Christopher F. Rufo
The Truth About Homelessness in San Francisco
updated
It’s been another momentous week, and we’re going to be talking about the boys of DOGE, the scandal and controversy about USAID creating the left-wing NGO apparatus, and finally, our Hegelian theory of Trump as world-spirit that has extended itself across the Middle East. All that and more in this week’s episode.
Intro 00:00-02:36
Shutting Down the Department of Education 02:37-11:13
The DOGE Boys Take Over DC 11:14-28:00
The USAID Scam Unravels 28:01-48:39
Trump, Gaza, and the World-Spirit 48:40-01:10:53
We’re back this week with the writer and publisher Lomez, who will help us sort through
President Trump’s blizzard of executive orders. We also discuss the controversial New York
Magazine coverage of the Right’s Inauguration celebrations and a strange cult of transgender
computer engineers who are allegedly involved in a string of murders.
All that and more in this week’s podcast.
We’re back this week with the writer and publisher Lomez, who will help us sort through
President Trump’s blizzard of executive orders. We also discuss the controversial New York
Magazine coverage of the Right’s Inauguration celebrations and a strange cult of transgender
computer engineers who are allegedly involved in a string of murders.
All that and more in this week’s podcast.
We’re back this week with the writer and publisher Lomez, who will help us sort through
President Trump’s blizzard of executive orders. We also discuss the controversial New York
Magazine coverage of the Right’s Inauguration celebrations and a strange cult of transgender
computer engineers who are allegedly involved in a string of murders.
All that and more in this week’s podcast.
We’re back this week with the writer and publisher Lomez, who will help us sort through
President Trump’s blizzard of executive orders. We also discuss the controversial New York
Magazine coverage of the Right’s Inauguration celebrations and a strange cult of transgender
computer engineers who are allegedly involved in a string of murders.
All that and more in this week’s podcast.
Intro 00:00-19:22
The Cultural Right Is Ascendant 19:24-29:13
Curtis Yarvin and The New York Times 29:14-35:57
H-1B Debate and Vivek Ramaswamy 35:58-44:05
Transgender Computer Science Cult 44:06-55:32
Reintegrating Leftists 55:33-01:01:13
Retaking the Smithsonian 01:01:14- 01:06:54
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This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: city-journal.org
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This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: city-journal.org
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This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: city-journal.org
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This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: city-journal.org
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This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: city-journal.org
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This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: city-journal.org
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This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: city-journal.org
***
This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: city-journal.org
We’re entering a new phase of cultural change: 2024 is almost gone, the Biden-Harris Administration is on its way out, and, as I argued last week, the BLM era is over.
This week, I’m speaking with Jonathan Keeperman, the writer and publisher who goes by the pen name Lomez. We discuss the mysterious drones over New Jersey, the controversy around Disney’s deleted trans storyline, and whether we’ve really entered the “post-woke” era.
All that and more on this week’s podcast.
We’ll trace the path of Luigi Mangione’s ideological development and explain how we might be entering a new phase of left-wing nihilism, in which mass movements have failed, but individuals hope to spark revolution through spectacular acts of violence.
Plus: the so-called “Woke Right,” Elon Musk’s DOGE, and Trump’s deportation plan.
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Last spring, I published a whistleblower report on the secret child sex-change program at Texas
Children’s Hospital. The hospital had previously promised to stop such procedures, which
included the administration of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, but had, in fact,
continued to perform transgender medical interventions on children as young as 11 years old.
Following the publication of the story, Texas legislators passed Senate Bill 14, banning all child
sex-change procedures statewide, angering left-wing activists and officials at Texas Children’s
Hospital, who had opposed any restriction on transgender medicine.
Then the plot took another turn. Federal agents, presumably having reviewed forensic
information from TCH’s internal servers, tracked down the whistleblower and Assistant US
Attorney Tina Ansari threatened him with prosecution. Although the whistleblower redacted all
personal information and remained within the bounds of federal privacy laws, the Biden
Administration wanted to make a point: those who challenge trans orthodoxy will be punished
by the state.
Now, in this exclusive interview, the whistleblower, former Texas Children’s Hospital general
surgeon Eitan Haim, has decided to come forward and speak the truth about the perils of
transgender medicine. He knew the risks he was taking as a whistleblower, but felt a moral
obligation to protect the children who were being butchered by his colleagues.
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This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: city-journal.org
In a new short documentary, I tell the story of a small public college in Florida that’s become the opening move in a conservative counter-revolution. Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed a new board majority, including me, to New College of Florida and tasked us with a simple, but audacious, mission: take over the failing school, bring in new leadership, and transform the institution into a liberal arts college in the classical tradition.
The move caused a firestorm. Conservatives cheered it on as an essential step in recapturing democratic institutions. Progressives denounced it as a violation of some principle or another. But, whatever one’s opinion, one thing is certain: the takeover of New College has changed the dynamics of America’s culture war and, if successful, will provide a model for a conservative counter-revolution across the nation. #NCF #newcollege #florida
This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute.
Intro 00:00-01:14
Nixon's Counter Revolution 01:15-02:48
Law & Order 02:49-04:32
Nixon Vs Administrative State 04:33-06:55
The Bureaucracy Strikes Back 06:56-08:44
Counter Revolution in Our Time 08:45-10:39
The transgender movement has conquered American life. Activist teachers have converted classrooms into propaganda. Influencers are driving billions of social media impressions. And doctors are cutting up kids in the name of gender-affirming care. The story goes deeper than you might imagine, featuring rage-filled intellectuals, a trans billionaire benefactor, and large scale medical experiments in a Detroit ghetto. This is the story of the transgender empire, how it came into being, and how it hopes to change the face of American society forever.
Intro 00:00-00:34
The Origins of Transgenderism 00:35-03:44
The School-to-Gender-Clinic Pipeline 03:45-06:49
The Synthesis of All Oppressions 06:50-09:41
Frankenstein's Nihilism 09:42-12:24
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This video is sponsored by Manhattan Institute.
I made the case that the modern university has lost its sense of purpose and requires significant institutional reform, even political recapture, to restore the principles of classical liberal education, while my interlocutor, Princeton professor Keith Whittington, argued for a more cautious approach, emphasizing the values of academic freedom, faculty governance, and institutional autonomy.
My belief is that the old right-libertarian solutions, which rely on procedural values, are doomed to fail. In fact, they are responsible, in large part, for the current mess. Rather than continue to pursue this dead end, I believe that we must revive the democratic governance of our public universities and shape them according to the principles and priorities of voters, who elect legislators to govern state institutions in the interest of the common good.
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During my recent stay in Budapest, I sat down for a wide-ranging conversation with the conservative journalist Rod Dreher, who has been living in Hungary since last year. We discussed the American culture war, the coming presidential race, and Viktor Orbán’s political strategy.
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This video is sponsored by Manhattan Institute.
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This video is sponsored by Manhattan Institute.
I recently hosted a summit on anti-woke public policy and, beneath all of the legal and technical details, I realized that there is an opportunity for a significant shift in rhetoric for the political Right.
For decades, conservatives made their arguments primarily through a statistical frame, using the language of finance, economics, and performance metrics. Think “running government like a business.” But in recent years, the rise of left-wing racialist ideology—BLM, CRT, DEI—has created an opportunity, even the necessity, for conservatives to make their arguments through a moral frame, speaking to the conflict of values that underlies the division between Left and Right.
This linguistic shift is already happening—and paying dividends. At the summit, we discussed two specific examples. First, on education, the activist Corey DeAngelis noted that the school choice movement suddenly started winning when it stopped making statistical arguments about performance metrics and started making moral arguments about parental rights and the content of the curriculum. Second, on the federal budget, Wade Miller of the Center for Renewing America has engaged in a similar strategy, moving the debate from the language of large-firm accounting to the language of moral conflict, arguing that Congress should defund the “woke and weaponized bureaucracy.”
Yes, we should improve test scores and balance the budget. But the deeper purpose of government is to secure the rights of the people and to establish a principle of justice. Conservatives must speak to the ends, not simply the means. And, in our advanced managerial society, this will require a new moral language that appeals to the interests and emotions of the common citizen, who wants to be protected from the institutions and ideologies that have arrayed themselves against him.
This video is sponsored by Manhattan Institute.
President Biden has announced that he would support federal legislation requiring states to administer hormone treatments and sex change operations for “transgender kids.” He blasted recent restrictions on such practices in Florida as “close to sin” and said that so-called gender-affirming care should qualify as a basic civil right.
The president’s message is dystopian on its face, but, at a deeper level of analysis, reveals the disturbing new metaphysics of the American Left, which has elevated the “transgender child” into a totem. In primitive societies, tribes in places such as North America and Aboriginal Australia would use totems to connect with nature, mediate their relationship with the spirit world, and honor the categories of the masculine and the feminine. In modern America, political activists use the “transgender child” as a post-modern totem to connect with a utopian, technologically-perfected future and to create a new category beyond man and woman. Through chemical and surgical intervention, they believe, they can smash the patriarchy and transcend the limitations of human nature.
In truth, however, these procedures will not usher in a utopia. As we are beginning to see with the first cohort of “detransitioners,” so-called gender-affirming care denies biological reality and often results in horrific complications and regrets. The American doctors who are performing double mastectomies on healthy young girls and penectomies on healthy young boys are not the saviors of the future—they are the butchers of the present, enacting a post-modern form of child sacrifice.
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Earlier this week, I delivered a presentation with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis exposing the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy in Florida’s public universities.
I based my presentation on my recent investigative reporting series, which has revealed the process of ideological capture at four public universities. These programs preach the values of tolerance and inclusion, but in reality, serve as vehicles for left-wing racialist ideology and partisan political activism. They are designed to replace the system of academic merit with a system of race-based preferences and discrimination—which, in many cases, explicitly violates federal civil rights law.
Here are the headlines from these investigative reports:
–Florida State University divides students according to a “matrix of oppression” and offers a racially segregated scholarship that deliberately bars white students from applying.
–Florida International University condemns the United States as a system of “white supremacy” and trains students for participation in violent left-wing protests.
–The University of South Florida encourages students to attend racially segregated counseling programs and promotes “reparations,” “defund the police,” and “prison abolition.”
–The University of Central Florida condemns the United States as “white-supremacist culture” and encourages active discrimination against the “oppressor” class, characterized as “male, White, heterosexual, able-bodied, and Christian.”
To address this problem, Governor DeSantis and Florida legislators have proposed a bill, HB 999, that would eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in all public universities statewide. This would immediately disrupt the process of ideological capture and send a clear signal to the rest of the nation that conservative taxpayers will no longer support left-wing political activism under the guise of neutral scholarship.
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My colleague Heather Mac Donald has published a provocative new essay in City Journal, titled “The Great Feminization of the American University.” Mac Donald points out that women now constitute the ruling majority on campus: 75 percent of Ivy League presidents, 66 percent of college administrators, and 58 percent of recent graduates are now female.
And the consequences, Mac Donald argues, are troubling. “Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma,” she writes. “For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus.”
In my new video essay, I analyze this cultural shift and explain how the modern university has become a “therapeutic institution,” characterized by the following trends:
-The left-wing victim narrative has moved from an economic axis to a psychological axis, with “traumatizer” and “traumatized” replacing “oppressed” and “oppressed.”
-Individual pathology is valorized as a form of marginalized identity.
-This new social system incentivizes trauma, disorder, and emotional displays.
-The university has created a therapeutic bureaucracy that operates on political ideology.
This video is sponsored by Manhattan Institute.
In 2018, the journalist Bari Weiss crowned a heterodox group of writers and cultural figures as the “Intellectual Dark Web.” The promise of the IDW was that it was generating a substantive critique against left-wing orthodoxy that could not have emerged from the traditional Right. These new figures were also using new media, especially the podcast, to reach younger audiences and generate buzz for their intellectual movement.
But now, five years later, the IDW has become a spent force. As the group was confronted with a series of real-world political decisions—the rise of Trump, the COVID crisis, and the anti-CRT politics—it fractured, splintered, and decomposed. With some notable exceptions, such as Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, and Bret Weinstein, the “centrists” of the IDW could never move from the domain of criticism to the domain of action. They acted as if they could solve political problems through podcast debates and failed to offer a viable theory of change.
Consequently, the IDW was overtaken by events. Although the movement deserves credit for pointing out the problem of left-wing overreach in America’s institutions, this critique is now part of conventional wisdom and is no longer sufficient. As I explain in my new video essay, the lesson of the IDW’s disintegration is clear: opponents of left-wing orthodoxy must grapple with the reality that, in a two-party democratic system, the path to reform must go through politics. If they want results, they must be willing to get their hands dirty.
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The writer Curtis Yarvin recently posted a criticism of the conservative takeover of New College of Florida, where I serve on the board of trustees.
Yarvin, who has built a cult following on the “neoreactionary” Right and the “post-Marxist” Left, is best known for advancing the thesis that the progressive-managerial state, which he calls the Cathedral, is so powerful, that any action to challenge it will end up reinforcing its power. The better solution, Yarvin counsels, is to adopt the posture of a prey animal, find satisfaction through aesthetics, and wait for the American Caesar.
I disagree. Yarvin’s philosophy is an expression of self-fulfilling pessimism. To a certain extent, the conservative takeover of New College has already been successful. We immediately fired the former president, abolished the DEI bureaucracy, banned coercive and discriminatory “diversity” programming, and brought in former education commissioner Richard Corcoran—a man of great tenacity and courage—to lead the turnaround effort.
Furthermore, our initial campaign at New College has already had a ripple effect: multiple states, including Florida, have introduced legislation to abolish DEI bureaucracies at all public universities, and the higher education establishment has expressed fear that a conservative counter-revolution has begun. At a minimum, we have proven that the political commissars are not inevitable, not invincible, and not untouchable.
This video is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Read more here: https://www.city-journal.org.
In recent conversations on Twitter, Dr. Peterson has urged caution about my education policy proposals and the reforms happening in Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis. In response, I released a sixteen-minute video with the express intent of persuading Dr. Peterson to endorse our plan to abolish DEI bureaucracies and restore the principle of colorblind equality in the public universities. I pointed out that he has repeatedly called for “D-E-I to D-I-E,” in other words, for its abolition, but when the actual policy was proposed, he hesitated. My question was: why? If DEI is a threat to academic rigor, democratic governance, and equality under law—and it is—there is no reason to hesitate. In fact, there is a duty to act.
Dr. Peterson watched the video and graciously asked me to join him on an episode of his podcast to discuss my position further. I made the case for reform and Dr. Peterson responded positively, saying that I was correct about the necessity for reform and that I had addressed his concerns. And yet, at the end of the podcast, he was still somewhat reticent to explicitly endorse my proposal, warning that there might be “snakes lurking under the
carpet.”
After the episode, I realized that Dr. Peterson’s ambiguity was not about the quality or correctness of my proposal, but was based on the difference between theoretical and prudential wisdom, or, the difference between philosophy and statesmanship. I developed a deeper appreciation for Dr. Peterson, who seems to be simultaneously attracted and repelled from political life, which operates on a profoundly different set of principles than the contemplative and intellectual life of the college professor. Dr. Peterson approaches the world philosophically, while I approach the world politically. These are not in opposition, but exist in a productive tension.
I urge you to watch the whole podcast: youtu.be/N3t5cpGZwik. And I would like to thank Dr. Peterson for his generosity of time and spirit—I remain a devoted admirer of his work and consider him a friend and ally in the cause.
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The order, titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” relies on three key strategies: creating internal cadres and power centers through the deployment of “Agency Equity Teams,” funding third-party political activism through grants to “community[-based] organizations,” and weaponizing civil rights law to require federal agencies to use artificial intelligence “in a manner that advances equity.”
In this video, I explain how Biden’s executive order manipulates language and statistics in order to nationalize the DEI movement, suppress dissent from the new racial orthodoxy, and subvert the Constitution’s promise of equal treatment under the law.
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Chapters:
Intro 00:00-01:43
Creating Internal Cadres 01:44-08:00
Funding Third-Party Political Activism 08:01-12:50
Weaponizing Civil Rights Law 12:51-21:31
The DEI Bureaucracy Can Only Lead to Tyranny 21:32-26:11
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The film shows the dramatic decline of the American interior through a mosaic of stories including an ex-steelworker scrapping abandoned homes to survive, a recently incarcerated father trying to rebuild his life, and a pair of sisters hoping to escape their blighted urban neighborhood.
I spent five years gathering these incredibly intimate portraits of Americans living on the edge. The film sheds light on how our crumbling social institutions have created a dangerous divide between the haves and have nots.
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#breakingnews #florida
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#breakingnews
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This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: city-journal.org
Subscribe to my newsletter: christopherrufo.com/support.
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This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: city-journal.org
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This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute. Subscribe to City Journal here: https://www.city-journal.org.


