The Jackpod: Culture warrior
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I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The JackPod, where On Point news analyst Jack Beattie helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now. Hello there, Jack. Hello, Meghna. Episode 81, what's your headline? Culture Warrior, Christopher Ruffo's Journey. Ah, okay, this is going to be an interesting one. So where are you going to start on Ruffo's Journey?

Well, we're going to start with just a headline about who he is. The New York Times recently called him the most important activist in American politics since Phyllis Schlafly and Ralph Nader.

He is important, especially to the Trump administration. He's central now to the Trump administration's campaign against Harvard and indeed its assault on higher education generally. The ideas for that, the policy of that is all his.

And, you know, his journey to success as a policy entrepreneur, it began five years ago this month and perhaps this very week.

And it began in Seattle, which was then engulfed in protest over the killing of George Floyd. And there were some weeks of just general unrest. And in the middle of it, a particular neighborhood, the Capitol Hill neighborhood, the police under assault and rocks quit their station there, abandoned the police station there and left that neighborhood.

And the city essentially, you know, allowed the neighborhood to become sort of self-governing for about 23 days. It's amazing. And it was called the people who sort of organized this.

activists, anarchists, people of goodwill, progressives. They called it, quote, CHOP, the Capitol Hill Organized Protest. And it was also called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, about a six-block area that was claimed by these demonstrators and policed by young men, some of them carrying pistols.

And, you know, it lasted, as I say, for 23 days. And then after four shootings, including two fatal ones, and after innumerable calls from businesses and people in the district to the police or the fire department or the ambulance and getting the response, we can't come in, it's too dangerous, this is a, you know, sort of a cordon sanitaire here.

After 23 days of that, the city had had enough. They took down the barriers. The police moved back in. Christopher Ruffo was then a 30-something conservative documentarian, several movies, several films, and writer, and he lived in Seattle. And he went to the demonstrations. He sort of botanized on the autonomous zone.

And, you know, where the media showed anarchy, and really the New York Times used that word, reporters used it, anarchy, chaos. Christopher Ruffo saw ideas. Here he is just at the same time talking to, that is June 2020, talking to an interviewer for the City Journal.

One Native American activist who spoke at one of the large gatherings very bluntly said, you know, it's time for every white person in the audience to find an African-American and give them $10. And we're going to be monitoring you. We see you.

So you see the kind of really theoretical ideas of social justice and critical race theory. You see activists now trying to implement them in practical form. But I think it gives you a sense of what's to come in the kind of mainstream political platforms.

as the kind of liberal left in the United States really doubles down on the posturing and the politics of identity, of race, of this kind of mainstreaming and platforming of academic postmodernism. Yeah.

Jack, that's so interesting. So he's talking about what he sees as the mainstreaming of postmodernism. He himself should be and does take credit for mainstreaming another idea on the criticism of critical race theory, right?

Oh, yes. In fact, later that summer, really, his star was in ascendance. Trump was watching Fox, and he saw Ruffo declare, quote,

Critical race theory has pervaded every institution of the federal government. Trump summoned him to the White House, and the White House, I think within 24 hours, essentially adopted the policy that he recommended, which was to end trainings and the diversity. Trump put out an executive order banning all that.

And so right away, he had this tremendous success. And his language, it'll sound familiar, he says, because the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy is now being weaponized against the American people, we have to turn critical race theory into a toxic brand theory.

The goal, he said, is to have the public read something crazy and think that's critical race theory. We have decodified the term and will recode it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

So he was kind of doing some intellectual skywriting here. What's wrong with the federal government, the bureaucracy? What's wrong with the left? It is critical race theory. Wherever he looked, he saw that.

Absolutely. To your point, from the beginning, Rufo was very, very open about wanting to create a, as you said, a toxic brand. That's right. That's his words around the concept of critical race theory. And what's so interesting to me is that he said from the start that they that the that

conservative activists needed new language around what he saw as a post-Obama America. And he happened upon critical race theory because of actually some things that were going on in the city of Seattle that, once again, I'm just going to be that annoying person who says that they do have a kernel of truth to them, right? Because he turned up those trainings that you talked about in Seattle that included PowerPoint presentations that...

You know, made people question what do we do in white people's spaces or that, you know, all white people have internalized racial superiority or things like that. And so I think a lot of that is actually quite distasteful to a lot of Americans. But then he transforms that into this overreaching, overarching new supposed villain, right?

in what was a legal theory, right, into this sort of sweeping critique of the American left and villainizing critical race theory. I mean, he's a very smart modern-day activist, I think.

Yes, he is. And he's got the jargon down, postmodernism, construction, and all the rest. And he's easier to take than Stephen Miller, who I wanted to compare it to. You listen to him, you think, well, this is a smart young man. He knows his stuff.

Later on, we're going to see that there's a dark side there, too. Totally. That's the summer of 2020. His journey has taken him to the White House. Flash forward four years, November 1st.

2024 and Rufo's journey this time takes him to Mar-a-Lago where, and here I quote the Wall Street Journal, he will present the president-elect's team with a plan to gel American universities if they don't pull back from diversity measures. Quite a verb there, gel American universities. And

In an interview with The New York Times, he spoke of what his idea was. He said, a medium or long-term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts the universities in existential terror.

Now, where have we heard that kind of talk? Well, we heard almost that very phrasing from Russell Vogt, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and the author of, the primary author of Project 2025, when he said his goal was to, quote, put federal employees into trauma. Mm-hmm.

Well, here we have that same phrasing. I want to put universities in an existential terror by saying, unless you change your policies to suit us, meaning the regnant administration, Trump, we're going to cut off your aid. And this is not just, you know, petty cash. This is billions of dollars in research, among other things, of course, money.

We know how much is at stake in all that. So he had found with Trump, first he had the federal government get rid of all the trainings, all that. Trump did an executive order. Now Trump is following his prescription to the T on universities. And why focus on the elite universities? Yeah, I was just going to ask you that, Jack. Exactly. Exactly.

Well, Rufo talked last month on PBS. He addressed that question on the PBS NewsHour last month. You want to focus on elite universities because elite universities establish the cultural signals that then flow downward to the university sector as a whole. And what we know from Ivy League universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, is

is that they are directly, flagrantly, and intentionally violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They're promoting from their central administrations racial discrimination, scapegoating, and even segregation. Jack, I have to ask. I mean, he's making a very, very big assertion there that the universities are in violation of the Civil Rights Act. Did he provide the NewsHour any actual evidence of that, or was it just sort of his interpretation? Yeah.

His interpretation. Yes. I mean, he and and, you know, Amna Nawaz, his interviewer said segregation. Hold on. Segregation was a use of law, state law to keep down immigrants.

African-Americans in the South. It was a system of oppression. What you see in universities today is more like homophily, you know, the tendency that we all have to hang around with people like ourselves. So there's an African-American club. There's a, you know...

That happens everywhere. To Ruffo, that segregation. And I left this out because it was so ludicrous. He actually began that little colloquy by saying, you know, Ike sent...

the paratroopers to Little Rock in 1957 to integrate Central High School. John F. Kennedy used the federalized National Guard to integrate University of Mississippi. He said the colleges are getting off easy. In other words, he's not yet going to send the 82nd Airborne to Harvard because of diversity. He speaks to this in another soundbite from that PBS NewsHour.

I'm a fellow at Hillsdale College. Hillsdale College takes no federal money because Hillsdale knows that when you start taking taxpayer dollars, there are corresponding and reciprocal obligations and duties. And so Harvard has a duty to uphold the law. Certainly, we've made massive progress since the civil rights era. But the last bastion of racial segregation is, ironically enough, at these elite Ivy League universities, which retain segregated programs.

programs, segregated graduation ceremonies, segregated scholarship opportunities in many cases. And so that's really what we're fighting against. And I think we're going to win. Harvard actually announced yesterday they were going to stop racially segregated graduation ceremonies. It's a good start, but much more is needed. To see segregation, to use that word about people just

wanting to be with others like themselves, that is just, it's an absurdity. But again, it's that quality of intellectual skywriting. You see, it's segregation. Yep. Keeping people apart. Yep. Having scholarships reserved for minority students. Yep. Well, you know, the Bakke decision, which sort of launched the era of diversity in

higher education. You know, they say diversity is a, the Supreme Court said diversity is a proper goal for universities. And even in the, even the Roberts Court, they didn't entirely, they said, you know, you can find proxies for race in the circumstances of somebody's life and somebody who's, you know, had to fight poverty and

You know, should another one giving that person a scholarship provided they meet the standards? So the point is that universities have adapted to this more conservative atmosphere by trying to adjust, downplay the racial aspect, play up the diversity and talk about class issues. I have to say something about Hillsdale College, though, Jack, because it's interesting.

Rufo's right. They have long celebrated their refusal to accept any state or federal funding. But at the same time, they are also very openly a 501c3 tax exempt organization. Right. So in that sense, just like Harvard. Right.

Although Harvard does have billions in its endowment. But just like Harvard, Hillsdale College benefits from the government's largesse in not having to pay taxes.

OK, so it's like, you know, sure, they don't take direct aid, but imagine what life would be like if they had to pay taxes for any any institution of higher education. Right. This is something that that has long actually been a thorn in the side of, I guess, the American people when folks like Harvard or Hillsdale or you name it, don't pay taxes. But Rufo doesn't seem to see a problem with that.

No, no. And, you know, if you look into the faculty hiring there, I don't know that for a fact, but I expect it's, you know, it's a very preferred group of professors that they have and that there may well be. Some people are just excluded. Let's put it that way. We can just, I think, surmise that based on their views. And, you know, what's next for him in higher education? Well, he said that he wants to seek

college enrollment cut by more than half. Now, I don't think any person in public life has made such a call, at least in my lifetime. And you say, well, what would be the consequence of that? Essentially, that would kick away a ladder of opportunity, a source of social hope for millions of Americans.

And it is a direct attack on mobility, on people having better lives. That's what he wants. He wants the doors of – so get rid of foreign students, sure, and shrink the university more, sure. He wants the whole thing to be cut by half. He has had a very, very sharp track record of success over the past four or five years. He has. And so where could he go next with this?

Well, you know, he's first of all kind of enjoying his moment. And here he is on The Daily just recently, you know, taking a bow. I mean, it has been a journey. And some of the moments in the past few months have had a surreal feeling.

I've been working on these issues for five years. At the beginning, it felt like I was the only one fighting. And now fast forward five years, some of the ideas that I had cobbled together suddenly become reality. Yeah, no kidding, Jack. Yeah, and he goes on to say, and now, you know,

where there were words, there are now billions of dollars at stake. I mean, to me, they were just ideas. Now my ideas are being, you know, made flesh with the government essentially saying to universities, you're going to lose billions if you don't play ball with us. And, you know, the issue of the picture of him as an activist, it elides some things. And, you know, really the evidence, I think, suggests that he's as much a propagandist as

For example, in Florida, he was very much involved down there. In fact, he's a trustee of the new, I think it's called, I forget what it's called, the new university or whatever it's called, a sort of a space that's safe for conservative students to go to. And his new college, and he's one of the trustees. While he was down there, he claimed, and this was, of course, when Disney was in the crosshairs because of its popularity.

policies toward LGBTQ employees. Well, Ruffo got into that. He claimed that discussions of LGBTQ issues in the classrooms could indicate grooming. Grooming. And then he went on to cite a study which he claimed showed that public school teachers were responsible for 100 times more sexual abuse than Catholic priests.

The author of that study said that it's a completely invalid construal of what she wrote and wrong in every way. But he put that poison out there. Think of the libel in that. Just the horrible, you know, that's wicked. So, yeah, he's an activist. He's also a propagandist of the worst kind to propagate a

hatred like that. And what is that connected to? It's connected to another ambition of his and people on the right generally, which is to essentially abolish the public schools, tar them as the home of groomers, and let's send that money to parents so they can use it to

you know, to give their children a better life without all these foul people interfering. This is a, you know, so it's defamation on a mass scale connected to a policy end. And, you know, nor was this lofty sounding young man who talks about postmodernism and valorization and social construction and uses all that talk.

Nor is he above dabbling in, well, the cat scandal. He got involved in the, you know, immigrants eating cats. Not in Springfield, Ohio. That was covered by the president with his defamation, his lie, and J.D. Vance about the cat-eating Haitian immigrants eating

Christopher Ruffo offered a bounty of $5,000, this was on his website, for evidence that could support his claim that in Dayton, that immigrants there, these were African immigrants, were grilling cats on the barbecue. And he showed grainy photographs of films, of video of, you know, what could have been the cat being cooked.

And, of course, the African immigrants were barbecuing chicken. Okay. So, folks, what do you think about Christopher Rufo's success so far in really reshaping and giving new language to far-right conservative thought and activism?

Let us know. You know how to do it. Pick up your phone and look for the On Point Vox Pop app. If you don't already have it, just go to wherever you get your apps and look for On Point Vox Pop. All right. So, Jack, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll hear the many things that Jack Potter's had to say about AI and the impact it's having on their lives in the 21st century. So we'll be back.

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Support for this podcast comes from It's Revolutionary, a podcast from Massachusetts 250. In a place like Northampton, Massachusetts, the freedom to be yourself is not just celebrated, it's embraced. For one drag king, it's where he's found the space to live his truth. I really do think about it all the time. Like, I don't think there's anywhere else I could have lived my lived experience and do what I do besides Massachusetts. Stick around until the end of this podcast for his story.

Okay, Jack, we are back. And last week you talked about the impact of artificial intelligence on a very important part of our lives, and that is the workforce, or just the sheer number of available jobs, which AI is expected to decrease quite dramatically, especially for white-collar jobs. And we heard from a ton of people, Jack. Let's start with Barb, who calls us from Westwood, Massachusetts. Hi.

She's actually on the other side of things here. She's not worried at all about AI replacing entry-level jobs. She thinks it's a welcome change. In terms of entry-level jobs that are being automated, I am so for that because being in my 60s, I was in my 20s and 1980s, and those entry-level jobs were so tedious and boring and

could easily be automated, which I'm happy to see them go away. There would be new entry-level jobs, in my opinion, that will involve a college education and more advanced critical thinking skills. AI does not do critical thinking very well at all. Okay, Jack, here's Elizabeth from Durham, North Carolina, who has a different take on AI and entry-level jobs.

Unlike Barb, she is in her late 30s, Elizabeth is, and she says she has gotten to where she is now because of the skills she learned in those early entry-level jobs. Absolutely. Everything I did in that first couple of years, right now, you could have an AI do it in a few minutes. And even within the specific industry, yeah.

tasks that used to take hours, like recording audio, syncing it with slides, things like that, can be done in, you know, a minute and a half through AI. And I think what everyone who's looking at the series is seeing is that, yes, what I did at the beginning could be done by AI, but I would never have the skills I have now if I hadn't had to go through it myself. Jack, your thoughts?

What a combination of views, Barbara and Elizabeth. I'm sympathetic to both. I know exactly what Barbara means. I've done a fair amount of rote work in my life, too, and I kept, I would think, gee whiz, why am I stuck with this? And of course, one of the hopes of AI is that it can allow us to be more human, you know, to exercise human skills, critical thinking, empathy, whatever the

Whatever the thing is. And by the way, I put this question about what advantage do humans have, I put that to Claude, the computer for Anthropic that we talked about last week. And Claude replied, well, human beings can do critical thinking, just what Popper said.

And they do empathy. That's not what we do. We don't do that. We AI bots don't do that. So in other words, there's a lot to that that we can get rid of the sort of Bartleby the Scrivener jobs and have us do something that's more, that calls upon our human essence, not our ability to just shovel through the day.

But then what Elizabeth says, you know, there is a certain discipline and a certain habituation that work, even tedious work, can leave one with a sense that, well, I paid my dues. I began at the bottom. I did a lot of scut work.

And, you know, that's a source of pride. I think we all feel some of that. And also maybe a source of social sympathy. Yeah. Right? We understand what other people, especially young people, are going through. We remember what that was like, and we are more sympathetic and maybe more helpful. So I think between the two of them, we get a very...

complicated picture of a complicated reality. I want to just go back to what Barb said really quickly because I think she's right that there would be a new level of entry-level job. But the problem is, is that the higher you make the skill set for entry-level jobs, the

Actually, fewer jobs there are at those levels already, right? Like the issue is entry-level jobs prior to any form of automation. You needed a lot of people, right? We've seen this in every technological revolution. And so those new higher-level entry positions would require, I guess, higher levels of education or some sort of higher measurable skill set. But you just by definition don't need as many of those people, right?

So it doesn't necessarily eliminate the core problem of just the numerical reduction in the number of jobs that the future is going to need.

And so I think that's the part like just like I don't know what the solution is unless we're creating like entirely new kinds of jobs. Yeah, like totally right. That you don't need you still don't need a college education for or, you know, with associates degree you can get or with, you know, technical training. These are all things that the vast majority of Americans, those are their jobs.

They're worthy skill sets, but they're not going to be qualified, quote unquote qualified, for these supposedly higher critical thinking entry-level jobs. It's a matter of numbers, which we don't have a solution for. And that's what I keep coming back to. Right. But there may be a beachhead there for, as you suggest, new work, work we can't imagine now. Yeah, I could talk with you about this for hours, Jack, but I will resist the urge except to say one thing.

And this is what you said last week. I just think it's really important to mention, like every technological revolution leaves casualties in its wake. Right. Like the industrial revolution, it absolutely created millions of new types of jobs that were never imagined prior to the late 19th century. Right.

But in order to get there, millions of other people, right, were thrown into even further penury. They lost their livelihoods all, you know, in a matter of several years, right?

their whole way of life was gone. And that will happen this time around. It's just, as you pointed out, it will happen much faster. Yes, and it's the speed of it. Yeah. I just think that is inevitable. And if we are not prepared...

to provide the kind of social support that these casualties of this technological revolution are going to be needing, the recipe for social unrest is profound. And I just don't think that our political leaders understand that at all enough. So...

Anyway, let's move on to Christian. He is in Joshua Tree National Park in California. He's a park service interpretive ranger. And he says his job is to help visitors understand the national park better. And he says visitors rely greatly on his services. They have lots of questions. They really greatly attend ranger programs and they desperately like seek interpretation while they're in the national park. And I wonder, can AI replace me?

I know that an AI bot could know a lot more than I do about that particular national park, but can they make any kind of connection with humans? I feel like humans want to connect with other humans and desperately seek things like interpretation from a fellow human when they're in a national park, but...

Yeah, I wonder, could I be replaced? No, Christian, I'm going to say right now you cannot be replaced. Jack, I just have to say that, of course, I think I've said it a lot on point, but I'm going to say it in the jackpot. The National Park Service, I believe, is one of America's greatest institutions. And I honor and thank all

all the people who work in the Park Service for being stewards of our most spectacular public lands. And there's just no way that even like a mechanized, you know, fake human AI bot standing there with a Park Service ranger's hat on is going to make me love the backcountry the way a park ranger does. Just got to say that. Oh, very important to say. And all of us have seen such people. On the other hand,

No, no. Go ahead. Years ago, this is, you know, 40 years ago maybe, I toured the Antietam Battlefield in Maryland, Sharpsburg, Maryland. And there was a guide there, but they also gave these automated, you know, you could take a recording with you when you went from station to station, just as in a museum, right?

So even at a national park, and 40 years ago, they were going toward automation. So let's move on to Jessica, who's in North Stonington, Connecticut. And she also wanted to talk about human-to-human connection. She works in the tech field now, so she is actually very cognizant that her job could be

overtaken by AI. But she's not too worried because she finds hope in her family's side gig of running a small farm and an Airbnb.

I really like running the farm and the Airbnb, and I like working with customers and making the space really nice for people. And I truly feel like as we continue to push forward with technology advancements, people are going to continue to want authentic types of experiences, and they're going to want to go to places where there are real people and they can engage with them and

So I suspect maybe I might just have to transition to turning more towards that part of my life. Jack, what do you think?

Isn't that something? She used the word authentic experiences. There is such a hunger for that when you spend a day or even an hour on the computer. You know, you want something that's authentic, that's human, that's visceral, real. And that hunger is only going to grow. I mean, there's no question about it.

And to search for the real, the authentic, you only find it in human encounter, which you can't plan out. It's going to do what it's going to do, but it makes you feel alive and you recognize the life in other people. So I think she's on to something, and good luck with that. It sounds like that side gig might become the main course. Yeah.

Okay, Jack, in the pod last week, you talked about how you saw the primary victims, I'll just put it this way, or the most vulnerable people in this AI revolution being young people, right? And we talked about those entry-level jobs. So that actually resonated with a lot of jackpotters because we got a lot of comments on how young people now are

college kids, high schoolers, even younger who are coming of age with AI, how this will shape their future. So here's Alan from Bloomington, Indiana. He has two daughters in college, and he's trying to embrace the uncertainty. What I'm telling them is that they should see their education as a chance to become educated and make themselves into better people and improve their minds. I don't know

I don't know if parents have been saying that to students for a long time because for a long time it's been, make sure you get training for this job or that job. You have to become a doctor or a lawyer or a computer scientist. Now I'm saying, become educated.

That's what school is for because we don't know what the future holds. Jack, before I let you respond to that, because I imagine you have a lot to say, I want to go to one last jackpotter who brought in some more literature to the conversation. This is Bob from East Lansing, Michigan.

And he wanted to bring to mind Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 dystopian novel, Player Piano. In it, the world is run by a small number of managers and engineers who are required to keep the factories going. Everyone else who would otherwise be unemployed is shuttled into the reclamation and restoration core doing make-work government jobs like fixing potholes.

It is a dystopian look at the future we may be looking at. Okay, Jack, over to you.

Well, I think Alan is really giving the vision of the liberal arts, isn't he? To make you better people, you know, deeper and more delicate. Isn't that what education should be about? And yes, there may not be a vocational upshot from it, but how much vocational gain is there going to be if you're trained for a

a specialty that in 10 years won't exist. How much better to be trained to be a deeper person, to know more about the Western tradition, to feel, sharpen your critical thinking. You know, what does Matthew Arnold say? To learn what is the best that has been thought and said before.

in the world. It's called education. And I think what great advice he's giving his daughters there, it seems to me. Did you want to talk about Kurt Vonnegut? Yeah, go ahead. Kurt Vonnegut. I read all of Kurt Vonnegut, but it was so long ago that I've forgotten this novel. But this may be the novel where after everything has been blown up and changed,

somebody is tinkering. Somebody is out there. There's an engineer who's tinkering with something to put it together again or to make something new. And that is a, you know, for all that he saw the danger of that, he also saw that, you know, automation comes out of that tinkering, that improvement gene that engineers have. They can't let well enough alone.

Well, Jack, thank you as always. Thank you. I'm Magna Chakrabarty, and this is The Jackpod from On Point.

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Support for this podcast comes from It's Revolutionary, a podcast from Massachusetts 250. Listen on for the story of one drag king's self-expression, pride, and transformation in Northampton, Massachusetts. ♪

You're listening to It's Revolutionary, a podcast celebrating 250 years since the shot heard around the world was fired right here in Massachusetts. I'm Jay Feinstein. From revolution to revolution, we're exploring the people and places in Massachusetts that shape America.

Today we found ourselves in Northampton, Massachusetts, home of some pretty rad rainbow crosswalks. They're nothing small. They're pretty, it's a pretty chunky, very obvious rainbow. That's Ross, better known as the drag king Victor Evangelica. I

I carry the spirit of Victor everywhere I go. He spreads the good word. I met up with him at the Cafe T-Roots on Main Street, the city's main drag, to talk about how Northampton might be revolutionary as an oasis of queer life. I want to make sure they know that they can bother us for food. Of course, after we ordered some delicious food. Oh, thank you so much.

Oh, that looks so yummy. And he said revolutionary doesn't even begin to describe Northampton. You know, this is a place where Sojourner Truth lived, Frederick Douglass visited. There is a long history of people who have been critical to our understandings of the human experience and people's struggles that have found refuge in this area.

Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, best known for Shays' Rebellion, lived around this area too. And today, Northampton continues to be an oasis for artists, queer people, and anyone who might not have somewhere else to go. You know, it's a very zany population here, I'm very proud to say.

It's a place he feels he can really be himself. The queer joy and honestly like self-expression that I can have here is something that I genuinely feel it's some of the best in the world. This is like one of the best places in our world to be queer and

I think about that and I think about the struggles I still face and sometimes it's disheartening, but it's also, it brings me so much joy that there is such a resilient group of people around here who are very friendly, you know, want to help you. If you talk to somebody about confusing parking meters in this area, somebody's going to help you out. If you talk to somebody about where's this thing or that that's a local, they're probably going to know where to point you and what's the best place to be.

And he's right. It was Victor's suggestion that brought me to T-Roots in the first place. But I was also in town to see Victor perform, where he dressed up in a costume made of wires and chains and Super Nintendo cartridges. One of the parts of the big reveal is I take off this, like, inhibiting jacket made out of wires, and I shed these things, and I'm able to move more freely throughout this number, and...

show people that act of transformation and freeing yourself from that kind of personal bind you might have. I mean, it just sounds like it gives you a level of joy. I'm just watching the smile on your face as you describe the character. Yeah, I kind of do a lot of 80s riffs that are nostalgic for me, just based off of what my parents were into a lot growing up. And that's really what makes me

the most at home, I feel, and it's the easiest for me to fit into. It's a lot of fun. So that night, we joined an eclectic crowd in an arcade called The Quarters to see some drag.

Before the show, we caught up with a few audience members. Yeah, what are you hoping to see tonight? Craziness, fun, queer love, joy, you know, that kind of thing. Most of the time, there's usually a drag show happening somewhere. So whether it's like here, a couple towns over, there's usually like some place to go to see it. I just love drag as an expression of...

like individuality and what people can do with their craft and their skills. It's fun to see how creative people get with it. I mean, the way people do their makeup and what they wear, it's amazing to see people just go up there and just be their authentic selves. And being authentic is what it's all about, says Victor. The best drag that people see is truly reflective of people who know themselves and

reflective of people who are so proud of the person that they are that they're able to go on stage and serve a fantasy.

And he sees drag like that and art like that all over the Northampton area. I think when you get people who can live as their authentic selves as an area, you get better art. You get people who are doing things for real. And I'm, you know, I really do think about it all the time. Like, I don't think there's anywhere else I could have lived my lived experience and do what I do besides Massachusetts. I like that.

It's Revolutionary is a podcast from MA250. For more stories, check out massachusetts250.org or wbur.org slash ma250. ♪