Chris Rufo Thinks the Right Can Control This. I Don’t.

The Ezra Klein Show - New York Times Opinion

Ezra Klein interviews conservative activist Chris Rufo on his strategies, ideology, and concerns about the right’s direction. The conversation explores power, truth, propaganda, and the tension between means and ends in

Key takeaways

• Rufo rejects institutional neutrality, arguing all institutions reflect values

Transcript preview

You could really make a case that Chris Rufo is the most successful activist, certainly on the right of the Sarah. He initially rose in prominence as the central strategist in the rights counterattack on DEI initiatives. He's very much behind a lot of the demonization of critical race theory. Critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people. He claims CRT is actually a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the declaration. and he built that into a series of campaigns. They've actually changed policy. It's very influential in Rona Santas's governorship and kind of running Claudine Gay out of Harvard. Pushing out Claudine Gay, toppling the president of Harvard for a journalist like me is a big win. Then in Donald Trump's second term, quite a lot has come out of Rufo's work for better and from my perspective from Morris, from a lot of Trump's early executive orders. of so-called diversity equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector at our military to some of the work that led to the ICE and CBP deployments to Minnesota. This week I published an exclusive story exposing the Somali fraud rings in Minneapolis Minnesota which are stealing billions of dollars from American taxpayers. significantly affected the world we live in. He's also, if you listen to him, and he's a very, very smart and often quite honest analyst of his own side. One thing I appreciate about Rufo is he always says what he is doing clearly and in public. He seems uneasy. Gone are the days when Tucker Carlson's nightly monologue set the agenda for the entire right. You can feel a sort of disquiet, a sense that maybe the right, this right is not becoming what he hoped it would be. Now we find ourselves, now we find ourselves in an end escalating war of influencers, trading conspiracies and counter conspiracies. That its attentional and informational sphere is polluted. Driving the right into all different kinds of rabbit holes and dead ends. That the administration is not getting as much done as he had hoped intended. Tried to help it do. As I wanted to have Rufo on, not because we agree on things, we obviously don't, you'll hear that. Not because I'm trying to talk him into my way of seeing me way. things. I'm not going to do that. But both to understand how he understands what he is doing and also to interrogate it, to ask if the tactics he is using are actually working or if he's scoring short-term victories at the cost of helping to seed profound long-term problems. Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory, the Manhattan Institute. He's a contributing editor of City Journal. He is the Co-host of the Podcast, Rufo and Lomez, and he's the author of America's Cultural Revolution, how the radical left conquered everything. As always, my email as our client show at my times.com. in there, but the one I wanted to begin with is you write, no institution can be neutral. So tell me why. Yeah, I mean that's an obvious reality if you think about it for longer than a minute. And I think it's important to say because there's this mythology that we have in the United States. And it's a small ill-liberal that institutions can be neutral arbiters that they could be valueless vessels that achieve. some kind of pragmatic or instrumental ends. And my point is that no in practice institutions always have values, whether they're implicit or explicit. And for those of us who are on the outside of many powerful institutions, there's a lot of value in simply revealing the underlying reality. And in fact, political fights are at heart, the fight for who determines the values, what values are installed in an institution, and then there are. for what kind of decisions get made. So I should take a lot of the arguments about institutions particularly within the broad philosophical tradition of liberalism, target that they can have neutral treatment. They can have neutral rules and a lot of for better and worse procedure in these institutions, everything from noticing comment periods to different ways that they have to create transparency are about trying to create that capacity for people to be neutrally treated. Do you think that's possible? No, I think neutral is the wrong word. I think what we're looking for is And I would agree with that. Everyone should be treated equally as an individual under law, but that's impartiality, not neutrality. So in a criminal case, if you sentence somebody to the death penalty, you're not treating them neutrally, you're actually taking their life because the underlying law is a kind of moral code. And so I think neutral and impartial are similar, but in this case, critically different. So another argument you make in that piece is you say, the popular. slogan that facts don't care about your feelings betrays similar problems what slogan being Ben Shapiro slogan in reality feelings almost always overpower facts reason is a slave of the passions yeah that's true and we'll caveat we love Ben Shapiro we're Ben Shapiro fans of course but I think that that he's he's very wrong on that and I think conservatives have made a fundamental error in latching on to that and really what it is it is it's a rationalization for losing. It's like, yes, we may have lost the great political question which operates on emotions or passions. But you know, we have the facts on our side and if only people would read our white paper, our kind of regression analysis, our rigorous logical argumentation, then we would be vindicated. But look, while we should have the facts on our side, while we should use logic, by itself it's insufficient. And in fact, politics operates on a deeper level, an emotional level, and politics occurs on the on the field of sentiment and public opinion much more on the field of you know a lot kind of abstract argumentation at the top. So and then you go on in the same piece to make an argument for agit prop. So Agit prop old Soviet Union term for agitation and propaganda. Yeah, mashed up together and it doesn't have a great reputation. a term of endearment but you say, ajiprop doesn't mean sacrificing the truth but rather channeling the truth toward victory. So how do you define what ajid prop is and what are you trying to explain to your fellow conservatives about how to use it? So, right, I mean if you're obviously if you're conducting say propaganda on behalf of a falsehood or evil or an unjust cause, it's bad. So, right, I mean, if you're not always necessarily, true if you are pursuing a cause that is good and true and beautiful. If you look at the word propaganda, the original meaning it comes from the Catholic Church and it was the propagation of the the Gospels, the propagation of the truth. And so these are concepts that we can recover because the reality is that all politics and the age of the printing press and onward depends on propaganda. And how do you define what propaganda itself is? Propaganda is simply the method of communicating a political narrative. Again, we're using neutral, I'm going to say a true narrative, to a mass audience through the means of modern media. It's a rhetorical argument, intended to persuade the majority of people to cobble together a majority of public opinion. And look, this is again for conservative especially, not new. you know the founding fathers of this country wrote to each other about this they wrote in public about this we seem to have forgotten some of these lessons of how politics actually works you have to persuade people what is persuasion it's rhetoric what is rhetoric at an industrial scale it's propaganda you've been connecting the question of propaganda to whether or not the end it is aimed at is true how do you think about when you have untrue propaganda unleashing passions. That's bad. Towards a true aim. Yeah, look, I don't think that that's good. I think that Aristotle has a great line in his book on rhetoric where he says, the truth has a tendency to prevail. I love that. I love that because it's like, the truth doesn't always prevail. We can look at history, you know, and sometimes lies prevail. I think in 2020 to 2024, during the woke era. many lies prevailed. But what is so interesting about that line is the truth has a tendency to prevail. What I take from it is that therefore you always want to be on the side of the truth, even for your own pragmatic political ends. You always want to be on the side of the truth. And so look, certainly there are untrue elements or narratives on the right and on the left. I think a political movement to succeed has to have the discipline and integrity to go after it, but always to remember. that if the truth has a tendency prevail that's where you want to be. And then your piece builds to this idea that, quote, in order to realize the ultimate promise of the political, there also must be something higher, a Tylos, which is the Greek word for something like an ultimate n. A final cause. A final cause. So one reason I've been focusing on this piece is to understand the way you do York and what your work is. So what is your Tylos? Well, politically speaking, let's say, let's leave it that that that that that that that that that that that. I don't that. I don't Yeah, I mean, I think I want to have a restoration of the principles of our republic. And so if you're thinking about our republic, you're thinking about those guiding principles where they have strayed over the last 250 years. I want to have a restoration of that. And so I'm constantly looking backward at the founding and trying to understand it better and understand how to bring those principles forward. And so you want to have the principles of liberty and equality. You want to have a functioning health. the public and you want to have a culture that is organized according to virtue. And in particular, you know, the virtues of our Western Anglo-American civilization. And through my personal observations around the world, as well as my study of the past, I think the Anglo-American civilization, the principles that have animated our republic for the last 250 years are still the best that we could hope for. So from that perspective, we're 17 months into today. Donald Trump's second term. Is that all? It feels like longer. Tell me about it. It feels like longer for you guys probably. Is this administration building the kind of country you want to see? Yeah, I think so. And here's how I would, here's how I would assess it. On the elements within Article II, so the executive power, I think Donald Trump has done almost everything he could do. Great people with the administration have done almost everything they could do to advance. this kind of vision of the country. Liberty, equality, virtue. Yes. And I think that the momentum was strong, year one. I think it's trailed off in year two. And, you know, could that be the executive has lost some of its energy? Yes. Could it be that public opinion has softened? Yes. Could it be some of the foreign adventures or misadventures, depending on who you talk to have distracted focus? I think yes. But ultimately, but ultimately. the problem is that the president has a majority in Congress but not 60 votes in the Senate and so fundamental transformative legislation that I would like to see is impossible. Make the case to me that Donald Trump is restoring virtue. This is a hard case because what you're going to say is that Trump does not exhibit the kind of Christian virtues in his personal life, right? I'm not even thinking about his personal life. I'm thinking about his public life. Okay, well you tell me. didn't claim he exhibits virtue. So you said that they are doing a pretty good job bringing back liberty, equality and virtue. Correct. Make the case to me. Sure, I'll make you the case and I'll make it through the particular example that I'm most familiar with. So one of my big campaigns, the last couple years, was the fight to abolish DEI. And so DEOI was this idea that had been kind of germinating in the 90s and the 2000s, but really exploded, but really exploded. into public life with universal adoption by most large institutions after 2020. And it was this idea that is very simple. That there are oppressor groups and oppressed groups in the United States because of the historical realities of our country and therefore to achieve, to move towards equal outcomes, you have to treat individuals unequally according to their group identity. And the president on day one issued an executive order that was very much in line with the work that we have been doing. to go and kind of wipe out the DEI bureaucracy throughout the federal government. And so in that case, I think that you could argue that the principle of equality and impartiality, as we were discussing earlier, had been restored, not totally, we still have some problems with the underlying statutory law. Just recently in the last couple of weeks, the Department of Justice has taken a buzz saw to so-called disparate impact doctrine. Same idea. If there are unequal outcomes, it must therefore by definition be because of discrimination, therefore you have to remedy it by treating people unequally. And so in this case, I think, and because this is the issue I've worked on and have been passionate about, I think that you can make an argument that liberty, equality, virtue have been restored. Are there other problems? Of course, are we all the way there? No. But on the issues that I personally care about, that I personally have worked on. I think the country is in a much better place than it was two years ago. I guess one thing I think about when I think about Donald Trump and virtue is corruption. So I see Trump taking luxury aircraft from Qatar. I see his family getting involved in all kinds of crypto schemes where the investors in their crypto schemes in many cases seem to be people who have business before the family, business before the country. The New Yorker sort of did a I think a quite conservative. of how much money the Trump family and Trump have made or how much the net worth has increased that has been connected to the presidency. The number was about four billion dollars in this term. It doesn't, when I look at it, look virtuous. Yeah, look, here's my general perspective and I'll lay it out to you as honestly as I can. There are the issues that I work on that I'm passionate about that I feel like I have some control over. influence over time and there are the issues that I don't and I think I've been very straightforward in the areas where I think the administration has fallen short and certainly the perception and we'll see over time I'm sure that there will be you know inquiries investigations etc into these business enterprises is bad you're not going to get me to defend it I'm perfectly happy calling out the administration where I think it's strayed or erred and this is one of those places I mean I remember the the crypto launch, it was during the transition I think, where they launched the Trump coin, right? And it's like, I don't like this, I don't want to see this, they shouldn't be doing that. And yeah, you're not going to get me to defend it. Well, one of the things I'm touching into here is I've been watching a show and I see a growing vein of discomfort from you on at least what parts of the right are becoming. Sure. So in December you tweeted, you tweeted. apparatus is how the right teaches its followers how to think and it's currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts. If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a third world click farm. So what's, tell me about that, what's been alarming you? Yeah, yeah, sometimes when you hear your quotes back to you're like, oh, that's kind of very, yeah, very, very lively language. Yeah, this is a huge problem and I don't, okay, so I'll put it this is There's a growing split between the institutional right and the online right. The institutional right I think actually deserves credit for gatekeeping some of these kind of bad tendencies out of our institutions and and I think that's good. However, the online right being like Fox News and yes, conservative think tanks, you know, the Manhattan Institute all of all of the kind of the institutional layer of the professional right, I think it's done a very good job at gatekeeping some of these bad psychological and political tendencies out of our institutions. The problem that we're grappling with though is that the traditional way of thinking about political media is always as an outgrowth of institutions. So you'd have your magazines, your newsletters, your think tank, you know, policy papers. The internet has created, you know, kind of benefits, costs and benefits. One of the benefits is the... kind of ease of communication with a large audience, but one of the negatives is that you have the proliferation of insanity, madness, psychopathology. And on the right, I think this went into hyperdrive after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, was bubbling up before then, but really then took a turn. And so you have this tendency on the right historically. You have like a kind of a bircher tendency in the post-mortem in the post-mortem. war era and then it kind of waxes and wanes over time. And right now you have in the online right, someone like Candice Owens, who has like departed so far from reality and yet has a massive audience. And I think that it's doing a disservice to the public and even more say kind of self-interestedly doing a very grave disservice to the right because if you can't teach the audience, your followers, your political base, how to think properly, how to think properly. they're not going to behave properly and you're not going to have proper outcomes and so I think it's important for us on the right to have this internal fight which is to say if you think that you know Israel assassinated Charlie Kirk or you know whatever kind of handful of conspiracies you have you know you're you're on the outside you're not within the movement and and this is a fight that is happening now and I think given sufficient amount of time I think we'll win. Why do you think you're you're at the right and I see Tucker Carlson is current guys which is a much more conspiratorial guys and he's had before has become more and more dominant figure as you note Candice Owen's success has been startling I guess I'd ask this question in two dimensions what is the audience demand that they are meeting right what what is it that they are providing that people want and then I guess the second question is why do you think you'll win? Yeah, great question. So first of all, the audience for conspiracy theories is enormous. Before his kind of legal trouble, someone like Alex Jones was making apparently millions of dollars selling vitamins and survival supplies and if you think about it, to generate that kind of revenue requires a massive, if kind of quiet under the surface audience. And so I think they're really tapping into that side of the audience. It's right wing, but not exclusively. right wing and in fact a lot of the people who have come over to these conspiracy theories are in that part of the horseshoe where their politics are you know let's say sub-ideological they're more of a feeling of perception a set of resentments second how to conspiracy theories work for people who want to forfeit agency for people who do not see the possibility of constructive action in their personal lives or in public life And therefore the conspiracy theory gives them the rationalization and justification for their nihilism. It's, you know, insert here, right? It's this group, it's that group, it's this other group that is controlling the world, making everything impossible, assassinating our heroes, and this gives them a psychological key, right? That is self-reinforcing, because a conspiracy theory for conspiracy theorists can never be debunked, right? It's just one layer of the onion that gets peeled. And I'll tell you why I think we're going to win, because I've noticed this, even for people, let's say in my kind of one degree of separation, conspiracy theories, and I think in particular anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, eventually fry your brain. And so I think that we'll see a lot of these personalities, a lot of these psychological tendencies, kind of burn out on their own. And on top of that as a kind of extra layer of confidence. That is an optimistic view on the history. of anti-Semitism right there. Yeah, well, okay, I'm saying in the near term these things kind of wax and wane, but I think what I've seen in the United States is a greater set of antibodies than you might find elsewhere and then institutionally for our side on the right. I think the look the people who run institutions are aware of the problem, they're confronting the problem, we're dealing with it and to me this is inevitable. Political coalitions are going to have some kind of mixture of the good and the bad and the question and the question, and the question, and the question, and the question, and the question, and the question, and the question, and the question, and the question, and the question is, and the question is, and the question, and the question is, and the question is, and the of leadership, what kind of courage and integrity they have, and can they succeed. And so I think that when I look at the field as it is, I think this, say, faction is less powerful than it was six months ago, a year ago, and I hope that trend continues. I think there's an interesting question on institutions in the right here. You, I forget if it's a Chesterton quote or a CS Lewis quote, but he says, one of them, says, that, that when men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing when men stop believing in God they believe in everything and I do think there's a dimension of that around institutions where the right has become much more anti-institutional I think the view that institutions cannot be neutral and largely can not even be impartial is much more widely held and there's been a sort of coordinated attack on many of the institutions in American life but sort of new ones haven't emerged right you could imagine the right and the left having institutions that have different core values because I do agree with you actually that institutions almost they do always have values at their heart and when you don't think they do it just means you don't know what they are correct but I think a lot I think they're being deliberately obscured right there being sometimes about I think Tucker Carlson is an interesting figure here somebody who came up institutionally I think sometimes about this speech he gave at the 2009 conservative political action conference and I saw a conservative media organizations and I saw many of those organizations prosper and I saw some of them fail and here's the difference the ones that failed refused to put accuracy first. This is the hard truth and conservatives need to deal with this. I believe this. I'm as conservative as any person in this room I am literally in the process of stockpiling weapons and food and moving to Idaho so I'm not in any way going to take a second seat to anybody in this room ideologically but I will say honestly if you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news you will fail you will fail the new york times is a liberal paper but it's also and it is to its core a liberal paper it's also a paper that cares about whether they spell people's names right by and large it's a paper that actually cares about accuracy conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions that are that's that's the truth you don't believe me so put aside the special pleading for the new york times here Carlson tried to build the Daily Collar. I would say it did not, my impression of it is that it did not become a place to put accuracy first and became a kind of conservative New York Times. And it did not become a conservative New York Times. Over time he went in the darker and darker directions as he chased the audience and now he's fully without institution and has, I think emerged, I'll put it this way into a form I think when I listen to you find more. concerning and problematic. So what do you think when wrong there? Yeah, well, look, this is a long-term trend. This didn't emerge in 2009 or 2020. I think of it at this way. The left is over-institutionalized and the right is under-institutionalized. I save us all the time, man. Left is over-formed by institutions, the right is under-formed. Correct. And so we have kind of opposite problems. And I think of it also in this way, in this way. I wrote a about this, I don't know a long time ago, and I think it really holds up. The left is organized as a capital P party and the right is organized under a capital P prince. So you have Donald Trump essentially sets the direction of the right, for better for worse, through personal charismatic power and his relationship with the conservative base. There's really no mediating institutions in the kind of way that you would see elsewhere. That's where conservatives. out this formula for at least the time being to achieve political victory. It has benefits, it has problems. The left has the opposite problem. The reason why I think you get like presidential candidates on the left that seem to be like devoid of traditional charisma is because it's organized as an institutional apparatus or a capital P party. And so conservatives have a problem with institutions, conservatives have a problem with institutions, conservatives have a problem building institutions, And this is the deepest irony, right? It's that conservatives in a healthy republic would be the ones that are preserving the institutions, restoring the institutions, maintaining the institutions. But conservatives have found themselves on the outside of institutions. And so when we're talking about this concept of counter-revolution, it's a paradox, right, because a counter-revolution is not necessarily a conservative impulse. on the top. You can have a conservative mission or goal that drives it. That's why it's a counter-revolution rather than a revolution. But conservatives are in this really interesting position where you have a lot of people on the intellectual right. They attend the black tie gala, they attend the events at the country club, they eat the salmon dinner at the whatever Hilton ballroom. And I'm always looking around at these. I don't like these events because I'm always looking around and saying, you guys are, you know, you guys are. out of your minds. You guys are operating as if, you know, the Elks Lodge was still the formative institution of the United States. You're living in a fantasy, you're living in a nostalgia that isn't actually grappling with the fundamental problems in the country and is totally out of step with the very voters that you claim to represent. And so, look, this is a problem. I can't say that there's a snap your finger solution. And so you have to start where you start, I work for an institution that I think is either the best in the business, the Manhattan Institute. I think we do good work that has a high degree of accuracy and rigor and intelligence and I think that we've put up practical political victories in a way that few others have. Another version of this is a line I like is that the personality type of the left is bureaucratic and the personality type of the right is autocratic. And I don't think that was always true. I don't think that was always true. Well, I don't think so, right? I think in the Trump era it is. Okay, well, make the case, make the case. There is a falling in line behind Donald Trump. So here's my view of the two coalitions right now. The genius of Donald Trump in the 2024 election was he collapsed the multi-dimensional test of party loyalty that existed in the previous Republican party were you pro-life, you do believe in low taxes, you know, what was your foreign policy, etc. and certainly the multiddimensional, the multi-dimensional agenda and the multi-adimensional agenda and, and, and, and, and, and, and, the multi-dimensional agenda, and, the multi-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-dimensional agenda, and, and, and, and, the multi-dimensional agenda, and, the multi-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-dimensional to see on the left, down to a single point of loyalty. Did you support him personally? If you did, there was actually room for a wide variety of other opinions. You could be a technophuturist, a podcast, you could be a Muslim, a Christian traditionalist, you could be RFK Jr, who'd been running as a Democrat just a year or two before, but also you could be Ted Cruz. And what held that together, is that the line that you could not cross was Trump himself. But as long as you're useful to him, you could be on the team. Now that has obvious issues when you move into governance and I think some of them have emerged, but it gave him and them a freedom of movement across other issues where, you know, a Kamla Harris, a Tim Walz, Joe Biden, were much more box checking, right? test