General
The Anti-D.E.I. Crusader Who Wants to Dismantle the Department of Education
Christopher Rufo’s mission to make universities to feel “existential terror.”
Hosted by Ross Douthat
Ross Douthat is an Opinion columnist and the host of the ‘Interesting Times’ podcast.
Christopher Rufo on D.E.I., ‘Racial Favoritism’ and Donald Trump
The D.E.I. crusader’s mission to make universities to feel “existential terror.”
Below is a transcript of Ross Douthat’s conversation with Christopher Rufo. It has been edited for clarity and length. We recommend listening to the conversation or watching it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the video player above, the audio player below, on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify,YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
Editors’ note: This episode originally aired on the “Matter of Opinion” podcast on Mar. 7.
Ross Douthat: So this week we’re going to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion — a vision of social justice that took elite America and its institutions by storm during Donald Trump’s first term and a vision that is now in full-scale retreat. In part, that’s because of the actions of the Trump White House, which is doing everything it can to eradicate the D.E.I. programs and initiatives that proliferated inside the federal bureaucracy over the last 10 years.
But it’s not just the Trump White House. Companies like Google and Walmart and Paramount and Bank of America are also shedding diversity-related efforts that they had celebrated just a few short years ago.
And even universities, a bastion of progressive ideology, are suddenly backing away a bit, or treading carefully. Almost all of this shift happened because of the work of one man who is arguably the most important activist in American politics since the days of Ralph Nader and Phyllis Schlafly.
That man is our guest today, Christopher Rufo. And we’re going to be talking to him about how he won — for now — what it means for the second Trump administration, and what his vision is for America after D.E.I.
Chris Rufo, welcome to the show.
Christopher Rufo: It’s good to be with you.
Douthat: Thanks so much for being here. So, I imagine that a big part of our audience first heard of you around the same time that they first heard about critical race theory, an academic term of art that your activism successfully adapted and used to frame the D.E.I. debate.
