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The fight for our civilization is here, and today’s guest is no stranger to the fray. Christopher Rufo is a member of the New College of Florida board and the mastermind of a number of projects devoted to winning the culture war. He’s the author of the new bestseller America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, which covers why the right’s been on the losing side, and today he chats with Rob, Peter and James about how we can turn the tide. If you’re seeking bold strategies on how to save our country, this is the podcast for you.
Song of the Week:
– Soundbite from the open: Christopher Wray and Kamala Harris
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The college credential matters, because employers cannot give tests to candidates and K-12 diploma does prove a person is a capable worker. Fixing K-12 will reduce the need for colleges becoming remedial learning and testing centers.
I think that foreign students should be taxed. We want to make US schools more American an focused on serving the tax payers that support them.
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I’m replying, not to the main part of this episode, but to the opening. Would you rather be back in 1973? In many ways yes. It is my entire adult lifetime ago. Married two years, parents of our first child. We had practically nothing, but we didn’t really care, AND, we weren’t hounded by a constant barrage telling us we were failures. But most importantly, there was the spiritual aspect. Most media attention is paid to the boomer interest in esoteric spirituality but there was so much happening in christianity, the Jesus Revolution in California and across the world, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in mainstream churches, most especially in the Catholic Church. We were part of that charismatic renewal and lived for 14 years in a community devoted to living out the gospel 24/7. And it wasn’t just us, there was a desire for a real experience of God. It seemed like there was a real openness to things that has disappeared. You could mention casually to someone that you attended a prayer meeting on Thursday night and they would ask where. Today if you did that you are looked at as some sort of freak. This atmosphere or spirit was full of optimism about the future that had no connection to politics or economics. Certainly those things are important but the spiritual is so much more important
Peter,
You and I are about the same age. We both grew up in upstate NY. We both moved West. BUT you actually worked for a Republican administration. Therefore I will grant you little slack for your historical error:
-Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, not 1973
Government schools don’t add any value. It’s something to commandeer by the left and the school unions. The concept worked until about 1970. Cut a check to the parents.
Look up “full service schools”. The left is obsessed with them. Minnesota just made every single meal free up here for no good reason. The federal government spends 30 million a year on it.
I’ve heard the yoots of today are flirting with socialism again. This young man Rufo seems a typical example.
I suggest they date Venezuelans. That should fix the problem.
The real answer to Peter’s first question and what Christopher Rufo could have said in one sentence, is that people from foreign countries aren’t coming to US colleges for gender studies etc, they’re coming mostly for hard sciences etc, which – at least so far – haven’t come totally under the thumb of the leftist crap.
That may still be true — that they mostly come for STEM — but you also have dumb kids with rich parents who merely want some kind, any kind of degree obtained in the U.S., for the reflected prestige. And those kids may have a lot of influence back home, precisely because of who their parents are.
For that matter, even STEM students are increasingly forced to take woke propaganda courses.
Also, I think he was right about skipping college. That is going to cause a lot of problems as he explained it. Having said that, if your standardized test scores are below a certain level, you should be really careful about getting any kind of four-year degree.
I think the big problem is the accreditation system, but nobody talks about it. They should just ignore it and let people take what they want, and if a class doesn’t actually directly relate to economic output, they should charge less for it. If the bottom half of the colleges did that, that would change a lot of things for the better.
At one point, it almost sounded a bit like Chris was advocating for replacing their (meaning progressives, generally) “experts” with ours, our accredited “ours”. I know that’s not where he was going, meaning we need highly educated elites telling us what to do (regardless of political leaning, this is flatly wrong and antithetical to the precepts everyone was talking about), but that still felt hinky to me. I use words like “hinky” because Harvard wouldn’t let me in, other than to mop floors.
I’d also argue that the statement about pipe-fitters not being the people you want is also elitist, and wrong – those are *exactly* who you want at a local level, for local office, school boards, etc, since their roots are highly grounded in reality and not read about in a book in a 3rd floor of an old building sitting on a campus somewhere. If you’ve run your own business, you’re more grounded in the realities of what’s wrong than the bulk of folks out in the wild, giving opinions.
Also, the DEI stuff in Florida was already well on its way to being massively unpopular. Calling these realities out, the evils it perpetuates, is always productive, but taking credit may be something of an overstatement. Contributing vs. causing.
Chris Rufo makes an interesting point: We appear not to have won the Cold War, as we have espoused the ideas of our foe. For the record, Solzhenitsyn “prophesied” that in his book, “In the Third Circle” in 1953.
Now with the mass demonstration of anti-Semitism in America, it appears that we may not have actually defeated the Nazis in WWII.
THe Nazi project to rid the world of Jews was also espoused by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Arab/Islamic world aligned to a considerable degree with the Nazis in WWII, and have perpetuated that anti-Semitism since the end of WWII, particularly with the creation of the State of Israel. Now that anti-Semistism has spread around the world, and captured the political moment in America. And it appears that it is not just Palestinian immigrants in America, but a wide variety of groups here, to a greater or lesser degree, from Black Livers Matter, to mainline Protestant churches. I was shocked by the some of the expressed attitudes in the PCA Church that I have been attending. I learn to my distress that the Covenant Theology espoused there asserts that God is done with the Jews, that the Jews forfeited all of their promises from God when they crucified Christ, and, as the Preacher said to the Sheriff in Blazing Saddles, the Jews are on their own. And deserve whatever they get. PCUSA, a more “woke” church than the PCA, has issued a mealy mouthed moral-equivalence statement, worthy of that Hamas mouthpiece and avid anti-Semite, Barack Obama.Distressing, to say the least.
Shouldn’t we charge *more* for classes that don’t have financial benefit? At least at schools that take tax money or are not-for-profit. If my tax money is going to schools, because it is a public good, then the learning better be a direct benefit to society.
Well, I try to see the value in liberal arts. Obviously, all college has been overpriced since the 80s. If it doesn’t have any value, this is the biggest scam in history. When I went to college a million years ago, I couldn’t believe how angry all of the smart guys were about being forced to take liberal arts classes. And they made sure you know they thought you were stupid if you thought otherwise. Amazing.
Also, education is not a “public good”. Look up the definition. I realize I’m the only person that thinks like this, but I am absolutely obsessed with the concept of a public good. Blah blah blah, Rufus is a terrible libertarian, but you can’t explain to me why you need the government to do anything but public goods and maybe Social Security and Medicare if it’s run right. It’s impossible to perfectly estimate this, but some economist think that the government is now 80% non-public goods. Real genius. Maybe we could try more centralized power and more experts. We could vote on it lol.
Also, tell me what good 2% inflation does. ***Who voted on that?*** It came out of the basement of the Eccles building. Then the politicians of both parties are forced to spend endlessly as if to manage the side effects. Endless theft and a debt to GDP ratio that goes out of control. 60% of the country lives paycheck to paycheck because…don’t discuss it.
The Debt was addressable
The education system as more sane
Then they whine about people not procreating enough W-2 slaves.
$50 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
The guest today is exactly why the Republican party lost on Tuesday.
The Republican base is not interested in managerial control by a right wing technocracy that doesnt give a damn about them.
Why should the average working person vote for the same from the right.
They just stay home in droves.
Your never going to appeal to the Nerdrotics and Sargons of Akkad with that kind of drek.
Trump wins cause hes not a technocrat.
You vote on that, when you vote for Congress and the presidency. Those bodies control the body that controls the monetary policy, but they pretend otherwise. 2% inflation is a market incentive for people to put cash (capital) to work. The Bible tells us to do that and the Fed provides a small incentive. If you think you are smarter than the Bible, bring a strong argument.
People live paycheck-to-paycheck, because they can. Heck there are some situations where people should spend more than they make (retirement, new house, new baby,…). Government also incentivizes people by punishing wealth.
Delete
Really? If people’s cash was getting more valuable all the time, they wouldn’t invest it? I don’t think so. All this does is grow debt funded misallocated capital and government and government debt.
People whine about the debt to GDP. It’s the consequence of inflating it away all the time until you can’t anymore.
Are you seriously framing this as positive?
All they are doing is stealing people’s wealth to give it to the already wealthy and the government.
Inflation does not cause deficit spending by government, but it is often used to enable deficit spending.
If cash is getting more valuable over time, then functionally speaking it IS invested. Risk free. Why do something with it where you have to worry about losing value?
That is a terrible policy to produce inflation and then rely on politicians to not use it to overspend. I mean everybody has to take counter measures against inflation and government over spending. Real genius system.
Really? Have a bunch of central planners force inflation on everybody, so they invest it? Look at the mess they have created.
Everybody should get one or 2% real return on savings all of the time. This is madness. All it does is sap power up to the wealthy and the government. Then it all collapses because of the debt to GDP.
I’m not speaking about whether the policy is good or bad, just your analysis that in a deflationary monetary cycle people would still invest cash. They wouldn’t, because cash would BE an investment (grow in real value over time)
So your view is, people shouldn’t get a return on savings accounts. I think that if you stick a bunch of cash under your bed, it shouldn’t lose value. It’s central planning to do otherwise and it’s going to end badly and we are already seeing it.
When cash loses value from Fed policy, it’s actually an unconstitutional taking.
Banks invest the money from savings accounts. If you got 2%, that is far less than the 9% that the stock market historically returns. Etc.
Reading is fundamental.
I’m referring to the hypothetical you posed [If people’s cash was getting more valuable all the time, they wouldn’t invest it?] in a deflationary economy cash GAINS value over time. That IS a “return on savings accounts”. Risk free. Why invest it in a venture where it could lose value if you’re guaranteed a gain just sitting on cash?