Hi again, listeners, it's Ross.

In our farewell episode last week, we told you to watch this space for what's to come.

And while the new show isn't ready just yet, I wanted to give you a taste of the kind of arguments and ideas that I'll be exploring soon enough.

So this week, we're going to talk about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

A vision of social justice that took elite America and all its institutions by storm during Donald Trump's first term, and a vision, as almost everyone has noticed, that is now in full-scale retreat.

In part, that's because of the actions of the Trump White House itself, which is doing everything

it can to eradicate the DEI programs and initiatives that proliferated inside the federal

bureaucracy over the last 10 years. But it's not just the Trump White House.

Companies like Google and Walmart and Paramount and Bank of America

are also shedding diversity-related efforts that they had celebrated just a few short years ago.

And even universities, a bastion of progressive ideology,

are suddenly backing away a bit or treading

carefully. Almost all of this shift happened because of the work of just one man, arguably

the most important activist in American politics since the days of Ralph Nader and Phyllis Schlafly.

That man is our guest today, Christopher Rufo,

and we're going to be talking to him about how he won, for now,

what it means for the second Trump administration,

and what his vision is for America after DEI.

Chris Rufo, welcome to the show.

It's good to be with you.

So I imagine that a big part of our audience first heard of you around the same time that they first heard the term critical race theory, an academic term of art that your activism successfully adapted

and used to frame really the whole DEI debate. And we're going to talk about that. We're going to

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