Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Seth Barron, associate editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is a friend of the podcast, Christopher Rufo.

Chris is a documentary filmmaker based in Seattle.

He's the director of the Discovery Institute's Center on Wealth and Poverty

and a city journal contributing editor.

You can find him on Twitter at Real Chris Rufo.

Chris has been busy uncovering a major scandal, this time inside the country's federal

government, where the ideology known as critical race theory has made inroads.

We're excited to have him on the podcast to talk about it.

Chris, thanks for joining us.

It's great to be with you.

So what is critical race theory?

Critical race theory is the idea that the United States was a country founded on racism and that American institutions such as the

Constitution, our legal system, and our kind of social order kind of preaches the values on the

surface of equality and freedom. But under the surface, those are simply a mask for white supremacy

and racial oppression. And it's

basically a kind of Marxian dynamic of oppressor and oppressed, but rather than a kind of

economic base of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it's now taken on the kind of identity

politics theory looking at oppression dynamics through the lens of race.

I feel like we've been hearing a lot about this sort of thing. Like, for instance, the New York

Times had their 1619 project. Is that a version of critical race theory?

It is. Yeah. I think the 1619 project is really a historical expression of critical race theories, philosophical

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