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Please check it out at UnwantedBook.com. Good afternoon, Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. We have with us, I think, one of the most requested, long time coming guest, Christopher Rufo, Chris is the author of America's Culture Revolution. You have been at the forefront of fights against woke, DI, critical race theory, all that good stuff. And you've had such an amazing impact on America's culture. Before we get started on where you think the future is, can you tell people what your definition is of woke? Because it seemed like such a nebulous term for a lot of people. Yeah, sure. It, after all these years, it's true that it's a, it's a hotly disputed term, but there's a vernacular definition,

and then a more rigorous intellectual definition.

It comes from this idea that you should be woke

or awake to your own oppression

to the threats of the oppressor against you.

It comes from an African-American vernacular English

or AVE, and then it's been used as a signifier or a term

for a broader, what you might call a cultural Marxist ideology, which says that there is an oppressor and there's oppressed, and in shorthand the white man is the oppressor, the black man is the oppressed. And in order to be fully woke, you have to redistribute income, property, self-esteem, psychological well-being from one to another. And at the end of that, the consequence of being woke is racial justice, racial equity, or sometimes more broadly social justice. Yeah, one of the, and I think a lot of it, I'm confident you'll agree, is completely intellectually dishonest. I think much of wokeism is based on the idea that language itself is a means of oppression and you have to deconstruct the colonized books and things like this. I remember specifically the first season of the real world, which was, I don't know, the 90s. And when the characters there, one housemates said that black people can't be racist because racism means race plus power, right? So since black people apparently don't have institutional power, they can't be racist. And then you say, okay, well, can they be prejudice? Can they be bigoted? Sure. So what's the point in this semantic argument? You're just playing kind of a shell game. And I think would you agree with me that on the right people are increasingly understanding that it's inherently intellectually dishonest? Yeah, 100% would agree with that. And look, I think we've had these like language debates for many years. And my sense of it is that after 2020 when Roke Woke really started to have an impact on the average person's daily life, I think we've more or less settled these debates. I think the public actually knows what woke is, the public, depending on how you measure it, rejects, woke ideas by two to one, four to one, ten to one margins in some cases. And so what's been really interesting is that the same people who are simultaneously insisting, woke is good, but we don't know what woke really means. Now seem to be running away from it altogether. That's a sign that at least in this intermediate period, we seem to have won at least against this woke 1.0 formulation. Let's talk about this, because I think that's a topic a lot of people are interested in because certainly with a Trump election and winning the popular vote as well, it was a decisive victory against the kind of de-I candidacy of Officer Harris as many have characterized it. And I was looking to the T-leases, I'm sure you were, about where the left broadly speaking and the Democratic party are going. Nancy Pelosi, I bring this up all the time in her retirement video from her San Francisco constituency where she's not ready for election she'd even been discussing AIDS then bring up the words LGBT or gay

But she talked about same France of a CC she talked about veterans day. How much she loves those at the same time

You have people like James Taylor Rico who's a democratic candidate for the Senate here talking about how

He's kind of skin suit Christian talking about how much she loves trans kids and to Bashir, who's a red-state governor, who's considered a representative. He's talked about so-called trans kids. Devon Newsom has kind of, with Charlie, the late Charlie Kirk, walked back women in men's sports and now seems to be reverting. I'm curious as to your perception of, is woke dead or is it just sleeping? Yeah, look, I mean, Marxism is the kind of best example of a zombie ideology. You can kill it, but it's never really dead, and it will always come back. So you see this encycles from the 19th century to the present that these ideas kind of ebb and flow with public opinion, with social and material conditions, but they're never really abandoned and they're always at least the secret faith of the left. And so while James Tallerico, the candidate in Texas, a lot of these quotations are a number of years old. These videos have been recycled to remind people of what he believes. He's very shrewdly and dishonestly, now trying to pivot away from them. And so it came out that, for example, a couple years ago in one of his state campaigns, he had said that his whole campaign was vegan and that they were not eating

meat on the Tallerico campaign. And then of course he puts out, you know, now he's under fire for this because people have remembered it. It's Texas. And he puts out a photograph of himself, you know, eating a, like a rib or something. And so like it, you know, they run away when it's unpopular, but I think we all know it's really what they secretly believe and they have an abandon their beliefs at all.

Well, that's the big question because there's two kind of schools of thought. Let's talk about democratic politicians, right? There's two schools of thought. One is they're by and large, like closet and Marxists, and they're biting their time, buying their tongue, and when they get enough numbers, you're going to have this kind of Kierstarmer British dystopia. The other vision is that, okay, these are corporate party hacks, corporations donate very heavily Democratic party. It's hard to think of Joe Biden having, for example, a strong ideology, let alone being a committed Marxist so that as you said, they'll do well because it appeals to their donors and

activists but they'll just happily throw it over with board when it doesn't start their purpose anymore because they don't really have a governing world you other than some vague sense of government control. Which of those do you think is true? I think they're both true, they're both complementary and they coexist sometimes in unity, sometimes intention. And so there is of course a more professional upper middle class, kind of layer of democratic party officials and scholars and administrators and intellectuals. They are liberals with a small L. Some of them feel uncomfortable with the woke element or the harder Marxist elements or active elements within their party. But the liberals always have the sneaking suspicion that they are just kind of the cowardly leadership class of these really true ideas. And so they have this crisis of confidence where they're not able to fully resist or keep in check or kind of set boundaries around the party. And so it really depends like how popular those far left ideas are. And then the liberals will kind of go with public opinions. During BLM, they were kind of all in on BLM ideology. Now that that ideology is unpopular, it's a liability, they try to walk away from it, but they don't have it within their hearts to actually declare definitively with moral authority and moral conviction. We don't want this in our party. And so, there, this kind of, simultaneously, the most professional, but also the most malleable. And right now, they sense that they have an opportunity to tack to the center, but I'm not sure that that's durable or totally in good faith. Yeah, I don't think anything politicians doing good faith, and I don't that they even have that luxury because if I'm every other year as a house member up for election or if I'm you know in the Senate, you know,

I have to be responsible responsive, excuse me, to the president is there's only so much leeway I have. If I was a Democrat and I didn't think Trump should be impeached, I'd be out of office, even

if I was against them completely and vote against all policies, that wouldn't be enough for

the masses.

And also, you saw Kristen Sinema and Joe mentioned, when Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney bucked the party and they fight the president, there have integrity, they're courageous. I mean, Kristen Sinema and Joe mentioned, tack to the middle, they're traders and that's not what you were voted in for and how dare you. So there is still a big, you know, people in CRT talk about systemic power. There's an enormous amount of ingrained systemic power in the media pushing Americans in politics specifically towards the hard left. Sure. Yeah, I think that's true, but it is bound by public opinion, right? So there is a calculation. So Talleriko is campaigning as an aweshocks Christian preacher with the Texas Twang accent, because he feels like that's the best path for him to win. And so they modulate their presentation, at least, depending on political public opinion. But yeah, it does seem to always go left. It seems to be a never-ending fight. And what I would say, too, and this is particularly important, given that we are in the Second Trump administration, the people who run America's major institutions, whether it's the major media outlets, the major universities, the major government departments, these are all still uniformly left-wing. Trump really hasn't done anything very, very little and even that, more or less unsuccessfully, to change the composition of America's leadership class. And with some small exceptions around the edges, that's the status quo that frankly conservatives are gonna have to deal with. And we haven't quite figured out how to successfully change that dynamic. Well, I think you're being a little modest because this is the point where I kinda have to kiss your feet because you are not single-handedly but largely responsible for taking down a Harvard University president. Just like Elizabeth Warren, you have a scalp. And I would love to hear the story from your perspective how that happened, because I think the idea was even 10 years ago, which isn't that long ago, that you had these people untouchable. Like, yeah, you can vote out some Democrats, some other, but harder than your time You know they're so well fortified. There's no way some Jerk like you're a meat with the keyboard is gonna do anything about it and you proved them wrong So I would love to hear that story Yeah, that that was a lot of fun and so this is a number of years ago. This was during the Biden years Yeah, And it's pretty simple. It was old school, gum shoe investigative reporting. And we had obtained a document that outlined very clearly that the Harvard president had plagiarized dozens and dozens of passages, or kind of constructions in her thesis. And then in conjunction with another reporter, Erin Savarium of the Washington Freebeak Inn, we discovered that she actually plagiarized something like three quarters of all of her academic papers, at least in part. And so we kind of drummed up attention around this story and look, if you're an academic. You're going too fast, I like dull this out for me because this is my ice cream. This document falls into your lap, right? Like you have the receipts. This isn't some some like, oh, there's some tweet from 10 years ago or a little clip out of context. This, this is something academia does still take seriously. This is your reputation, this is their reputation, you know, you're reputation. You're kind of getting a degree. So when you got this dropped in your lap, were you like Indiana Jones, like Holy crap? I'm looking at the arc or were you like immediately? That's right. Immediately. Yeah, it's like, oh boy. And of course, I'm always assuming defensively that the tips or the leads people send me are false. Right. So say, all right, well, let's verify that this is actually accurate because if it is accurate, this is a bombshell. So, you know, a lot of these academic papers, you can't view. So we were like finding academic journals. We were buying individual papers for, you know, $49 a piece, you know, getting all the documents together. And then the lucky thing as you can just compare. You say, well, here's our thesis, which we have. Here are these papers. And these are just verbatim ripoffs that are unquoted, unsighted, and unacknowledged. And so we just went through piece by piece to figure out, OK, where is she really stealing from? And then actually a friend of mine had a PDF copy of Harvard student handbook from the time that she had published this thesis at Harvard. And the student handbook was very clear. If you commit plagiarism as a graduate student, it's the serious academic crime and the remedies are up to and including being expelled, you know, forever. You're getting nuked out of the program. And so the question is then as well, is the president of the university held to the same standard as students at the university? Right. And that was ultimately the hypocrisy that over time as we drummed up these stories and sequests, that was ultimately the hypocrisy that just was not tenable. And eventually the board was under such humiliating pressure from us. They told her, hey, you gotta step down, you're done here. And just we'll give you a kind of golden parachute. But if you don't step down, you know, we're going to get rid of you. So did you dull these out piece by piece, or did you do like a big drop and nuker? We dropped this the first story with just the thesis, our colleague Aaron Sivarium dropped a subsequent story with additional examples from our academic work, and then we dropped a kind of contextual story. The other wrinkle here, which viewers may not remember or may not have known, is that she was touted as the super scholar. She was also Harvard's first black woman president, and so she had built this massive DEI system around her. And so she was, she was really, I mean, to the outside perception until this incident, she was considered untouchable from every angle. I mean, she was like a made woman in the mafia. You can't get rid of a Harvard president. You certainly can't get rid of Harvard's first black woman president. That was the perception going into it. And so we knew it was going to be tough at the very outset. Folks, as some of you know, I had sleeping issues early in the year. I got diagnosed with sleep apnea. 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