Meet the Man Driving the Right’s Culture War Panic

Deconstructed

The Intercept

News

4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Republican Party’s full embrace of the culture war as a political tactic — from drag queen story hour to critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives — has been chiefly guided by activist and polemicist Christopher Rufo, author of the new book “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.” But is the effort fundamentally nihilistic? And is it overly obsessed with sex while claiming to uncover pedophiles everywhere in our midst? This week on Deconstructed, Rufo joins Ryan Grim to defend his approach and his philosophy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Picture this, static cars, idling engines, angry horns, now picture you, zooming past
0:12.4	it all, light and breezy, ah, the sweet feeling of whizzing past traffic, book your train
0:21.6	journey via AvantiWestcoast.co.uk, AvantiWestcoast, feel good travel.
0:30.6	I'm Ryan Graham. Welcome to Deconstructed. We are joined today by Christopher Rufo, who is the author of
0:42.0	the new book, America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Concord Everything. And I know
0:47.8	that a ton of our readers, ah, a ton of my listeners, I should say, will be very excited to hear
0:53.0	that the left has conquered everything. So congratulations to us, but Christopher just-
0:59.2	Well done, Chaps. Well done. Nothing to it. We'll teach you how we did it. For people who don't know,
1:05.8	Chris is a conservative activist, Barry Weiss, in fact, on the back of this book, calls him the most
1:10.3	important and effective conservative activist in the country, the Atlantic, calls him one of the
1:16.2	most gifted conservative polemicists of his generation. We got the New York Times on here,
1:21.8	calling him the country's preeminent critic of critical race theory. But you also have a bit of an
1:27.6	unusual backstory. It's not like you kind of came out of college and got a Coke Fellowship and
1:32.8	then worked in the- for a House Republican and have been an operative ever since. Kind of had a
1:38.5	winding path here. So I think a lot of our readers, probably your listeners, probably understand,
1:43.4	know you as like the guy who made critical race theory a household name, the guy who's like
1:50.0	really gotten like drag queen story hour into the news over the last couple of years. Yeah.
1:54.7	But who are you before that? How'd you wind up in this place?
1:59.1	Before that, I was probably a more typical kind of intercept listener type. So I think that I was
2:06.4	on the hard left growing up in my teenage years. I come from a long family of Italian communists.
2:13.6	So my aunts and uncles in Italy are still card carrying, unreconstructed communists to this day.
2:20.8	Some of my formative political memories are visiting my family and then seeing my aunts-
	...

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