The race for Critical Race Theory
Christopher Rufo on what ails America, the parent revolt happening inside schools, and recreating what Tocqueville saw
Here’s the question I had at the end of your film: governments are kind of like the proverbial man with the hammer. What they have is money and government institutions that do things, and so they try to fix problems that those tools can fix. But how do you create family? How do you create community?
I mean the first step is to stop destroying it, to stop kind of deliberately, both intellectually and through public policy, shredding that social fabric, which is what we’ve done for the last 60 years. If you read critical theory dating back to the 1960s, they deliberately say we want to shred social institutions to create instability, so we can then be in a position where we can achieve the revolution.
So in the intellectual lineage of the critical ideologies is a deliberate attempt to undermine institutions like faith, family, local community, self-reliance, et cetera. So the first step is to stop doing that.
And then I think the bigger picture, the thing I’ve thought about since making the film, hadn’t quite gotten there at that time, is the great federal political project for conservatives should be to gain power and strip these ideologies from the federal government, from federal policy, from federal personnel, from federal training, from federal grant making, absolutely strip it. Remove, kind of ruthlessly and relentlessly strip these ideologies from the structures and functions and policies of the federal government.
And then to the greatest extent that we can, redistribute power, money, and authority to the lowest level possible, sometimes to states. So for example, the $1.1 trillion in means-tested benefit spending: divide it by per capita and then block grant it back to the states with no restrictions and let them kind of experiment and go.
Read the whole interview HERE.