The radical left's influence in American institutions has not declined but rather consolidated, with the same individuals who were enthusiastic about progressive causes in 2020 still holding their positions and gaining more DEI jobs. This phenomenon traces back to Herbert Marcuse, who developed critical theory as a form of self-conscious Marxism adapted to Western conditions, and influenced figures like Angela Davis. The Weather Underground exemplified the shift from violent revolution to institutional infiltration. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not fundamentally change left-wing ideology, which remained frozen in 1968. The psychological appeal of communism lies in its promise of eliminating envy, inferiority, and unearned privilege, though this utopian vision fails to account for human nature. The CRT debate was strategically won by conservatives who accurately defined the ideology while the left's obfuscation tactics backfired.
How the Radical Left Conquered Everything: Christopher Rufo | Coleman Hughes Full EpisodesAdded:
The argument is, well, you know, wokeness has peaked and is now receding.
We were we revert to the mean. I I don't think that is true either. I actually think what's happening though institutionally is that all the same people who were gung-ho, you know, in in 2020, you know, pushing all this stuff, they still all have the same jobs.
Actually, they have probably more DEI jobs and ideological jobs than the past.
Um, they're still in a dominant position in the universities, for example. And while they may be embarrassed to say some of the same things publicly um rightfully um I think what we're seeing is actually a consolidation of wokeness within the institutions, not a retrenchment, not an absolute decline.
My guest today is Christopher Rufo.
Christopher is a political activist and filmmaker known for his opposition to critical race theory or CRT. He's a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute and he's the author of a new book called America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. In this episode, we talk about the German philosopher Herbert Marcusa and the role he played in popularizing critical theory. We talk about the legacy of the weather underground. We talk about the admiration that left-wing intellectuals in the 20th century had for Mao and Stalin. We talk about the relationship between critical theory and Marxism. We talk about the psychological and emotional appeal of communism. We talk about the effect of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the Western. We disagree somewhat about the legacy of McCarthyism. We talk about the political leanings of public school teachers today. We talk about the strengths and weaknesses of classical liberalism as a philosophy. We talk about the teaching of CRT in public schools and much more.
All right, Chris Rufo, thanks so much for coming on my show again.
>> It's good to be with you.
>> So, the occasion of this conversation is your new book called America's Cultural Revolution.
Uh, and I'm excited to talk to you about this. you know, till now you have shown up in the public eye more as u an activist than a writer or intellectual necessarily. So you you know people have gotten you in sound bites rather than in long form and I think this is the the first time um the public is getting to see you in long form. So, you know, first, how do how does that kind of transition feel? Do you view those two things as separate projects or or how do you how do you view that?
>> Yeah, I think they're, you know, of course, separate, but definitely complimentary. Um, and and I would agree. I think that the public has mostly digested the work that I've done in recent years in short form in uh you know 800word articles and op-eds and reports uh you know three minute Fox News segments and then the occasional longer uh interview but you know I've been writing you know feature essays uh for for a number of years that that that certainly are kind of training ground for then writing a a fulllength book and so I hope that people get a sense of the kind of deeper foundations of what I've been doing as an activist. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think they're all complimentary. They're all driving towards the same ambitions, the same goals, the same outcomes, and they're merely different means of communication for a slightly different audience, and of course, uh, you know, written in a slightly different manner.
So, I don't remember exactly when the last time I had you on my podcast was, but it was in the in the heat of critical race theory being really in the news. And I may have told you in the audience this last time, but in just in case, uh, when I began writing my book, which will come out in February, I remember, you know, talking to my editor. This was probably early 2020. And as part of my research, I was going in detail on a critical race theory compendium. And I thought that this was crucial to understanding how, you know, the left thinks about race and to understanding what we call wokeness and all of that. And, you know, I think my editor said something like, "Well, look, you know, I I get that you're interested in this stuff, but I don't think there's going to be any wider interest in critical race theory." And I remember being very frustrated with that. And then about two years later, um, you know, you're talking to the White House about, uh, banning critical race theory in in in the federal government. And, you know, every third word out of people's mouths is CRT. And I felt privately vindicated.
Um, >> but very p publicly you were tacit and a man of tact and reserve, I'm sure.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So um this is a very interesting book and I think people uh my audience will find it interesting. Let's just f first talk about the title. Is there a reason that you chose cultural revolution as a um as a reference to what happened in China or is that just a more general um term?
>> Yeah, it's actually a almost a derivative or a secondary reference. And so obviously you have the the most famous cultural revolution uh in world history, the Chinese cultural revolution that was the the the namesake, the moniker that they chose, you know, in the 1960s. But at the same time, uh Marxist and neo-Marxist intellectuals in the west um saw what was happening in China and devised a strategy for replicating a cultural revolution with Western characteristics or in our case American characteristics. They were explicit about this. They said we need to have a cultural revolution in the west. These are the tech t tactics and techniques of cultural revolution that we can adapt and this is our primary political strategy. And so the reason it's America's cultural revolution rather than America's Marxist revolution or America's total revolution is that starting in the late 1960s early 1970s left-wing intellectuals realized that they couldn't have a traditional orthodox Marxist style revolution seizing control of the government seizing control of the means of uh industrial production seizing control of you know large agricultural facilities and they limited their ambitions to the domains and the transmission of culture and so in a sense it's a lowering of the left's ambitions but in another sense it's also where they've managed to be uh extraordinarily successful and so I delineate it as a cultural revolution um of course in its original sense referring to the Chinese cultural revolution but in the specific connotation that this is a western phenomenon it is the method of revolution that has found its its poem uh here in our country and this is you know the narrative or the story or the history uh that I'm telling.
>> Okay. So, let's go back to the beginning. Um you you put a lot of stock in March and um and and him as the father of critical theory which then gave birth to critical race theory which then gave birth to intersectionality and what people think of as wokeness today.
you're looking back at at the roots of this entire phenomenon and not taking it for granted and asking the question where the hell does this come from? How did how did it become such a powerful force in American culture? So, can you start where you start in the book and just give a a kind of short summary of who who Marus is and why he's important as the father of this whole movement in your eyes?
>> Yeah, Marusa was a a scholar of Marx and Hegel. um you know grew up in in Germany, fled Germany as Hitler was rising to power, came to the United States. Um he actually served in the US government office, the OSS doing some intelligence work and research. Um he was, you know, by all accounts and you can see this in his work, a brilliant uh scholar, that kind of oldw world scholarship where people had uh kind of a compendium, an encyclopedic knowledge of of Western philosophy. Um and he was after World War II uh disillusioned with life in the United States. Um had gone to various professorships around the country, finally settled at University of California, San Diego as someone in kind of late middle age or or or early late age rather. um and he became um you know he was one of the founders of critical theory as a discipline but he really became the the most prominent critical theorist in the United States and he was the critical theorist that was most actively engaged in partisan or or revolutionary politics and I think he's important for um intellectual reasons and also for practical reasons.
Intellectually he developed the theories of western Marxism, neo-Marxism that applied a kind of new vision of revolution to the west. The ideas that that he um uh kind of pioneered or he really explicated in intellectual form are still the key ideas for the left today. And in a practical sense, he had an enormous influence over academic life. Um his most famous graduate student was none other than Angela Davis uh who was then a mentor to uh the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement really their inspirational figure and Angela Davis of course also was uh responsible for generating the kind of proto theory of intersectionality. She was writing on women race and class uh in the 70s and 80s. Um these ideas were taken up very um uh very eagerly by the critical race theorists that uh translated it into a single you know Latinate term intersectionality. Um and and so you can see the transmission of ideas not just purely intellectually but actually personally. And so what I try to do in the book is is is not just uh expose the lineage of ideas in a dry abstract intellectual form but to actually put flesh and blood to these ideas to to show that these are the ideas of real people and time and space that there's a transmission um not just mimemetically but actually there is a hand-to-hand transmission of these ideas and these are relationships across generations that have shaped where we are today.
So I mean naively I would think as an immigrant coming to America after World War II, one of the um you know a period of American hegemony around the world, massive booming economy, uh what about that America did he see and dislike?
>> It's actually really interesting and and Marcusa arrived in America um an optimist about America. I mean for for some obvious reasons obviously it's a the country that took him in as he as he fled uh uh uh you know the Nazis who were rising to power in the 30s. Um but he describes even later in life um in an interview that I that I capture in the book where he says, "I remember coming to the United States and passing the Statue of Liberty and feeling like I had finally arrived in a a free country where I could do my intellectual work, where I could pursue my own ideas without fear of of repression, without fear of death, um that of course many feared in continental Europe. And that was um you know protected from the the the catastrophes of ideology in in Europe. And you know he served uh by all accounts uh you know uh productively um in in the war uh against uh the Nazis as a research scholar doing strategic work for the OSS. Um but he became disillusioned you know I think in some ways paradoxically after World War II in the moment of America's great uh triumph over the ideologies of Europe and those those those wars of Europe um and in the triumph of the American economy and and he was really horrified by the American economy. He thought that um uh the the rising standard of living, the contented middle class, the system of mass affluence in the United States um concealed, buried and really is squaltched um the very possibility of revolutionary consciousness. And he saw in American institutions a repressive system that that provided the substitute or the false consciousness of freedom and equality. um but actually uh foreclosed the very possibility of a Marxist or neo-Marxist revolution um this possibility of establishing a utopian society. Um and so he became disillusioned with the United States and concluded that um the situation was so hopeless that that he had to invest hope in uh disaffected uh white uh intellectuals within the universities and uh uh marginalized or and disaffected um African-American communities at the fringes uh at the lowest end of the socioeconomic ladder.
So he thought that the only hope for revolution was with was was with this new white black uh high low coalition of outsiders that could put pressure on the great American middle class that could go around the democratic structures and launder or or bring in this ideology um in an extra parliamentary fashion into American institutions.
>> Yeah. Interesting. So, you you also, you know, spend a good deal of time on the Weather Underground. Um, can you describe who they were and why they're an important uh an important um sort of example of the move from violent left-wing movements to nonviolent uh left-wing projects.
>> Absolutely. You know, Marcusa was a a teacher of uh and an inspiration to many members of the Weather Underground, which was a revolutionary organization that that that stemmed from the great uh uh student movements that thought that the student movements of the mid1 1960s uh were not going far enough in their demands for let's say color-blind equality, but that they needed to actually overthrow the deeper systems of the American government. And they thought, you know, for a time, naively in retrospect, that they could achieve revolution violently by overthrowing the state, by planting bombs in police headquarters, at the Pentagon, at the US capital, and that these spectacular acts of revolutionary violence would would would would cause a spontaneous mass uprising of the people against the state and they would come in as the vanguard of the Marxist revolution. And so uh that was the idea, that was the plan.
They actually took steps towards uh executing the plan. Um but but by the mid 1970s um they had done um everything in their power to disillusion almost everyone in society. And so uh everyone from of course the the the kind of conservative middle class to the op-ed page of the New York Times to even many um uh uh kind of members of the moderate or the center left. um they found themselves uh under siege. They found themselves isolated. They had really given up hope that the violent revolution could happen. Of course, this was the era of Richard Nixon um and and and his rise to power and his stunning re-election win in 1972.
And they devised with, you know, kind of in a parallel fashion to Marcusa and to other other left-wing intellectuals of the time an alternate strategy of um of bringing the revolutionary ideas from the fringes to the mainstream um by passing them through pre-existing institutions. They couldn't make a revolutionary society. Um they couldn't uh uh smash the status quo uh through violence. But what they could do as they lowered their ambitions was pass their ideologies through the universities, through the K- through2 education system, through the organs of mass media. And so that became by the mid1 1970s their new primary strategy. And what I document in the book is that this strategy for the large part actually worked. And the next 50 years from let's say 1971 1972 to 2020 2021 was this great uh and and sometimes invisible conquest um of ideology over the uh existing institutions.
>> Yeah, it's that's very interesting. I think it's um it's worth just lingering on you know what exactly is wrong if anything with with this philosophy. I mean, one thing I noticed is the left-wing radicals of that era had a terrible habit of admiring societies which were by every measure much worse than America's. So, you know, they admired China under Mao, they admired uh the Soviet Union in general and even under Stalin, they admired Cuba under Fidel Castro.
You know, in every case, these are societies that people were desperate to leave and and yet this was the ideal, right?
This was the ideal for them um for for all of these radical movements.
And there were just so many ideologic ideological rabbit holes that if you go down them, what you get on the other side is basically goologs and a police state.
And some people saw this at the time, but many just didn't. Now, part of that is because all of these are closed societies without real journalism. So, it's it's diffic it was difficult to understand just how bad Mauish China was when it was happening, right? Like you you couldn't just read the open up the New York Times and see that there was a great famine. It w we we know all that very clearly in retrospect, but a lot of it was just willful blindness after a certain point. What was it about these left-wing radicals that made them so consistently admire societies that that are are known to have been hell holes?
>> Yeah. I I mean you you captured the the precise dynamic and you know I opened the book with an anecdote um from Soulja Nitsson and Soulja Nitsson was speaking of all of all people to the ACL AFL CIO labor union uh in the United States and he recounted a story about Angela Davis and so Marcusa student Angela Davis um was involved in the uh Marin courthouse siege that left a number of people dead.
Uh she advocated for abolishing prisons a violent revolution uh against the American government. uh uh she was a you know member of the Communist Party USA would run for president later under that political party and you know she was after her aqu quiddle in the marine courthouse siege uh crime um she went on a tour a kind of victory tour to all of the satellite states uh of the Soviet Union and of course uh in Soviet Russia itself and while she was on one of these tours where she was lauded as the great hero as America's political prisoner as a champion of of of of intersection sectional freedom although not in that exact terminology. Um she was approached by a group of Czech dissident and the Czech dissident said Angela Davis you are um uh you were a political prisoner in your own country. You advocate for abolishing uh prisons and unjust uh imprisonment of dissident. We have many Czech dissident in Soviet goologs right now. Will you advocate on on their behalf and advocate for their freedom?
and she looks at him in ice cold and says, um, you know, they're criminals and they deserve what they get. You know, the Soviet state is never wrong.
>> Um, and and so I think that Soulja Nitsson used that story to expose the hypocrisy of this and that I think what it signifies in a deeper sense to answer your question is that is that what they were looking for uh was not uh whether these societies were just. So in other words, they were looking to see not if these societies realized the highest ends, a just system of governance. They were simply looking for were these societies where their shared ideology had attained power.
>> And they really stopped in their analysis at that point. Um and and and so what you see over and over is that even in the 80s and 90s, many of these figures were still justifying the the Chinese culture revolution, were still justifying uh the the kind of Russian communist revolution, were still justifying the third world Marxist Leninist regimes that were just as bloody, although on a smaller scale, in a more dispersed fashion. And I think you see that over and over. These left-wing regimes leave behind them a trail of bodies. Um a trail of destruction, a trail of illiteracy, a trail of despair, a trail of of practical failure.
But the belief in the ideology itself is so fervent um that no historical evidence uh can falsify it, can disprove it, um can can can guide people away from it. Um, and that's the the pattern that I saw amongst all of the the thinkers uh that I profiled in the book.
>> I mean, I think uh we'll get to the present soon, I guess, but that pattern showed up so clearly to me in the aftermath of 2020. Um, as I'm sure you know, 2020 represented the the single greatest year-over-year increase in the American homicide rate um, possibly in American history, but certainly in the last h 100red years, which is a an extraordinary fact. You know, that's just that was just a pew headline in like 2021, which is which I've given lots of attention on my podcast, but I don't see get very much attention outside of that. Um, so to have the single greatest one-year increase in in the homicide rate coincide with a a gigantic movement against the police, um, cities burning, uh, and all of the social upheaval that happened in people's in corporations, in universities during 2020, you know, to have that essentially memory hold by the activists who caused it, you know, instantly. I'm I'm amazed at at how there is just no reckoning or um internal reflection on the part of people that supported all of the movements uh you know, defund the police, BLM, etc., which caused that moment. There's just no reflection on wow, you know, I I wonder what it says that all the ideas I espoused in practice led to a huge increase in the homicide rate disproportionately borne by the black community.
>> I I mean I think that's right and and in a certain sense you can look at the slogan and then look at the results of of as the slogan becomes public policy.
And so if you had the slogan of 2020 was black lives matter, but I think that the slogan, you know, negates itself when you actually look at the evidence of, you know, homicide rates in in in black communities um in the wake of some of those policy changes and at least many of those cultural changes. And so this is a pattern that we see over and over.
And in fact, there's an analog in the in the in the 1970s that I document in the book where the Black Liberation Army, um, you know, which was a kind of prototype of the Black Lives Matter movement adopted the same kind of rhetoric, the same kind of strategies, uh, the same insistence on on on prison abolition, prison breaks, um, you know, community policing, ejecting the police from from, uh, uh, you know, low-income black communities in New York City and other places. Um, and they said in their literature, the Black Panther Party, which was the kind of original organization from which the BLA splintered, they said the number one recruiting mechanism for us is to cause conflicts with the police, highlight incidents and and in some case manufacture incidents of police brutality and then bring in people who are already predisposed towards violence and indoctrinate them with our left-wing politics. They they said this very clearly in interviews and pamphlets, etc. And what they started doing as they got more desperate in the mid1 1970s was actually just assassinating police officers in in New York, in Georgia, in other cities, they would find a police officer on the side of the road, you know, sitting in the cruiser and, you know, run up to their window and at point blank range, uh, execute them. And they would do things like um in one instance a grizzly incident in New York City. They executed the police officer, shot them in the genitals, shot them in the head, and then did a war dance over the corpse before fleeing. And what they discovered, you know, as as we could, you know, imagine is that this actually alienated the very people on whose behalf they claimed to be fighting. Um and so they found that these these communities where they said we are going to displace the police and we will become the law. Um but actually they became the mafia they were robbing, stealing, shaking down, holding hostages, you know, uh you know ruling through violence. Um they were rejected by the very community that they claimed to represent. And so this dynamic, this process we saw in really dramatic scale in the 1970s and then in you know in a relatively smaller scale in some ways uh or rather less dramatic maybe not smaller but certainly less dramatic scale in 2020.
>> Okay. So zooming out what is the exact relationship between Marxism as a theory and critical theory?
>> Yeah, great great question. And so I you know critical theory of course has a number of different uh scholars and intellectuals. So there's a range within critical theory. But if we take Marcusa as let's say the paradigmatic example of critical theory in the United States and as an established uh discipline um that branched out elsewhere. What I would say is that critical theory is uh Marxism that has gained self-consciousness and Marxism that has passed through a process of self-criticism.
And so Marusa realized um very early on that orthodox Marxism had no future in the west and more particularly had no future in the United States which again had a a strong um satisfied middle class um and that had been in his view uh satiated by false consciousness and material u abundance. And so critical theory um takes the basic Marxist ambition, the basic Marxist conception of human nature and the kind of directional force of Marxist politics and revolution, but seeks to recompose it and reconstitute it uh and adapt it to modern conditions and discard the pieces of Marxist ideology that were no longer relevant. And to Marcus's credit, he actually wrote a book in 1955 called Soviet Marxism that said that the Soviet that the Marxist dream had failed in the Soviet Union. It had descended into bureaucratic tyranny. And again to his credit, he wrote that in 1955 when many people were still believing in the dream. But what Mar what Marcusa then constructed and and is highly influential to the to to this day is a theory of Marxism passed through the experience of the mid- 20th century and oriented tactically towards success in the west and um let's say that is at the broadest level uh what critical theory is and then of course in the academic uh environment in the United States critical theory has splintered into a thousand different subd discciplines or has as a kind of methodology or an epistemology conquered existing disciplines. Um and and the basic you know thrust of it is that critical theory is what Marcusa called in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner the power of negative thinking the negative side of the dialectic the critique of all existing institutions and that's the spirit of it that I think is um now the default spirit in academia as a whole >> so it's interesting to me there is something circular about uh Maruza's point here Right? If his point is that originally Marxism meant that capitalism was inherently unstable, the working class just is by definition predictably going to rise up and overthrow the bourgeoa. It was more of a prediction than a than an ad admonition. It was, you know, Markx believed he was a scientist and he was predicting the cycle of uh of societies and that these the uprising was inevitable. simply couldn't be stopped. it was in the nature of capitalist exploitation that the people would get fed up and and so forth and and so you know someone like Marcusa comes to America and says well people seem a little bit too happy to violently overthrow the uh the government and they're kind of content with like you know going to the movies and you know going to a diner and getting a milkshake and um you know getting a move forward and and so forth.
So rather than that disproving Marxism, I'm going to say, well, they they must not really be happy. The happiness must be some kind of it must be some kind of paliotative like it must be some kind of false happiness.
And so I'm going to kind of reconstruct Marx Marxism to work in a scenario where the working class appears to be too happy to revolt but is in fact uh not happy. Is that sort of the the logic?
>> Yeah, that that's precisely the logic and that's that was his basic case um in the mid 1960s and then um accelerating into the late 1960s early 1970s. And um you know he he in a sense still believed in the dream um and was just uh simply trying to rebuild the inner workings of the theory and the machine of politics and the the theory of action to overcome it. And you know again Marcusa is not a kind of wildeyed reckless thinker. He's uh you know brilliant and has you know some deep insights that are tied to some tragic blind spots and tragic flaws in his thought. But you know he sought um revolution almost at any price which I think was his great downfall and he saw the possibility in 1968 for this revolution and he merely thought that you could change the revolutionary subject. As you mentioned the proletariat was quite happy in the United States. the proletariat has had actually gotten a pay bump. They had become the middle class.
>> And so he saw the only avenue for change as the as as as really the the same as the BLM coalition and the kind of modern radical left coalition on race and gender. Let's say you have you know the intelligencia at the top and then you have uh the lumpin proletariat at the bottom. And so, you know, let's say, you know, the Marxist idea of lump and proletariat, the kind of uh outermost class, the disaffected, the unemployed, um uh uh the the the ill-educated. And so, um you know, to to to a great degree, um you know, you can almost see in advance why this also would not work.
But he was trying to look at it pragmatically and to say, well, what do we actually have? What are the assets at our disposal? which assets can we deploy into the political system and and and for better for worse uh that's what he saw um and that's where he invested his hopes.
>> So you say he had brilliant insights what were those?
>> Yeah I I I mean I think that um you know he was to the greatest extent possible um a a critic um that that that saw the flaws of orthodox Marxism. He saw the flaws of the Soviet Union very early on.
Um, and I think that, you know, if you read his his his work, um, he saw some of the the the the kind of dark side of of the capitalist abundance. Um he he did I think touch on a very real uh problem which is that kind of mass affluence can lead to um a loss of uh consciousness, creativity, high culture.
Um you know he uh was an till till the end u um a kind of penetrating advocate for uh western high culture, western high philosophy. Um uh he he he was kind of of an aristocratic temperament in some ways related to art and aesthetics.
Um and and and he was a a serious scholar um let's say predating his more activist uh activist ventures. you know he was a serious scholar of Marx Kant Hegel uh and great minds and uh and and so I think that you know you can in some ways almost admire uh uh certain parts of his body of work certain uh insights that he was uh uh fighting for and and and even a certain spirit of of utopianism at at an advanced age which I think was enormously attractive to so many people uh in in the great uh uh appeal evils of the 1960s. And so you have these great images of of of student protesters in Europe and the United States carrying banners uh that that that said uh Marx, Mao, Marcusa and and they you know the three M's that was the kind of their belief and they thought that Marx was the the prophet of revolution. You know Marcusa provided the theoretical basis for revolution in our time and Mao was the great sword of revolution in the third world. And obviously to me this is horrifying. Um um but but I think that it's you know nonetheless it's incumbent upon us even critics of these ideas to try to understand why were they so attractive to people? What uh kind of power did they have and and and and why were they able to move societies in such a way um that is not simply uh mechanistic but actually moved people also in spirit.
>> Yeah. So if if I were to put my uh I don't know my my critical theory hat on and ask why is this so attractive to people the core of the explanation for me is that Marxism and critical critical theory um and you know critical race theory all of these seem to promise uh a a beautiful and utopian world where, you know, basically everyone is equal.
No one is, uh, no one has more than me, uh, or less than me. You know, I don't have to walk past homeless people on the street, but I also don't have to look up at Jeff Bezos and wonder why that has like yachts and I don't. Um, so it eliminates the unpleasant emotion of envy from uh my life, the unpre unpleasant sense of inferiority from my head, the unpleasant sense of pity and um perhaps survivors guilt, unearned privilege.
I, you know, I just copy paste my life right now with all of its abundance and and niceness and just delete all of these unpleasant emotions that I have.
And then a person comes to me and says read this book this is available you know heaven is real and um it it can be made on this earth if we follow uh the right path.
Now in some sense the appeal of that is so obvious it for many people it doesn't even need to be stated.
The problem is that it's just not in the cards. I think it's not in it's not on the menu for for creatures such as ourselves because of uh because of certain aspects of human nature which which prevent us as societies from um from achieving it. So I mean there there's one other way I think one really useful way of looking at it which is I can't remember who said this but uh they said everyone is a communist with their family a socialist with their friends and a capitalist with the world and that gets at something profound which is you know if you grew up in a in in a really good family you know if you didn't have a good childhood discount what I'm saying but if you did if you grew up in in a in a happy family a big family family where everyone shares, you know, everyone has a say.
This is uh there's a reason people go through such trouble to create such families because they're incredibly rewarding. To live in that way is is to experience a a kind of daily and deep pleasure that is very difficult to replicate in the outside world.
So the fantasy of living that way with the entire human race is uh you know it needs not needs not um doesn't need to be explained. It's it's it's self-evident.
And so the intellectuals that can come in with, you know, high verbal IQ and sell you a path towards that reality have been enormously successful throughout history. though they've been completely wrong in practice because they don't understand that I think they don't understand evolutionary psychology and human nature and the way in which those things prevent the very possibility of extending the family relationship to all of mankind.
Yeah, that that's that's quite quite beautifully put and and I think it was I I first heard that that idea that concept that heristic from Nasim Talb although I'm not sure if he's the one who originally said it but what I've also found interesting to to follow up on your point is that in fact in practice communist societies invert that relationship. So the idea the kind of happy ideal is communist at home, socialist in the immediate environment, your kind of primary institutions around you locally and then a capitalist for those great structures of society. So you have competition, you have merit, you have a kind of earned hierarchy and you have a let's say uh for lack of a better term a kind of more neutral oriented space that is operating on other systems rather than a kind of forced equality. Let's say for example, but in communist societies you actually get the opposite. Um you you you have um a very capitalistic interpretation of family life where they say that the father is exploiting the mother and the parents are exploiting the children and there has to actually be revolution within the family because the family itself is a system of oppression.
>> You have local communities that are then totally subordinated um to to the state.
So that eliminates that middle register altogether. And then at the highest sense, they're they're governed in a communist way, which is of course forced equality. Um the the attempt at the obliteration of hierarchy, the obliteration of inequalities. Um and and and the obliteration of any uh distinction in faculties and virtues uh as the founders uh might have said. And that of course is a a totally um um um unjust system in practice. So they've taken this beautiful kind of uh uh layered system of governance that recognizes that the problem of scale has to be handled with with some kind of differing approach and they end up turning it on its head that creates tyranny all the way down. And and that's really what we saw over and over in the 20th century. And I find it, you know, I found it frankly disgusting and off and and and and repulsive that all of these western intellectuals uh uh in the United States in the post-war environment particularly after the civil rights movement established you know kind of dour colorblind equality in law that they were looking to these Marxist Leninist regimes scattered across the third world um desperate places dysfunctional places um governed by by by by by an iron fist. Um um and they were looking there for inspiration. Um and and I find it that this is this process of moral inversion that you see over and over that that that for whatever reason they're they're they're blind to. And I think it's you know in part for the because of those ambitions or because of that that that promise that temptation that you described.
>> Okay. So, how important do you think the the collapse of the Soviet Union was in dis disillusioning American leftists?
And I I guess the the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late ' 80s, early 90s and also uh the death of Mao and the subsequent pivot in China's economy towards freer markets. Do you think that these things had an had an effect on on those same intellectuals in the left that had previously looked to such societies as as a model?
>> Yeah, I I think it had um an effect on the trappings uh and and the shell but not an effect on the actual substance and the content of of the ideology itself. And so yes, obviously after ' 89, uh, leftwing intellectuals in the United States were no longer saying that the Soviet Union was a superior system of governance. They were no longer uh it was kind of uncomfortable or maybe a little bit declass to say that chairman Mao's culture revolution might have gone too far, but it was actually great. So you didn't get those explicit arguments.
Um, but um but but at the same time, they didn't change their basic ideology.
The ideology of the left was fully developed and then frozen in time in 1968. Um, all of the BLM vocabulary, it's all either the direct language or the refreshed language of Angela Davis in 1968, for example.
>> Mhm.
>> And I actually think that the opposite is more true. I think that the fall of the Soviet Union was um was a kind of in some ways uh had negative consequences for the right. uh because you had this u this grave error on behalf of conservatives in the United States and in the west more broadly in which conservatives in the United States who had fought communism you know tooth and nail for multiple generations and won the fight finally um two two catastrophic things happened. One is that they adopted the yoke of their enemies uh ideology. Meaning that conservative uh thinking was a mirror image of Soviet Marxist thinking.
Meaning that whereas the Soviets were left-wing economic collectivists and materialists in that sense, the right had become and really devolved into a libertarian uh individualist materialist conception of politics. the kind of uh mirror image of one another um largely because of this dialectical conflict in the 20th century. But then at the same time the right had essentially let its guard down. The right said we won against communism. Communism has been forever uh discredited. Communism is a dead ideology that will never uh uh survive again. Now we are going to retreat into private life, retreat into economic life, and we are going to essentially give up the responsibility of governing our institutions in the absence of an external threat. Well, what did that do? Beginning in the '90s with the establishment of critical race theory, it's late ' 80s, early 90s where the discipline took off. You have essentially no opposition intellectually and no opposition institutionally as these ideologies then conquered department after department, institution after institution. And the right was uh you know making money, was you know retreating to the the country club lifestyle. Uh was was was was uh you know taking care of their families and their businesses and doing whatever. Um which of course in itself very good. um but had totally seated control of public institutions and institutions more broadly. And then all of a sudden people are waking up in 2020 and saying, "Wait, what happened? I thought we won. We we defeated communism and all of a sudden we have, you know, Marxist radicals that have reconstituted themselves and they have risen yet again." And so my view of the Cold War or rather the victory of the Cold War was a was an unintended um and and and kind of catastrophe uh in some sense.
>> Interesting. That's a very interesting theory. I mean, I I think there's kind of a another side to that.
There's a flip side to that, too, which is that during the Cold War, our efforts to suppress and harass uh you know, anyone who was a Marxist or a communist or, you know, people that weren't even communists, but you know, I mean, we're we're talking just after the the film Oppenheimer has been released.
So I think people who have seen that will need no reminder of how uh you know how insane and tyrannical and and unjust our covert system of suppressing you know free speech and free association with respect to Marxism was. I mean, you know, it's like someone like Martin Luther King's job was actually made much more difficult by Jed Garoover and uh the the sort of outsized paranoia that we had to fight every every you know wherever there's a tiny bit of smoke that there could be a communist well we should treat that person as if they are a spy and um you know use all the resources of the covert state to to sort of suppress that I mean to what extent was the the long march through the institutions by Marxism uh by Marxists sort of slowed down by the what many people would now recognize was was a kind of draconian um anti-communist FBI and and um and American state. I mean was it are there two sides to that coin? In other words, when that is lifted, yeah, the long march goes through, but um there's a lot of parts of that that people aren't proud of in retrospect.
>> Sure. Yeah. And look, obviously uh Hoover's FBI went beyond uh the law, went beyond the constitution in in many uh regards and is justifiably and correctly criticized. But I think that to a to another extent though uh kind of the the McCarthyism uh you know critique uh is is largely um uh exaggerated and is claimed to be unjust even in instances where it was quite just and claimed to be this massive repressive apparatus when actually I think the facts reveal that it was um rather small uh compared to the system of uh thought suppression and surveillance that we have today. I mean what we have today is is is something that Jed Garoover could have never dreamed of. Um the scope and scale and intensity of it is many orders of magnitude greater than the uh programs of the let's say the ' 50s60s and early '7s before they uh tailed off. And in many cases, uh, something that I go into in the in the book is that if you investigate the actual facts of this, um, you had the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, for example, two of the the the the the kind of stories that I tell in the book and the Weather Underground as this kind of, let's say, radical fringe group. I mean, they were plotting the violent overthrow of the United States. They were planting bombs in important government buildings.
They were executing police officers on the street. They were robbing banks, taking hostages, um, and and running propaganda campaigns to try to, um, uh, to try to pose an existential threat to the government, to the Constitution, uh, and to the American regime itself. And so, to me, that absolutely justifies, um, a strong intervention. Um and it's not you don't have a first amendment right um to assassinate police officers uh you know uh you don't have a first amendment right uh uh to to to you know to to to run bombing campaigns and during this period there were thousands of property bombings that were politically motivated. So you have to remember that this is a this is actually a live fear that the whole constitution could be overthrown. And so I I I think that the the kind of retrospective criticism is is is actually off base.
And even if you look at something like, oh, the McCarthy speech codes in California universities, that was a big point of contention. This is so unjust.
It's absolute repression. It's, you know, the worst thing that's ever happened to the point where now people say McCarthyism has a kind of one-word argument. Case closed. If it's McCarthyism in any form, it's a it's an automatic evil. But I actually went back and I read the the the so-called uh you know speech codes of of the McCarthy era in California's public universities. And it was actually uh you know quite quaint uh and I thought quite uh quite simple and and and in in some respects uh quite surprising. It was basically um I am not a member of the Communist Party and I will not uh work to violently overthrow the United States government. And remember these are public employment jobs. you are working for the state. And so to me it seems the height of reasonleness to say that if you are going to be working for the state employed by the state um and and and the theoretically working for the great public interest on behalf of the the the voters and the citizens and the taxpayers of our country or our state um the very minimum commitment is that you don't want to overthrow the United States government. Um and so if you compare the those speech uh uh requirements with the DEI speech requirements today um and you ask me which is more uh repressive to open thought which is more of a threat to uh uh kind of liberties and freedoms which is actually uh damaging intellectual life in the United States more it's hands down the modern DEI regime is much more repressive than uh you know the so-called kind of McCarthy speech code and public universities in the 1960s.
>> Though I would want to split the difference and say the the first commitment shouldn't have been on there, right? You shouldn't have had to avow that you weren't a communist. Although the the second one >> well it it's a good question but I think that it's reasonable because the the Communist Party USA um you know wanted to violently overthrow the United States government and was aligned with uh of course the Soviet Communists um who had had you who with whom we were in an an existential conflict u uh and and and so you know yes I think that one is more defensible than the other obviously just violently overthrown the United States government I think is defensible. Let's say it's a harder argument for for you know kind of membership in a political party. But I think that it is you know um if we even if we take it there I think that you could say um you know professing an allegiance to a political party that seeks to violently overthrow the American Constitution and the kind of DEI um style speech uh speech requirements of our modern regime. Um you know one of those is more reasonable than the other.
Okay. So, >> and again, this is not your private speech. I don't actually think you have a first amendment entitlement to to um to to to do whatever you want in a public institution. You can be a member of the Communist Party. I mean, you can run for president as Angela Davis did as a member of the Communist Party, but but it's simply to say that uh public institutions have uh a greater um uh must have greater scrutiny um and and can impose reasonable limits. um uh that that are in a sense unrelated to the first amendment. The first amendment of course protects the government rather protects the individual from an imposition uh of by the government. But in this case we're in a bizarre situation where where leftwing activists are involving the opposite. They're saying that the first amendment protects the government from limitation by the citizens meaning the democratic uh restrictions and prudent limits established uh through law. And so I think that public institutions have every right to establish prudent limits.
I mean you can't go into a kindergarten classroom and then you know preach communist ideology or Nazi ideology or whatever ideology you want. You're acting on behalf of the public trust.
The public can place reasonable limits on your conduct if you are in public employment. And so I think that it's not actually a violation of the first amendment to say that you can't seek to violently overthrow the government and use government jobs to to advocate as such. um while you are still of course protected to be a member of the Communist Party or to advocate a revolution under the first amendment in your private life.
>> Yeah. My feeling would be that um in practice the meaning of all you party memberships and values is so contested that in order to have a public job you shouldn't be made to disavow everything bad in the world. Like you know cuz where where does that end? Right? If I if in order to work at the post office or in the federal government, I have to write a list of all the things that I'm not. I'm not a member of the Nazi party, not a member of the Communist Party. I do not support Hamas. I do not support is like to me this kind of thing is is so um it's it's you know I think you and I would probably agree on anything down the line like we would all agree that those things are bad but I think the government should not ought not be in the business of you know um you know requiring me to disavow all the bad things in the world because you know often those what that means to me might might mean something different to someone else and I might be a member of the party for reasons that have nothing to do with its written aims and and so it's you know those kinds of requirements make me uncomfortable in principle right >> sure yeah and I and I think that in in a certain sense it's a moot point right because at at this point the kind of party membership question you know uh you can belong to whatever political party you want I don't think it makes much difference the the actual credential and practical politics our situation is quite different um but but so setting that aside which you know I agree it doesn't make sense uh in our in our in our country and our current politics there's a set of more interesting questions that are that are a big part of this debate now which is you know what are um reasonable restrictions and limitations uh to place on public employees. This is a question that's being debated in the Supreme Court. Uh uh you know, currently I'm actually a party to one of these uh one of these lawsuits that I think will eventually hit up to head up to the Supreme Court. But um this is an important question because my basic conviction and and what I've learned through basic experience is that >> all institutions will have values. they will be oriented towards some vision of the good. And my argument is that given that necessity and given the impossibility of of of institutional neutrality on questions of ends um you you must have a values frame framework. It can be explicit or implicit. Um but in a public institution the the values framework and then the means by which you seek to preserve, protect and and transmit those values has to be a political question deliberated by uh uh the elected representatives of the people. And so in order to maintain our basic social contract between the people and the government, um the people have to be able to shape the institutions of the government using the democratic process as it was intended and they should determine the values. And when the values of the in of the institutions of government are no longer reflect no longer reflect the values of the public, when the public um implicitly no longer consents to that form of government, they must be given an avenue by which to by which to uh reform that government, to restrain that government, to limit that government, and to reorient that government uh toward their vision of the common good or their vision of the highest good. Um, and if we do not have that, even under this I can kind of think wrongheaded myth of institutional neutrality, >> you're actually not creating a neutral space, but you're creating a space that becomes tyrannical because the state protects itself from from the influence of the public. And that to me is actually a much deeper threat um than than you know uh procedural norms uh that that that seem to be the favored uh defense mechanism of both liberals and conservatives in the United States today.
>> Yeah. I think this is such an interesting issue. I think at the heart of it is the fact that and this is something I've talked about a lot on this podcast. public school teachers in this country are far to the left of the median American, right? And I've I'm not recalling the exact stats. Maybe you have them, but they're they're I mean they're literally certain kinds of teachers or like health teachers or something where it's it's almost like 100 to one are Democrats as opposed to Republicans as opposed to the general population which is way closer to to a onetoone match. And so what you're finding is that, you know, we all pay our taxes and we fund the salaries and operation of public school systems and therefore have a what would seem to be a reasonable expectation that the values the the schools have would be somewhere close to in the ballpark of the values that parents have. But in practice, there is just this huge divergence. And that wouldn't really m like if if the post office is 10 to1 Democrats to Republicans, nobody gives a because their job is just to to send the mail. But if your job is to teach my child history, for example, and what seems objective to you, because you and everyone you know is is is liberal or or even to the left of that, what seems quote unquote neutral to you is going to tend to seem very, you know, extreme to the median parent. And I think that that is the crux that to me that's the crux of the issue.
And it's an it's an issue that I'm not sure to what extent American political philosophies prepared for such an issue.
And so it really scramles my own and many people's intuitions about what is the right approach to politics, you know, to classical liberalism. It's like how do you solve that kind of a problem?
I'm not sure it's a problem necessarily that someone like John Stewart Mill envisioned or could have envisioned.
>> Well, well, no. I actually think that that that the opposite. I I think John John Stewart Mill was was in in some very real sense part of the problem and and set in motion some of the ideas that have uh that have us now arriving in this predicament. And um you know I think if you look at at at Mill I think you also get this sense where Mill's ideas uh let's say broadly speaking are are are adopted as as as as ends by many American so-called classical liberals or right liberals left liberals but but even to Mill these were not ends these were means and and Mills ends were were were were quite uh you know progressive in nature. I mean he really uh desired a a in his own iosyncratic way um a kind of crushing of existing manners and mores and what he saw as restrictive cultural practices. And so his method for achieving that were some of the have now evolved into some of those kind of phrases that we have today. We could say academic freedom uh we could say you know institutional neutrality are very million uh notions. But I think that we've forgotten um what what what the actual out out objective of of mill was and and why those serve that objective and we're discovering that very much today. And so I would actually say that we need less mill and more lock. Um and because lock would teach us that that uh that ultimately um if the people do not consent uh to the to the rule of their government, let's say in this case if the parents do not consent to the ideology being imposed on their children by the state. um you have a fundamental political problem that ideally is resolved through the reform of the government through the democratic process where you can regain the consent of the governed. Um and and and I agree with you though that we're in this very interesting dance where the kind of classical right liberal notions um uh are sometimes adopted by the left and vice versa. um because we're in this interesting moment where I think people are starting to reevaluate some of these priors and and I think that it's the the and and it's a misnomer. It's not classical liberal by any means, but the so-called classical liberal uh ideal is is uh failing in many of our institutions and has people uh from all perspectives now starting to question them once again.
>> Yes. So, I mean, I generally identify with John Stewart Mill quite a bit, but I I I fully see your point here. And so, like, here's an example. My friend has um my friend has three kids uh in in the Westchester area and they go to public school. And uh you know, they're they're a mixed race family. and he um he took home his kid's lesson from school. This is probably his kid is probably I don't know 9 years old. And they have a class about culture, right?
They're learning the concept of culture today in social studies or whatever it is. And they've got something like a 30 or 40 page kind of like slideshow about what culture is, right? This is a very broad basic important concept.
So, I see like starting on page three, they have a slide about black hairstyles, right? Um, you know, some people wear their hair like this. You know, I myself used to have an afro and what this means in black culture. I go, "Oh, great. That's that's a great thing to have one slide devoted to, a great example of how different cultures wear their hairs differently and what that would mean." And then page four is also a black about black hairstyles. And then page five is also about black hairstyles. And then page six is also about black hairstyles. And then page seven, and you see where I'm going with this. The problem in this case was not at all the the choice of subject, but it was the the air time you were going to give to the subject. Amongst all the world's cultures, if you're going to introduce a small human being to the very concept of culture, you cannot give the hairstyles of one particular culture 20 out of the 40 pages, right? That can't be the whole lesson. But how do you how do you legislate that or or or or um like you can't legislate that. It'd be ridiculous. you. Oh, well, black hairstyles must only take up no more than two of like this is impossible. The only way that that is mediated is through the culture of the school itself, right? If the culture of the school itself is steeped in >> this this idea, >> no matter what the no matter what the written norms are, there's going to there's so much wiggle room that and into that wiggle room is going to be inserted the culture of the institution which is determined by who the people are, what their beliefs are um and so forth. That's that's a problem that like how do how do you solve that problem? I guess you in in principle you go to your PTA meeting and say 20 pages on black hairstyles. Are you kidding me? That should it's a fine topic. It should have it should it should be in proportion. Like I want them to learn about Tibet and India and and Europe and you know and Rome and whatever.
Um >> but again if you do that >> Irish hairstyles there should be a page on Irish hairstyles.
>> Exactly. Um but it but I guess it does I mean the reason I give this example is because it's it's such a clear case in which um I'm not sure that I could vote to change this. I could go to my PTA >> meeting nor would that be advisable.
>> Yeah. I I in theory I could go to my PTA meeting unless I'm afraid that someone's going to fail me and put me on Twitter and something's going to come out my mouth wrong and then my job, you know, I'm going to lose my job.
>> Um so how does one solve that problem?
um you know visav the norm of like academic freedom and institutional neutrality. I'm not sure there is a solution from that philosophy, right?
>> Sure. Yeah. And and and and you know it's it's a good question and a fun example. And so there there really two ways to tackle these questions. The first is legislation. So, you know, state legislatures and then in a smaller way kind of school boards, policymaking institutions can can can promulgate and and codify general principles, right? I mean, a state legislature should not be uh determining the page length of the black hairstyles curriculum. That would be ridiculous uh misuse of time. But a state legislature state legislature can have basic curricular standards and the board of education can can codify them through rulemaking process and through basic standards. Okay, great. None of that would would would tackle the black hairstyles uh dilemma in Westchester County. And so the best way of handling that is exactly what you're saying. It's a question of institutional culture. So the leader of the school, the selection of the curriculum, the the teachers who actually implement the curriculum in the classroom, the parents who participate and provide feedback to the school, that has to be a much more organic process and the consent has to be earned in a much more human way. And so, you know, your friend might say, "Hey, this is great. You know, we all love, you know, the various hairstyles here, but >> have you thought of maybe including X, Y, and Z and rebalancing this?" And so, that to me would be the most appropriate way of doing it. And then, you know, hiring the right people is actually the most underrated form of governance. And so, you want to hire the right people that have the same kind of attitudes, priorities, um, uh, um, the same kind of decision-m process that you would hope they would have. um that that would would recognize that and actually preemptively solve that problem. And so this to me strikes me as something reasonable. Um and and and in the case of something that's more aggressive like a kind of let's say a white privilege exercise in which students are segregated by race and your friends kids would very awkwardly say, "Well, which directions do I go? Do I go with these people or those people?" um something that that that I think is actually harmful to kids and antithetical to um the the basic values of education. you would have a more forceful response at that administrative level, teacher level, schoolboard level, and then ultimately what I think is the best solution to these questions is to do now what we've accomplished in in I think uh six or seven states is to provide all parents with the option to exit a fundamental right to exit the public schools and to let them take their education dollars, you know, $7,000 a year per child to any institution of their choice. And so you can either voice uh opposition and try to reform the institution from within to regain that that basic consent or you can exit and enter an institution uh privately with that uh uh with that funding or with that scholarship essentially provided by the state um so that you can have a a private uh consent within civil society between parent and and and children and the educational institution of your choice. That to me is the kind of decentralization or or subsidiarity of decision-m that would yield uh you know even in a utilitarian sense the most happiness for the most people and I think actually would would also conform to this sense of the the highest good people could pursue their vision of the highest good both through the political process but also through civil society.
M one of the most frustrating aspects of the CRT debate was that it it basically said, you know, one side was saying we don't want CRT being taught in schools. CRT is bad, and the other side would say, well, CRT, I'm not going to say whether CRT is good or bad, but it's just straight up it's not taught in schools. It's not like you are hallucinating, in other words.
and and and and this was very frustrating because it was, you know, as many culture war debates are, just a kind of almost willful talking past one another and and and so forth because clearly no one is saying really I don't think anyone meant for instance on your on your side of the bait your side of the debate that what was being taught was literally you know the academies that you and I read when we are reading critical race theory compendiums full of massive jargon and you know the the 20 20page law reviewview papers by Kimberly Cruncher. So if that if that is your narrow definition of critical race theory then yes you're right critical race theory is not being taught in to 5-year-olds.
But what is being taught is more of the sort of anti-racist baby. And I'm referencing um Ibram Kendy's book Anti-Racist Baby, which you know, the philosophy of which is just a very watered down form of critical race theory, right? And and so you know, your >> I think you played a big role in in branding the public debate.
>> Um and people really caught on to your language of calling it critical race theory.
But the the flip side of that was that it gave the other side a way of just saying of of kind of weasling out of the conversation by simply saying, well, actually technically the dictionary definition of critical race theory is not being taught in public schools. Um, and that was just a very frustrating aspect of the debate as a as a as an observer and participant.
>> Yeah, I agree. I agree. And uh it it was frustrating to me at the time, but actually um that turned out to be the left uh you know generally and then the critical race theorists in in particular. Um big mistake during that debate and uh we were able to shift public opinion um you know 2:1. We were able to win over u you know pretty much all of the the major demographic categories opposing critical race theory. We were able to define critical race theory accurately uh in my view but also we were able to define it uh politically in in the public discourse and this strategy of evasion hiding language games while it was frustrating for me at the time actually backfired on them. And a paper just came out from some social scientists at UCLA and other institutions where they looked at the critical race theory debate. And their conclusion empirically was that conservatives won this debate by asymmetrically activating their opponents and or activating their supporters rather and demoralizing their opponents. So conservative voters were highly motivated by by critical race theory. Conservative legislators uh uh responded to that with with passing legislation in 22 states.
um it turned into a huge issue um both electorally but also as a matter of policy. Um uh we were able to to drive home the concept and and win over the majorities while at the same time the left's response which was obiscation um not only failed to activate their people to defend CRT but actually demoralize them demotivated them even in the in an electoral sense and and and even Kimberly Krenshaw herself conceded this point. I think a number of years after, it might have been last year, she was at a at a at a kind of critical race theory summer school, which was trying to mount a defense, a belated defense of critical race theory. Um and and she said that that that her allies in a sense abandoned her and critical race theory by denying its existence by obiscating by trying to hide the ball >> that that she felt like the left didn't defend critical race theory on the merits and consequently the right was able to uh to to define it and to destroy it in the public imagination.
No, I mean I think that's >> and so I I I think that you know that that in in the end that that kind of verbal sophistry uh failed to actually uh win political >> right. I mean I think I I've noticed in my life a telltale sign of of sort of you know a bad argument is if you say X is bad and then your opponent says well actually X doesn't exist or X is not happening. So rather than say actually you're wrong, X is here and it's good. Often a short step away from them acknowledging that X is bad is to first deny that it's happening.
>> Um >> that's right.
>> So I mean this leads to a a question another question which is that do you think that CRT and wokeness in general has peaked? because it it seems like you know as you say it's been in the on a long march since the '7s and on a kind of quicker expansion since say like 2013 2014 in the media and so forth and it you know it erupted in an orgy of violence and social tension in 2020 and you know bit in 2021.
Do you think it has come down since then? Do you think it's reached a kind of local peak and it's likely to continue to abate? How do you feel about that?
Yeah, I mean certainly I think that it has it has obviously for all of us who observe it uh you know come down a bit from the high of 2020 um ideologically, intellectually as a matter of discourse um to the point where you know the the the you know the New York Times recently published an op-ed written by me advocating for abolishing DEI departments and public universities.
something that would not have been possible given the limits of discourse in 2020 or 2021. And so there is a bit of a of a kind of reemergence of the center left uh trying to reassert its uh position within their own coalition. I think also the right has been able to capitalize successfully especially on the CRT debate, putting the left on the defensive um uh shifting public sentiment and then of course BLM and as an institution is in total shambles. the the leaders have, you know, kind of looted the organization and then decamped to their mansions. Um, and and and it's certainly a a a for the time being a spent political force. It's spent all of its uh political capital and and so superficially the argument is well, you know, wokeness has peaked and is now receding. We return we revert to the mean. I I don't think that is true either. I actually think what's happening though institutionally is that all the same people who were gung-ho, you know, in in 2020, you know, pushing all this stuff, they still all have the same jobs. Actually, they have probably more DEI jobs and ideological jobs than the past. Um, they're still in a dominant position in the universities, for example. And while they may be embarrassed to say some of the same things publicly um rightfully um I think what we're seeing is actually a consolidation of wokeness within the institutions not a retrenchment not an absolute decline and and so um this is a perilous moment for those of us on the political right that are trying to make progress because it's maybe receded in intensity intensity ideologically um but I think it's actually consolidated even if there's a slight push back uh institutionally um at that position. And so we we have to defeat these things not just intellectually or not just as a matter of public opinion or public discourse but we have to actually defeat these uh the these things institutionally which is a much more difficult challenge and something that I'm um you know really hoping to work on in a more significant way um in the coming years.
It seems from what I hear though you are really, you know, as much as anyone the face of opposition to all of the critical race theorists, critical theorists and so forth, that you have a um a not so subtle admiration for their ability to change institutions. Is that right?
>> Of course. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, you you know, you have to you have to give your your enemies, uh, uh, uh, uh, credit. Well, you don't you don't have to give them credit. You have to at least recognize their strengths.
>> Um, and you have to also essenti learn from your your enemies or your opponents. Um, they can be a great teacher, uh, both positive and negative examples. Um, and and then of course, um, there's a reason why they've been able to do what they've done so successfully. And so I think it's important to uh to understand that. And I think there's also this this important rule that I'm more and more um attuned to which is you also have to choose your enemies wisely. Um because your enemies leave an imprint on you. Your enemies actually dialectically um uh in some ways define who you are. And so you have to be very careful and very deliberate in how you see conflict, how you seek conflict, how you avoid conflict, how you conduct yourself in in political conflict. Um and and and so you need also to choose get a worthy adversaries.
Uh you know, you can't choose trivial adversaries. You become trivial uh by reflection. and and I I I think that that is um something I've spent a little bit more time thinking about in in in the last year or two.
>> Okay. Well, Chris, this was very interesting conversation. There is a lot just a lot of meaty material, interesting historical and current material in your book that we didn't get to. So, I encourage people to get the book. It's called America's Cultural Revolution. Um it is uh it is just you know in a way a different but similar uh thematically similar side of of the Chris Rufo to what you may have known in the past. So I really encourage people to get it and um and I you know I I assume everyone listening to this knows where to find you online and so forth. So, I don't really have to ask you to do that, but um it's really been a pleasure and uh I I hope I hope that you know this process of promoting this book is interesting for you.
>> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I I appreciate the time and I'm very much looking forward to to reading your book when it comes out in in February and I think it will be part of this great conversation that all of us are having from I think you know sympathies but also slightly different angles on this on these issues. And so, um, I look forward to yours as well.
>> Today's episode is all about Greenland.
I remember the first time I thought about Greenland. I was a kid and someone told me that Greenland was actually full of ice and Iceland was actually full of green. And I thought that was funny.
That was also, as it happens, the last time I thought about Greenland, that is until the president of the United States decided that we were going to buy it or take it by force.
If you're like me, you did not know anything about Greenland until very recently. And now, suddenly, the largest island in the world is in the news every day. But don't worry if you haven't been paying close attention. Today's guest will catch you up on all the context you need to know to understand the basic contours of this issue. Heather Connley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where she focuses on transatlantic security and geopolitics in Europe, Eurasia, and relevant for this conversation, the Arctic. In this episode, we talk about what Greenland is politically, why it matters, how it intersects with Trump's threats to leave NATO, what China and Russia have to do with Greenland, what's going on in Trump's head, and much more.
We've all been thinking about Greenland more than we ever have. Uh, as as Americans, I think it's I speak for all of us when I say I have thought more about Greenland in the past 6 months than I have ever even heard the word said in the first 29 years of my life.
So, this is an area where I imagine most Americans have close to zero context on why the issue matters, what Greenland even is. Uh, and so I want to just start before we get into the Trump administration's pronouncements and Bellico statements and and goals and so forth. I want to give the typical uh American or broadly western audience member some background on on Greenland. You can go as far back or as start as recently as you think is is relevant. What actually is Greenland as a political entity and how did it come to obtain its modern political status?
>> Well, a great question. I feel like this is Greenland 101. So, let's go let's go back a little bit. Actually, let's go back to 1867. And that is when uh the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire. And at that time, President Johnson contemplated um purchasing Greenland. uh they decided not to do that. They took a lot of flak at the time for the purchase of Alaska.
And then um in 1916 1917 um the United States purchased from the Kingdom of Denmark um what was known as the de the Danish West Indies which is currently the US Virgin Islands. So the United States purchased that and at the time in 1917 reaffirmed that Greenland was part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Now, fast forward World War II, Greenland, uh the first the the Roosevelt administration and then the Truman administration were very concerned that during the Second World War there, you know, certainly could have been a plausible scenario when um the Nazis occupied Denmark that they could possibly try to seize Greenland. And because it was such an important area to manage the critical sea lanes of the North Atlantic, um in 1946, the Trimman administration very quietly, very privately offered to buy Greenland. And it was very quietly said, "No, thank you." The Kingdom of Denmark said, "No, we're not willing to sell it." And then from that point, uh 3 years later, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in 1949, NATO.
And in some ways that really removed the need to uh acquire Greenland because the Kingdom of Denmark uh and Greenland as part of the Kingdom of Denmark became part of NATO. And then two years later in 1951 um the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark signed a really important um defense bilateral defense agreement which pretty much allowed the United States to do what it wanted to do uh militarily in Greenland. So at that time and then as the cold war was really um uh beginning, the United States opened numerous uh military installations um and uh we had a very cooperative relationship with Greenland with the Kingdom of Denmark. It was not easy. Um one of our aircraft uh uh lost some nuclear bombs on Greenland they had to find in the 1960s. So it was a very impactful relationship but it always served us very well. So NATO was at the foundation and then our bilateral defense agreement was really what allowed the United States to to exercise great military um posture on Greenland.
Now the history of Greenland uh yes uh it has been part of the Kingdom of Denmark for centuries but in 1979 the Kingdom of Denmark created um uh established home rule government meaning that the Greenlanders could begin to make some decisions for themselves. And then in 2009 um uh the Greenlandic government uh was able to make decisions for their economic relations but uh Denmark uh has ultimate responsibility for uh foreign policy, national security. So it's been uh a relationship between Copenhagen, Denmark and and Greenland has been one of devolution of powers back to the local authorities. Um, and it's always been an area of strong security, defense, and economic cooperation between the United States and Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark. Is that okay for Greenland 101? We can unpack that a little bit. It's a lot. It's a lot.
>> That was very good. Uh, just two follow-up questions. One is just explain why Greenland is actually strategic. Um, why does it matter so much? Why is it a strategic piece of land geopolitically?
>> So, it's helpful for listeners to grab a map because it's always hard to do this without a map. Um, but um so Greenland occupies a very strategic part of uh of land uh in the North Atlantic and obviously uh from the North Atlantic to the Arctic region. Um so certainly um in as I mentioned during the World War II it was very important for us to you know to be able to control and militarily uh support Greenland to keep these sea lanes open so US forces and equipment could uh could go could go to Europe to continue to supply US forces to fight the second world war during the cold war. The Arctic also became very important as as the Eisenhower administration created the distant early warning line that called the DU line.
And basically it's the arc of the Arctic region. Um it's where you know we protect North America from uh for Soviet Russian missiles. And so uh that is why today uh on the northwest coast of Greenland, the United States has its most northernly military base, the Bedufix Space Base and that is where we have an early warning radar that helps to detect uh those missiles. Greenland also plays a very important role in detecting Russian nuclear submarines. Um and uh there's a famous uh Greenland, Iceland, United Kingdom gap, the GIUK gap. And that was the gap is where if not detected with anti-ubmarine um aircraft and things like that, Russian submarines could slip through and potentially threaten, you know, the east coast, the United States. So during the Cold War, it was very important to um you know, sort of think Hunt for Red October to make sure that we could detect and deter those submarines. Now fast forward to today. Um Greenland remains very important to again as a as a location for missile defense um for North America. It remains very important for the exact same reason of detecting uh increased maritime vessels. They could be cargo ships, commercial ships.
They could be shadow oil tankers. They could be um scientific vessels to be able to detect and make sure we have an awareness of uh the ships that are in the Arctic. We're seeing an increase particularly for Russia. uh they're increasing their military posture uh along the Russian Arctic, building new bases that again if you have a map uh are closer to Greenland, closer to the United States and we are seeing an increase in Chinese particularly scientific research vessels and as well as container vessels um uh you know in the Arctic region. So uh this is really a moment uh to understand our history.
Greenland has always been important to the protection of North America and to the North Atlantic region. Um, and we know with as the uh Arctic uh continues to transform environmentally, it's opening up new economic opportunities, new maritime passages, new critical minerals opportunity that we need to be more persistently present in the region to monitor, to detect, to deter, and ultimately to defend. But nowhere Coleman in that is that we need to own Greenland. We have all the tools we need uh with our Arctic allies and all of the Arctic uh countries minus Russia of course are now part of NATO when Sweden and Finland joined. So we have this great Arctic alliance that needs to do more and strengthen more. But right now our position on acquiring Greenland is now antagonizing uh those very important allies. In fact, those allies now are are preparing themselves to to defend against the United States.
>> So, I'll ask you in a moment why we're antagonizing our allies in this way. And obviously, we as a country aren't doing it. Trump is doing it. But, um, before we get to that, I want to understand the relationship between the people who live in Greenland and Denmark. So, one analogy for Americans might be Puerto Rico, which has a degree of home rule, is ultimately governed by uh by Congress and by the president, but but de facto has quite a bit of independence in terms of its local laws. Um, Puerto Ricans are American citizens ultimately, but uh they aren't the 51st state, so there's something and and that has been to a large degree by the consent of the people that live on the island. That they'd rather be a so-called commonwealth than either be a state or be an independent country on the other hand. Is that analogous to what Greenland is? And how does the population of Greenland relate to the I to their own identity as as a as kind of a entity? Yeah, I think I think I think the analogy of Puerto Rico it works. Um certainly uh because uh the Kingdom of Denmark provides upwards of $700 million of subsidies uh annually for those approximately 56 57,000 uh Greenlanders uh on Greenland um health care, education, social. So they they pay an enormous amount of subsidies to support the Greenlandic population in addition to providing defense, law enforcement, all of that. But the Greenlanders do um you know get to decide uh economically what uh is in their best interest. Now as I mentioned, the Kingdom of Denmark still retains decisions over foreign policy and national security. So I'll give you an example. In 2018, uh there was Chinese firms that were interested in building airport infrastructure in Greenland. And uh now this was something again it's an economic investment under their devolved relationship certainly the Greenlandic authorities could make that decision but because it was China because of the national security dimensions of that actually Copenhagen weighed in with a lot of conversations with uh the United States and said no we do not want China uh to make infrastructure investments uh in Greenland. So Denmark uh stopped those procedures, those tenders and actually made the investments in some of the airport uh activities. So there's always a little tension between the economic decisions and of course as we know with economic security so much of it is national security. So before President Trump and again this began in 2019 in the first term began to make very strong signaling about uh acquiring owning Greenland. You know there were a lot of tensions between the capital of Greenland nuke and the capital of Denmark Copenhagen. um you know in in many ways the their both their home rule uh government does allow for at some point the Greenlandic people to make a decision about whether they want to be independent from Denmark. The challenge for the Greenlandic population is they haven't found the alternative for the subsidies the 700 million annually because their economy is fairly small.
Um, so if you remember the Scottish referendum from uh, you know, 2014, that's always the challenge. How do you find the economic viability after you declare independence? Um, and so this there were some tensions certainly uh, and frustrations both sides, but ever since President Trump has been focused on on acquisition, my goodness, we have done more to unify the Greandic people and the Danish government together than I've seen in in my professional experience. and I was part of a negotiating team when we upgraded our uh early warning radar on Paduig base in 2004. It was a it was a scratchy tenuous relationship and now we they are completely unified to protect and unify themselves against the United States.
>> Yeah, it's it's really an amazing own goal that Trump has achieved here. You know, all made all the more absurd and ridiculous when you consider as you mentioned the population of Greenland.
talking about like 50,000 people, which is the same roughly the same population as the suburb I grew up in in North Jersey. So, it's not that many people.
You could imagine an alternative strategy where say we all agreed that America wants closer ties and and even more rights than we already have in Greenland. You could basically try to have a quiet town hall meeting with pretty much all of Greenland and make the case to them, right? I mean, you can imagine all kinds of gentle outreach um and and just like the soft glove of diplomacy rather than the hard fist of whatever Trump is doing, especially given that there's like three people living there. And if you know, if you convince a critical mass, we could get a lot of good outcomes. But it's it's a very strange thing that's been happening.
>> Yeah. I mean you're you're absolutely right. Um the frustrating part is for the last year um the Danish and Greenlandic governments have been saying look we are very open to uh the United States increasing its military posture um on Greenland. We're we are extremely enthusiastic to welcome more economic engagement like critical minerals uh development. Um, so as the the Danish and Greenlandic government said, not for sale, open for business. We want more America. And so that was on offer the whole time, just not ownership. The Greenlandic people do not want to swap, you know, one um power, Denmark, for the United States. They seek independence for themselves. Um, and so I'm not even sure even if it was quiet like again sort of what what President Truman did in 1946, a real quiet under the table offer. I think it's it's a misreading.
The Greenlandic people as they move towards independence are thinking about it. They want to do it on their own terms and it is for them to decide. But our soft power unfortunately at least last summer had a bit of more covert activity. In fact, the Danish government um called in the uh US uh Charge DeFair, the interim ambassador um this summer and highlighted that they were seeing evidence of you know US influence operatives in Greenandic communities trying to sort of get support for uh you know acquiring being acquired by the United States. That's not how allies should work. If the if you go with an offer and the ally says no thank you, then you find a way to enhance collaboration. That door has always been open. President Trump just uh does not want to go through it. And as he said just this morning, there is no going back. But boy, this road ahead, if he's not going to go back, is going to be fraught and very painful and difficult.
>> So to what degree have Russia and China tried to gain a foothold in Greenland?
What has that actually looked like? What are their aims and how serious a threat is that?
>> Well, isn't it? There are there are real concerns about Russia and China's uh military and economic presence in the Arctic. Um we just aren't seeing well, let me begin. We aren't seeing an enormous amount of Chinese presence. As I mentioned in 2018, we did see sort of the the polar silk road or you know the the the Arctic uh version of Bel and Road uh initiative. There were some strong interest in the Chinese becoming um more involved in infrastructure even in mining projects, critical minerals in Greenland. Um but again, this is where good diplomacy, American diplomacy, uh Danish Danish diplomacy diverted that.
What we see right now near and around Greenland has been Chinese um scientific research vessels, ice breakers. Um, and what concerns me the most about that honestly is part of the um their research is they are using manned submersibles and they're doing a lot of science and I'm going to put that in quotes science um along the seabed floor uh particularly along areas that have some question marks about uh the extension of outer continental shells.
But it's mostly coming in science. And we're seeing an uptick um in Chinese container vessels that are testing out these new polar routes. The northern sea route which goes through the Russian Arctic and then what we the transpolar route which actually goes up and over uh uh the North Pole or the central Arctic.
So China's presence in and around Greenland has been fairly muted. It's mostly science and economic. As we know with any Chinese presence you are getting what we call dual use. You are getting military applications with uh their um civilian applications. Russia as I mentioned is a much more uh significant presence uh in the North Atlantic submarine activity um intelligence ships. Uh we are certainly seeing um you know intelligence and hybrid use of shadow tankers. Um certainly the our British colleagues have been picking up much more activity uh military uh naval exercises and as I mentioned uh they're certainly building and modernizing their military footprint in their very far north fron Ysef land Alexanderland. Um, we're also seeing just because again, um, of of the shortening of distances that the Arctic represents, the Russians do test most of their hypersonic uh, their their, um, missile new missile capabilities, their new underwater capabilities from the Arctic. And of course, Russia's uh, nuclear submarine fleet is based in the Arctic. This is the part, Coleman, that I have to say, I have to scratch my head. the the intensification that we're seeing of both Russia and China exercising together, air exercises, naval exercises, isn't happening in the North Atlantic Arctic. It's actually happening near Alaska. It's happening in the North Pacific Arctic. And that's because we're seeing a lot of Chinese um LG carriers. They're going up to get Russian um Arctic LG from the Yamal Peninsula and coming back through the narrow bearing straits uh near Alaska.
We've been in detecting just this summer there were for the first time ever five Chinese scientific uh research vessels I'm going to put that in quotes again because it's not all science uh appearing in um the the buffer chaki the bearing sea and this is where honestly the United States needs to take a lot more attention to the North Pacific Arctic making sure that we can protect the Alaskan uh maritime uh domain um certainly The Russians have been testing our our air sovereignty near and around Alaska. So we have two Arctics for the North America, the North Pacific Arctic, the North Atlantic Arctic and all this focus on Greenland, which is important and it remains important. I actually think we need to take care a little bit of business uh right now in the North Pacific and make sure we can detect SC China and Russian activities uh near and around Alaska.
So, as with many features of the Trump presidency's um both terms, reality in increasingly mirrors, uh entertainment and obviously Trump was successful on The Apprentice. He has, I think, an instinct for drawing eyeballs most of all um by his statements and by his actions. And there is, you know, more than anything in in this term, the pronouncements about Greenland have had the character of sort of watching a TV show because everything else seems at least potentially real, right? I mean, we've seen he Iran bombing the nuclear facilities in Iran u was an immensely serious matter. It never really felt like a joke, although not everyone expected him to do it. Uh likewise Venezuela, very serious matters there.
Like the notion of invading Greenland seems like um it it just sounds like a joke. It's it's hard to take it seriously. And uh the perpetual question with Trump is does he mean it? And I think he likes for people to be asking whether he means it. I think this is part of his this is part of his mo. Um, and at this moment he's operating at a moment of of very high leverage because he's now done several things which even some of his supporters did not predict he would do.
He's done he's followed through on certain promises that many people thought were all talk from tariffs on the entire world to bombing Iran to extracting Madura from Venezuela and so forth. So he's at a moment where it's, you know, no one any longer wants to say, okay, that's Trump just talking because we've seen too many examples where the just talking becomes a policy.
And yet he can't really mean invading Greenland, right?
So I think we have to take the president very very seriously and I think there's a little bit of a throughine um uh even you know the Venezuela op operation you know the president certainly cited many times that he sought uh to topple uh Maduro in the first term uh and we saw that that played out in actuality in the second term this this Greenland acquisition came from the first term and again we're starting to see the manifestations of that. As I mentioned, the summertime, the highlighting of potentially covert activity, US covert activity in Greenland, at least the the the Danish government felt that that was there was evidence to to support that.
And then I think exactly as you said, because the president in the LA in his first year of office and the second term has not hesitated to use military strikes to achieve his um his goals. So I I think we have to take them seriously. Europe is taking it very seriously. Exactly as you said because of the potential, you know, the Iran strikes last year, the Maduro seize operation, they take this very very seriously. Um but you're right. I and I have to say this is where my own professional experience and imagination.
I cannot imagine a scenario where the US places forces on Greenland and potentially could come into contact with Danish forces protecting Greenland. This is uh this is extraordinary and this is why the Danish prime minister has said you know the day this happens NATO stops. This is why and and obviously the European reaction we are seeing and I think we just take a pause for a hot second on this. You've seen Europeans over the last year sort of roll with these punches. Um, liberation day and tariffs, they have always they they've dedicated themselves to not freaking out to finding a way forward, have dialogue, get to a better outcome. And this is where they're not doing that anymore.
You are now hearing, you're hearing this in Davos. We're just going to hear the it's not the World Economic Forum, it's the World Greenland form. You are just hearing leader after leader saying enough. I draw the line. a territorial integrity and sovereignty and this is what I think for the first time the president is really encountering European resistance to this and it's angering him greatly and um this is where we don't know where this goes because if he's saying there's no way back and European leaders are saying well we're not going where you want us to go where does this end so I I just think all I take him at his word all options are at the But this is where the American people, Congress, uh, you know, the cabinet need to start to become an impediment to this. And if they are not, the Europeans are going to have to, I think, retaliate, which is the tragedy because we're fighting ourselves when our adversaries are um, you know, continuing, Russia's continuing to to prosecute uh, an incredible war against the Ukrainian people that are freezing right now. Literally, China is exercising a complete blockade and invasion of Taiwan. Um, we're missing this plot here. And this is the the many tragedies of why we're having this conversation today about Greenland.
>> Okay. So, help me think through the game theory of the issue of Greenland and how it relates to Trump's long-standing skepticism of NATO. So for years, well many presidents in a row have talked about the fact that NATO allies don't contribute enough to their own defense and in effect are free riding on American military spending. And that's there's always been uh more than a grain of truth to that critique and that's been a bipartisan critique of Europe. uh none of them went as far as Trump did, which is to seow doubt about the idea of NATO itself and essentially threatened to leave NATO. Um and he's done similar things with our commitments in South Korea. And you could see how all of this from his perspective, he may be thinking, look, if they don't feel the fire under their butts, they're never gonna actually going to start spending more, right?
they're only going to be motivated by fear and and the rest is just talk is cheap, right? So, I'm I'm imagining a scenario where Trump is in the White House for the first four years and he's asking his national security adviserss, he's asking HR McMaster and Joan Bolton in his very Trumpian way, why the hell can't we just leave NATO? Right? and they sit him down and they say, "Donald, look, if you want to just think purely in terms of the US self-interest, not in terms of the stability of the world, not in terms of Russia's power, not in terms of our responsibilities as a global superpower, but just be as as brutally selfish as possible, we're going to lose access to, among other things, one of the greatest pieces of real estate that we now have considerable amount of access to, namely Greenland." And you can imagine that this might have come up in conversation.
And then at a certain point he says, "Well, why the hell can't we just take Greenland? If this is if this is one of the the pieces of leverage that NATO essentially has over my desire to leave it, why can't I just get that and then be in a much better negot negotiating position visav NATO?" Is there any scenario? Obviously, I'm I have like no evidence that this is a thought process for Trump, but it just from reading the White House memoirs of Trump, it seems like it could have been a part of how we got here. Is is there anything to that or am I just imagining things?
>> No, I mean I I think you're absolutely right. And and you know, unfortunately, President Trump's methodologies have proven correct. Uh meaning you're exactly right. It took the threat of US withdrawal from NATO uh in part doubtless and Vladimir Putin has done the other job uh to make sure that uh our European NATO allies dramatically increase spending. They see the threat coming from the east and now increasingly they see a threat coming from the west from from the United States. But it did take this to motivate. So he's correct and in some ways I mean this is the irony of all of this. I think the president has really internalized this is a big foreign policy success for him. He really was able, you know, President Eisenhower would have just cried with joy if if NATO members would have committed to 5% of their GDP for defense spending.
And you know, he can say, "Hey, I I did that." Um, and I think this is why we're seeing lots of his social media messaging like, "I created NATO." Nope.
You know, I did this or NATO wouldn't be around. NATO would be around, but it would be a NATO that probably wasn't spending what it should. and that the pattern absolutely repeated here in the Arctic. Uh so as President Trump made comments about desiring, you know, that Canada become the 51st state and acquiring Greenland, what happened?
Canada put forward a pretty impressive Arctic security package, long overdue.
Uh the Kingdom of Denmark also put forward a really robust uh security package, long overdue. They will admit that this was long overdue. uh NATO itself has been pretty slow in I in my in my view uh to be a bit more forward-leaning on developing an Arctic policy for fear of you know militarizing the Arctic or you know you know increasing potentially a confrontation with Russia even they admit they're slow. So in some ways the president by rattling the chains the way he does so undiplomatically um you know yes it gets it motivates.
Now, here's where I think we're at a tipping point of this working against the president because because the the whole Greenland issue is about taking what we want, the violation of territorial integrity and sovereignty.
If this goes against the wishes of the Greenlandic people, um then we're in a different ballgame. And uh this is now motivating our allies to to have to stand up for those principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity.
um and to begin to contemplate having to defend themselves from the United States or to separate themselves from the United States uh totally. Now, this is, you know, right now it's talk. It is not action. But as you're seeing across the board, the nationalism that we've created in Canada, in the Kingdom of Denmark and Greenland, and even Europe, we're we're we're creating antibodies uh against us. And this ultimately just hurts again what we want. We want more Arctic security to protect North America. We do that with allies. So the frustrating part again is we could have all we wanted. We just refuse to to to do it in a collaborative way.
>> So what leverage does the EU actually have if uh if Trump escalates further.
>> So I think we'll see it economically. So I think how this week will play out at Davos. Um the they're going to plan a meeting with the president uh talking about Greenland. We'll see if there's dialogue opened. I mean, a week ago, we actually thought there was a channel for dialogue. Uh when the vice president uh and secretary Rubio met with the Danish and Green Manic foreign ministers, they had created I mean the policies didn't change, but they had created this high level working group to basically start channeling this into a dialogue and to again hopefully get to a win-win outcome short of acquisition. The next day, uh, the White House said, "Nope, those were technical talks that lead to acquisition." And of course, that was not was what apparently was agreed at the meeting. Also, I mean, there is broader fear of what further steps the president could take. As we said, announcing, you know, I I'm I'm playing out worst case scenarios, and I hate that I'm even these words are even spilling out of my mouth. um uh you know threatening again to withdraw the United States from NATO or threatening to withhold intelligence and military equipment to Ukraine. You know, against the backdrop of all of this, we still have um a very very uh difficult situation in Ukraine that requires uh great European and NATO security to protect it from Russian uh hybrid activities and elsewhere. Um, so I I think we could keep going, but I think the EU, they had developed a pretty good list, a 93 billion euro list of tariffs on goods after liberation day last year.
They could they could agree to that. Um, they do have a a more powerful tool called an anti-coercion instrument which really goes after services which would basically shut the European market down to to US companies and things like that.
Tough, tough, tough. I I don't think they're there in any sense. Um but they are going to have to show resolve here because I think if there's no punishment, the president, as you said, is is very feeling very confident. No one is getting in his way and he uses his leverage to to get his way. I'll just finally say, I mean, we're all playing this game of why why is President Trump so so interested in Greenland? He just won't let this go.
It's like, you know, a junkyard dog. I just will not let this go. I think there's two factors, at least this is my my own analysis. Um, number one, as a real estate professional, there is something incredibly attractive to him about ownership of the world's largest island. And I think this I think this will he believes will cement his position as a historic figure that actually enlarged the United States. And I think those two are very powerful uh influences for him. And as I said, unless there is u things that will stop him, stock market problems, economic problems, real resolve, I think he believes he can get his way, which is why I think he said there's no going back.
>> Yeah, it's a good place to end. I guess my my last thought related to what you just said is we we often fail to appreciate the degree to which you know for the first hundred or so years of of uh of the United States of America basically the civic religion centered around expansion around westward expansion in particular but Trump is a blast from the past in the sense that we're not used to seeing people for whom physical expansion is such a deep priority and acquisition of territory is such a deep priority. I think many of us think of that as a relic of the past, but it was actually, you know, arguably the main strain of American political ambitions in the 19th century. And so and and I know Trump is a big fan of William McKinley in particular um and of that era of American thought and ambition that to which expansionism was central. So I do think that's underrated. You're you're right to highlight that as an aspect of Trump psychology and I think people don't highlight it just because it's so alien.
it, you know, it absolutely is. And I think that the there's a good part and a bad part here. I mean, as you said, you've talked thought about Greenland more in the last six months. Well, I've researched the Arctic for over 15 16 years. It's so important to highlight why the Arctic is important to US national security and that the changes that we're seeing need to be addressed.
The problem is um how the president views this as critical for ownership and control. that is not how we achieve success in the 21st century. Um and but um we I think are going to keep talking about Greenland for quite some time, Coleman. So I really appreciate you having me here and being able to share our information about Greenland.
>> Okay. Thank you so much, Heather. Thank you.
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ElinJen
2K views•2026-05-29
The fourth great humiliation. #jimmycarr #crowdwork #hecklers #standup
jimmycarr
576K views•2026-05-28
