The War Against Harvard ft. Chris Rufo

Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the bitcoin.com studio. Christopher Rufo joins the show all about disparate impact affirmative action, DEI and Harvard and Princeton. And secondly, we then have Senator Mark Wayne Mullen from the great state of Oklahoma talk about Pete Hegseth, Cash Patel and one big beautiful bill. Email us as always freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.

Buckle up everybody, here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

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Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. I want to dive right into it. Joining us right off of the top is Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, friend of mine, and we want to get into the news of the day. There's a lot that we need to cover, including Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth is a friend of both of ours who's under relentless assault, even though recruitment is up and procurement is in the right direction and military exercises are up and war games are up and the woke stuff is gone. Pete Hegseth, by all objective outside measurements, is succeeding, and despite that, he is under merciless assault. Senator Mark Wayne Mullen is with us now. Senator, great to see you.

Thank you for taking the time. I believe Pete Hegseth is doing a great job. No one liked what happened with the signal gate situation. To blame that all on Pete is outrageous and wrong.

In fact, that is a sloppy and very shallow and politically motivated analysis. What's going on with our friend Pete Hegseth? What is the latest and what are your Senate colleagues saying? Senator, thank you. I'll tell you, the Senate Republican GOP is standing solid behind Pete. We understand this is an attack, another character assassination, trying to get rid of a guy because he's daring to challenge status quo. He's made some big changes inside DOD, and we know they needed to be made.

Since he's ruffling feathers, he's also made some enemies throughout the media and obviously throughout the Democrat Party. I will tell you, our support hasn't changed. My support hasn't changed.

Pete is doing exactly what he needs to do. We had a bloated Department of Defense that went woke. They had started leaning in towards a Democrat Party that has lost their direction of understanding what lethality is, what mission ready is, and about the war fighter that became very risk adverse and tried to play politics. You can't win wars and you can't deter our enemies by playing politics, and Pete is restoring the DOD's mission. That hasn't changed. We're going to stand strong with him no matter what type of onslaught and slander the media and the left want to throw at him.

I want to dive deeper, though. How are your Senate colleagues thinking about this? It's no surprise that he had a tough confirmation fight, and I'm glad he survived it, and thank you for being a champion of that. Are there murmurs about this on Capitol Hill? How are the Senate, let's just say old bulls, thinking about Pete Hegseth's job right now, and what should our audience be aware of?

Well, I will tell you the majority of the GOP's is solidly behind him. I don't want to talk about this one person by name, Charlie. I want to be very respectful because we have a meeting Monday afternoon when I get there in his office, but we have one member on SASC, which is the Senate Committee on Armed Services, that is trying to ruffle feathers a little bit. He's the same individual we had some problems with with Pete's confirmation, too. So this doesn't come at any surprise, but we feel like there's a way to get around it. One thing that we're trying to keep from happening is actually allowing the Democrats to have a hearing on this because the hearing wouldn't be for production.

It would be for promotion and a production for them to be able to go out and show their base, their fighting and stir up stuff. If it was actually a meeting of substance, we may be up for it. But we're going to work around that.

And so out of all 53 senators, even the three that voted against them, they are not saying anything. It's just one individual on the committee that I feel like we can work out some differences of. And we've talked multiple times. So I feel very strong. We're standing with Pete.

I'm glad to hear that. And look, I completely agree. The last thing we want is some sort of a waste of time hearing where we're not going to learn anything.

But Democrats get to go fundraise off of all of it and get to go on cable television. Nothing fruitful will come out of that. So speaking of your Senate colleagues, Senator Van Hollen from Maryland just went down to El Salvador. Let's play cut 235 to begin.

Let's play cut 235. But you told my colleague Dana Bash yesterday that you did not ask Abrigo Garcia whether or not he's actually in MS-13. You said you know what his answer is.

But how do you know if you did not ask him? Well, because I know what he's said many times in court, and that's the proper forum for debating this. So he goes all the way down to El Salvador to try and petition to get a non-American from El Salvador to come back to America, who obviously is part of MS-13.

Senator, what's going on here? It's not just a non-American. He entered the country illegally. He was two judges that already said and already suggested that he should be deported. He had a rap sheet since he's been inside the United States.

Keep in mind, his first time to have contact with the police, he had a wad of cash, he had baggies of drugs, and he had cash that had the symbol, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, which is a direct coalition to MS-13. So he had ties to him. And so there's no question about it. But here you have Senator Van Hollen who spent taxpayer dollars to fly down to meet with an illegal alien that entered the country illegally, that had broke the law since he'd been here, that had ties to a organization.

And it's not just us. The court had said this too. He can deny it all he wants, but most criminals deny their crimes anyways. So for Van Hollen not to look him in the eye and ask the question tells you all you need to know about this radical Democrat party. They don't care. It's not about what's doing right. It's about a message piece. It's about getting promotion.

It's about seeing what they can do to have 15 minutes of fame. And that's all that Senator Van Hollen did here. He wasn't trying to solve a problem. He saw an opportunity that he felt like he could get on national TV for, and guess what?

He has. But his constituents should see that he's not fighting for the rule of law. He's fighting for himself so he doesn't get caught up in this same situation that Chuck Schumer's caught up in and could cost him his office. You don't have Democrats that are serving for the good of the American people. You have Democrats that are self-serving themselves.

And that's what's happening inside the Democrat party right now. We're hearing from the Trump White House. We're hearing from Kevin Hassett. Big beautiful bill is coming. I know I've asked you about this for quite some time. Bring us into the room.

Bring the audience into the room from the ability that you are able to share. What are the negotiations like? Is it a mood of optimism? Is it one of hope that we're going to get this thing done? It's just a matter of ironing out the details?

Yeah. So real quick, we're ironing out the details on tax, permanent law versus permanent policy or current policy. We'll get into that. We are very optimistic. We feel like our timeline, it's not set in stone, but our timeline, we would love to be able to deliver this to the president's desk before Memorial weekend. Now I will tell you that's a tall order because there's details that we can get into on some real differences between the House and the Senate and why current policy versus current law and tax policy. It plays a huge pivotal point in this. Ask 10 people to define the word capitalism. How many different responses do you think you'll get?

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C-H-A-R-L-I-E for hillsdale.com. So Senator, can we just go, let me just kind of go through three things. No tax on tips, no tax on overtime. And then finally, the kind of middle-class tax cut, no tax on social security. Is this a realistic thing that you think we're going to get in the big, beautiful bill? Well, we can't do that. There's some stuff in social security we can't get to.

So there's some of the no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on social security that may not fit within the Byrd Rule. We're going through that process. Either way, we're still going to bring it back in a separate package because the president said he wants that. The American people said they wanted that. So we're going to try and get it done.

If we can do it in reconciliation, that's great. Now, and this is the way I describe the Byrd Rule. The House doesn't have to deal with the Byrd Rule. We do. So what the budget did is it instructed the Senate more than instructed the House on what can and can't go into the bill.

Remember, you only get one shot at it. If you get the bill and you send it up, and it's against the Byrd Rule, you've got to scrap the bill, redo the whole thing all over again. So we have to work with the parliamentarian moving forward. The best way to describe it is the House can put it in there. The House can put whatever they want into a bill.

But that's kind of considering the House can walk into a warehouse through the open dock door. And once they get in, they have to close it. And then the Senate has to knock the glass out of the top part of it and try to squeeze everything in through the Byrd Rule.

So we don't know if it can get in there or not. We feel we've got a bill that addresses it, that tries to make it in. But it's remember, it's an appropriation bill.

So some of the stuff with Social Security can't be touched in it. Got it. So just one one last question on this spending cuts.

And I do want to get to the Milwaukee judge. Just one minute on spending cuts. What can we expect? Because tax cuts are wonderful. But if we do not have equal, if not greater spending cuts, then we're just going to keep on driving up the deficit. Are your colleagues thinking in this way? Yeah. So there's two ways.

Absolutely. Our target is one point five trillion dollars. That's our target of cuts.

One point five trillion. I feel like we can hit that. But it's hard once you really get in there because, you know, everybody's got great ideas. But we actually put the concept down on how it's going to be delivered. It's tough now through rescission, not through reconciliation. We may be able to get even more cuts through rescission. So basically, rescission and reconciliation runs together. In fact, we're doing rescission, we're doing reconciliation, we're doing budget. Recision, basically, and Elon and I had a conversation about this yesterday, that anything that isn't appropriated by Congress, meaning that this USAID that wasn't reauthorized by Congress and we didn't directly appropriate dollars for those programs they're doing, they can be rescinded. And when they're rescinded, now they can also be taken away and the president chooses not to spend it. But when you rescind it, and he sends it to Congress as a rescission package, if Congress votes on it to rescind it, then the next president can't come up and just restart the program.

So rescission makes this stuff permanent. So we're working really close with Doge and Elon to get this done. Then reconciliation, we can go back in farther and make cuts to the agencies themselves, which is where we're going to be targeting $1.5 trillion. And really, I'm telling you, that's our target. We may be able to do more than that.

I don't want to give people false hope. But when we really start putting the pen and paper together, that's our target, $1.5 trillion. And then we're going to slowly get our house back in order. What we're really trying to do is get back, and I think Ron Johnson has said this the best, we'd really like to get to 2019 spending levels pre-COVID. And that way, we can actually have a true path to balance the budget. And the president has made it very clear, he wants to balance the budget while he's in office. And we want to deliver that for him. But keep in mind, we probably need to try doing that. If we can't do it in FY26, we're going to definitely have to do it by FY28.

Because God forbid something happens in the midterm, and we were to lose one of the chambers, no way the Democrat Party is going to let us balance the budget. No, they're going to be uninterested in that. You're caught up to speed now on the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, charges of obstruction. What's going on here? Well, I'm glad that Cash made this public, because he's been taking on a little heat from our base. Actually, Cash and Pam both want to know what are they doing, they need to get started. This just shows you that they do a lot of stuff behind closed doors, and they can't do it in public, but they're acting fast on it. I mean, this is just a case that actually developed a week ago that Cash was able to put the information together and arrest a judge for obstruction of justice, for literally running a blocker for an illegal immigrant so he could try getting away, and they had to chase him down by foot.

Cash and Pam are working every day to get this woke, political-motivated bench, literally, and start holding them accountable. But it's difficult, and I hope our base will realize you're going to see stories like this trickle out, but just because you're not seeing them out there every day, most of the cases they're talking about they can't talk about until afterward. Senator, thank you so much. Keep fighting hard.

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844-464-3043 or visit VOM.org slash Charlie. Joining us now is Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Christopher, great to see you.

Thank you for taking the time today. You have a major story here that I know that you've been focusing on. Tell our audience about the disparate impact study that you have been on and what that actually means.

In practice, Christopher Rufo, the floor is yours. Well, right now we are doing a series of investigations into the Ivy League universities, beginning with Princeton. And the president of Princeton is a man named Christopher Eisgruber, who a couple of years ago said that Princeton was systemically racist. And he was right, but not in the way that he imagined from the documents that we've obtained, the faculty that we've interviewed.

We found that he has built a system of discrimination against whites, Asians, and Jews, especially men from those different racial categories that are in total violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 14th Amendment. And so these documents from our report have now rocketed around the Department of Justice. And I think what's going to happen with these Ivy League universities is that they're going to be caught doing something illegal. But for the first time ever, because the Trump administration is taking up these issues in a real way, they're actually going to pay an enormous price. And that's what we're seeing, not just at Princeton, but really almost everywhere in higher education.

So let's go deeper into that. Is it really a true quote that, quote, don't hire white men unless absolutely necessary? Is that a real quote out of Princeton University?

That is a real quote. And it's not just a singular incident. My sources on the faculty at Princeton have said there is a kind of spoken and unspoken assumption in hiring that you have to do everything you can to avoid hiring white men in particular. And a professor was told explicitly, you cannot hire this person because he's a white man. This professor went to the department chair who happens to be Jewish and said, hey, this is what we did at Princeton to Jews 70, 80 years ago.

It's discrimination and it's wrong. And this department chair responded simply, this is what we have to do. And so this is the kind of rot inside academia that has been festering for a long time.

It's finally coming to the surface. And I know that Harmeet Dillon, who's at the Department of Justice Civil Rights as the deputy secretary, she's taking a close look at these policies and she is a very good and very tough lawyer, as you know, and I don't think she's going to pull any punches. So all of this has come to a head, obviously, with Harvard and President Trump signing executive orders.

You did mention something with Princeton. They are in blatant violation of federal law. And Harvard, by the way, has been ignoring, just flatly ignoring federal law, saying that, oh, yeah, OK, fine. The Supreme Court ruled this. We don't really care what penalties, what realistic penalties can the Trump administration usher and issue when these colleges are actively discriminating against white people?

And I just want the audience to imagine. Imagine if Princeton University was caught saying don't hire black men unless absolutely necessary. I mean, it would be the number one news story on the planet for three months straight and there would have to be marches and all that. But it's actually perfectly OK at Princeton to say don't hire white men unless absolutely necessary. What can we do to actually hold these universities and penalize them for this? Well, we face a really critical question about our Constitution and our law. Does the law apply to all groups equally or does the law apply to certain groups, but not other groups?

My contention is that we can only have a great country if the law applies to everyone equally. And so we should approach this with just as much urgency as President Eisenhower approached it in the 1950s and President Kennedy approached it in the 1960s. I think we have three basic remedies. The first remedy is what the president has already put on the table, stripping federal funds from these institutions which are in violation of federal law. The second remedy is what's called a consent decree, which has been used by the left on police departments and other institutions, which basically means you put these universities under the control of a legal process and a federal judge who will oversee the administration from the inside to ensure that they're not discriminating. And then there's the third option that was used by Eisenhower and Kennedy, which is to send in federal troops, to send in the 101st Airborne, to force these universities to desegregate, to stop discriminating and stop scapegoating.

That's of course an ultimate option. I don't think we're there yet, but we should absolutely keep that kind of dramatic intervention on the table. Help our audience understand just how big of a deal it is, the executive order that President Trump signed on disparate impact and how disparate impact has been used for admission standards, for remedial standards, disciplinary action, for even algebra. What is disparate impact and what is the enormity of President Trump and his executive order that he signed the other day?

Yeah, it's a historic move and I'll explain disparate impact in pretty simple terms. When most Americans think about discrimination, they think about someone who says, you know, I don't like people from this certain group. We're not going to give them an opportunity. We're going to deny them employment or benefits or access to a public space. Disparate impact says the intention to discriminate doesn't matter. The action of deliberate discrimination against a group doesn't matter. All that matters is if there is a disparate or disproportionate number of people of one group. That is de facto racism. That is de facto discrimination.

This of course, again, only applies one way. If you don't have enough African Americans at Harvard, it means that you have to provide a racial quota or a kind of positive discrimination as a remedy, but it doesn't apply to, for example, the NBA. We could say there are not enough Asian and Jewish players in the NBA, which under disparate impact theory means the NBA is discriminating against Asians and Jews, but that really just reveals the absurdity of the whole concept. The NBA is hyper competitive, hyper meritocratic. It just so happens that certain groups are not as dedicated or not as talented in basketball than other groups. What the president is saying is we're going to go back to actual, real, substantial discrimination as the test. We can't use statistical pseudoscience and we also can't assume that there will be an equal distribution by race in every category. For example, something as silly as Korean Americans own a disproportionate number of dry cleaners. I'm okay with that.

That's completely fine. Now the president is saying we can't take these absurd standards and make them into law. All of this in combination, critical race theory, affirmative action, disparate impact, all that together has done what to education in this country, Christopher, and what can we see now that we are removing these burdens on our education system and businesses?

What can we expect now? How big of a deal is this for prosperity and the pursuit of excellence? Well, it's just the first step and so it's beyond question that these left-wing racialist ideologies have compromised academic institutions.

They've really degraded race relations in the United States and they've turned many K-12 schools into these ideological training grounds. These executive orders are the beginning of reversing that process and moving America towards the standard of colorblind equality under which everyone is treated equally as an individual and not rewarded or punished based on their ancestry. That vision of America is extraordinarily popular.

That is a vision of America that most everyday Americans support. What has to happen next to make that a reality is that the administration has to keep pressing forward on these policies to change the culture within these institutions and then to take people like President Christopher Eisgruber of Princeton, put him on the stand, punish him publicly and severely for the racial discrimination that he has perpetuated at his university, and really turn his reputation so negative that anyone else in that position will immediately say, I better get my act together and stop discriminating even if my predecessors have done so in the past. On top of that, President Trump is now disassembling the Department of Education and he is sending it back to the states. I'm so hopeful that we finally have a president, we finally have an administration who's making education a top priority from K-12 mobility, from going after Harvard. Are you a little concerned though, Christopher, and we'll pick this up after the break, that the weakest spot of these universities might not actually be the anti-Semitism critiques, which are legitimate, of course, but actually the violations of the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment.

What is your take on that strategically, Christopher? Well, look, here's what we have to do. You know, I've had a lot of conversations with American Jews and friends who are very concerned about anti-Semitism, but what I've been recommending to them as the most successful strategy is not to say American Jews need speech protections, American Jews need DEI, specifically on anti-Semitism, but actually American Jews can tap into something much higher and much more powerful. This principle of universal standards to say every group needs protection from violence on campus, every group needs protected speech, every group needs to be treated equally and not rewarded or punished based on their racial, ethnic, or religious background. That is the winning argument, and we have to see anti-Semitism as really just the smallest nesting doll into this fervent, you know, anti-Semitic, anti-white, and anti-American hatred.

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Go to yrefi.com, that is yrefi.com. So places like Harvard, Christopher, are the trendy targets, but most people don't go to the Ivies. What are the schools that we should focus on to really send a message that would improve the places that people actually want to go to, Christopher Rufo?

Well, I think you have to start at the top and then work your way downward. You know, universities are driven to a large part by social status, and so if you can change the social status at the Ivy League universities, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, most notably, and then you could start changing the social status at the flagship state universities, Berkeley, Michigan, Texas, et cetera, you're going to send a very strong message downward that it is no longer safe, it is no longer high status, it is no longer even possible to have discriminatory DEI programs or to have this really anti-Semitic, anti-white, anti-American, and often anti-Asian sentiments and policies on campus. I think that's what you have to do because we need to turn this into a cultural movement, not just a legal campaign. That's really what we're fighting for, and we have to ground it again in this principle of colorblind equality, treating everyone equally as an individual. That's the frame that we have to deploy, and that is both the sword and the shield we have to use to defeat the left and the left's really dismal ideology of judging people on the basis of race. And they do this all in the spirit of allegedly getting rid of racism.

They want to judge people based on race, and they say that we are trying to fight racism. You look at these executive orders combined, getting rid of the affirmative action and hiring, getting rid of DEI, getting rid of critical race theory, being taught in our schools. A lot of this is going to be debated within the courts. Christopher, are you optimistic that ultimately the Supreme Court will rule in favor of these very courageous executive orders from President Trump?

Yeah, absolutely. I think all of these orders, a lot of these policies were established by executive orders from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And so he has absolute authority to rescind those executive orders and to turn the government in a new direction. That's the basic nature of his Article II powers under the Constitution. But the real tricky part, and where this is going to get tough, not only for these issues related to racial discrimination, but also for permanently dissolving the Department of Education, the president needs Congress to act. And judging by the last 97 days or in change, the president is much bolder, much more decisive, and much more comfortable with risk-taking than the Republicans in Congress. He's got to get Republicans to take some of these incredible executive orders and actually pass them through the legislature so that they can survive further into the future.

And they could still be the law, even if power changes in four or hopefully 12 years. Codification is key. Christopher, please plug anything you want our audience to be aware of, please. We want to support you.

Absolutely. Yeah, just follow me on Twitter at RealChrisRufo. Sign up for my substack at ChristopherRufo.com. And keep fighting, Charlie. You're doing incredible work. You're really a tremendous leader on all these issues, and we're all grateful for it. Thank you. Christopher, keep it up. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Thank you.

Email us freedom at charliekirk.com. Look, we have a once in a generation opportunity right now to get back to the roots of the intent of what made America such a spectacular place. We have allowed so much of this nonsense and this garbage to infect every major institution. Really is a cleanse.

It is a reset. It is starting from square one. When you realize how much of our country is being held back by affirmative action, being held back by DEI, being held back by the legal theory of disparate impact, and how corrupt these elite institutions have become. And it is incumbent on all of us, including President Trump, to keep the pressure on. You notice that this hasn't actually received that much news coverage. They are more worried about Abrego-Garcia than they are about affirmative action. It's very interesting, isn't it?

What is it about Abrego-Garcia? Well, they actually know that affirmative action is a major losing argument for them. When affirmative action is presented to America, they say, wait a second, you get extra points if you're of a black skin color and get less points if you're white skin color. That's exactly what affirmative action is. President Trump is fighting for it in a colorblind, in a merit-based, in a character-based agenda, not one that is rooted in tribalism or racial preferences.

We believe in an America agenda. God bless President Trump for fighting for that every day. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.