America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Con… (2024)

Rufo sets out to prove that modern America’s movement for racial equality is actually a Neo-Marxist scheme to destroy capitalism, democracy, meritocracy, and Christian faith. I recall hearing a similar argument back in the 1960s, when a proselytizing churchman knocked on my door and tried to convince me that Martin Luther King Jr. was actually a communist, devoted to eliminating Christianity, killing whites, and stealing their property.

As Rufo explains it, modern activists for racial equality are Marxists with a difference. Instead of calling for a workers’ revolution, they call for race revolution. Their end goal is not truth and reconciliation, but the destruction of all that makes America great. This is evident, Rufo claims, because a significant minority of embittered blacks (such as the famous Black Panthers) have indeed become ideological fanatics, calling for the system’s demolition, and even engaging in terrorism. He certainly makes a point that violent fanaticism is mentally deranged. And I do wish that fanatics of all stripes would realize that.

However, I notice that Rufo makes no mention of danger from white racist fanatics such as the KKK, the Proud Boys, the Aryan Nations, or the Atomwaffen Division. Although white supremacists commonly aim to overthrow the system, and have perpetrated many acts of terrorism such as bombing black churches or the Oklahoma City Federal Building, these fanatics do not make Rufo’s list as enemies of the state. It’s an omission that reminds me of good studies I’ve seen on fanaticism, authoritarianism, religious cults, etc., which examine the problem of extremism as it appears in many kinds of political, religious, or communal groups. Rufo, however, examines just one kind of extremism, namely the kind he hates.

Rufo also shows that many zealots against racism get highly offensive with their puritanical crusading. In many cases, people accused of insufficient moral purity have grounds for complaint. It’s especially counterproductive when people are accused, not of doing something wrong, but of being wrong by nature. As Rufo demonstrates, many advocates of critical race theory seriously insist that America is “an irredeemably racist nation” and that white people constitute “a permanent oppressor class.” It almost mirrors the traditional accusations of inherent inferiority made against non-whites. Rufo argues that this nihilistic argument is the real point of modern anti-racist activists: “They want to dismantle the pillars of Western society—rationalism, individualism, capitalism, natural rights, the rule of law—and usher in a post-liberal, or post-whiteness, political order.” He quotes many embittered black people who really do talk this way, which seems to prove that antiracists have nothing constructive to say, and self-respecting Americans should reject all such negativity. I suspect, however, that there’s also a problem with having zero-tolerance for criticism from other people. In our highly reactive culture of identity-labeling, I suspect we have trouble telling the difference between somebody saying “You’re showing unconscious bias,” and somebody saying “You’re evil by nature.”

In calling Americans to defend their nation against the peril of radical anti-racism, Rufo’s argument against “critical race theory” aligns with the “race replacement theory” (that non-whites have a plan to replace the white race). He makes it seem obvious that it’s blacks, not whites, who are consumed by racism and hate. Of course hate is actually fear, since we try to exclude or control others mainly out of fear. And Rufo is one of the greatest fear-mongers I’ve ever read.

Christopher Rufo has written a very important book and the more people read it the better, though probably not many will. He covers the founding and growth of the far left's nihilistic race is everything aproach. There an in depth coverage of 4 of the premier people responsible for the philosophical (such as they are) underpinnings of this revolution, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell.

It's a very disheartening book, since from the beginning it's been clear these people have nothing of value to contribute to society, they just want to bring it down while living off the fruits of others who did contribute. Like it or not, though it's importasnt becuse of the extent these revolutionary ideas have taken over most of the important institutions of our country, education, media, politics, big business.

This is first class work, I give it 5 stars.

on the pulse

I had high hopes for this book since I’ve admired Chris’ writing and reporting for years, but it has surpassed my expectations. The book lays out the framework of critical race theory. It’s dominant in all institutions by storytelling on the main “character” of the revolution, making it easy to follow.
I also loved the conclusion since it is optimistic and practical. It is easy to fall into the trap of despair, but this book brings hope.

This book is unsatisfying. It lacked something vital, a connection, an argument to hold the profiles together. It would have been perfect for a book titled, "American Cultural Revolutionaries".

He answered the question of who and who were involved in the revolution, but not when the revolution started, why it started, and what it has achieved.

It also did not address how the ideas of those profiled moved from dry academic theory to a well assimilated praxis. How did we move from the academic theories of Derrick Bell, Angela Davis, Paolo Freire, and Herbert Marcuse to a grassroot stage where these theories are believed and practiced effortlessly?
I recommend for the profiles alone, but it lacked a binding argument.

It might be easy to dismiss this as the work of a few harmless radicals who are “keeping Portland weird” and, for the most part, represent a minority coalition of the malcontent and the mentally deranged—a quick glimpse through the Antifa mug shots released by the Portland Police Department will confirm this impression.

Always the dick, Rufo.

America’s Cultural Revolution is Rufo trying to be a very serious writer with very firm intellectual underpinnings to his inflammatory positions on Critical Race Theory/DEI/whatever amorphous blob that gets you to “Black Lives Matter was an op”. There’s a very good Vox article that reflects my thoughts on the book, other than it being too nice to Rufo about the readability of his biographies.

However, I do want to comment on a couple of points.

The Triumph of Liberalism

The intellectuals and activists of the counter-revolution must arm the population with a competing set of values, spoken in language that exposes and surpasses the euphemisms of the left-wing ideological regime: excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos.

I find Rufo at his least intolerable when he unconsciously acknowledges that, wow, it’s possible to have diversity of thought and a debate about matters.

During the section on Derrick Bell, Rufo summarises Bell’s writing on Critical Race Theory and rounds up some informed critics of Bell’s writings:

Bell had attempted to explain away any expression of white virtue as cloaked self-interest, but, according to Clark, a basic historical study of the Civil War and of the civil rights movement, in which both he and Bell had participated, left no doubt: white Americans could transcend their own narrow interests and contribute toward the realization of black freedom.

...and... ...that’s fine. I don’t have a problem with an approach that is “Here’s what this guy said, and here are a bunch of guys that said that first guy was a dork.” I don’t even mind if you slant things towards your position – you’re allowed to have an opinion! There’s plenty of academic informed criticism of the 1619 Project and other elements that could be described as part of, or at least adjacent to, Critical Race Theory.

Rufo provides clear evidence that Critical Race Theory is a publicly contestable position because he quotes people that contested it! Other than Bell (according to Rufo) getting snippy about them, those critics don’t seem to have suffered adverse consequences. Accordingly, what makes more sense:

(a)Critical Race Theory imposed itself (somehow) on an educational system; or

(b)that Liberal Tradition has absorbed and de-radicalized elements of Critical Race Theory?

How many guest essays in the New York Times do you need before you feel your free speech rights are no longer being stifled?

Rufo’s conclusion also makes a mockery of his argument that Critical Race Theory is a suffocating new orthodoxy:

The counter-revolution must also restore a healthy sense of historical time. The past must be remembered not as a procession of horrors, but as a vast spiritual tableau for mankind, in which his greatest cruelties and his greatest triumphs are revealed. History must once again serve as nourishment for society, and its highest symbols—the Founders, the Constitution, the Republic—must inspire a renewed and unashamed defense. The critiques of the critical theories, insofar as they reveal injustice, must be absorbed into the narrative of the counter-revolution and serve as a reminder of human limitation, which has been gradually and steadily overcome through the unfolding of the principles of the American Republic.

Congratulations on discovering: (a) Historiography and (b) Pluralism. Rufo’s interpretation of history is tied to particular lodestones of the Founders, the Constitution and the Republic (which, ironically, Rufo doesn’t define despite castigating Critical Race Theory as nihilism), while admitting that views of history change and that his viewpoint may be different that others. Rufo’s fantasy is that this will all be resolved by unfolding the principles of the American Republic as though those principles exist as objective facts with no fuzzy boundaries. I would suggest Rufo talk to some actual historians about the plausibility of that.

Lying Liars and the Lies they Tell

For the critical pedagogists, nothing can be left standing. The endpoint of abolition is, ultimately, the abolition of America itself.

I was generous to Rufo in the previous section. I pretended he was an honest, if misguided, broker. What Rufo really does... ...is lie. And he said I could say that, because:

Journalistic standards mean that the Vox must dance around as to Rufo’s habit of exaggeration and factual missteps. My standard of “emotional Goodreads reviewer” holds him to be an outright liar.

It is complicated to tease this point out because Rufo cites and quotes sources. As an explanation, look at the below and count the number of quotation marks:

Therefore, according to Walmart, the objective is to create a psychological diagnosis of “whiteness,” which can then be treated through “white anti-racist development.” Whites, the manual explains, are inherently guilty of “white supremacy thinking,” which is based on the belief that “one’s comfort, wealth, privilege and success has been earned by merits and hard work,” rather than through the benefits of systemic racism. As a result, white Americans have been subjected to “racist conditioning” that indoctrinates them into “white supremacy,” which includes the racist values of “individualism,” “objectivity,” “paternalism,” “defensiveness,” “power hoarding,” “right to comfort,” and “worship of the written word.” Racial minorities, on the other hand, are constantly suffering under the yoke of “constructed racist oppression” and “internalized racial inferiority.” Their internal psychology is considered shattered and broken, dominated by internal messages such as “we believe there is something wrong with being a person of color,” “we have lowered self-esteem,” “we have lowered expectations,” “we have very limited choices,” and “we have a sense of limited possibility.” Minorities, Walmart claims, thus begin to believe the “myths promoted by the racist system” and have feelings of “self-hate,” “anger,” “rage,” and “ethnocentrism,” and are forced to “forget,” “lie,” and “stop feeling” in order to secure basic survival.

It seems weird that we have to rely on Rufo to provide context for all these sentence fragments he has put together. Unsurprisingly, when you track down the actual material, you find that Rufo has made somewhere between “pretty major” and “gross” misrepresentations, to the extent that he is lying about what it actually says. The worst example I could find was Rufo’s citations of Professor Cheryl Harris’s Harvard Law Review paper “Whiteness as Property.” Approximately 80 pages of writing are reduced to very specific sentence fragments from approximately 6 pages to construct a false summary that would earn him a slapping from any academic publication that he dare submit to.

Rufo’s sourcing for present day examples of the dominance of Critical Race Theory is also poor. He often relies on his own articles, which may or may not provide the material he’s basing his screeds on. On one occasion his source is a congressional candidate writing an opinion piece in the Federalist.

Seems like that candidate might not be a trustworthy guy!

When claiming the Treasury is overwhelmed with wokeness, I would expect more than one anonymous employee as a source Similarly, Casey Petersen off his own bat deciding to send an email blast to Sandia National Laboratories employees about trainings that Petersen admits were 90-95% “moderate” (a point Rufo elides over) is not the damning evidence Rufo portrays it as. I personally hold that an employee whose political views are expressed by unsolicited email might not be representative.

In historical terms, the counter-revolution can be understood as a restoration of the revolution of 1776 over and against the revolution of 1968. Its ambition is not to assume control over the centralized bureaucratic apparatus, but to smash it.

America’s Cultural Revolution opens by claiming credit that President Trump issued an executive order abolishing critical race theory in the federal government, nationalizing the issue, and sending American politics into a period of contentious and consequential debate. He just can’t help but brag about the cultural orthodoxy he imposes on others, right at the start of a book claiming victimhood.

That’s all the message about Rufo you need, really.

This is a brilliant and important scholarly work, which in the end becomes of practical, especially political value. Mr. Rufo positions himself as a worthy successor to David Horowitz who has led the intellectual charge against America's radical Left since defecting from its ranks in the 1960s.

The ideal audience is anyone you know who hasn't been paying close attention since people like Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paolo Freire, and Derrick Bell laid the theoretical framework for the Far Left's long march through our institutions from 1968 to the present. The most important chapter for all is the last, the essential final thirty minutes of the audiobook version, where Rufo sketches in very broad strokes the necessities of the counterrevolution to come. (I'm sure he'll expand upon those in future books and in his superlative work via City Journal and Substack.)

Until that final chapter it's a bit of a long slog through Professor Marcuse's theories of revolution, the racial conflicts triggered by militants like his student Angela Davis, the corruption of education theory by the Marxist Paolo Freire, and the poisoning of legal thinking by the likes of Derrick Bell.

Is it necessary to know your enemy in such detail? Yes, if you are fighting on those battlefields. I'm more concerned by the battlefields not so closely observed by Mr. Rufo's book. The commanding heights of the radicals' revolution, after all, weren't only schools and universities, and the central protagonists weren't just thugs and theorists.

Rufo's choice of subjects underestimates the centrality to the cultural revolution of our media and entertainment sector, a core spawning point of left wing nastiness. Leading with deliberate subversive intent was popular music glorifying "gangsta rap." The motion picture industry fell next, with television news and prime time entertainment coming into alignment later on. The tech industry, originally populated by libertarians, became a left wing stronghold in time to step on the scales of the 2020 election.

Across most sectors of American business its human resources departments have slowly been allowed to form another front, slowly implementing boilerplate mission statements with closely watched hirings and non-firings into the DEI and ESG mandates of today. We hear about these things at a distance from Rufo, but in this book you're more likely to read about scholarly reaction to political theories than practical examples of how those ideas find their way into narratives, products, and services consumed by hundred of millions.

So for my populist instincts this book is a bit too cerebral, and insufficiently prescriptive as to the great restoration which must take place. I'm worried that the conservatives who read it will learn plenty about Marx and Gramsci, but not enough about the path from McLuhan to Musk.

On a more optimistic note. Mr. Rufo understands that the political implementation of the Marxist Left's agenda has, does, and always will fail to work. Put to the test of governance, they've got all the wrong answers and can be relied upon to generate catastrophic results. Theirs is reliably leadership by 180 degree example.

The most glaring recent example is the anarchy begat by anti-police policies following the "George Floyd riots" of 2020. The crime statistics bear this out. The inverse, the conservative pro-policing ideas successfully turned into action against street crime in Rudy Giuliani's '90s New York (ably chronicled by City Journal's Heather MacDonald) is a template to guide the counterrevolution to success. Other Far Left policy choices also turn brilliant when reversed, especially economic ones.

The Costanza Principle often applies: if all your instincts are wrong (as the Left's are), just "do the opposite." Sometimes, however, it's not that easy. The moderates on the American left were correct to embrace women in the workplace, same sex freedom, and racial equality. Any effective counterrevolution to the Far Left needs to forcefully embrace those notions. The proper opposite of racism isn't reverse racism, it's race neutrality.

Part of Rufo's definition of counterrevolution relies vaguely on religious faith. He should be very careful in this era. As a post-Enlightenment movement, the American Left gains traction and growing support by opposing supernaturalism and doctrinaire religious proclamations which restrict personal freedom. A successful counterrevolution need not oppose these themes. When the secularists replace religion with collectivism, that's their mistake, because it runs directly against our American constitutional preference for individual freedom. The counterrevolution doesn't need to rely on any one particular religious construct, nor does it need to give supernaturally based ones aid and comfort in their losing battle against science. The proper opposite of totalitarian collectivism is individual choice and freedom.

I fall somewhere in the middle on the political spectrum and take every issue as it's own. I really hate the divisiveness in the media, so I like to read books from multiple perspectives on an issue to get a full picture of why people think the way they do (and what evidence they have to support their thinking). In the past I've read "Caste" and "White Fragility" and liked them both. Both challenged my thinking in new ways. When I picked up this book it was because I'd seen some of the failures of the current Critical Theories and the pervasiveness of ideologies in all of our institutions. They have these big ideas full of outrage and bitterness without yielding any real results to help elevate those they are meant to be helping through their work. This book was worth reading to get the historical context of these movements and how we ended up here. It's very dry at times and was hard to push through; however, some of the highlights were the chapter on Portland (since I live in the PDX area) and the Conclusion. The author isn't racist, as I'm sure many will claim. He simply believes there are better ways to solve social problems at their root causes and to elevate those in need. The only way to solve these issues is to unite us and work together. It's one of many books to read if you want to get a more well-rounded picture of these really complex issues.

This book is a political Rorschach test and because of that some people will read it differently. Ironic, since the post-modern subversion of “Truth” for “my truth” is at the heart of this book. Three points I want to make:

1) Rufo is up there with the likes of Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven; Into the Wild), Erik Larsen (Devil in the White City), and Rebecca Skloot (Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), as far as the craft of non-fiction writing goes. I’d even put him in the same ballpark as Truman Capote. He’s that good. This book draws together narratives and strands from postmodern theory, Marxist theory, 1960s radical politics, government coups, and personal rivalries, and frames them into a dynamic portrait of the American university that anyone who has ever been a part of it (even a third rate state school like me) can recognize. And the story he tells is epic, fascinating, and terrifying. As someone who studied Critical Literary Theory at the graduate level and was steeped in the insanity of Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Helen Cixioux, and Luce Irigaray, I recognize this story. “Subvert the dominant paradigm!” says every single flavor of critical theory. “Language is power and whoever controls language has the power,” the critical theorists chant in unison!

2) I now have a whole different take on the infamous Beer Summit between Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and that cop who arrested Gates outside his house. I’ve always been a fan of Gates. His memoir “Colored People,” which beautifully describes his childhood in West Virginia in the 50s and 60s is on my syllabus and has been for years. He edited the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Anyway, he is a premier literary scholar and one of the first outspoken critics of Critical Race Theory as envisioned by Derrick Bell at Harvard Law. Obama always was a defender of Bell’s theories and matriculated at Harvard Law when Bell was there. Suffice it to say, Gates and Obama weren’t on the same ideological page, and that knowledge adds a whole other layer of context to that moment. And of course, a literary scholar would understand the problem with destabilizing language to the point that literal and figurative meanings get transposed (words are now literal violence, etc.). Gates called that out from the beginning and got accused of being an "academic minstrel" by Bell and his acolytes. Makes me respect the man even more.

3) In a rather cheesy episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Season Three, “Past Tense”), through some sort of transporter shenanigans, the crew of DS9 gets trapped in 1990s America. In this America “homeless” people are corralled into inner-city “sanctuary districts” and kept out of sight of the rest of the population. There’s an uprising led by an activist named (wait for it) "Gabriel" Bell and due to the DS9 crew’s presence this revolt now inadvertently leads to Bell’s death. Sisko has to now take his place and lead the uprising or humanity will disappear forevermore. The crew, of course, fixes the timeline, except in all the history texts Bell is now pictured as Sisko. I’m sorry, but that is just hilarious. I can just see the writers with their little MFAs from UCLA so excited to cram subversive CRT into their episodes under everyone’s noses. That cracked me up. The entire episode is a riff off of one of Bell’s works of fiction that Rufo summarizes. So funny.

If you are inclined to hate Rufo, you should read this so you understand why he is so effective. And if you’re a classical liberal/conservative/libertarian who wants to understand what the hell happened to higher education and what to do about it, this book illuminates a positive path forward.

I liked this book more than I expected or wanted to. Don't get me wrong - it's extremely tendentious. Rufo takes the most radical elements 20th century leftist thought and activism, wallows in the outrageousness of it all, and then tries to connect the dots to contemporary diversity training in academia in corporate boardrooms. So, basically, once upon the time the Left in America tried to stage a Marxist revolution by blowing things up and shooting cops. Then they realized that didn't work very well so they decided to put on corduroy jackets and becomes university professors instead, biding their time until the Great Reawokening.
But despite all of this, Rufo's book is much better researched than I expected. And when he gets to the concluding chapters point out the excesses of "DEI" ideology in contemporary US institutions, he's on solid ground. Likening it, as he does, to Mao's "Cultural Revolution" might be just a *bit* of a stretch. But there's some genuinely alarming stuff going on there to be sure. Whether Rufo's "counterrevolution," with its blunt dismissal of the value of academic freedom, is viable as an alternative is a quite different question - and one which Rufo doesn't really address in this book.
Still, I learned more from this than I expected to, and overall, would recommend it despite its significant flaws.

This is another great book.. unfortunately it's on a depressing subject... the deterioration of our entire society by its planned destruction by Communists among us. While the book goes Less into the motivations of those out to destroy US, it delves deeply into the historic figures who started the practice And the How of accomplishing their goal. And it appears that they are succeeding by the process of Boiling the Frog in its own Bath Waters.

Obviously, just for awareness of what's being done to US, I recommending reading this book cover to cover. There's not an uninteresting uninstructive part in the book. You may know many/most of the keywords and general concepts of how they are eroding US but I guarantee you don't know anywhere near the detail provided by this book. It's eyeopening.

Exceptionally well done. Extensively documented and precisely-argued, Rufo lays out a compelling narrative for the ideological and bureaucratic conquest of CRT through every major institution of American culture. Alongside Trueman's Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, this is one of the best books I've read that explains how our culture arrived at its current state.

The book focuses on four Marxist revolutionaries over the course of the past century: Herbert Marcuse, Paulo Freire, Angela Davis and Derrick Bell. While Marxist followers have always focused on the oppressors, the strategy evolved to pathologize white identity (as oppressors) and radicalize black identity (as inherently oppressed). The book is enlightening, though delving into the context of their ideas becomes a little like a long tortured visit to an insane asylum. One of the scholars in the book even proclaims, "The truth is what we say it is." Oka-a-a-y, so no argument must be made against their proclamations.

One of the subjects, Paulo Freire, was invited to implement his Marxist ideas in various countries around the world, and his prescription for a fully functioning enlightened society failed each time. In Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, the system of colonialism gave way to a system of poverty, repression, illiteracy, mass murder and civil war. It's amazing that each successive country would even attempt the experiment after witnessing the failure of the others. Hope springs eternal, I guess. It's the longstanding argument by socialists that true socialism will actually work if implemented, the correct recipe just hasn't been tried yet.

The creep of the ideology through academia, the government and now through corporate America is leading to a frightening future for the country and the world, unless we can reverse the course of the disease.

In America's Cultural Revolution, Christopher Rufo introduces to readers the Marxist intellectual forces that led directly the the current "cultural revolution" taking place within the United States. These neo-Marxist ideologies seek to explain oppression along the binaries within capitalist societies: socioeconomic class, race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. To explain this "march through the institutions," Rufo skillfully divides his book into four themes - revolution, race, education, and power.

In each of those four themes, he also introduces us to the intellectual works of a single revolutionary. For part one, "revolution," German Marxist intellectual Herbert Marcuse and his plan to invoke a "long march through the institutions" via "critical theory" In essence, Marcuse sought to introduce Marxist ideology into the American education, corporate, and government institutions in order to for all institutions to become revolutionary tools. Hence the name, he intended it to be a "long march" that could take generations. Marcuse simply planted the seed that could grow. In part two, "race," Rufo introduces us to Angela Davis, the Marxist Civil Rights Movement leader, who has heavily shaped race-based neo-Marxism through "critical political praxis." Her violence towards authorities stem from her affiliations with the radical Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground. We also learn how she and fellow members of these two violent groups entered into academia, setting the stage for radical left ideologies perpetuated in colleges. "Education" is the theme of the third part, which Paulo Freire's theories of radicalism in education are introduced, also known as "critical pedagogy." A native of Brazil and an exile to the United States, Freire gave birth to the idea that education is to be used as a political weapon - the left can use the education system to radicalize the coming generations. He took much of Marcuse's ideas and applied them directly to education. Finally, in part four, is "power." Derrick Bell, the father of "critical race theory," is the main character of this part, specifically analyzing how he grew from a legal scholar to that of a hateful, revengeful, and racist academic. Rufo also examined how critical race theory and DEI initiatives "conquered" the vast majority of institutions in the United States.

At the very end of his book, Christopher Rufo offers his solutions to effectively combat the radical left's takeover of American institutions. He bases a "counterrevolution" through the democratic process on the fact that the revolution "collapses when it is put into practice," specifically that it "devolves into nihilism when it unleashes violence." According to Rufo, the plan for a counter-revolution will be "along a new axis between the citizen and the ideological regime." In essence, it is achieved by revamping American values, morality, Christianity, republicanism, and the "spirit of 1776." Rufo is hopeful that this counter-revolution can work. I appreciate Rufo's optimism, but I am unsure if the United States' conservative bloc can rise up in force to save the nation in time.

Overall, Rufo has written a masterful work with extensive research on the Marxists and critical theories. This is a wonderful primer for understanding how and why "wokeness" has infiltrated into virtually every American institution, from preschools to Fortune 500 companies to the federal government. Rufo also gives readers a thorough understanding of the different variations and theories of neo-Marxism. He brilliantly breaks down their complex theories and arguments into smaller chunks. Based on the endnotes and the detailed analyses of these Marxists works, Rufo clearly combed through their works, one by one. I would caution readers, though. For those not acquainted with Marxist terminology (praxis, inversion, dialectic, binary, hegemony, proletariat, bourgeoisie, critical theory, oppression, etc), it will be quite difficult to follow along. That, though, is the nature of the beast in neo-Marxism. The heavy language is needed to properly explain this ideology.

Though this is an excellent and well-researched book, I do offer a few critiques. First, is a lack of placing these movements within historical contexts. I think Rufo already assumes his readers know the historical contexts of these Marxist revolutionaries and their ideologies. In the first chapter about Herbert Marcuse, there is little about why Marxism gained steam in post-World War I Germany and how Marcuse was shaped by that. I do believe that would have added more depth to his arguments. Additionally, here is an overall lack of explaining why the Marxist revolutions of the 1960s-70s failed in the United States. While Rufo mentions Nixon and Hoover's offensive against the Marxists, he does little to explain the role of anti-Communist sentiment over the majority of the American population that prevented outright revolution in the United States. These same issues are seen across the book. While important, I do not believe the lack of context ruins this book. It is regardless a very well-written and extensively researched piece. A final critique is that Rufo does seem to repeat himself as he analyzes the theories of the different Marxist intellectuals. It is a minimal criticism that does not take too much away from the importance of Rufo's work.

In conclusion, Christopher Rufo's America's Cultural Revolution is a very important and timely read that should be read by every American who wishes to end the Marxist cultural revolutions. Readers will understand how and why radical leftism grew from a fringe ideology to now mainstream. We learn about Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell, as well as details on their Marxist ideologies of critical theory, praxis, pedagogy, and critical race theory. While at times slow, complicated, and depressing, Rufo's thorough research makes this a must read.

The revolution did not run through the streets, Bell concluded, but through the faculty meeting and the seminar room.

When listening to the rhetoric from those on the American left today, does it ever feel like they think we are still living in the 1960s? In this book, Chris Rufo argues that there is a good reason for this. His central thesis is that after the "Revolution of 1968" and the subsequent domestic terror campaigns by groups like the Weathermen and the Black Liberation Army failed, its leaders retreated into academia. Despite their violent acts and numerous bombings, these radicals astonishingly almost always avoided imprisonment. They recognized, however, the violence had alienated them from society and was counterproductive.

Far from being a fatal setback, however, and mirroring Mao's resurgence after his 5,000-mile retreat, the radicals devised a new strategy of a "long march through the institutions." Rufo argues the strategy has been wildly successful, starting in academia but now expanding to capture most of present-day America's important institutions, including corporate America, the federal bureaucracy, and K-12.

Biographies of Key Figures

The book includes brief biographies of some of the key figures of America's radical left, with particular emphasis on

- Herbert Marcuse, a neo-Marxist, head of the Frankfurt School, and "the father of the New Left."
- One of Marcuse's most famous students: Angela Davis
- Eldridge Cleaver, who was the leader of the Black Liberation Army,
- Paulo Freire, a Brazillian Marxist who is generally seen as the most influential figure in modern educational theory, and
- Derrick Bell who is known as the father of critical race theory.

In the case of Marcuse, Davis, Friere, and Cleaver, Rufo emphasizes their rhetorical and charismatic gifts, their sharp intellects, and their sympathies toward violence. For example, in Marcuse's case, Rufo makes it clear that he directly supported and met with militant groups in the United States and Europe working toward violent revolution. His rhetoric was crafty enough to leave just enough ambiguity as to whether he was calling for violence: at least if you only took his statements in isolation. However, by looking at the overall picture, Rufo clarifies that Marcuse supported violence.

Derrick Bell, unlike his counterparts, was not a proponent of violence. Rufo underscores Bell's noteworthy accomplishments as a Civil Rights lawyer and founder of CRT, juxtaposing them with his eventual plunge into pessimism and nihilism. Bell's inclination towards dystopian fiction is highlighted, with him envisioning scenarios where white Americans would buy rights to discriminate openly against black people and, in perhaps the most extreme and well-known example, even sold them to extraterrestrials. Particularly striking is Sowell's critique that Bell, feeling outmatched at Harvard, chose to maintain his relevance through outlandish fiction.

The Capture of Academia

Although Rufo's biographies are fascinating, Rufo's recount of the radical capture of America's colleges is equally intriguing. In particular, Rufo emphasizes Marcuse's insights into the need to turn away from violence which, sadly, he realized only after it has already burnt itself out. At this point, Marcuse realized that the key was to capture academia as a base and then expand into the rest of society from there. Remarkably, this aligned perfectly with the fact that most of the 1960s and 1970s radicals, including nearly all members of the Weathermen, were able to avoid prosecution, and many of the most prominent took up academic careers as their next stage in life.

Among the book's most fascinating information, which is not currently well known, is that it was Marcuse's third wife who created the prototypes for the first DEI programs which were first instituted in academia. Rufo recounts how key components were modeled after the guilt-inducing struggle sessions denouncing whiteness and privilege that were rituals of the Weather Underground.

Davis's preeminence in academia is also detailed, with Rufo, for instance, crediting her for articulating the key notions of intersectionality long before Bell's student Kimberley Crenshaw.

Rufo additionally emphasizes that educational theory was the key focus of the radicals-become-academics. This included both post-secondary and K-12.

Expansion Beyond the University

Rufo details that critical theory, the main thread he sees uniting the radicals turned academics, was not content to remain confined to academia. Given the similarities between publicly funded education and government bureaucracies, Rufo details how the federal bureaucracy put up essentially no resistance to critical theory and DEI.

The capture of Corporate America is only slightly more complex and occurred in large part through DEI programs. Rufo presents statistics regarding the explosion in critical theory jargon in NYT articles after the Great Financial Crisis. This he attributes to layoffs followed by hiring new graduates thoroughly indoctrinated into the critical theories now generally accepted by universities. Beyond ideological sympathies, Rufo explains how corporations have come to see alignment with critical theory as necessary to the bottom line. For instance, Rufo argues that it is treated as "protection money," or the cost of doing business and avoiding coming in the crosshairs of social justice activism.

The Book's Strengths

Even with some background in this field and prior knowledge of Rufo's work, I found this book enlightening. It offered fresh insights like Marcuse's shift toward non-violence and institutional infiltration and the early nexus between Critical Race Theorists and Gramsci. Because of the wealth of new information, Rufo's ability to recount fast-paced, engaging stories, and editing the book to the lower end of medium length, I never got bored.

Another great strength of the book is its meticulous endnotes. Since they often lead back to primary sources, this makes it hard to deny things many on the left would like to.

Specifically, Rufo's notes show that Critical Race Theorists are against free speech; they seek a suspension of property rights, first through a temporary suspension and redistribution, followed by ongoing interventions in the name of affirmative action. Rufo connects this opposition to free speech to Marcuse's writings, where he explicitly discusses a dictatorship of intellectuals who would determine what could be discussed and what could not. For example, free speech would be allowed for Marxists on the left but denied to fascists or even those whose words intellectuals worry could inadvertently promote fascism.

The final strength to mention is Rufo's emphasis on how the modern left operates through psychological manipulation, primarily by inducing unwarranted guilt. Rufo provocatively sees this as a consequence of what he describes as a shift from failedmasculinenotions of capturing society through violence to more effective but covert and sinisterfemininestrategies.

The Book Weaknesses

Compared to its strengths, the book's weaknesses are relatively minor. The book does make some minor errors. For instance, it claims that a statue of Lincoln was torn down during the riots of 2020. Although there was a rally that made this seem imminent at one point, it never transpired. There are a few other minor inaccuracies throughout the book, with, unfortunately, probably enough for a pedantic critic predetermined to give the book a bad review a chance to cherry-pick out and make their focus.

More seriously, Rufo's book omits a crucial CRT assertion: that formal equality alone cannot secure actual equality for minorities. He avoids elaborating on the details, although it presents a plausible claim: a person's success generally correlates with parental wealth. Hence, CRT could be correct in suggesting that generational wealth disparity, which resulted from horrific past injustices, might permanently impede black people's advancement. Rufo neither adequately presents nor counters this proposition.

A final weakness from the conclusion is that although the book decries critical theory's inability to produce evidence that it leads to positive results, Rufo fails to address why black people should have hope that they can succeed without critical theory-based policy. Here, Rufo could have done better. He is clearly a fan of Thomas Sowell, who has argued that, through educational reforms, quite the opposite of those envisioned by critical theory, black people can overcome obstacles such as being born into poorer families. Indeed, Sowell gives examples of black people doing this starting immediately after the Civil War.

Summary

Out of all the books I have read since the 2020 riots, Rufo's "America's Cultural Revolution" provides the most concise and well-sourced account of the radical left's influence on present-day America. It is a fast-paced book providing short biographies of the key figures of America's radical left since the 1960s. It discusses how, after violence failed, they captured academia, expanded Marcuse's critical theory, and merged it with other acidic leftist schools of thought. The book then details how leftist radicalism expanded into the federal bureaucracy, corporate America, and K-12. Due to the wealth of new material, the book will fascinate those new to Rufo's thesis, along with those who already consider themselves well-versed.

The book's weaknesses are minor: only enough to make it 4.75 stars instead of 5.0. There are a few relatively minor inaccuracies, although none on crucial points. This is even when Rufo presents what, initially, seem to be claims that those on the left would surely fight hard to deny but will not be able due to his meticulous endnotes.

The final minor weakness is that the conclusion could contain more specifics. Rufo could have pointed to others, like Sowell, who have solutions to improve black people's lives and avoid the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of critical theory and its underlying nihilism.

Another one that I came into with pretty strong confirmation bias, but still quite the eye-opener here. Rufo does an impeccable job of laying out exactly how "The Dumb" has infiltrated just about every organization under the guise of "DEI" and other social justice buzzwords. Cannot recommend this one enough. My takeaways are a bit more "stream-of-consciousness" on this one but high points that jumped out to me regardless....

- Never heard the name Herbert Marcuse previously; now to find out he's one of the first jerks behind the idiocy of the modern progressive movement was fascinating, he started "The Dumb"

- Marcuse gave up on subverting the "mainstream" culture and refocused on colleges so as to hijack the "knowledge source"

- Never knew that "Weather Underground" was anything other than a weather forecast site, ha ha

- "The way forward was not through the messy politics of revolutionary action, but through the manipulation of symbols and ideas" (well-worded and highly accurate)

- Recent surveys show professors in social sciences self-identifications as follows; 24% as "radical", 21% "activist, 18% "Marxist" while in the humanities; 19%, 26%, and 5%

- The purpose of flooding the discourse with these concepts is not merely to shape public consciousness, but to precondition the population for left-wing political conclusions. Marcuse called this process “linguistic therapy,” which he described as “the effort to free words (and thereby concepts) from the all but total distortion of their meanings by the Establishment” and to initiate “the transfer of moral standards (and of their validation) from the Establishment to the revolt against it

- The universities served as the initial hub, but the language of the critical theories was quickly translated into the language of the state and the corporation. The practices of the New Left were professionalized as “social science” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

- Social scientist Zach Goldberg has meticulously documented, the vocabulary of the critical theories rapidly conquered the paper’s linguistic universe. Between 2011 and 2019, the frequency of the word “racist(s)” and “racism” increased by 700% and 1,000%; between 2013 and 2019 the frequency of the phrase “white privilege” increased 1,200% and the frequency of the phrase “systemic racism” increased by 1,000%

- Had heard of Angela Davis but never dug into her history and contributions to "The Dumb"

- According to the Pew Research Center, that narrative has been cemented into the Democratic mind. In 2009, only 32% of Democrats believed that racism in the United States was a “big problem”; by 2017, that number had more than doubled to 76%

- On the CHAZ "experiment"; "Our leadership is in chaos,” said one frontline officer. “The mayor has made a decision to let a mob of 1,000 people dictate public safety policy for a city of 750,000.” (good reminder that "The Dumb" is actually only a small number of the whole of citizenry)

- After moving out of state, Judge McKenna warned the public that the progressive-justice coalition was perilously close to establishing a shadow court system. He argued that the leaders of the government-and-nonprofit criminal justice coalition were becoming “modern-day lords and landowners,” with the power to dispense justice outside the constitutional framework. McKenna explained that nonprofit diversion programs, which exist beyond the confines of the state and are not subject to meaningful public oversight, were potentially violating the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a public trial before a jury of one’s peers.

- As the ideology exhausts itself logically and empirically, the humanism falls away and vengeance reveals its hideous face.

- The rise of critical race theory can only be described as an intellectual coup. From its beginning in the late 1980s to the present, the theory has become pervasive in virtually every discipline in the universities

- Next, “equity.” If diversity is the framework, equity is the method. The word is a deliberate obfuscation. It is a near hom*onym to the word “equality” but carries an entirely different meaning. The American principle of equality was first proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, consecrated in blood with the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment, and codified into law with the Civil Rights Act, which attempted to create a colorblind system that treated individuals equally under the law. But for the critical race theorists, these documents provided a fig leaf of equality that disguised the reality of continuing racial domination

- BLM activists were never a threat to capitalism—they were its beneficiaries

- Ultimately, critical theory will be put to a simple test: Are conditions improving or not improving? Are cities safer or less safe? Are students learning to read or not learning to read? The new regime can only suppress the answers for so long. The average citizen will be able to feel the truth intuitively, even if he is temporarily deprived of the language for articulating it.

Clearly the author has a purpose in writing the book, yet his discussion of the evolution of ideas that led to so called “woke policy” agenda items is surprisingly neutral and accurate. I am always baffled when people living in western civ don’t know much about the Bible given its continuing cultural impact on social and political morays. Similarly, Chris Rufo’s history of the forefathers of DEI and Antiracism is enlightening and worth a read whatever your political views are. Understanding the historical development allows one to better defend as well as critique ideas in their current form and not succumb to the emotional pull of group think.

So all this DEI nonsense is just a continuation of Marxist revolutionary garbage from the 60s. Throw it all in the garbage where it belongs.

Christopher Rufo has earned a stellar reputation as both analyst of, and strategist against, the poison of “critical theory.” In "America’s Cultural Revolution," with verve, precision, and clarity, he explains what critical theory is, where it came from, and how, over the past fifty years, it was used by the Left to conquer America. His real target, however, is much older, because critical theory is merely the latest iteration of Left ideology, inevitably corrosive and parasitical, conceived in the Enlightenment and birthed in 1789. And, no surprise, the fruit of the Left’s latest conquest has been the same as always—the extreme degradation of a decent, productive society.

Rufo’s explicit purpose is to inspire a counter-revolution. This is a tall order. After all, despite successes Rufo and his allies have had in several quarters, the Left today utterly dominates all areas of American life, not only all levels of government, directly or indirectly, but also private enterprise, education, media, culture, the military, and religious institutions. That this has led America to a dead end is irrelevant to whether Left hegemony will continue. The Left always ignores its perfect record of failure in its efforts to create a new society; they will only drop the power they have grasped if they are forced.

Nobody voted for any of this, so how did it happen? In Rufo’s telling, the updated Left project began with Herbert Marcuse. Of the four individuals Rufo profiles, Marcuse was the smartest, and his theories formed the bridge between the class-focused pre-1960s Left and the race-focused Left which spawned in the Age of Aquarius. Marcuse was a German Marxist, who emigrated to America in the 1930s along with other members of the so-called Frankfurt School (a term Rufo does not use), and immediately began injecting their venom into America (and back into Germany—Marcuse was one of the chief architects of the Allies’ postwar denazification program, which he used to try to usher in Communist domination).

What did Marcuse, and all the modern Left, want? The same thing the Left has always wanted, ever since the serpent in Eden, the first leftist, spoke to Eve. (If I had an objection to this book, it would be its subtitle, “How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.” There is no radical Left; there is only the Left, always and everywhere the enemy of mankind.) They wanted to destroy the deep structures of the West, the most successful society the world had ever known, in order to achieve total emancipation from all unchosen bonds, combined with forced total equality of individuals, in order to usher in utopia. It cannot be overemphasized that the philosophical, or rather psychological, goal behind Left evil is the belief that the perfection of mankind is not only achievable, but just ahead, glimpsable around the next bend in the road. This necessarily implies that no price is too high to pay, right now, to reach this goal—especially if the price paid is merely the lives of men and women who oppose this glorious future, as shown by their refusal to worship the new gods on offer.

However, a necessary, and historically unique, ingredient for the triumph of the Left in modern America was tension between blacks and whites. Without this history, Left advances would have been far less likely. The white man, or at least white elites, had long flagellated himself over the bad treatment, real or imagined, of black men and women by America and Americans. Simultaneously, the black man often felt he had always gotten a raw deal, and the Left fanned the flames of resentment and envy, encouraging black people to reject personal responsibility and self-examination in favor of cultivating grievances, which justified never-ending demands. The Left thus used both white guilt and black resentment as essential tools; if those did not exist, it is not clear anything else could have carried the Left to such total dominance.

But that is jumping ahead. In the early 1960s, the Left was retrenching. They had failed, despite their best efforts, to conquer America for “traditional” Communism. Therefore, in 1964, Marcuse wrote One-Dimensional Man, an updating of Marxist theory, responding to the working class’s universal rejection of Marxism. Marcuse claimed workers had failed to serve the revolution because they had been seduced by “an ever-more-comfortable life.” Certainly, they remained alienated and unfree, but could not, and could not be brought to, recognize their own sad situation. The solution was to ignore the workers, to substitute emancipation of the supposedly marginalized for emancipation of the worker, and to call for rule by an intellectual elite, composed of men such as Marcuse, which would “educate” the rest of society. This was to be achieved by violent revolution—nothing new there, but the engine of the revolution was now to be “ghettoized” underclass blacks, rather than workers.

Marcuse’s plan seemed like a pipe dream at the time, but five years later it roared to life and became the engine of the New Left, and Marcuse became a global superstar. Even though he was now old, he wrote prolifically, aiming to assist in creating the “total rupture” that would initiate the Millennium, including a “qualitative change” in human nature “in accordance with the new sensitivity and the new consciousness.” To this end, Marcuse famously openly advocated violent repression, by the state in cooperation with private entities, of any person or belief opposed to the Left, casting repression as “liberating tolerance” and necessary to bring the masses to a state of true consciousness. This is and always has been a standard Left tactic; Marcuse’s innovation was to bring repression out of the darkness into the light, and celebrate it, while providing a bogus intellectual justification. This made the implementation of, and maintenance of, violent repression much more feasible, with the results on display all around us in America today.

At a different time in history, Marcuse and his work would quickly have been forgotten. But at the point of decision for America, the 1960s, his influence became all-pervasive, the spark which lit gunpowder trails that collectively destroyed America. Why the Left became ascendant at this point is a good question, but it is undeniable that the Left has been gaining ground steadily throughout the West for fifty years, whereas prior to that time it had made significant inroads, but was far from dominant, and had been unable to fracture the foundations of American society. In a different forum, Rufo notes that “The man who can discover, shape, and distribute information has an enormous amount of power. The currency in our postmodern knowledge-regime is language, fact, image, and emotion. Learning how to wield these is the whole game.” In other words, Rufo believes controlling the narrative, in all organizations and forums, is what matters, and in his book this is largely what he outlines as the Left’s path to dominance.

For the Left’s project, facts are always irrelevant. Most important is emotional manipulation, which in the West has always been a key tool, maybe the key tool, in the Left’s attempt to rule the narrative. It is worth noting, and it may explain much of the past fifty years, that emotional arguments are far more effective at changing public opinion in a feminized society, and nobody can doubt that America is a vastly more feminized society than it was in 1960. But feminization leading to narrative control is not the entire explanation. The great wealth accruing to the nation, the result of hundreds of years of hard work by white men, allowed parasitism to flourish—in any sensible society, a man such as Marcuse would not have been able to feed himself, yet he and millions of others became full-time freeloaders on the productive. The Left was able to get traction by selling the idea that we could all have our cake and eat it too—if you support the Left, you get meaning in your life, you don’t have to work, and you can do whatever you want all day long.

Regardless of why Marcuse caught fire, the thought of Marcuse, of various disciples, and of others, especially a grab-bag of charismatic black thugs who were seen as saviors by credulous and self-loathing whites, was all thrown into a cauldron to cook up a noxious stew. The result was several years of Left extreme violence, thousands of bombings and scores of murders, in service of the idea that killing would immediately bring on the revolution, which would, with total certainty, usher in a permanent heaven on earth. The memory of this violence has been wholly suppressed, and those who led it, such as the Weathermen Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, along with Angela Davis (the second of the four figures Rufo specifically profiles), richly rewarded instead of being punished. Yet the revolution failed to arrive, and as always with propaganda of the deed, the perpetrators isolated themselves and lost, rather than gained, support for their cause.

Marcuse and his circle saw in this not any failure of their ideology, but rather a “Thermidorian reaction”—that is, that the forces against which the revolution was to be fought had won the battle. The sensible realized that the violent, cultish behavior of the Weathermen and the Black Panthers had been counterproductive; the not-sensible died in shootouts or with heroin needles in their arms. The considered response, the next iteration of the Left wheel, in the early 1970s, was to turn to the famous “long march through the institutions,” a phrase originated by the German Rudi Dutschke, and modeled on Mao’s Long March during the Chinese Civil War (though the term came from Antonio Gramsci, who died in 1937).

In painstaking and masterful detail Rufo shows how, though it took nearly fifty years, this process first infiltrated, then dominated, the universities (led by Paulo Freire, the third figure Rufo analyzes), and from there spread into every segment of American society. He pulls together the several threads which over decades wove this poisonous web. These include, most importantly, critical race theory (the creation of Derrick Bell, the fourth figure Rufo profiles) and intersectionality. Again, race was crucial—it was, and is, the tentpole of intersectionality, the clever, and largely new, Left claim that the supposedly oppressed, ranging from women to sexual deviants, form a unity, who by acting together can seize power and distribute stolen goodies on the basis of supposed oppression.

Given Left premises and the power granted to the Left by a complacent ruling class that shared many assumptions with the Left and refused to act to counter the Left at any point, some variation on the American present was probably inevitable. But Rufo does us a great service by expertly tracing exactly how we got here. For example, he demonstrates how very early on this latest iteration adopted language now in common currency, such as “white privilege” and “institutionalized racism.” New language was deliberately designed both to mold public consciousness and to “precondition the population for left-wing political conclusions.” The strategy was less violence; more manipulation. The result, at every level of American society, is the total implementation of Marcuse’s vision of a society where wrongthink is suppressed by force, and propaganda is utterly ubiquitous.

As always, always, when the Left gains power, the actual results are repugnant to anyone who does not obtain his life’s meaning from living and breathing Left politics. The Left can point to no place they have not ruined when given the chance, but this never stops them trying again. Rufo refers to where we are, at what is hopefully the peak of Left hegemony, as the “new nihilism,” and this is a good way of putting it. Nihilism is most visible in the demand to destroy everything in our society, from the family to statues of heroes, that might contradict or slow down the march to total Left victory, or remind us of our glorious past. It is also visible, though perhaps less dramatically, in the Left’s massive program of theft. A great deal of Left organization and effort revolves around stealing money and goods, to be transferred from the productive to the parasitical, as well as honors and privileges, to be transferred from those who earned them to those who could never earn them.

The goal of Marcuse and his successors was to “reshape every domain of human life.” If by “reshape” you mean “ruin,” they succeeded spectacularly. But we are not the first. Quite a few societies have been here before, on the greased slide to chaos and destruction. It inevitably gets worse, until the counter-revolution (though past counter-revolutions have not been nearly thorough enough, a mistake we should not make). As always when the Left gains power, nothing new, good, or original is or can be created, and the institutions taken over no longer are able to function to achieve their original goals. Stupidities and horrors abound. California mandates the worship of Aztec gods. New York pays billions to those who failed objective tests for teacher competency. BLM steals millions in money donated by morons and suckers. And in Seattle, we get the warlordism of CHAZ, what the Left wants for the entire country, the Left-ruled free-fire zone briefly conjured in central Seattle in 2020, which would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so evil (but which would have lasted a maximum of minutes if five tough men from Appalachia had showed up with guns).

That total chaos is not yet the norm in today’s America is merely the result of still being able to consume what remains of our seed corn; wait a few years and check back in. We are just travelling along the rainbow to see where it ends. If we are honest, we already know where it ends—not with a pot of intersectional gold, but with a charnel house drenched in raw sewage, after which we will have to pick up the pieces and scrub our societies clean again. It is past time to end these iterations once and for all, if we can.

So what does Rufo tell us to do? Rufo’s aim in writing this book is, I think, two-fold. First, to educate, in opposition to the Left propaganda machine. And second, to recommend action. What action? Counter-revolution. What does that mean, though? Here, Rufo is a little opaque, and I suspect, esoteric. He recommends “ruthlessly” fighting back, he says we should not “assume control over the centralized bureaucratic apparatus, but smash it.” Still, he puts no real meat on those bones, probably because what that means will have to be determined by opportunity and circ*mstance.

The core realization one comes to from this book is that we need to accept we can’t live with these people, the five or ten percent of our nation who lead or are most active in supporting the Left. Leaving aside actual war, the best strategy is pitilessly breaking the back of Left capability in every place that we can. In practice, this means mostly on the local and state level, for now at least. Yes, the Left has enormous power to reverse such gains, and to persecute leaders in such efforts, as we see in the terroristic machinations of the Department of “Justice.” But that is no reason not to try, and if history is any guide, a relatively small critical mass of such victories will encourage a Left overreaction that can be used to destroy the Left, with a (metaphorical, perhaps) whiff of grapeshot.

Rufo’s book has a crucial role in this process, because it is perfectly pitched to those who are not fully aware. He wants people to get angry, and they should be angry. Anger is necessary to make changes. Knowledge is power, the ability to know how to translate anger into action, and to make sure the Left is never permitted to rise again.

Rufo wisely does not recommend adopting Left tactics. He wants citizens to be informed and to grasp how they have been lied to. But he rejects that we should lie or rely on propaganda. We don’t need to, because the great advantage of the Right is that reality is on our side, and merely showing the truth is enough, at least for anybody not blinded by ideology. Nor does Rufo, unlike some putatively on the Right, recommend that we try to implement our own version of the long march. That strategy was successful for the Left because they took advantage of the naivete and good faith of the average American; they will never make the mistake of extending the same to us. Less obvious is that we could never have done it in the first place, because unlike those on the Left, those on the Right generally do not define their life goals, do not achieve meaning, through trying to change mankind into something it is not. This is the great disadvantage of the Right. We prefer to simply lead our lives, to form families, to build, to grill. In a society where the average person is encouraged to be politically active, those on the Left who dedicate their lives to that project will always greatly outnumber those on the Right—even more so if, as today, billions of dollars are dedicated to pay those on the Left to do so. There are today millions of total losers, people with no meaning in their lives other than political action, who live for nothing but advancing the Left. The counter-revolution must restore the balance.

Rufo does not here list his narrow, specific political goals, although he has in other forums. His basic message is that this is a struggle for power, and that the Right needs to step up to the plate. But I can think of several specific goals that should be part of the counter-revolution. We should fully restore the right to free association. The so-called Civil Rights Act, and all its myriad progeny, is the root cause of a great deal of the Left’s power. We should choke off the Left’s supply of money, whether by Bud Light-type actions, or, ultimately, more direct methods (defunding is, I should note, one of Rufo’s explicit recommendations). We should ensure that in every place and time our friends are rewarded and our enemies punished; the Right has never done either. We should re-masculinize our society; this is always an inoculation against the Left, which is why they fear and loathe, with seemingly strange vigor, young men improving themselves through diet and exercise. No doubt there is much more, but we can start with these.

Whatever the specifics we will adopt, Rufo’s book will be extremely valuable in making them possible. Very often . . . [review completes as first comment].

Pretty well written book. Could of saved time and just scrolled on my twitter feed for five minutes. Otherwise good though

I decided to read this whole book because the author is probably one of the most successful conservative activists out there right now; I believe he probably deserves at least a little bit of credit for the results of the 2021 Virginia gubernatioral election, and I think the New York Times was right to draw a connection between his activism and the (ongoing) moral panic that might've contributed to what happened in Colorado Springs last year (see the article "Club Q and the Demonization of Drag Queens"). Unfortunately, the book appears to have more to do with CRT which makes it feel a little dated because it feels like people have already moved to blaming gender ideology for all the world's problems, but I decided to read the whole entire book anyway.

In my opinion the book is bad. The author has a habit of drive-by quoting the people he's talking about without explaining what they mean when, in many cases, it isn't obvious. This is something a college student does when they don't understand the material. Rather than trying to explain something he doesn't understand, he's just trying to tell a story where the people whose ideas he thinks he doesn't like look bad. Let's take the beginning of Chapter 1 for example:

Speaking in a thick, Weimar-era German accent, Marcuse excoriated “the syndrome of late capitalism” and “the subjugation of man to the apparatus.” The audience, which included pedigreed Marxist intellectuals, counterculture artists such as Allen Ginsberg, and black militants such as Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis, sat in hushed silence. They had gathered at the conference in order to “create a genuine revolutionary consciousness” and devise strategies for “physical and cultural ‘guerrilla warfare’”—and the old man, who wore a formal suit and peppered his conversation with references to the great philosophers of the past, seemed to hold the key to unlocking it.

First of all, I'm not sure what the professor's accent has to do anything; do most Americans know what a "Weimar-era" German accent sounds like? Secondly, the author makes this lecture sound like a religious sermon when he uses terms like "excoriate" and describes the audience as sitting "in hushed silence." (It was an academic lecture; it is not remarkable that attendees other than the lecturer were silent.) Thirdly, you can Google the title of the lecture and find the text and audio online easily; the part where Marcuse says "the syndrome of late capitalism" is like twenty minutes into the lecture. According to Marcuse, "the subjugation of man to the apparatus" is one of several things that "constitute the syndrome of late capitalism" so it's redundant to say that he "excoriates" both of them. Also he doesn't really sound angry in the audio, but Rufo makes it seem like he's totally unhinged.

At the beginning of Rufo's next paragraph he says that Marcuse "praised the hippies and the counterculture for initiating a 'sexual, moral and political rebellion.'" This happens way way later in the actual lecture, and Rufo doesn't explain how it's relevant to the main point of the lecture, and I'm not sure it's accurate to say that he "praises" them; if that's true it's an oversimplification of what he was saying, which really was sort of tangential to the main point of the lecture anyway.

Later in the chapter, citing "An Essay on Liberation," Rufo writes that:

Today, America is living inside Marcuse’s revolution. During the fever pitch of the late 1960s, Marcuse posited four key strategies for the radical Left: the revolt of the affluent white intelligentsia, the radicalization of the black “ghetto population,” the capture of public institutions, and the cultural repression of the opposition. All of these objectives have been realized to some degree . . .

If Marcuse were alive today I don't think he would agree that "these objectives have been realized to some degree," and I also don't even think this accurately represent what he said (but I don't know if I can explain what he actually said because it's confusing). You can read An Essay on Liberation for free on the internet, and press ctrl+f and then type "ghetto population" if you don't believe me, and if you can find a part that shows that Rufo is describing Marcuse's views accurately, let me know!

Also I think the author is trying to get us to think that the reaction to the killing of George Floyd was, for critical theorists, like that part of the beginning of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers intro where Rita Repulsa says "Ah, after ten thousand years I'm free! It's time to conquer Earth!" and maybe that's why it seems like all of the things that conservatives don't like about America started to materialize shortly after Trump's term ended, but I don't think that's what happened. I remember Andy Ngo saying something similar in his (IMO awful) book—that the killing of George Floyd was the beginning of this huge and permanent change in how Americans think about race or whatever idk. Maybe this is what many conservative influencers are trying to argue but I don't really believe it!

After having read the whole entire book, I think the problem with this book is that the author's real talent lies in doing the sort of thing he did in shaping the public's perception of critical race theory without really getting too specific about what it is, simply by connecting it to real things that were happening that were unpopular (but that were not "critical race theory"). As he said on Twitter:

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️
@realchrisrufo
We have successfully frozen their brand—"critical race theory"—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.
3:14 PM · Mar 15, 2021

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️
@realchrisrufo
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
3:17 PM · Mar 15, 2021

In conclusion, I think the author's activism is very impressive, and I'm kinda terrified by how it has affected how the right feels about LGBT issues (i.e., much more hostile than before, and you can see it on Twitter and in Gallup's recent poll about how Americans view the morality of same-sex relationships), but I don't think this book is very informative or honestly written really. If you think I'm biased because I'm gay or a leftist or whatever, I'm capable of admitting when I think right-wing propaganda is kinda persuasive (for example I think Curtis Yarvin's propaganda is sometimes challenging to not be a little swayed by, but don't misinterpret that as an endorsem*nt; you should not read him or any other right-wingers in my opinion). If you must read this book for some reason, I think you should also check the sources he cites (I think most of the Marcuse stuff is available online). I hope this review of the entire book that I read is informative and all that stuff, and if you think I'm wrong about anything, I'm not a philosophy professor or whatever (I have a bachelor's degree in computer science) so I'm not sure I'm 100% right on the details of why a lot of this book is wrong, but it's definitely wrong, I think. So don't read it, unless you really want to.

A remarkable book. Hugely impressive contemporary history along with a stinging critique, of the political and cultural changes that have taken place in the United States since WWII:

“The descendants of the New Left have captured the elite institutions but have not been able to reorder the deeper structures of society… The universities have lost the ancient telos of knowledge, replacing it with an inferior set of values oriented toward personal identities and pathologies… The public schools have absorbed the principles of revolution but have failed to teach the rudimentary skills of reading and mathematics… The activist-bureaucrats had a simple list of objectives: capture the culture of the federal agencies; enforce political orthodoxy with critical theory-based DEI programs; turn the federal government into a patronage machine for left-wing activism… The state becomes the primary vehicle of revolution. It no longer seeks to serve the public but, following the dictates of critical theory, seeks to subvert itself.”

“The bitterest irony of the critical theories is that they have attained power but have not opened up new possibilities; they have instead compressed the prestige institutions of society with a suffocating new orthodoxy. The revolution along the axes of identity has proven unstable, alienating, and incapable of managing a complex society, much less improving it… The Left has achieved cultural dominance over the entire range of prestige institutions… the critical ideologies are a creature of the state, completely subsidized by the public through direct financing, university loan schemes, bureaucratic capture, and the civil rights regulatory apparatus.”

“The simple fact is that the ideology of the elite has not demonstrated any capacity to solve the problems of the masses, even on its own terms. The critical theories operate by pure negation, demolishing middle-class structures and stripping down middle-class values, which serves the interest of the bureaucracy but leaves the society in a state of permanent disintegration. Ultimately, critical theory will be put to a simple test: Are conditions improving or not improving? Are cities safer or less safe? Are students learning to read or not learning to read?”

“If the endpoint of the critical theories is nihilism, the counter-revolution must begin with hope. The principles of the society under counter-revolution are not oriented toward sweeping reversals and absolutes, but toward the protection of the humble values and institutions of the common man: family, faith, work, community, country. The intellectuals and activists of the counter-revolution must arm the population with a competing set of values, spoken in language that exposes and surpasses the euphemisms of the left-wing ideological regime: excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos.”

The book is structured around four pivotal figures:

“Herbert Marcuse was the preeminent philosopher of the so-called New Left, which sought to mobilize the white intelligentsia and the black ghetto into a new proletariat. Angela Davis was one of Marcuse’s graduate students and, after pledging to violently overthrow the state, became the face of racial revolt in the West. Paulo Freire was a Brazilian Marxist whose work on turning schools into instruments of revolution became the gospel of left-wing education in America. Derrick Bell was a Harvard Law professor who set the foundation for critical race theory and recruited a cadre of students who would capture elite institutions with their new racialist ideology.”

“This represents a change in regime – a cultural revolution. The victory of the critical theories has displaced the original ends, or telos, of America’s institutions. The university no longer exists to discover knowledge, but rather to awaken “critical consciousness.” The corporation no longer exists to maximize profit, but to manage “diversity and inclusion.” The state no longer exists to secure natural rights, but to achieve “social justice.”… And just as it was for the revolutionaries in the Third World, the goal for Giroux, McLaren, and the second-generation critical pedagogists is always the same: dismantling the criminal justice system, disrupting the nuclear family, overthrowing the system of capitalism, and, in the words of Freire, turning the schools into “an extraordinary instrument to help build a new society and a new man.””

Bettina Love is a prominent advocate of abolitionist education, who writes that: “White folx cannot lose their Whiteness; it is not possible. But they can daily try to deal with and reject the Whiteness that is obsessed with oppressing others, centering itself, and maintaining White supremacy through White rage. Being well and White is rejecting Whiteness for the good of humanity.”

“The governing institutions in Portland have reached the strange paradox in which the state, through the organs of education, is agitating for its own destruction. They have condemned the entire structure of the social order and celebrated the figures who would tear it down. They might get what they wish for, although not in the way they imagine. As the historians have warned since ancient times, democracy can easily degenerate into mob rule, which occurs when the populace loses faith in the governing system and the rule of law. The result is not utopia, but anarchy.”

“The real brilliance of critical race theory was not intellectual, but tactical. The “activist scholars” learned how to wield the politics of race in elite milieus and use it as a fulcrum for accumulating power.” Randall Kennedy provided a critique of critical race theory in 1995, in which he “laid bare an embarrassing truth: the critical race theorists crusaded for “diversity” but treated racial groups as monoliths. The discipline did not transcend racial stereotypes, it simply inverted them: minorities were assumed to be wise, disadvantaged, and deserving; whites were assumed to be sterile, imperial, and oppressive. Race became a proxy for worth and group identity became the new criterion of moral and intellectual evaluation.”

“Together, the acronym for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” represents a new mode of institutional governance. Diversity is the new system of racial standing, equity is the new method of power transfer, inclusion is the new basis of enforcement… The pattern of conquest was perfectly circular: the intellectuals provided the ideology, the administrators captured the infrastructure, and private diversity contractors attached themselves to a new source of financing and distribution… Taken together, the three pillars of critical race theorists’ ideal system of governance – the replacement of individual rights with group rights, the race-based redistribution of wealth, the suppression of speech based on a racial and political calculus – constitute a change in political regime.”

Complementing this book, have a listen to the podcast with Christopher Rufo and Coleman Hughes called "The Rise of the Radical Left".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6eJq...

Christopher Rufo is a political activist and filmmaker known for his opposition to Critical Race Theory (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 this new book called "America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything".

I didn’t like this book

The historical case Rufo makes, tracing "wokeism" (or my preferred term, critical social justice ideology), is factual, well-researched, and properly selected. However, there is, even within his own argument, a slight of hand and a bad-faith attempt to label the ideology as Marxism and therefore conjure the specters of 20th-century communist horrors.

His case is basically that Marx begat the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, who begat Angela Davis, who begat BLM, etc., ergo this is Marxism. Along the way he recounts how the ideas were radically transformed, and therein lies the flaw in the formula. Why, if not for brazen political purposes, is it useful to label this ideology as Marxist after the convolution of Marx's idea to fit the disgruntled elitism of the Frankfurt School, then the dumbing down of it by Herbert Marcuse to try to be "a cool cat" in the eyes of the 60s hippies, then the complete bastardization of it by the black radicals, and finally the commercialization/scammification of it by BLM? Saying it's Marxism but without class is like calling something Christianity but without Christ.

The problem with critical social justice ideology and with any conception of cultural revolution isn't that it's Marxist, it's that trying to change culture without changing people's material conditions is inevitably doomed to fail, or worse, result in a backlash, one which Rufo seems happy to lead.

"America’s Cultural Revolution" serves as a right-leaning probe into the rise and influence of the “radical left,” notably critical theory and critical race theory. By profiling pivotal figures behind these ideologies, the book attempts to unmask their origins, intentions, and societal impacts. While it offers a lens into the ongoing debate about ideological biases permeating American education and corporate culture, the book misses the mark in several crucial aspects.

Herbert Marcuse, a figurehead of critical theory, started his intellectual career as a Marxist with ambitions to topple capitalism. Inspired by Stalin and Mao, he promoted violent social uprisings in the 1950s and 1960s. These movements gained some traction but eventually fizzled out, facing public ambivalence and government crackdowns. Marcuse then retreated to the academe, infiltrating humanities departments and creating platforms for attacking Western traditions and “white values.” His introduction of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in institutions shattered merit-based practices, allowing the “new left” to seize influential roles.

Marcuse's framework prioritizes power structures, dismissing Western intellectual traditions as instruments for white capitalist dominance. The ultimate aim isn’t reform; it’s to dismantle existing systems. The result? A leftward bias in intellectual spheres, notably journalism and government administration.

Critical race theory follows suit. Early actor Angela Davis transitioned from militant Black activism to academia, promoting the idea that racial justice demands a complete overthrow of current systems. Her works fueled street violence, notably in the Black Lives Matter movement, which shares an acronym with the militant Black Liberation Movement of the 1970s, not coincidentally.

Paulo Freire later pushed for 'racial studies' in K-12 curricula. Freire's agenda aimed to downplay 'white truths' like math and science, replacing them with a racially centered narrative. Several states have adopted this, leading to declining academic performance. Derrick Bell, meanwhile, institutionalized critical race theory, starting as a marginalized Black scholar before rising to prominence.

The book offers a glimmer of hope in its final chapters, suggesting that the 'new left' movement may be on its last legs. The author contends that these ideologies, being intrinsically destructive and offering no viable alternatives, are destined to lose public support, thereby reducing their influence and dominance.

The book excels in delineating the historical development of both critical theory and critical race theory, tracking their evolution and ascendancy in contemporary American society. The book successfully debunks the defensive stance from the left that these theories are “mere academic discourse,” asserting that these theories originated from militant social movements with the explicit aim of instigating sweeping social revolutions. Importantly, the book emphasizes that the reach of these theories extends beyond academic institutions. They have infiltrated K-12 education, shaped elite corporate cultures, and influenced editorial perspectives in the media. The book argues that the tumult ignited by movements like Black Lives Matter is a foreseeable outcome of these theories proliferating unchecked.

While the book succeeds in tracing these theories’ history and current dominance, it’s far from a comprehensive critique.

Firstly, the book neglects to scrutinize the merits and factual underpinnings of critical theories, opting instead to cherry-pick incendiary quotes that paint these theories as mere political rhetoric devoid of substance. This approach is insufficient for discrediting theories that have thrived within Western academia before gaining enough traction to challenge and potentially dismantle these longstanding institutions. A more rigorous analysis that delves into the theories' foundational assumptions, lines of reasoning, and mechanisms of propagation would strengthen the book's argument.

The book also falls short in detailing meaningful resistance to these ideologies. It insinuates that these theories have overrun institutions without opposition. If that’s so, why? The 'Trump revolution' in 2016 was seen as a backlash against leftist ideology—so what triggered the rise of these theories in the first place?

The portrayal of DEI is another sore point. The book vilifies DEI as a tool for suppression and brainwashing without providing substantial evidence. DEI practices vary, and many see them as productive, not destructive. A more nuanced treatment would be more convincing.

Moreover, the book misses a vital opportunity to draw parallels with Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China. The title implies this comparison, but the content falls short, leaving those of us with first-hand experience in such regimes feeling that something crucial is missing.

Despite the shortcomings of “America's Cultural Revolution,” it nonetheless serves as an indispensable contribution to the discourse surrounding America's ideological and institutional shifts. By charting the historical underpinnings and current influence of the "new left," the book broadens our understanding of these movements' intellectual heritage and ideological foundations. However, this is merely the starting point. A more expansive exploration of critical theories as both intellectual phenomena and societal disruptors is crucial for fortifying our institutions against such transformative pressures. Only through such rigorous examination can we ensure that a cultural revolution of this sort finds no foothold in America.

This makes a great companion piece to Kevin MacDonald's The Culture of Critique. On its own, you're missing important context. However, it's an interesting account of the Marxist Left's "long march through the institutions" through the malevolent stories of Jewish radical Herbert Marcuse, black revolutionary Angela Davis, communist educator Paulo Freire, and CRT founder Derrick Bell. Given the title, I would've liked a lot more expansion to the comparison of the American situation to Mao's Cultural Revolution. With its radicalization of youth, iconoclastic anti-traditionalism, violent suppression of dissent, and, of course, Marxist inspiration, there was a great deal that Rufo left unexamined.

American’s Cultural Revolution (2023) by Christopher Rufo describes the development of critical studies in US Universities and beyond. Rufo is a conservative activist who has a substantial impact on policy in the US and in particular in Florida.

The book uses the lives of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire and Derick Bell to describe the growth of critical studies in the US. The book does a very good job of using the lives of these activist academics to hold a non-fiction narrative together. It is highly critical of the conclusions these people reached.

The way that the activists are portrayed is not unsympathetic. Marcuse was a German Jewish family and Marcuse would experience Weimer Republic violence as a member of various left wing groups. I did not know that the centre left SPD helped to kill various members of the Spartacus movement. Marcuse then left Germany in the 1930s as the Nazis rose to power. This puts into context his ideology. Marcuse then became a member of the Frankfurt School of social theory. Marcuse also appeared to recognize in the 1960s in America that markets were working and that the working class were unlikely to rebel. Rather than realise that Marxism was essentially wrong Marcuse went on to write about how material success produced a ‘one dimensional man’ and kept his faith that somehow a revolution would come.

Marcuse appeared to appreciate to a considerable degree that the Marxist analysis of class was wrong. But the same type of analysis could be used to say that other groups were instead the groups that must rise up. There were, of course, substantial reasons that other groups could see that they were much poorer than largely white western countries. Women, residents of the third world and African Americans all had legitimate serious causes that they could rally behind.

The narrative of the book is next carried by Angela Davis, who grew up Birmingham Alabama and experienced serious racism there. She grew up on ‘Dynamite Hill’ where the KKK and others would blow up the houses of successful Black Americans. Davis was brilliant and got scholarships to Universities and became a disciple of Marcuse and took his critical theories and applied them to Black American issues. Unfortunately, but in many ways understandably, Davis provided serious support to Black terrorist groups such as the Black Panthers and other terrorist groups such as the Weathermen. After these campaigns failed Davis didn’t examine her beliefs, but rather moved to academia to write and propagate her ideas.

Next is Paulo Freire, the Brazilian academic who saw education as the way to further revolutionary causes. Freire’s family lived through the great depression and then Freire’s father died when he was young, which clearly had an impact on Freire who later stated that his desire to help the poor stemmed from growing up hungry and poor himself. Friere combined Marxist theory and some educational theory and wrote ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ which is currently the third most cited work in the humanities. Rufo describes how Freire worked in Guinea-Bissau and how his work on education there failed as his emphasis on political education against concentrating on the basics of reading did not help the country.

The last person that Rufo includes is Derrick Bell who was a civil rights lawyer who became a law professor at Harvard and USC. Again Bell suffered from discrimination in the US but overcame it and became a lawyer. He worked successfully in the South against discrimination. Then he became an academic and became interested in Marxism and critical theory and created critical race theory in the 1970s.

Rufo ties the themes of each section together by describing how Marcuse and Davis recognised that after the failures of the attempts at violent revolution in the late 1960s and 1970s that instead a path through institutions would need to be taken for their theories. This would be taken through universities and with Freire’s theory into indoctrination of earlier education. Bell’s critical race theory strengthened this and helped to further push critical theory into other institutions. Rufo describes how the Diversity Equity and Inclusion is the tool used to further the perspective of critical theories in institutions, particularly the government. The book describes struggle sessions and similar actions.

The book is especially interesting because it is the perspective of an activist on how he sees the activists on the other side of the debate.

America’s Cultural Revolution is well worth a read. For anyone who wants to know what Rufo thinks it’s worthwhile. It also provides a good description of the growth of critical theory. The book Cynical Theories is similar and provides a view of more the theorists. Rufo’s book is less comprehensive but is easier to read.

A regrettably good read. Rufo's writing is fairly objectively and allows the reader to understand and even sympathize with the positions of the thinkers and activists he ultimately criticizes.

Later that year, Gates penned an essay for the New Republic that leveled an even more serious criticism against the professor and his young disciples. Gates blasted the ideology of critical race theory, drawing a sharp contrast between the civil rights movement, which regarded civil rights and civil liberties as mutually beneficial, and critical race activism, which had abandoned faith in the principles of the Constitution and argued in favor of the government regulating, restricting, and punishing individuals for vague notions of “hate speech.” The critical race theorists, Gates observed, imagined themselves the victims of institutional racism, pervasive bias, academic exclusion, and subtle oppression. But this was an illusion.
In truth, Gates argued, the critical race theorists—law professors in elite universities—were not members of a persecuted class. They were members of a privileged class with significant institutional support. They could appeal to the institutions for protection against “hate speech” because they knew the institutions were likely to side with them. The critical race theorists used their identity as the “victim” in order to exploit the moral power of the oppressed minority, while in reality they represented an ideological majority that sought to cement its own power. “Why would you entrust authority with enlarged powers of regulating the speech of unpopular minorities, unless you were confident that the unpopular minorities would be racists, not blacks?” Gates asked rhetorically.”
One by one, Gates cataloged the flaws in the critical race theorists’ ideology and the problems that would emerge from their ideal regime. He argued that their political project, which would involve regulating expressions of speech, would replace politics with an unstable form of psychotherapy. The critical race theorists had based their theory of knowledge on the shaky ground of radical subjectivity, which elevated their perspective as the only valid point of judgment and then demanded that it be turned into positive law.
Gates predicted that this approach would lead to absurd inquisitions, empower the most hysterical and punitive elements of the bureaucracy, and enthrone “a vocabulary of trauma and abuse, in which the verbal and physical forms are seen as equivalent.” He cited an example from the University of Connecticut, which had banned individuals from “actions that undermined the ‘security or self-esteem’ of persons or groups” and, at the same time, also banned “attributing objections to any of the above actions to ‘hypersensitivity’ of the targeted individual or group.” In other words, a catch-22: the enforcers of the victim perspective determine guilt and any attempt at defense is considered further proof of wrongdoing.
More importantly, Gates argued that the critical race theorists would turn racism into a mirage. The critical race theorists had focused all of their attention on the preoccupations of academia and abstract condemnations of elite speech and behavior while offering very little to say on the real-world plight of the black underclass. “The problem may be that . . . the continuing immiseration of large segments of black America cannot be erased simply through better racial attitudes. Poverty, white and black, can take on a life of its own, to the point that removing the conditions that caused it can do little to alleviate it,” Gates wrote. “Rather than responding to the grim new situation with new and subtler modes of socioeconomic analysis, [the critical race theorists] have finessed the gap between rhetoric and reality by forging new and subtler definitions of the word ‘racism.’ Hence a new model of institutional racism is one that can operate in the absence of actual racists. By redefining our terms, we can always say of the economic gap between black and white America: the problem is still racism ... and, by stipulation, it would be true. But the grip of this vocabulary has tended to foreclose the more sophisticated models of political economy that we so desperately need.”
The critical race theorists had substituted verbalism for meaning, and symbolism for substance. If they were to attain power, Gates warned, they would sacrifice liberty for a phantom notion of equality, which, in the end, might end up destroying both. Contrary to the activists of the civil rights movement, the aim of the critical race theorists was “not to resist power, but to enlist power.” The result would be a system of manipulation that uses guilt, shame, and intricate linguistic and psychological traps to maintain social control.

I think whether or not you agree with Rufo, you can learn a lot from this book about the way our current political conversation has been shaped. I learned a lot about a few individuals (Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, Derrick Bell) who Rufo links to current progressive ideas.

Many people dismiss Critical Race Theory and its related ideas as the recent work of a few crazy people, Rufo presents it in a way that really allows you to understand and appreciate it as its own philosophy with its own definitions and frame to view the world. Many people group CRT with the civil rights movement, but it really is a totally separate and unique worldview that has taken over a lot of institutions in the last decade. It's not an extension or fulfillment of America's founding principles, and it's explicitly against many civil-rights-era ideas. If you don't believe me, the introduction to Critical Race Theory--The Key Writings That Formed the Movement says "The aspect of our work which most markedly distinguishes it from conventional liberal and conservative legal scholarship about race and inequality is a deep dissatisfaction with traditional civil rights discourse."

After reading this book, it seems remarkable I took it for granted that the core ideas of individualism, colorblindness, free speech, equality, and integration--which were taken as obvious, unquestionable truths when I was growing up--have been exchanged for race-consciousness and a re-examination of American institutions and symbols. I think most people don't really realize it and try to argue against those people by appealing to free speech and neutrality, but you can't, because they don't believe in it.

After really trying to understand what CRT is, I get frustrated when people try to hide it or paper over it. For example, John Oliver says that it was not remotely true that CRT teaches kids to hate America, and cites Kimberle Crenshaw saying that CRT is patriotic. Well, if you believe that the United States was founded on white supremacy that persists until today, how can you not hate America? In her Masterclass, "Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw speaks to how the American system of governance cannot be divorced from its origins in white supremacy. She also calls for a new “constitutional imaginary” to shape a better future." She says "So we are, in the United States of America, a culture that comes out of a white supremacist set of ideas. The way that our institutions have historically functioned have placed white people above everybody else." (https://www.masterclass.com/classes/b...) How can you not hate America if you believe it was founded on and is inextricably linked to white supremacy? What other conclusion could you come to?

Oliver also tries to minimize it by saying that CRT is "graduate-level legal theory, so unless your five-year-old is currently pursuing a law degree, they're not reading Kimberle Crenshaw." Okay, well just look at Oregon's new elementary school social studies standards (https://www.oregon.gov/ode/educator-r...) that wants students to learn how to "Identify how systems of power, including white supremacy, institutional racism, racial hierarchy, and oppression affect the perspectives of different individuals and groups when examining an event, issue, or problem with an emphasis on multiple perspectives" and "Evaluate the impact of the intersectionality of what constitutes identity including, including but not limited to, gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, physical and mental disability, and class on the living histories and experiences of peoples, groups, and events." Agree with it or not, this is language straight from Kimberle Crenshaw and others CRT scholars.

Very Important and Highly Recommended

It’s undeniable that the traditional American/Western ethos has been all but discarded and replaced with a new morality that seems anything but moral according to the time-honored and rational values of the not-so-distant past. Tolerance under this new morality implies full acceptance of the new prevailing mores, and is intolerant of any disagreement. Racism cannot be overcome among the white populace and cannot be deemed racist when practiced against whites. Oppression is incontrovertibly white, male, heterosexual, and capitalist, and exacerbated by “intersectionality” of the oppressed. Merit is oppression. It is a postmodern, incoherent ideology, and it is succeeding. The state prevails. The individual must diminish. The question that must be answered and understood is how this capitulation succeeded so dramatically and quickly.

In his outstanding new book, “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything”, Christopher Rufo traces the origins of this cultural upheaval to 1968 and four influential bellwethers. Their impacts have been the deconstructive ideology of revolution and “march through the institutions”, the primacy of race, the power of education, and finally the triumph of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as defined by the ascending revolutionary class. Rufo profiles these leaders and their ideologies and shows how they have melded together to form the foundation and successes of the radical left’s cultural revolution. It is a fascinating and revealing analysis of how we got to this quandary.

Fortunately, he also offers important observations and conclusions about how we might overcome the malignancy. The leftist revolution has an Achilles heel, its reliance on the political power of the state to establish its creeds irreversibly. Rufo encourages that it is not too late to use political power to get us back on track. He offers several conceptual ideas on how that might begin to be accomplished, but the key is leadership that ascribes to the need for such recovery and can convince America of that need. Elections matter, and reversal cannot wait through many more election cycles, if any.

This book should be read and embraced by all concerned with the present state of affairs and trajectory of America, especially by those aspiring to political office, particularly the presidency. The right must abandon its quarreling and pursue this superordinate goal. “America’s Cultural Revolution” is important and perhaps essential in this effort.