hard. You have to hire a lawyer. Just go to the website. It's right there that that these laws protect white people as well. You may not like it. Eric Holder didn't like it that came out during his administration.

But the law is the law. And I know what I mean.

Jodi, tell us, because it wasn't just those two incidents in reading up about you and your story, I walked away thinking this place, Smith College, is obsessed with race.

They were shoving it down your throat at lectures and presentations and behind the scene in questions about students involved in altercations or it just seemed to constantly be their focus. Yeah, constantly.

I mean, I, I only arrived there in twenty seventeen. It was already a topic. And then when the July 30 first twenty eighteen incident happened, it was like they went into hyperdrive. Right. So then it was in hyperdrive for a while and then I filed the complaint and immediately after I filed the second part of my Clayton May twenty twenty George Floyd was murdered and BLM got active and there was a global pandemic on top of it where staff were told you might be getting furloughed.

Then they went into like hyper hyper drive. I mean, it was I was getting invited. My director sent email to only the white staff in my department, inviting us to get together to talk about how we can support the non white staff. And of course, and she said, oh, it's optional. But, you know, so I didn't go and I'm sure everyone else went and I don't know how that went down. We were invited to the entire school, How to Generating Justice event, and they said the president said that white people are especially responsible for dismantling racism.

This was in an email. So I actually went to that. And right at the beginning, they said, where we're going, we're not going to we're going to privilege voices of color. So white people kind of need to take a back seat. So so you're right. There's there's no way you can win here or you're being told that. First of all, here's the problem. There's systemic racism and this is how you as a white person need to respond and behave in order to, quote, help.

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Previous efforts, which in some instances had been in good faith and mild to sort of draw attention, to make people think, to bring people together just morphed into really dangerous, insulting, offensive messaging, which I think our next guest, Chris Rufo, is going to tell us had been percolating all along.

They just had been given a huge green light in the wake of the BLM protests and so on to just shove it down everyone's throat and compliance submission, open acceptance and vocalisation was the only way through it. So.

So you've gone through all of this, you filed the complaint and so on, or you tried to then in October, on October 27th, twenty twenty was when you released your your video, your first Facebook video calling attention to all of this, the problems there. What made you do that? What was the final straw there? Well, the whole time I'm thinking, if, you know, I hope they investigate this complaint thoroughly because clearly nobody was even denying that these things had happened that I was alleging in the complaint.

And I hope things can change.

But in my mind, I thought that was kind of my the last gasp or the last thing I had that I could pull out, because I know the college does not like publicity, especially around anything having to do with race.

So that summer. So I filed the complaint and that summer after George Floyd, things got it got they got worse. I was getting invited to be part of the white stuff. This part of the white stuff that the college released, a four page document called Toward Racial Justice at Smith that had all kinds of initiatives in it that were tied to performance evaluations and paying people equity equitably across registers of identity. And so I had all these questions like, what is all this stuff mean?

And so I started asking HRR, what does this mean in terms of my job? Like what is? And I and I started questioning the very basic terms, like what is equity and inclusion? Can I have a definition of that in new terms, like anti blackness and anti-racism? What do those things mean? And so I kind of went on a quest. I was shuffled around to different people. My complaint was still pending. And I think the final straw was that I was told I would have to attend a meeting, actually a couple of meetings to discuss this document toward racial justice at Smith.

And I did not I had made very clear I do not want to attend any more discussions while my complaint is pending, having to do with race. I mean, even even where I just have to sit there and listen, because I did not want my not speaking to be framed as if I didn't want to be publicly humiliated again, I didn't want to put myself in that position. So I wrote emails. I said, you know, I, I don't want to do this.

I don't understand what this document is. Nobody responded. I did meet with some people, but I was there were no answers, no adequate responses, let's put it that way. And so the week I released the video, I did send what I call my Hail Mary emails to members of the president's cabinet and all of the people had ever been referred to. And I just said, you know, just so we're on the same page, this is this has gotten worse.

And I find it morally I think I use the word morally reprehensible. I will not participate in because they were asking me to take color into account in questionable ways in dealing with students and other colleagues. I do not want to participate in this. That was that was basically the email. And there was no response. These were very high level deans and members of the president's cabinet. Nobody responded to that email. So a week later, I released the video.

OK, and that brings us to the apex of our discussion, because I watch this and I thought, holy and holy moly, because I knew Smith wasn't going to like it.

And I think a lot of people had been feeling this, you know, as as I put it to my own school, the answer to racism is not more racism. You know, that doesn't cure racism.

In fact, it just creates more on both sides and is really dangerous.

This constant obsession with skin color is incredibly divisive and the messaging around it has been explicitly divisive.

So. And a lot of people, especially in the wake of the George Foy thing, have been very afraid to talk about it, especially white people, let's be honest.

So you fire off this this video and we have we have like a two minute clip cued up. I said to my producer, Debbie, I'm like, make it long because there's no way I'm going to be able to paraphrase as well as she said it in the first instance. So let's just listen to Jody Shaw, October 27, 20, 20.

I'm white and that really shouldn't be relevant. But my employer has made it clear that not only is it relevant, but it's possibly one of the most important or if not the most important feature of me as a human. I've been put in a position where I had to do this. I'm speaking for the staff who can't speak and want to be saying these things because I have spoken to a lot of you who feel similarly to me.

So here we go. I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself, because I feel like you do that a lot.

Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color. Because you don't know that. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based upon their skin color.

Stop telling the young women of color have no power or agency in this world. Stop telling me that young white women have power and privilege over everyone else.

Equally not true.

And both of those narratives that you are teaching the students and trying to convince staff of are very disempowering. Stop demanding that I admit to white privilege and work on my so-called implicit bias as a condition of my continued employment. Stop telling me that as a white person I am, quote, especially responsible for doing the work of dismantling racism. Most of us happen to make a salary around the equivalent of what it cost to attend Smith for a single semester. Stop emboldening students to act abusively toward staff by refusing to hold them accountable for their own egregious behavior.

We have the right to work in an environment free from the ever present terror that any unverified student allegation of racism or any other ism has the power to crush our reputations, ruined our livelihood, and even endanger the physical safety of ourselves or our family members while.

Stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on skin color. I feel like all you should have received in response to this was, I'm sorry, you're right and we will stop. That the fact that that Smith did anything other than than say you've got a point is terrifying to me.

I mean, again, think of if a black person said stop producing my personhood to a racial category, there would have been a panic from the Smith president to whom this was addressed and saying saying a white person saying you're asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on skin color should start a five alarm fire.

That's what white people did in the 1950s and before in a way that was so damaging. And now they want us to do it again. One of the saddest parts of this was. There was a statement where I think we've got this cued up, but you said you talked about how this had been affecting your self worth at Smith. And we've got this is just one more sound bite. Take a listen.

I, I don't really feel valuable anymore because I. I don't feel like you value me. I feel like my skin color is the most important thing about me and that that doesn't feel good. I believe my value lies in the quality of my work, the goodness of my deeds, the essence of my character and the fullness of my heart, not my skin color. These videos I'm making are really an effort to organize in the workplace for better working conditions.

Organizing in the workplace to improve working conditions is protected by federal law. So staff talking is protected. I didn't want to be the one talking about it, but Smith has engaged in behavior toward me that has pushed me over a line.

This is not a left right or a red versus blue issue. This is a human issue.

I'm a lifelong liberal in that helps. I love that, I love that, and it didn't help, did it? Um, it didn't help with Smith. No, I think that signifier helps for some people on the left because I made another video about the left being so afraid of the left, afraid of being associated with the right, that I think that's part of what keeps us from speaking out in a general sense, in addition to our employers being afraid we're going to lose our jobs.

But no, it didn't help with Smith.

That's so interesting, right? They don't want to be associated with the right and certainly in the Trump era. Oh, gosh, that term that term meant something most liberals did not want to adopt. I mean, we've talked a lot on this program about how there's no amount of weakness that's sufficient for the WOAK. So being liberal doesn't do it. Being gay doesn't do it. Being, you know, even being a person of color doesn't do it.

You have to subscribe to everything, everything and be on the right side on every issue in case where you get sort of kicked out of the Cool Kids group. What happened after you released it?

Because I know you said you've been speaking with other staff. What happened in your life, in your world? It's interesting.

You know, I didn't know if two people would watch it and that would be it. Or if, you know, thousands of people would watch it. And it was it was the latter.

I all of it's interesting what happened at Smith because we're all remote at this point. All of the people I had spoken to regularly about this kind of thing, you know, kind of whispering on the side, being careful, no closed doors and other people. This really bothered also and said, well, we should do something. But nobody, nobody everybody's afraid of losing their job. And so I did something.

And then none of those people are in contact with me now except for what one person texted and said, no way.

They all made very clear. I remember texting one and she made very clear she did not want to be associated with me any more. And I kind of understand that because it's kind of like guilt by association. Like they know other people have seen us together before. And now, my gosh, like I have to like people are going to know that I was speaking with Jodi and I don't want that association anymore. I mean, there is real terror.

There is terror. But on the other hand, a lot of Smith's staff and faculty have reached out to me, you know, on the down low. And we are now in touch and I'm now in communications. I will say there is still. There are only few who will put their name on it. It is it is a high terror situation, which is very concerning to me, because if we are already at the level I'm very concerned, if this keeps going, like if we're already at a level where we can't say anything, then how is this going to progress?

Like what? Where where does this go next? Like what is the next step of this, the first step as you might lose your job? What if this keeps going? That's why it was so bold.

What you did is so bold. No, nobody does this. They're afraid and for good reason. They need their jobs.

And I think you accurately read Smith's mood and understood you were taking a big risk.

It's the same reason parents don't speak out about what's happening in the schools right now. They don't want to hurt their child's future. They don't want to hurt his chances of getting into a good college or getting or being well liked.

At a school that leans hard left on identity politics, the students are praised for being little social justice warriors. And that's what gets results at the university campuses, too. So all those fears are totally understandable. And underscore the courage it took to do this, that the spike, the ball moment of this video is the practice law.

So for me, I was like, oh, my God, I love her. Was the warning about how they could not fire you for organizing in the workplace to improve working conditions is protected under federal law. So staff talking is protected.

Boom, like I might need to marry Jodi Shaw in my next life and teach Smith a lesson. How did did you consult a lawyer? Like how did you understand all that reading?

A lot. And and, you know, when I was thinking I might come to making a video, it really might come to the whole time. I'm thinking this might come to me having to do that. So I had to think very carefully about how to do it in a way that would be most protective of myself. No guarantee. And so when I found that, that actually made me realize I could speak about more than just race, really, for talking about working conditions, that kind of opens up the field for what I can really speak about.

I am now they I am under investigation now. However, I'm not I'm on a leave. They they did put me on leave and I am under investigation, but I have not been terminated.

So this is so crazy, this piece of the story. So I want to get to that. But so the university president, Kathleen McCartney did respond two days later and basically said she doesn't speak for this college or any part of the college. And the video mischaracterises are important ongoing efforts to build a more equitable and inclusive living, learning and working. But she's got all the buzz term. She knows exactly what to say and who she's appealing to.

Then she says the National Labor Relations Act protects employees who engage in concerted activities, including speech, with respect to workplace conditions. All employees have the freedom to criticize the policies and practices of their employer.

Nevertheless, I'm ready to affirm that the president's cabinet and I believe we have a moral responsibility to promote racial justice, equity and inclusion at Smith. To people of color in our community, please know our commitment is steadfast. And you took that message as what? What was she saying? Oh, well, I mean, to me, it was quite clearly like letting everyone know, because by then we were getting emails like, please fire. I think we're getting email, please fire Jodi.

Sure.

That, you know, we would fire her, but we can't because I read at the same rate, like, rest assured, she would definitely be gone by now, but totally was like fucking hate Jodi.

But I know I can't fire the part, though, about the, uh, she does not speak for any part of the college that really kind of like. Oh, like am I not part of the college. Yeah.

And she's wrong. I mean, she hasn't been talking to the people that you've been talking to. And what's happened is she's created an environment there in which I think it's a silent majority.

But let's say it's a silent minority of people who share your view are terrified to be open about the fact that they agree with you. She needs to pause and consider that. What have you done to make people who do feel as Jodi feels comfortable with expressing a divergent viewpoint? I agree, Megan, I mean, that would be the healthy thing to do, but I think I think this fear, this terror, I think it goes all the way up to the top.

And I think that, you know, it would behoove the administration to do a little self reflection and consider why why they're this afraid that this feels like fear to me. These are fear based Ponce's reactions, their fear based reactions, and that maybe that's indicative of a hostile work environment and that that they themselves feel such fear. I'm speculating, but I believe that fear goes all the way up to the top. I think there's a lot. It's a good point.

It's a good point. I think here in the New York City school systems, it's not exactly the heads of school. In some instances it is, but it's the boards. The boards pressure them to be on sort of the right side. And then there's only one answer. And that's being driven to by these very angry student letters. I mean, here in New York, we had the I know it happened in a lot of places, but you get the sort of black at the school, black at that school in the wake of George Floyd and an alleged incidents of racism would be raised, some of which were horrible.

And you'd say, Jesus, you know, my God, look back at whenever it took place. And invariably it was a long time ago. But, you know, you'd be horrified.

But there were more incidents of. When I went there every day in middle school, I sat alone at the lunch table by myself. And I really I looked at all of that thinking, OK, so that's called middle school, we we all have that.

And that's what are the disadvantages of having to litigate these things 20 years, 15 years, 10 years after the fact. There's no way of knowing why people weren't sitting with you at the middle school table at this point. It's like the Christine Blassie Ford thing, like 30 years after the fact.

We're never going to have real answers on this because the passage of time makes it very difficult to find evidence one way or the other. And that's why we don't that's why there are statutes of limitations on allegations in the criminal world anyway. All of it sort of plays together. But can we just I do want to get to what I think was clearly there, retaliation against you. They decided that you had to be placed on administrative leave. Why, when and why?

So it was right after Thanksgiving, so a month later, yeah, a month later, yeah, a month later I showed up and there was a meeting on my county. I showed up, I opened my computer and I'm going to have Furlaud. By this point, I've been half time furloughed. So I showed up and there was a meeting with an H.R. rep and a dean from my division. And I kind of been expecting this meeting because I was supposed to meet with them all that month and it kept getting pushed off about about something else.

So I showed up and the first few sentences that came out of the dean's mouth, I knew this was not the meeting I thought it was. She told me that your colleagues have been your actions have had a negative impact on your colleagues and they feel harmed by your behavior. That's how she started off the meeting. And then the rep took over and made several allegations in a very hostile tone. And that's what I took away from the meeting. It took me about three weeks to really get over.

That meeting was was so hostile, several different allegations, like there was a tweet you made that was disparaging about the college. And you're not allowed to do that because it wasn't about your jobs. It's not protected by the NLRB. And, you know, I pointed out how it was connected to my job. She said I made a statement about the affinity houses. We have to affinity houses on campus for one for black students, one for students of color, and wanted to know how I could continue to support those students.

I don't recall ever making a statement about the Finnie houses, but I assured her I could continue to support the students in those houses. And then the final thing was you forwarded a bunch of emails to your home account from the departmental account, the department's account. A bunch of people have access to it. We were getting a whole spate of angry letters from mostly alums saying, please denounce Jody Shaw. She Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist and she talked to Tucker Carlson there.

Ergo, you need to answer, please terminate her that those kinds of emails. And so I was was forwarding them to myself.

They were about me. And she said, why did you do that? Why did you forward those emails to someone? I said, well, I have a potential legal action against Smith College, so I'm collecting documents. And then she said, well, one of the emails contained student information and I didn't know which email she was referring to. So I asked her, can you tell me which email it is? And she said, you should know.

You forwarded it to yourself. So I did go I did go home. I go home. I was at home. I checked the email. And there there was reference to a student from a third party in an email. But I assured her, she said, you that's a that's a privacy, a violation of Phurba. It's a privacy privacy policy violation. And I assured her, you know, it's not because I had not have not shared those emails with anyone else.

No third party has seen those emails. And she seemed a little taken aback by that. I guess she hadn't thought of that. But in the end, I was not under investigation for any of those things. It was just that one email. And so they said they needed to conduct an impact assessment investigation into that one email, the fact that I had forwarded it to my home account. And so, yeah, clearly it's pretextual. It's clearly pretextual.

This is so obvious. I would love for this to wind up in front of a jury.

Somehow I would, too. So.

So I want to ask you what your next move is. You're on administrative leave as they investigate this. So you're still getting paid. But if they like what what's what's your next move? If they if they fire you, I assume you're going to sue them. Well, yeah.

If they fire me, that's retaliation. I am exploring my options, Megan. Good, you have a lawyer, you have a good lawyer. I do have a lawyer, I have a good lawyer. And there's. Yeah, I'm looking into it, so can I ask you, because you asked, are you mentioned you don't make a lot of money in your job at Smith College?

Um, I read that you're a single mom. Is that true? Yes. I mean, yes, I'm divorced. OK, so you've got a child. You've got to support your child. You've got to support yourself. You did not have a tenured position. So if they fire you, what's the plan to pay the bills?

Well, I am going to be working in I'm going to be doing maintenance. I'm going to be painting sheds and removing snow and learning a trade. Basically, I'm going to be working with somebody who does you know, he's a carpenter, going to going to be his little apprentice and learning how to do maintenance, because I kind of think that might be the a work proof area I work in where I just I, I will be another pay cut, but it will pay the bills and I won't have to, you know, I can my mind can be my own.

Let's put it that way. I can think of the thoughts that I want to think while I'm working and I can do my job and feel good about having done my job and go home. And that's really all I ever really wanted, was just to be able to do my job and feel good about what I was doing and then go home. My mind can be my own, I can think my own thoughts while I'm working, this is absurd. We have crossed over to the point of absurdity.

So with all of that right, with, you know, you're going to be shoveling the snow and you've got a single you've got you've got two kids to support and you don't have a financial partner to support you at this point. I have a partner. OK, ok.

Yeah. Yeah.

But are they supporting you financially because that would be helpful. Yeah, that would be helpful.

So why so aside from improving working conditions at Smith College, why, why do this, why put your neck on the chopping block and was it worth it. Because I have I have two kids, it's really for them. I don't think I would be doing this if it wasn't for them, um, because I'm very, very worried, Megan. I'm very worried. I do know a little bit about history. I see something forming that seems dangerous to me.

And I I have two white boys, you know, and I want them to know that who they are is more important than than what they're what they look like. And I want them to grow up in a world that, you know, rewards their their hard work and and not what they look like.

So it's really for them, for their future. And also something that a lot of people don't know is as I am a songwriter, you know, I'm an artist and there's that, too. I see a very dark future for the arts. If we can't establish that there is a human a universal human condition, really, this is what I think it's we're losing that. And that's a whole nother discussion.

But really, it's it's for my children. And was it worth it? Yes, I would say the relief that I feel in coming out and being honest. So anybody else thinking about doing this, the practical matters are serious condition, serious things that you have to consider.

Serious considerations, but. The relief I feel at telling the truth and being out of the closet, so to speak, is immense. I feel like the relationship I lost relationships, but I have gained so many connections now with people that are authentic and real, and I can speak openly. I forgot what it felt like, to be honest with you. It just feels such a relief. It's such a relief. So, yes, I at this point, I could say it's worth it.

I don't know how I feel a year from now, but definitely there's real activism starting in this space with people like our next guest, Chris, starting to fight back and organizing legal groups and so on to push back on this awfulness.

And whatever happens at Smith, I think for whatever it's worth, you should become a part of that.

You're such an effective communicator. You have such a gentle way of expressing yourself. But it's like my friend Janice DNA always joked that she wrote this book called Mostly Sunny, but and she is mostly sunny until she looks like the slasher in Psycho with the big butcher knife slashing at you.

So, like, if you get on the wrong side, like Governor Cuomo did, she knows how to she knows how to defend herself in that you kind of remind me of her in that way. And I think you should use your powers to continue to use your powers to help others and maybe do a podcast. But I, I kind of hope you do separate from Smith because I don't think you belong there. And I bet you the next chapter is going to be the best one yet.

Thank you, Megan. I, I do. I didn't mention that. But I do have aspirations in those areas. Yes. Good.

Well I will help you however I can. And I think I speak for my audience and I say we're rooting for you all the best. Thank you for your courage. Thank you so much, Megan. I know it's going to make you happy getting your best credit score. The average American has ninety seven points they can add to their credit score, almost 100 hundred points, but no idea how to get them. But score master knows how. Is this a stressor for you?

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And now before we get to Chris, we are going to do a feature that we call asked and answered here in the Megan Kelly Show, where our executive producer Steve Krakouer swings by with some questions that the viewers or the listeners want to know.

What do we have today, Steve?

Hey, Megan. Yeah, this one came to us from Questions Devil May Care Media, dotcom. We're getting a lot of great ones in there so everyone can keep them coming or just send it to our social media accounts at Meghan Kelly's show. But today is sort of a personal one. This one comes from Lynnette Kelly, and she wants to know what was absolutely required of you when you were growing up. And also, what are the non-negotiable expectations you have for your children?

Hmm, we might be related and she's you know, she's seeing my miracles with the same source of they probably work as Paul Kelly's have a certain sensibility in my experience.

So there were certain that no one non-negotiable in my family of origin and my current family, my nuclear family now is a sense of humor, like the ability to laugh at yourself and definitely at others do. It's fun to laugh at others, you know, when they're not around. You know what? I laugh right in their face. But like, if one of us tripped, oh, my God, we'd be merciless with one another. I saw that.

I can look, if I'm walking down the street now and I trip, I'm like, oh, God, did they see it? Because I know I'm going to get it. My family's going to gang up on me laugh and it makes me laugh. I love it. And if you can't laugh at yourself, good God, you're going to have a difficult time in this world. So also, I have really unattractive toes.

They're super long. They're like fingers, my toes like fingers. And my family was merciless to me about them growing.

And we laughed, you know, you got to, like, build in a little bit of a thick skin on your kids because life's going to throw a lot harder things at them than that. And if you can practice laughing at yourself on small matters or, you know, Long Spider Itoh matters, I think it sets you up well for life. The other thing is, my mom, she was always there with emotional support. My mom is she's a psychiatric nurse, so she understands emotional support.

But she showed us up so that we could do it for ourselves and she never swooped in to save us. When we screwed something up, you know, she'd let us fall and get ourselves back up. She she used to have a sign on our kitchen cupboard that read Lack of planning on your part does not justify an emergency on my part. And man, did we live that. I remember somebody wrote in to the Kelly File, a stranger to me who had worked with my mom at the Albany Veterans Hospital for years.

That's where she was a nurse. And he told the story unsolicited about how he remembered a day he was talking to my mother in her office. She got a call from me saying, I forgot my homework at home.

You know, as in high school, I'm like, I need it. I'm going to get in trouble with this teacher was due today and asking my mom. Now, I laughed at the thought that my mom would have done this like that. The fifty year old me knows exactly what would have happened, but the sixteen year old me was confused. And I asked my mom to go back to leave her job, go to my house, get the homework assignment and bring it to me at the high school.

And he remembered her laughing the absurdity of it. No world was my mother going to do that.

And it wasn't because she didn't care about my grades. It was because she cared more about my character than this particular grade or assignment. And the message she was trying to send is, was personal responsibility. You know, and again, lack of planning on your part does not justify an emergency on my part. And I'll tell you what, I didn't forget my homework ever again. It only takes a few of those moments for you to learn the lesson.

And a little tough love goes a long way. We do it now for our kids, too. And it does work just a little, goes a long way. So maybe that's been your experience, too, Lynnette, as a fellow? Kelley If not, I recommend it.

And thanks for asking. Chris, Rufo, thank you so much for being here. It's good to be with you since many of our listeners won't know what your background is.

Can you just tell us because you're you've become this sort of warrior against this critical race theory in this crazy racist teaching that's getting shoved down the throats of our American school, kids of corporate America, employees sort of everywhere we look.

And you've been sounding the alarm on this like nobody else, you and Jody. So what's your background? Sort of how did you get to this point of activist on this issue? Yeah, it's it's kind of a backwards, backwards leaning story. But, you know, I spent the first ten plus years of my career directing documentaries primarily for PBS. And I was probably a kind of center left person 10, 15 years ago and and slowly saw some of these theories creeping into the documentary World, The Art World.

And then as I shifted to do more politics and reporting, it kind of bit back in this really extraordinary way where all of a sudden, within kind of months of the death of George Floyd, it seemed like these critical race theory based programs and were everywhere in every institution and every corporation and every workplace. And I stumbled into reporting on it really through chance. A source at the city of Seattle sent me some documents and said, hey, you should really look at what the Seattle Office of Civil Rights is doing.

And so I filed a records request. I forgot about it for about a month and I finally got it back. And the documents that I found were absolutely astonishing. I mean, they were teaching as a kind of entry level employee training for white employees. They were segregating them by race. They were telling them that they had internalized white supremacy, that they needed to denounce their own kind of inborn characteristics and and join essentially a kind of cult of anti-racism.

And as soon as I broke that story, the floodgates opened and I started getting first tens and dozens and then hundreds of people all across the country telling me exactly what was happening in their institutions.

Right. It was their own. Me, too. Me too. Me too. Me too. We've seen it here in New York. I mean, in all of the schools for sure. But it reminds me of a couple of years ago when there was this one school in particular that made the news because they were doing this when it came to gender, they were separating the little boys and the little girls and having the girls write down the list of grievances that not they but women have against men and then shouting, shouting at the boys for perpetuating this unequal system and the like.

Even at that far left school, parents were pulling their kids after that like hell.

No, you know, this is too much. It's not even liberal conservative.

It's sane and insane. You know, I don't this is not anti black. This is and that other thing was not anti girls rights. It's sane and insane. Yeah, I think that's right.

And what we're seeing is a really interesting political realignment where old line liberals are kind of New Deal liberals or kind of Clinton style liberals are really caught in this place where they're trying to figure out where they find a home. And, you know, I'm at this point firmly in the kind of conservative camp. But, you know, I've really tried to open my arms and welcome in people on the center and center left who are really kind of revolted by this.

People who believed in the civil rights laws, believed in equality under the law, believed in individual protection of individual rights. Those are really all under assault by the very far left that have taken identity issues and tried to really look at the the foundations of our society and really try to shift them. And the schools is a good point. I broke a story recently in Cupertino, California, very similarly to what you're talking about, where the teacher basically said every student you have to break down and deconstruct your identity.

Now, these are eight and nine year olds. Third graders deconstruct your racial identity, your sexual identity, create an identity map, and then we're going to divide you on a kind of ranking of power and privilege. So separating a classroom full of hate and nine year olds into the oppressors and the oppressed. And I mean, it's absolutely crazy. And unfortunately, we're in a cultural moment where it's actually scary for a lot of people to call out something that is really just blatantly wrong, both totally inappropriate.

But people are so scared of being denounced on these racial and cultural issues. In a lot of cases, they remain silent.

Yep, because it's happening again, I mentioned gender, but it happens with the transition to that sort of messaging on trans boys and girls is shoved down your throat like there are way more than two sexes. There could be hundreds. And if you push back, it's your.

Transphobia and so parents are having this shoved on their kids in many departments. We're going to get into critical race theory with you because you've taken a hard look at that, gotten a lot of reporting on it. But just keep in mind for the audience at home, this is happening on a many different cultural fronts, all of which are deeply problematic.

This is social experimentation on, as you point out, kids who are eight. Right. In the Cupertino article that you wrote, I saw that.

And you had written that students were told these are the little ones told that they live in a dominant culture of white, middle class, gender educated, able bodied Christian English speakers who created and maintain this culture in order to hold power and stay in power.

And you point out this is a well off school district. No one is oppressed there. And the parents in that particular case are mad about what happened here.

They were outraged. And the kind of wrinkle in this story and really the kind of wrinkle in our identity politics that's emerging, especially here on the West Coast, is that the parents who mobilized against this program were Chinese American. It was a group of about a half dozen Chinese American parents. They banded together. They demanded a meeting with the principal and they shut it down. And I think this is really significant for two reasons. One is that, you know, Asian-Americans, it's very difficult to call them white supremacists.

I mean, it really doesn't make any sense. So they don't have that kind of fear of being denounced on those terms so they can act kind of more directly, more bluntly. But to you look at the kind of the kind of racial composition of our institutions, of universities, of of kind of testing. And Asian-Americans are going to be the biggest losers of this kind of new race based apportionment of power and privilege. So we're moving away from a kind of system of individual merit, determines your opportunities, individual achievement towards a kind of group based and identity based distribution of power and resources.

And Asian-Americans are looking at the numbers and they're saying we are right now an overrepresented in college admissions and in certain high prestige fields, especially in the math and sciences.

And they're looking at this not only for their own self-interest, but some of the Chinese American parents at that school and and frankly, in other places in the Seattle area where I live, they say, hey, we've seen this playbook before. When you try to deconstruct identity pit group against group, come up with these kind of really aggressive kind of strategies of of cultural change. This is straight out of the Cultural Revolution. And some of these parents told me we are we fled China to get away from this, and now we're finding ourselves seeing it here in America.

And that's why they're standing up against it.

Right. And the Chinese education experience has been studied and discussed by a lot of scholars. But it is interesting because there is a culture of academic achievement and it doesn't matter whether you come from a very rich family or a very poor family. There is a culture of working hard and getting good grades and that that's prized.

And so they're not in favor of, as you wrote about the San Diego Unified School District, abolishing homework deadlines and some other schools are getting rid of grades, getting rid of the SATs, getting rid of anything that would reward that kind of hard work and hours and hours of grit that they they would like to be rewarded for the amount of effort they are willing to put into their academic careers.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I mean, ultimately, right, no matter what systems that we create, there's really no substitute for hard work, for achievement, for excellence. And, you know, even in my own household, you know, my wife is a Thai American. She grew up in a slum in Thailand, very poor. Her mother was able to flee, come to the United States and had a difficult time really growing up in poverty.

But her mother drilled into her head, study hard, work hard, learn English, go to college, do all of these steps, because this is a place of enormous opportunity. And you escaped some system that was really rigged against all people into this new system. And, you know, my wife was able to excel. And I see it even at home with our kids. Our our oldest child is ten, came home with a B plus.

And my wife was furious. She's like B plus is not good enough. We're going to have to do an extra hour of homework every night with mom. We're going to have to push, push, push. We know that you can do better. And I think that that small experience is indicative of of even the academic literature that shows that Asian-Americans consistently put in more hours of studying than any other group and consequently have really good outcomes. And I think the the solution isn't really to do what we're doing.

Now, which is basically saying get rid of homework, get rid of the requirement to show up on time, get rid of standardized tests, really try to basically eliminate anything that could distinguish people based on academic achievement and just lump people into these really kind of kind of crude chromatophores, kind of skin color based groupings. But actually figure out, hey, what are the students that are doing most successful doing? And this goes for all categories. What are successful white and black and Asian and Native American students doing?

And how can we replicate what's happening with those students more broadly to try to rather than lower the bar? We want to lift the floor, but that's really hard to do. And a lot of these ideologues have no interest in doing it.

Just to pick up on a point you just made. You talked about some of the, quote, training, diversity training that was being done at the Department of Homeland Security. And one of the terms you were just basically discussing, which is merit. Right. Meritocracy and working hard. Right. And believing that this is a land of opportunity that was specifically derided by the DHS diversity trainers as as racist as they say. I took notes from the article that whites have been fed a racial curriculum based on falsehoods, unwarranted fears, and they believe in their own white superiority, that they've been socialized into oppressor roles and that there is a myth of meritocracy and statements like anyone can succeed here if they work hard enough and the most qualified person should get the job.

Those statements are racist and they're harmful. They're code for people of color, are lazy or incompetent, need to work harder.

Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty common meme or a pretty common idea in the social justice circles and in trainings all over the country. This idea that meritocracy is a form of white supremacy, this idea that punctuality is a form of white supremacy, objectivity, even so, any kind of, you know, abstract noun that we think of as a kind of a value or a virtue, the critical race theorists argue that that's merely a camouflage for racial domination and oppression.

So all of these things that you think are either neutral or or in some cases good are actually under the surface bad because they enable a system of white supremacy, et cetera. Another one is colorblindness. Colorblindness, the critical race theorists tell us, is actually racist because it again enables a system of discrimination and oppression under a kind of false pretense of equal protection. So it's really a upside down world in a lot of ways. And I think the the big problem is even people who mouth this stuff right, the people in the training sessions and the diversity trainers themselves, they say in kind of their language, oh, these things are all kind of white supremacist values.

They should be deconstructed and denounced. But how many of them show up to work on time? How many of them try to gain achievements and credentials and and academic awards or prizes or publications? How many of them function in a day to day basis as if objectivity is a is a kind of basis for rational decision making? The answer is all of them. I mean, the thing that is so infuriating is that they will browbeat their opponents in the most vicious terms when their actual behavior reflects that they have internalized, adopted and even value those same structures.

And I think it's really up to us to call them out, but at least they feel bad about it.

They've got guilt over it.

Yeah. And it's just it's just a performance. That's the thing. It's like, you know, I've had a number of trainings, actually, even one that came into my mailbox today. The new thing now is to introduce yourself in the meeting, not only by your name, but actually introduce yourself by your race, your gender and your name. So you're now basically in meetings and in school districts and in government agencies. We say, I'm Chris.

I'm a I'm a I'm a white male and my pronouns are he and him. And it's like we do this kind of unconscious dance where we try to check all the boxes of what's polite and what you're supposed to do and what's expected to avoid the kind of blowback. But, you know, does anyone really believe it? I'm not convinced that they'd like that.

It's it's absurd. This is this is what I have to say. Megan Kelly, figure it out. That's ridiculous. Yeah, it's absurd. I know transgender people. I have transgender family members and they don't want to have to say pronouns.

The whole point is switching over and sort of living in the in the body and in the gender that they felt they were meant to be born with is to live in that gender. And if they wanted more attention, called to the fact that they had trans.

And then maybe they'd be in for they'd be in favor of this, but if they're living life as a woman and they were born as a, you know, in the body identified as male, they don't want to have to run around saying protect pronouns all the time. They just want you to call her her. Or she is like there's a real split within the transgender community about this pronoun thing. So you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

And I mean, like saying your race, I would like you to open your eyes and it's absurd where we're going prioritizing all the wrong things.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, like, you know, the answer is actually much more simple. You know, they the kind of social justice crowd is basically saying all of these things are kind of kind of kind of irredeemable evil.

We need to overthrow the very basic foundations of our society in order to in order to rectify them. But the solution actually in so many cases is really simple. It's basic courtesy. It's recognizing people's individual dignity. And if you come across someone I don't know, this is what my practice is saying, OK, this person is maybe transgender, identifying as a woman. I just I just use that thing and then be very open to any feedback that's different.

Tried to respect and honor people's choices. And you don't necessarily need this kind of cultural revolution underneath. But I'm pretty convinced at this point that a lot of these kind of games that that are set up right. These are really games that were required to play this kind of loyalty tests or litmus tests of the cost are really just mechanisms. They're not actually important in themselves to a lot of these people, but they're mechanisms for a broader pattern of Cultural Revolution and the old ideas that kind of failed.

Century after century, kind of from the eighteen forties onward with its kind of Marxism and then centralized planning and the twentieth century, they kind of their zombie ideas, they never die. You can't kill them. And they come back in these reformulated ways. And I think that in a small way, these little games that we play as a society are reflective of deeper currents, of a political movement that wants a revolution, that wants fundamental change. Can we talk about that?

So let's go back and just talk about what critical race theory is, and I think a lot of people think they have a general idea but don't really understand what is critical.

Race theory and critical race theory is a kind of academic movement that started really to kind of blossom in the nineteen nineties and was really relegated to academia. And the idea is that is to to to kind of use race as a lens through which to analyze society. And basically saying analysis up to this point has discounted the importance of race. We should really look at race, racial discrimination, racial oppression. And as at that point, I agree. I think that's actually important.

So the kind of premise is correct. But they take another step, which is to say that they make a kind of historical judgment and then a legal judgment and a cultural judgment that the United States is fundamentally an irredeemably racist and white supremacist and that all of our institutions from the founding of the country to the current day are merely kind of cover or smokescreens for racist oppression. And the critical race theorists actually started out of law schools. And their idea was that the fundamental rights that we have as Americans enshrined in the Constitution, articulated in the declaration, are actually kind of perpetuators of evil and that we should essentially overthrow the constitutional order and end the kind of unfettered protection of speech and individual rights as individuals and private property, which is another form of discrimination, and then end kind of Fourteenth Amendment protections that you're all treated equally under the law.

For the critical race theorists, these aren't actually signs of progress. Even the Civil Rights Act, even desegregating schools, they were very skeptical of this because they say it gives the appearance of progress, but actually doesn't change the fact that racism is as bad and twenty, twenty one as it was in eighteen fourteen.

Oh, good God.

So I know it has its roots in cultural Marxism. Are you able to explain what that means? Yeah, I can explain it, you know, everyone on the left, people's heads explode when you say cultural Marxism because they say that's not a real thing. It's a made up kind of problem. But this is how I describe it, and I think it's accurate. Then people have been using the term cultural Marxism since the 1960s and 70s. So it has a kind of lineage.

But I would best describe it in this way, in kind of old style Marxism from Karl Marx based on kind of coming out of the work of of Hegel. The idea was that there's a kind of dichotomy in society between the oppressor and the oppressed. And in Marx's time, he thought that class analysis was really the most fundamentally important dynamic in society. So there was a kind of bourgeoisie. So the owners of capital, the owners of factories, the owners of financial institutions.

And then there was the proletariat, the kind of downtrodden workers and laborers at the bottom. And I mean, there's a certain truth to that. Right. But what they tried to do from Marx's time through the 20th century was we need to have a kind of communistic central planning system that overthrows the kind of capitalist domination. And it didn't work out very well, actually. It led to more than one hundred million deaths around the world. Those systems collapsed.

And even in the the states that are nominally communist like China, they've abandoned that kind of economic system. So in the nineteen sixties, a group of philosophers and scholars called the Frankfurt School that eventually actually can't many came to the United States said, hey, we we know that the kind of Marxist revolution has failed. They understood this by the nineteen sixties. So we have to find a new strategy to get to that revolutionary goal, to get to that goal of overthrowing the kind of European capitalist society.

And they said what we need to do is now focus on identity and on race and to create a coalition of the dispossessed. That's the kind of key framework and they got to work kind of putting together that ideology. It was picked up and then modified and changed and adapted by the critical race theorists in the nineteen nineties. And then with an almost astonishing speed after the death of George George Floyd, these ideas that had been brewing for a half century were all of a sudden perpetuated in every corporate office and every government agency and in every school in the country.

It's something, you know, to their credit, they patiently developed and built and perpetuated this in academia until the time was right where it was just caught fire.

So what do they want? What is the end goal? They want to get rid of meritocracy.

They want to get rid of grades. They they want to get rid of white privilege.

But like, what does the world look like in Ibraheem X Kennedy's utopia? Well, there's two answers. I'll give you the kind of the broad answer and then I'll answer on economics. Kennedy, I have a paper coming out that describes exactly this world. But the bigger picture is that when you ask folks and have access to a lot of people in my reporting, what do you want? They never answer what the kind of positive. They never answer what we want a society that looks like X, Y and Z, that institutions function this way.

It's almost always a negative or a negation. It's basically saying, well, we want to destroy capitalism, we want to be anti-racist. It always functions in what philosophers call negation. So denying, dismantling, deconstructing, interrupting all of those verbs that you hear in the language of social justice are all really fundamentally negative. And from Marx onward, even Marx had this problem where Marx never really said, what does the great kind of socialist communist society look like?

His answer was very vague. It basically said, well, we can't even understand how glorious this utopian future will be until we destroy the nightmare that we have today. And the social justice folks in many cases operate on the same framework where they say we have to destroy racism, patriarchy, capitalism, et cetera, et cetera. And then out of the ashes, a kind of beautiful new world will emerge. So that's one second. Ibram Kennedy's a bit more specific and it's it's frankly totalitarian.

He wrote a piece for Politico that said, we need to have a department of anti-racism. That is this permanently funded, staffed by unelected experts, theoretically appointed by people like Ibram Kennedy. And this Department of Anti-Racism should be essentially a fourth branch of government that has the power. And this is in the article, anyone can read it that has the power to nullify or void any law at any level of government in the United States and also has the power to monitor the speech of policy makers.

Which would include, you would assume, journalists and think tanks, et cetera, and essentially to shut down any speech that is not antiracist so. In this world, it would have a kind of omnipotent fourth branch of government that has total power to regulate speech and total power to control the law in every in every level of government. The United States I mean, if that's not a kind of authoritarian and totalitarian regime and he publishes it in the pages of Politico and then wins the kind of praise of all of the kind of technocratic class from from Twitter to academia to the media.

And it just it blows my mind that if you could get get away, get away with outlining something like that very bluntly and face not only no pushback, but get the kind of universal place praise of America's elite.

Oh, I mean, Politico just had a meltdown, the staffers there, because Ben Shapiro for one day edited the playbook, like basically the website and its editorial for one day. I don't remember any pushback when he can publish these ideas on the site. This is this is madness.

Instead of that, David Remnick of The New Yorker out there saying, I love, I love. He's like a brother to me. Scandi as like.

Pushes ideas that are un-American, that is that really is cultural Marxism, that's actual Marxism. And right now, people are in such a cowed position that the only response we're hearing is, yes, more. I I'm an ally and I submit. And if you don't, you you get called anti black, anti person of color and a white supremacist.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I would say, though, like, I get that a lot of people saying, oh, aren't you scared of being called this or that? And it's like, well, you know, I've been called this and that. And you survive, you move on. And people who actually can read your work and know your character will make a better judgment. But we also live in this weird moment that I've seen pieces in academic articles and popular press where they're saying that logic is white supremacist math is white supremacist, square dancing is white supremacist.

Even that from a very well known Black Lives Matter activists in Seattle that Barack Obama is a white supremacist.

I mean, we've defined white supremacy as essentially anything in this moment that people on the left don't like. And I think it's doing hopefully over the kind of short and medium term, people will say, well, wait a minute, if logic and objectivity are white supremacist, I mean, we've reached kind of beyond the point of absurd and this this epithet, which is really the worst thing that someone can call you in modern day America. Right. It's a reputation destroyer.

It once it loses its meaning by overuse.

It's kind of like the boy who cried wolf. And I think we're getting close to that point where people are going to start saying, hey, wait a minute, you know, the cities aren't white supremacist showing up to work on time as a white supremacist. You know, the adults need to start putting their foot down and just saying none of this stop. It's too much. Let's look out for people who are poor. Let's look out for people who are suffering.

But this isn't helping anyone.

The other piece of it is I talked about this with Douglas Murray not long ago last week, which was what what a lot of these folks seem to want is not equality as they say. They want whites to be cowed and self flagellating and in a permanent apologetic stance for sins that were committed hundreds of years ago.

And that, like I've been saying all along, that is no way forward for the country.

It's the same thing these sort of radical feminists were doing to men when the Metoo movement exploded and then imploded. Right. Like they went too far. They they they just started to sweep up any man with any small transgression in their hoover.

And then the movement lost all power because people just became afraid of them, started rolling their eyes at them and started to avoid them.

And I think that it's really cynical and a lot of ways where they're using race as this kind of emotional battering ram because they know that it's extremely effective at eliciting a response and getting results as far as practical political power. But if you look at actually, what does the world look like, I don't think it's saying, hey, we're going to voluntarily renounce our positions in the universities, step down from our positions on corporate boards and elevate elevate people in our place that reflect the kind of demographic preferences of our policy statements.

I think it's a political move and it's the left that is a multiracial left elite that is using the kind of frankly, using black pain and suffering and historical trauma in order to advance their own agenda.

Again, that actually isn't, isn't it kind of a predominantly African-American agenda?

It's really a kind of predominantly left agenda that, as I've said many times, this isn't about white versus black.

This is about left versus right, and not even because I think most of the left are with the right on this. It's this crazy faction on the hard left, hard sort of radical left, right. I don't mean people who like Bernie Sanders economic policies. I mean the radical left that's pursuing this crazy WOAK world that's unattainable and dangerous. Those are the and they tend to be Upper West Side white women.

I mean, it's like, yes, there are some black people say, but like they're the ones pushing this. They're the ones doing the self flagellating and making the rest of us feel. I mean, their messaging actually is that if a black person makes any allegation, not believing them is racist, that they're calling the police on a black person suspected of a crime that has been witnessed by a store manager in CVS is. Racist, right, like it's it's getting to that point where.

Upholding the law, pursuing due process is considered racist. Yeah, and if you if you look at it, that's really the battlefield right now, they're really going after criminal justice and I think they're going after criminal justice primarily because, you know, they already have kind of what you might call cultural hegemony over blue cities. Right. This kind of far left ideology is really running the show in New York and San Francisco and Seattle and D.C. and Boston.

But in these cities where they have pretty much total domination, there's one sector of society that they don't. It's the criminal justice system, it's prosecutors, it's courts, it's it's jails. And you notice their rhetoric is abolished. Courts abolish prisons, abolish the police, and they sense that that is really in their kind of apocalyptic worldview. That is the final impediment to their revolution. The criminal justice apparatus is really the last vestige of historical oppression in these cities.

And it just you can just feel all of the energy just converging on that point. And what they're doing in New York and other cities is now being reflected because as cities are de policing or decriminalizing or even defunding, in some cases, you see crime come back again. And it's almost like we forgot the lessons of the nineteen nineties in New York, where we actually had to take proactive measures to to to make society more peaceful and safer, especially for minority communities.

It's almost as if we've forgotten all those lessons and we've been swept up in this mania. And the latest numbers from the FBI show, you know, double digit increases in homicides in dozens of cities and some in some cases 50, 60, 70 percent, the biggest one year increase in recorded history. And at what point does that evidence and that true suffering and that kind of horrific violence start to make those Upper West Side when moms start to re-evaluate their their candy and chip?

I don't know. We'll have to see. Yeah, no, we did.

We defended our police by a billion dollars here in New York. Now we've got shootings have doubled. Murder rate is up by 50 percent. Gun violence has surged to levels not seen in years. And for what? Because we were told after the killing of George Floyd that this is a systemic problem, that the police were hunting black men, trying to kill them in the streets, which was a lie. It was a lie. The data do not support it.

And in fact, here in New York City, go ahead and recommend use in City Journal here in New York City, the rate at which police have killed unarmed black men or even just black men or even just defendants, suspects in general has fallen precipitously over the past 20, 30 years.

So we're going in the right direction. But because of a lie perpetrated by the media and activists who do want to like Black Lives Matter, who do want to and I quote, dismantle the nuclear family, we're having money taken away from the very communities who most need the police and the and the murder rate is going up.

You know, the the murder rate has doubled as a result.

No one no one seems to give a damn.

Like I've said this before, Chris, I am going to be fine. I live in a nice and a nice doorman building. I'll make sure I have security. If New York goes to hell or wherever I am, it's I'm worried about my fellow women in the inner city who are the ones who want cops. And if you poll blacks in the inner cities, they'll say they want more police presence, not less. And yet, my fellow women in the Upper West Side who were in the blue lemonde lycra have decided to make to feel better about themselves.

They need to deepen the police.

I know it's like it's straight out of a Tom Wolfe novel. It really is like it's really amazing. And I think on one hand, it's so absurd that it's almost like funny in a kind of dark way. But the more serious point is, is, is this is that the the great kind of moral crime of critical race theory and it's related political movements, is that it serves to kind of establish and strengthen elite status. So if you are a professor or a pundit or a media personality on the far left, this stuff is great for business.

It's great for your reputation. But actually, it does nothing to help the people that are most vulnerable, that are most kind of dispossessed, that are living in the poorest neighborhoods. And, you know, I spent actually five years directing a film for PBS about America's poorest cities. And I spent months and months and months and some of the poorest places on earth in the country, rather, including a housing project in Memphis. It was 100 percent African-American, nearly 100 percent rate of poverty.

And I spent so much time talking to people, listening to people.

And it struck me that. From that experience to then thinking about the rhetoric from critical race theory, these are people that live in two completely different worlds.

The actual concerns of people who are living in poverty, living in housing projects, have nothing to do with the concerns that are coming out of the mouths of the kind of academics and journalists who profess the kind of new racial orthodoxy. Those solutions that come from the top actually would do nothing to help people at the bottom. And as I'm going to be arguing in an upcoming paper, actually in a lot of ways actually make things worse both through crime and also through how institutions are refigured.

It actually undermines those institutions, like strong families, like strong communities, like strong churches that are actually the foundation of these places. And I think that we shouldn't be afraid to to oppose this movement because I think it's intellectually bankrupt, but it's also morally bankrupt. And I think both of those are tremendously important.

Just to follow up on my stat from Coleman Hughes's article, one of the many in City Journal in twenty eighteen, the NYPD killed five people, down from ninety three people in nineteen seventy one.

Can you just talk for a minute? Because I your articles are always so good, Chris. And they go through like the craziness of this critical race theory. And I'm just going to tick off a couple of things. But I want to pivot to God and family after this. But like this, just a couple that you've you've publicly outlined at the Treasury Department, they were being told America was built on the backs of the enslaved. All white Americans are complicit in a system of white supremacy.

Whites share an inborn racist and oppressive streak of whiteness. Whiteness includes white privilege and white supremacy. All white struggle to own their own racism, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. OK, and then.

Oh, and by the way, they say as you have to sit in the discomfort of your own racism because you're a white person as as black employees tell you about their pain, they warn the black employees that that they, quote, have no obligation to like you. Thank you. Or feel sorry for you or forgive you. It's sowing division. I read it and I have a note here. Forgive me. My note reads, this is so fucked up.

It is fucked up. I'm sorry, but it is. And then I got on to an article you wrote about the San Diego Unified School District having been radicalized there, getting rid of the homework guidelines.

And they do they bring in Bettina Love or were they just hired or did you get at two separate events? OK, so Bettina, Love, according to what I read in your piece, starts by telling the teachers that they're colonizers and they're sitting on stolen, stolen native land and that they're racist, that American schools are guilty of the spirit murder of black children, that racism runs deep in the U.S. and blacks alone know who America really is, that public schools don't see blacks as human public schools don't see blacks as human and are guilty of systemic anti blackness and the spirit murder, murder of babies, and that whites are directly responsible for the plight of, quote, dark children.

Whiteness reproduces poverty, failing schools, high unemployment, school closings and trauma for persons of color, and that white attendees must undergo anti-racist therapy in order to overcome their racism, ignorance and history of harm.

I cannot imagine how a white teacher hearing that would feel. I can guess it's not more unified and not not less colorblind, right, not not more colorblind, but shamed, disempowered, loathed, divided.

This is this is. This is evil that like this kind of talk now being embraced by a whole school district is evil. And was there any pushback, like to the teachers? What did they do? Did they just take it? Yeah, I mean, this is this is they held one of these speeches for all the principles of schools in the San Diego school district, which teaches one of the hundred thousand kids, and then another kind of teacher training over the summer.

And people sat there and took it and didn't protest, didn't stand up, didn't object, didn't file a kind of complaint.

Luckily, one of the teachers sent me all of the documents and said, this is outrageous. Can you please report on this? But please keep my identity anonymous because I'm terrified of getting fired. I'm terrified of getting mobbed. But this needs to be out there and it's absolutely crazy.

And you can almost sense the glee that this woman, Bettina Love, who's a professor, I believe, at the University of Georgia, she is really denouncing people in the most kind of vicious terms straight to their face. And they're sitting there and saying, yeah, yeah, we agree we are inherently evil. We spirit murder babies. We I mean, like the most like the verbiage is so out of control, it's almost like hard to believe, but it's racist happening everywhere.

It's absolutely racist. And I think if you if you take the language and you. If you if you kind of flip the kind of racial categories, this is some like the most toxic and awful stuff from a hundred years ago, from eugenicists and white supremacists and Klansmen, I mean, the language, the categorisations and even intellectually what they're doing is they're reviving three key concepts, in my view. One is race essentialism, this idea of whiteness, that every white person is not an individual but can be reduced to a racial essence.

That's what people argued again one hundred years ago. The second one is kind of collective guilt. That's a strategy that totalitarian regimes have used to manipulate. People were saying you are in this category and someone did something bad in your category. Therefore, you also are responsible or guilty for that bad thing.

And third, in a lot of cases and a lot of institutions now, they're reviving neo segregationists on the reviving segregation by saying they're calling them affinity groups or or kind of other kind of euphemisms for it. But they're actually holding training sessions and meetings explicitly. This is the room for blacks, this is the room for whites, and this is the room for the others, the kind of Asians and Latinos and and Native Americans and and and Indians. A lot of my friends are in their life.

And I don't know what the Asians and the Indians are most confused by all this. They're just like, this seems bad. Where do we go? I don't like this. You know, I've talked to a lot of folks in the tech sector about this and kind of cracking jokes, but it really is bizarre.

Like it's twenty, twenty one. We're now having racially segregated workplaces where now explicitly saying we need to get rid of equal protection and and go back to kind of race, race based decision making. And it's happening quickly. It's happening kind of in a profound way. And I think that as a as a reporter, as someone covering this, it's it's it's kind of darkly fascinating to watch society get consumed by this mania.

And I'm you know, and it's going to have children, as I know you do.

And I do. And Jody Charr does. It's scary. I don't want to pass this baton to them. You know, I've joked before that I can get targeted, of course, because I'm a white woman. And that's power adjacent in the in the language of these critical race theorists. I'm a woman, so I got that going for me to have a right to speak. But I'm white, which is power adjacent, you know, a white woman.

So power adjacent to white men. But then I did the worst thing you could possibly do, which is I created I have three children, but I created two, not two little white future men. Right. So it's like poor white men, like, good God, they talk openly behind the scenes about how they know that's the worst thing to be.

The everybody looks at them as though they hate everybody who's other than a white man. It's all nonsense. And they have been subjected to a lot of racist, sexist talk like that. I get the answer to racism is not more racism. So I want to ask you, because Douglas Murray says the answer to this and I know you're going bigger picture, which we're going to get to, but his answer in the moment is for somebody to stand up at the at the schoolhouse or the corporate boardroom and say, I will not allow you to read racialize my company, my country or myself.

I, I will not talk in these terms that you are trying to force me to talking.

And honestly, Jody Schott did it. She just talked to her and her words were, stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on skin color.

OK, and now Jody Shaw has been placed on administrative leave for some B.S. pretext of a you forwarded one email that may have had a student's information to your personal account, obviously pretextual that they got rid of her because of her trying to. Because of her video. Because of her speaking out. So. My question to you is, let's let's talk micro before we go macro, what do you think the teacher in the moment should do? What do you think the Jodi should do in the moment?

No, I think that's exactly right, and there was another whistleblower at the Sandia National Nuclear Labs that emailed all of his colleagues that kind of painstaking rebuttal of some of these programs. And again, he was placed on leave. Luckily, we were able to advocate for him, so he retained his job. But I think that's exactly what needs to happen. People need to have courage. I think that the value that matters more than anything in this moment is courage.

And courage, by definition requires putting something at risk and in many cases, putting your job at risk. And this obviously isn't a solution for everyone. Everyone has to kind of judge their their life kind of structure and their risk tolerance. But for the courageous among us, they have to stand up, stand tall and just say, no, I won't do this, I won't comply. It's not appropriate. It's wrong. And it violates these core values that I have and we have as a society.

And I think that people are so scared that they can get away with this right now because they bullied people into submission. But as more people stand up and say no, it's going to encourage others and then hopefully others after that, until you have enough people where you just can't fire all of them, they can actually stand tall together. And I'm seeing very encouraging small scale stories all across the country of people standing up in schools and the workplace and have been successful.

And I think that as these stories replicate, we're going to get two things. We're either going to get success stories that can be kind of models for future action or in some cases, we're going to get martyrs' people who have been canceled. And those are tragedies, obviously, but they also kind of serve as a kind of rallying point and and also as a kind of a point for condemnation of these systems that are willing to sacrifice individuals to uphold this ideology.

It's funny because I can relate on a couple of those fronts. I have definitely been attacked, in my view, unfairly for, you know.

Statements about race that were factually correct, any time I see you trending on Twitter, I'm always like, oh, boy, what's going on now? Oh yeah, it does.

And it can be about it can be about anything. And it doesn't have to be about race. I just I, I actually do kind of love how much I irritate the far left and the Twitter people that that kind of brings me enjoyment. I love that they don't they're too stupid to realize how much power they give me. Go ahead. Make me try and again get my name everywhere. Fine.

All you do is, is, is increase my name recognition and keep me in the news. And then they tell you you're irrelevant.

That's weird how you follow me and tweet about me and make me friend then anyway.

But I obviously I can relate on a personal level, but I and I've talked publicly about having to pull my kids from their schools, you know, I mean, at my boys school, they actually circulated a memo which which they wanted to be mandated reading for all faculty that said every children where I'm sorry. That said, in every classroom where white children learn there is a future killer cop that white children are being indoctrinated into black death. I mean, I'm sorry, but it took something that egregious for us to say and goodbye because things had been ramping up there at a slow but steady pace for four months and months and months.

Not every school will be that explicit in that offensive. But parents, if you won't do it for yourself, you have to do it for your kid who who would let a teacher who'd been indoctrinated in that kind of thinking have access to their little one.

Right. Like like I sat and thought, who is it? Is it my little love? Is it my little six year old? Is it his best friend? Like, how dare you, how dare you? And I do think, like, it's OK to feel some outrage at what's being done to our kids if you won't feel it for yourself.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And, you know, working on this investigative series on schools all over the country and it's not just New York and San Francisco, it's Missouri. It's others other kind of small cities where you wouldn't expect it. And it really is kind of strange. And I'm working on some research right now in Portland, Oregon, which is really kind of ground zero for the the madness. And they're implementing a curriculum and teacher training and kind of kind of administrative positions, too.

And I'm saying this, it's it's a kind of hyperbolic, but it's actually not their training child soldiers to fight this kind of race conscious revolution. And I say that because the actual materials that I've had leaked to me outline very clearly, we need to reform white identity into becoming a kind of member of this anti-racist movement. We need to train our kids how to protest, how to host demonstrations, how to get on the streets. And then the results of this kind of political education in predominantly public schools in Portland is that you have now dozens of minors being arrested as as kind of members of Antin for rioting, waving guns and at crowds, throwing bricks and bottles and rocks at police, lighting buildings on fire.

All of these crimes and kind of rioting are being, in some cases led by and then executed by children. And what happens when you get those kind of underlying ideologies that lead to these outcomes cemented in school curriculums throughout the state of Oregon and especially in an egregious way in the city of Portland, you are training kids to be born angry, fearful, entitled this kind of toxic mix of all of these attributes that's going to lead to chaos and destruction, whether it's self destruction, whether it's actually just collapsing people's sense of value internally or and sometimes as a result of external destruction.

Society is wrong.

Society is oppressing me. Society is is is evil.

Burn it down. And that's what I think we're saying. It's it's brainwashing, it's cult like it, and it's wrong, it's morally wrong in every way. And by the way, so before I move off of this, I did want to ask you, it's not it's not all about alienating people by race, by gender and so on. More and more, it's alienating children of faith from God and their families.

Like we're seeing more and more of that creep up in some of the literature that's getting leaked and talked about publicly. And I can say I mean, I know that I'm personally familiar with a book that was shared at the kindergarten level that in talking about the Harvey Milk case, put God says no on the page of what's wrong. Right. So the little children are being told what God said when God said that this is wrong, God's wrong.

And, you know, you can talk about sexual identity and sexual preference and you can talk about gay marriage, which I support and always have in a way that brings your political views forward. But you should not be telling six year olds that God is wrong. And I think this is what really upsets in my experience. I have a lot of black friends who that that's that was the last line for them when it comes to this stuff like that. All my friends don't like this critical race theory either.

But but pushing God as like the purveyor of wrongness. It goes it's a bridge too far. Yeah, and I think what you're talking about illustrates the really kind of two separate lineages, the two separate genealogies of of activism, let's say. And there's one that isn't the kind of Martin Luther King Day and the civil rights movement. A lot of people forget that the civil rights movement was emanated from black churches. It was deeply rooted in Christianity and then also deeply rooted.

And and Martin Luther King wrote about this and spoke about this in the principles of the declaration and the Constitution that they that he felt and many people felt correctly, weren't being fulfilled, weren't being honored by society. So you have that kind of one lineage, right? The origins of the civil rights movement, again, in the kind of constitutional principles in the declaration and in Christian churches, predominantly southern black churches and black lives matter. They like to claim that they are the new civil rights movement or the extension of the civil rights movement, the natural successor to the civil rights movement.

But they don't believe in either of those things that were the fundamental structures of the civil rights movement. They're explicitly atheistic. I mean, they're they're kind of denying Christianity as an oppressive structure, again, in the same way that Marx kind of attacked Christianity and religion one hundred and fifty some years ago. And they're also against the Constitution. Critical race theorists make this explicit in their academic work. They say we are really down on the Constitution. We really are skeptical of it.

We want to we want to reformulated it actually as a structure of systemic racism, etc.. So you have this thing that I think we need to separate.

The civil rights movement is not black lives matter and Black Lives Matter is not the civil rights movement. And I think what we're finding in the black community and then in the wider community of all Americans is that we're being faced with a choice.

Which value Invision do we want to pursue and uphold and strengthen? And I think I think pretty clearly the the value and vision that is based on the Constitution and on a kind of the kind of Christian principle of equality under God is far superior than to the position of a kind of Marxist revolution and kind of vicious identity based politics that we see in our streets today.

Mm hmm. So that that leads me to the macro, which is larger solutions. And you are one of the few people working on real solutions to this to this problem. Not every tweet, all your stuff, because it's always so spot on. But I've been saying for a long time that I feel like the law is the answer to this. And a lot of the cultural craziness we're seeing the law.

I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm not saying you don't have judges who are, you know, political one way or the other and let that creep into their rulings. But my overall experience of the law is judges follow it. It's the very nature of being a judge and it doesn't actually allow for that much identity politics to creep in. It's not to say it never does, but it doesn't really allow for it in the way it could in an academic institution.

You know, we talked about this with Jodi, but people may not understand the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the US Constitution and its equal protection law do not allow for racial discrimination against white people. That is illegal.

You may not treat a white person as less than or give them a lower job or what have you discriminate against them because they have the immutable characteristic of white skin, something over which they have no control.

So you're trying to organize a group of lawyers, Chris, because I saw you say the other day, it's up to over 100 lawyers who have now volunteered to help you do what?

Yeah, well, you know, the context is that, you know, last year, as many of the listeners might remember, some of my investigative reporting caught the eye of President Trump, who passed an executive order banning these critical race theory trainings from the government. And when Joe Biden won the election, I realized that that executive order probably wasn't going to last. And sure enough, one of the first 15 things that he did was get rid of that executive order banning critical race theory.

And but in that kind of intervening period, I said, all right, well, rather than just throw in my hat, we need to get activated. We need to figure out what's the next strategy. And I took a series of calls with a lot of the conservative think tanks and legal foundations, people who are kind of expert lawyers, very experienced.

And I said, hey, I think that we could take some of my whistleblowers, I now have probably more than a thousand different whistleblowers with documents and evidence. We can pick some of these cases and then I'll hand them off and you guys can start suing these institutions in federal court know, making the argument that these are violations of civil rights because they traffic in racial stereotypes, they constitute a kind of race, race based harassment. They create a toxic work environment.

They also compel speech. So we have a number of great kind of constitutional cases we can take. Here was the problem. All of these great institutions were like, hey, we're big institutions, we're bureaucratic. We typically don't fight on culture issues. We don't have a kind of dedicated staff to fight these issues. We're really interested. We're really excited about this. We think it's important, but we're just not there yet. And as you know, a lot of the conservative legal foundations have been more focused on economic issues, on regulatory issues, licensing, et cetera, and are not really ready for this culture fight that we're in the middle of.

So I was kind of discouraged. And then I said, you know, I'm going to take one more of these calls. And then in that final call before I was going to throw in the towel, I talked to a small group of private attorneys and they said, hey, we don't have bureaucracy, we don't have any decision making tree. We can start suing right now. And then I realized, OK, I can't just hand this off.

I'm going to have to actually organize this myself. So I found a kind of a network of advisors from some of the some of the institutions, but then also cobbled together a network of private attorneys and smaller legal foundations. Our coalition has already filed three cases. We're going to be filing another one in the coming weeks. And then all of a sudden, I get now more than a hundred other attorneys that are volunteering to file lawsuits in dozens of states around the country.

So what I'm doing this as the strategy on this piece is relentless, decentralized legal warfare with the ultimate objective of getting a case before the United States Supreme Court. And if we win there, it will have an immediate ripple effect in every school, every government agency and every corporation in the country that would say what?

What's the ideal Supreme Court ruling that would say critical race theory based programs, these programs that traffic in the concepts of race, essentialism, compelled speech, racial harassment, racial stereotypes are violations of the Civil Rights Act and and violations of the US Constitution. And then we would have the precedent so that any employee that is going through these programs could say, hey, the Supreme Court very clearly ruled that what we're doing here is illegal. They can reach out to to me and our network of lawyers to send a cease and desist.

And then again, I think a lot of people who are in risk management, who are in kind of corporate legal departments are going to say this is a liability, this is a risk, this is actually illegal. Get rid of it. And the kind of proof of that is that after we got the executive order, every Fortune 500 company in the United States that does business with the federal government that the president banned from conducting critical race theory trainings, we saw that immediately cease all of these programs.

So we know that they can press a button and knock it off and stop it, but we have to have the legal leverage to force them to do so. And that's what we're going to do. Mm hmm. And and there are a lot of these corporations, their hearts not in it. They're they're paying the ransom they're afraid to. And same with a lot of these school boards. They're afraid. They're afraid that they're going to get targeted.

They're going to be called racist if there's one racist incident at a school. And let's face it, racism is not gone in America. We all know that. But it doesn't mean systemic racism. It doesn't mean the whole country has to change. We have to get rid of capitalism. And an entire school district needs to change the way it does its hiring. The way it does is education. They have to replace math with critical race theory training.

You know, they're bumping curriculum for these mandated sessions for students and teachers. None of that is true. But the corporations are afraid and need cover.

You know, frankly, they need cover the PR cover and a Supreme Court decision or a legal decision, which it would be one hundred percent on the money, as far as I'm concerned, lawfully, legally, saying this is not lawful would do it. Yeah, that's exactly right.

I mean, I think corporate corporations I mean, you know, are are are cynical entities and a lot of ways. Right. They're very kind of practical politics. They want to defend the bottom line. They want to protect against bad PR. But if you shift the incentives, these corporations are going to adapt very quickly.

And I think that, you know, a lot of people say, oh. It's everywhere, it's in schools, as I all hope is lost. I'm optimistic because I think that what we're seeing right now is a kind of fad. And I think I look at figures like Ibram Kennedy as kind of like gurus, you know, in the 1960s and in the 90s. It's like you have the kind of yoga kind of fads and health food fads and kind of other cults, you know, that you can watch like a part Netflix series about.

And I think we're going through a similar moment. And I think that it's a fad. It is a kind of cult like structure. It is scary. It's overwhelming, it's being successful. But ultimately, I think our country and our institutions and our people in the United States are going to come to their senses at a certain point and recognize that we can be supportive of reducing racial inequalities and care about racial inequalities, but actually at the same time, oppose this method, oppose this philosophy, oppose this program.

And I think once we get to that reasonable point and we have a kind of silent majority that turns into a maybe a little bit more vocal majority, we can kind of, you know, crush this at its roots. We can kind of excavate some of the kind of the most kind of bankrupt ideas from this movement, expose them to the light, and then Americans will simply move on. OK, and and to those who say. You're on the wrong side of history, you are misreading the the national mood when it comes to race in America.

What say you?

Well, mean it's right there in the language, right. The national mood moods, what our moods, moods are kind of fleeting and transitory, emotional states. And I think that you can't be just like in personal life. Right. If you and I just reacted one hundred percent, according to our moods, I think we would have major problems. And I think as as as courageous people and as kind of intellectuals with integrity, we have to say we recognize the national mood is here and we're actually going to stand against the national mood, even if temporarily it causes us problems.

It gets us flak. It gets us, you know, insulted in The New York Times because we know that after this mood passes, the country is going to be here. These are the fundamentals. These are the structures and values we care about. And, you know, I'm happy to stand against the current mood.

And I think that we have to remember, too, and I think I'd like this important thing I've been thinking about a lot, is that you look at how they're using incidents, right? You look at how they are notching up these victories. It's almost always predicated on an emotional moment right where it was George Floyd that gets replicated billions of times in the media. It's whatever kind of story that is. The emotional anchor to a lot of these movements is that, you know, obviously you can lament the tragic death of George Floyd, but but what they do is they create this emotional premise where if you don't agree with all of our solutions, therefore you you know, you don't care about George Floyd, you don't care about X, Y and Z.

And I think that we need to break that logic. We need to say we need to separate out premises from conclusions and say, you know, not let people essentially manipulate the country by using emotionally charged, kind of affectively loaded incidents or images or or experiences to justify these huge political programs that once you really look at it and think about it and step back from that emotional overload aren't actually connected by any kind of rationality or logic.

Well, especially when the incidents that they are using are dishonestly represented. You know, I'm not saying the tape wasn't the tape on George Floyd, but again, as Colman's pointed out, you could find the exact same story with a white victim every time, and especially the George Floyd case. A guy named Tony Tempa had exactly the same thing done to him, 13 minutes under the knee begging for his life. And after he expired, the cops made jokes about him and they were not prosecuted.

The charges, charges against them were dropped. Brianna Taylor, same thing had happened earlier, I think, that same year to a white person inside of his home. No knock warrant, the same like that. The the knee jerk resort to race is not always supported. And no one will go back and be honest about that, nor is it always police brutality that's unjustified. We've been talking about the Jacob Blake case. There's very clear early on that there were reports he was, in fact, armed and that's why he got shot.

But I've seen almost no coverage of that piece of the story after the same media went over and over and over telling us he was unarmed.

So people need to be aware that we're being manipulated by people with an agenda. It's not blacks versus whites. Again, it's hard leftists versus the rest of us. They're trying to manipulate us to advance their own agenda and in some instances make themselves feel good is vertue signallers.

But as you point out, we're not there to service the mood in particular of one small activist group. If we were, we never would have had the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because of the loud majority or the loud minority in the country at that point, didn't they wanted segregation? Right. It was sort of the white Jim Crow folks down in the South who said the mood of the country doesn't support equality. We didn't listen.

We followed the law and we didn't think the law was good enough. We strengthened it.

So anyway, I, I do believe the law is sort of at the heart of what our future is. And before I let you go, I got to ask you one other question. That is, how are you feeling about. Joe Biden and these issues. Yeah, I don't know, I kind of have kind of conflicting, kind of conflicting thoughts about it. I think Joe Biden I mean, let's face it, Joe Biden is a kind of back slapping New Deal Democrat who, you know, he isn't a social justice warrior.

That's just not his personality. It's not his generation.

But I think what you've seen is that well, I don't think Biden's instincts are there. What does concern me is that certainly the vice president's instincts are there. Certainly his social media team's instincts are there. And then all of the different kind of cabinet members and subcabinet officials are there. And, you know, I think I thought of Joe Biden as kind of, you know, as like a carapace, like a kind of armor that was kind of battering through the election.

But within kind of protected by that armor was the kind of modern democratic left, the kind of identity politics base that equity instead of equality based folks. And we're seeing that in some of his cabinet choices. Actually, the superintendent of San Diego schools who hosted the Spirit murder sessions and lavished praise on the speaker, she's actually been nominated for deputy secretary of education. So I'm not so much worried about Grandpa Joe, but I'm I'm very much worried at the kind of administrative level where these.

Programs and ideologies are being implemented in the federal government, so I don't know, I'm kind of, you know, I'm kind of torn but but, you know, ultimately optimistic. I think that, you know, one silver lining, I voted for Donald Trump. I didn't vote for him in 2016, voted for him in twenty twenty. But one silver lining for him being out of office. And and even again, I oppose banning the president from Twitter.

But given that that's the factual reality, one one thing of him being gone from our kind of national Twitter timeline is that the left cannot say simply Orangeman bad. They actually have to now defend the ideas, defend the policies. So we have an opportunity in the next four years to actually make this a substantive debate and not give them the excuse. Well, you know, Donald Trump is bad, so that's what I hope will happen. But we'll have to see if somebody listening wants to help you.

How can they do that?

Yeah, you know, the best thing that we can do is we're establishing a coalition that is three parts investigative reporting. So if you have any critical race theory trainings that are happening in any institutions in your area, send me an email at Chris Rufo at proton mail, dotcom. Second, we're recruiting lawyers. So if you're an attorney, send an email to that same address, letting us know you want to get involved. And then third, if you want to support my reporting in my work, you can visit my website at Christopher Rufo dot com.

That's Christopher R. UFO dot com and now have about a thousand different people making small monthly contributions. That's been a huge source of excitement and inspiration and also help provide support for my ongoing efforts.

And I'm going to kick you out of Seattle at this rate.

Well, you know, it's so funny. I, I actually enjoy your last January a year ago, I moved out of Seattle for a lot of these reasons. I mean, the political culture in Seattle is extreme. They were harassing me, harassing my wife, started harassing my kids, and it just became untenable. So we we moved to a small town in Washington State. And it's it's awesome because I went from walking home from the office in Seattle and having random strangers flip me off to, you know, having now, you know, driving home and having my neighbors say, oh, I saw you on Tunker, awesome job.

So it's been quite a culture shift. And and, you know, it's been just a huge blessing for us to, you know, to flee the city. And then given all the covert stuff, it was just lucky timing. Well, I don't mean to sound like Dan Rather, but to reiterate what you said and what Jody Shaw said to courage is the word of the moment and it's going to take a lot of it. You've shown it.

She did, too. I hope our listeners will as well. And in whatever ways they feel comfortable or can muster up, because now it is not a time for the meek.

It's a time to stand up and fight for for true equality, for love, for support, for wellness, for our communities, not for divisiveness and shaming and awful presumptions about people, things to immutable characteristics.

We were trying to get away from that as a as a country for the better part of five, six decades. And we should continue doing that. Chris, thank you so much. Thank you. It's really great to speak with you and appreciate all your support.

Our thanks again to Chris Rufo and Jody Shaw.

Want to tell you that today's episode is brought to you in part by Armbrust USA. Go to Don't Shut Down Mascotte Dotcom and enter Code MKE for a 20 percent discount on your first order of Armbrust USA masks. Now listen, I want to ask you to do me a favor. Go subscribe to the show. Would you subscribe to the show, download the show and give me a rating. Five stars if you please, and a review. And I haven't done this on the show yet.

I've never done this before. But can I just I read all the reviews and there was one I loved so much I actually thought I'd share with you. Forgive me, because I feel self aggrandizing, but it was so clever and it made me smile. And it was like the only one I've ever shared with Abby, my, you know, my assistant, like she's like my little sister. Here's the headline. It's from Dante in Georgia. And the headline of his review is Five Star Hate.

OK, I like how it begins. Megan Kelly is very talented at having conversations, and that's why I hate this podcast. I subscribe thinking I would listen when she had someone interesting on the show, but I have to listen to all of them because every guest is interesting. I have other things to do, like listening to books, streaming TV, live sports and sports podcasts. But I get sucked in every time I start listening to an episode.

It might help if she weren't so reasonable and smart. I'm loving this guy. Yeah, I'm out here trying to find shallow entertainment to forget about the crazy right wing politics and the insane left wingers. But I'm a sucker for common sense people that love the country. So I keep listening. Apart from restoring what little faith I have left in journalism, in politics, I can't think of any reason to listen to this. I love Dante in Georgia, Dad.

Thank you so much for the clever, funny kind review. And I have to tell you one thing I've noticed in reading the reviews, we have smart listeners. You people are smart. The comments have been really, really good and insightful and thoughtful. You know, occasionally you get the like you're hot. That's fine, too. As you know, I'm not one to tell somebody not to say that, but I love it. So it's a great way for us to stay connected and communicate.

Right. I just wish I could write back. So this will be my way of writing back. I've read one on the show where we can talk about. And in the meantime, we'll talk on Friday. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No bias, no agenda and no fear. The Megan Kelly Show is a devil may care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.