America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything by Christopher F. Rufo was released on July 18, 2023.
I had preordered the book, but before I had a chance to start reading it, a friend of mine sent out his book review (see below). I encouraged him to publish this, but he is done with online fights (he has been cancelled at least once), so he allowed me to publish this anonymously.
From: [an MIT alum]
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2023 11:01 PM
Subject: Book Report: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, by Chris Rufo
This is the best detailed examination of Marcuse and Gramsci’s long march through the institutions that I’ve ever read.
- If you want to understand why the institutionalization of a nihilistic Marxist-Leninist ideology is the gravest threat to Western Civilization, read this book.
- If you want to understand how race conflict has replaced class conflict as the fulcrum in a revolution that has already succeeded, read this book.
- If you want to understand why Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and other progressive cities are coming apart at the seams, read this book.
- If you want to understand how the violent Black Liberation Movement became the violent Black Lives Matter movement, read this book.
- If you want to understand how communist revolutionaries became elite college professors, read this book.
- If you want to understand how DEI became the bureaucratic instantiation of Critical Theory, read this book.
- If you want to understand why DEI is totally incompatible with free speech, viewpoint diversity, and academic freedom, read this book.
- If you want to appreciate why the lauding of Angela Davis by MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth when she was invited by the DEI bureaucracy to keynote MLK Day is the most shameful thing our new president has done to date, read this book.
- And ESPECIALLY if you believe the Wokies “have a point,” or are critical of the bare knuckles counter-revolution that Chris Rufo is trying to foment (and that means you ivory tower purists at FIRE and Reason), you must read this book.
America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, by Chris Rufo
The cast of characters and their interlinked ideologies that Rufo carefully deconstructs is a who’s who of the Woke pantheon. The writings and actions of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Rudi Dutschke, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Patrice Cullors, Paulo Freiere, Derrick Bell, and many other key players that transformed the failed leftist revolutions of the sixties into the successful long march through the institutions are stitched together in a meticulously footnoted analysis. Our universities, media, cultural institutions, government agencies, and many corporate C-suites and board rooms are now in the hands of their acolytes, fellow travelers, and useful idiots exercising their power through enormous DEI bureaucracies and HR departments that cull out heretics.
The infusion of Critical Theory into K-12 education in many progressive states is perhaps the most frightening development as the seeds they sow will never be uprooted. The weaponization of language, the power of intersectionality, the creation of the cult of microaggressions, the rise of Bias Response Teams empowered to destroy the educations, careers and lives of refusenkis, the rise of cancel culture, and the importance of free speech suppression round out the story.
Interestingly enough, Chris left out the metastasizing of the gay rights movement into the LGBTQ+ gender affirmation/trans insanity movement. Perhaps he’s saving that for a sequel.
My Kindle notes (highlights) are attached. You can breeze through them very quickly if you don’t have the patience to read a whole book, though it is as hard to put down as it is not to rubberneck at the sight of a massive highway accident.
Onward to the counter-revolution.
[an MIT alum]
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America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything
Rufo, Christopher F.
Preface
Page ix · Location 39
I have seen the hideous face of revolution. My first encounter was in Seattle, Washington, where I began my career as a political journalist. When I started reporting on the city’s homelessness crisis, Seattle’s left-wing activists engaged in a relentless pressure campaign against my family, targeting our reputations, attempting to get my wife fired, publishing threats with our home address, and putting up menacing posters around my oldest son’s elementary school. Their objective was simple: silence, marginalize, and suppress—all, somehow, in the name of tolerance and an open society. At the time, I thought of myself as a moderate. But that experience opened my eyes to the real nature of left-wing politics. It radicalized me.
Page ix · Location 46
American institutions were playing the same cynical game, marshalling the forces of guilt, shame, and scapegoating in order to enforce a left-wing political orthodoxy.
Page ix · Location 49
Just as it had been in Seattle, most Americans—liberal, moderate, and conservative—could see the falsehood and danger in these ideas, but they were too afraid to speak out.
Page x · Location 64
This book is an effort to understand the ideology that drives the politics of the modern Left, from the streets of Seattle to the highest levels of American government.
Introduction: America’s Cultural Revolution
Page 2 · Location 98
The Soviet Union eventually collapsed, and many Americans considered the question of left-wing revolution settled. It had proven disastrous everywhere it had been tried—Asia, Africa, Latin America. The world had learned its lesson, they believed, and moved beyond the promises of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. But they were wrong. Although the left-wing cultural revolution had self-destructed in the Third World, over time it found a new home: in America.
Page 2 · Location 112
The story of America’s cultural revolution begins in 1968, as America endured a long season of student uprisings, urban riots, and revolutionary violence that has provided the template for everything that followed.
Page 3 · Location 117
The book is divided into four parts: revolution, race, education, and power. Each part begins with a biographical portrait of the four prophets of the revolution: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell. These figures established the disciplines of critical theory, critical praxis, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory,
Page 3 · Location 128
As Solzhenitsyn revealed the bankruptcy of the communist movements in the West, the most sophisticated activists and intellectuals of the New Left initiated a new strategy, the “long march through the institutions,” which brought their movement out of the streets and into the universities, schools, newsrooms, and bureaucracies.
Page 4 · Location 136
their strategy was ingenious: the capture of America’s institutions was so gradual and bureaucratic, it largely escaped the notice of the American public, until it burst into consciousness following the death of George Floyd.
Page 4 · Location 144
To enforce this new orthodoxy, left-wing activists have established departments of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” across an entire stratum of the public and private bureaucracies.
Page 5 · Location 167
Critical race theory bears all the flaws of traditional Marxism, then amplifies them with a narrative of racial pessimism that crushes the very possibility of progress. Over the span of fifty years, the cultural revolution has slowly lowered its mask and revealed its hideous face—nihilism.
Page 6 · Location 179
This is, in short, a work of counter-revolution. The basic premise is that the enemies of the cultural revolution must begin by seeing the critical theories and the “long march through the institutions” with clear eyes.
Part I: Revolution
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 9 · Location 192
Herbert Marcuse
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 9 · Location 194
In the summer of 1967, an elderly philosopher named Herbert Marcuse took the stage at the Dialectics of Liberation conference in London and calmly called for total revolution against the West.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 9 · Location 210
His message reverberated around the world. Within months, the carefully mannered and meticulous scholar of Kant, Hegel, and Marx would become a beacon for left-wing radicals everywhere.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 10 · Location 213
The militants of the Weather Underground, the Black Panther Party, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang read dog-eared copies of Marcuse’s books as they plotted robberies, bombings, assassinations, and urban guerrilla warfare against the state.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 10 · Location 217
In a sequence of three popular books—One-Dimensional Man, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, and An Essay on Liberation—Marcuse had sketched out the rationale and the methods for revolution in the West.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 10 · Location 228
California governor Ronald Reagan denounced the professor for his “communist” ideology that contributed toward the “climate of violence” on university campuses. 13 Vice President Spiro Agnew demanded that UCSD fire Marcuse for “poisoning a lot of young minds.” 14 Pope Paul VI, delivering a homily at St. Peter’s Basilica, criticized Marcuse’s revolutionary theory for opening the way to “license cloaked as liberty” and spreading “animal, barbarous and subhuman degradations.”
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 11 · Location 237
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.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 13 · Location 291
Marcuse earned his doctorate in literature from the University of Freiburg in 1922, worked briefly as a partner in an antiquarian bookstore in Berlin, then returned to Freiburg to study under the philosopher Martin Heidegger—who would later become a member of the Nazi Party—and eventually completed a second thesis, “Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity,” which qualified him for a career in academia.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 14 · Location 305
Marcuse eventually fled abroad, arriving in the United States on Independence Day, 1934.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 14 · Location 309
Following the war, he moved into academia, securing positions at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and, finally, the University of California, San Diego.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 15 · Location 323
For Marcuse, modern liberalism had reduced man’s existence to a single dimension and hidden the social, economic, and political contradictions of the previous age, which had animated classical Marxism.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 15 · Location 328
The consequence of this transformation was twofold. First, the working class had been stripped of its revolutionary potential. Second, the political system had become a “pseudo-democracy” with no authentic opposition.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 16 · Location 352
If not democracy, what should replace it? Here, appealing to Plato and Rousseau, Marcuse gently introduced his ideal political form: the “educational dictatorship”—or rule by elites who can distinguish false from true consciousness and freedom from slavery.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 16 · Location 358
Following the orthodoxy of Marx and Lenin, Marcuse believed there must be a temporary dictatorship in order to move society from slavery to freedom. But, breaking from his predecessors, Marcuse offered an ironic twist: instead of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which represented the will of the working class, Marcuse proposed a “dictatorship of the intellectuals”—which, presumably, represented the will of men like him.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 17 · Location 365
The only hope, Marcuse believed, was to unleash the destructive power of the slums and to hasten the collapse of the entire system.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 18 · Location 393
The new movement was not the “‘ classical’ revolutionary force” of the proletariat. It was, instead, the coalition of opposites that Marcuse had imagined in One-Dimensional Man: the intellectuals and the slum-dwellers, the privileged and the dispossessed.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 18 · Location 400
The new radicals were building a base of support on the Ivy League campuses and in the West Coast ghettos,
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 19 · Location 415
Technological progress, he argued, had finally made communism possible. The new proletariat could use race, rather than class, to prepare the grounds for revolution.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 19 · Location 424
“Utopian possibilities are inherent in the technical and technological forces of advanced capitalism and socialism,” Marcuse said. “The rational utilization of these forces on a global scale would terminate poverty and scarcity within a very foreseeable future.”
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 20 · Location 433
Marcuse shifted his hopes to the emerging proletariat of the New Left—the coalition between the “young middle-class intelligentsia” and the “black militants”—which had the potential to become a new locus of resistance. 66
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 20 · Location 441
racial conflict, Marcuse believed, could provide a viable substitute—and eventual catalyst—for class conflict.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 21 · Location 451
He saw the black militant movement, in particular, as a viable means of breaking the Establishment’s stranglehold on language and culture.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 22 · Location 483
For Marcuse, the practice of “liberating tolerance” would justify censorship, repression, and, when necessary, violence.
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution > Page 23 · Location 490
The new regime would apply strict censorship to all universities, corporations, media outlets, educational institutions, political parties, and the state itself.
Chapter 2: The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy” > Page 25 · Location 531
In San Diego, Marcuse rallied with students to establish a Marxist-Leninist college at UCSD and, along with his graduate student Angela Davis, was among the first to break down the door and enter the registrar’s office during a student occupation.
Chapter 2: The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy” > Page 25 · Location 535
Davis would become a famed communist revolutionary and, after providing the firearms used in a murder-kidnapping plot, a fugitive from the law.
Chapter 2: The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy” > Page 28 · Location 595
As the year turned from 1969 to 1970, the New Left embraced armed revolution as its new political strategy. During that critical juncture, Marxist-Leninist radicals formally established the Weather Underground Organization, the Black Liberation Army, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, known formally as the Red Army Faction, all of which were committed to overthrowing the governments of the West. Marcuse was connected with them all.
Chapter 2: The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy” > Page 30 · Location 647
The Weathermen followed Marcuse’s theory, outlined in his book Eros and Civilization, that sexual and political liberation were intertwined.
Chapter 2: The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy” > Page 32 · Location 681
The scale of left-wing political violence during this period was enormous. The Weathermen, black nationalist organizations, and other left-wing groups perpetrated a stunning number of property bombings, police assassinations, bank robberies, prison breaks, and violent assaults. During a fifteen-month stretch between 1969 and 1970 alone, police recorded 4,330 bombings that resulted in forty-three deaths.
Chapter 2: The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy” > Page 33 · Location 694
The New Left’s wave of violence, however, did not advance the revolution. It alienated the public and precipitated a forceful response from the government.
Chapter 2: The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy” > Page 33 · Location 700
Nixon—the architect of the counter-revolution—sealed his victory against the revolutionaries with a forty-nine-state landslide against liberal candidate George McGovern, promising a return to law and order.
Chapter 2: The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy” > Page 34 · Location 720
Marcuse’s twilight years were a long, contemplative gloom. His revolution, which he had chased since the bracing days of his youth, was over. From 1972 until his death in 1979, Marcuse retreated to his single-level suburban home in La Jolla to publish his final political manuscript, Counterrevolution and Revolt, and to contemplate the failures of the New Left. He still maintained a small office at UCSD, but following the conflict with Governor Reagan and the Board of Regents, the university had let his contract expire, putting Marcuse into early retirement and ending his career as a teacher.
Chapter 2: The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy” > Page 35 · Location 736
Still, despite these setbacks, Marcuse refused to accept defeat. “I do believe that a democratic Communism is a real historical possibility. Worse still, I believe that only in a fully developed Communist society is a general democracy possible,”
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 36 · Location 745
The Long March Through the Institutions
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 36 · Location 755
Marcuse, like Mao, was relentless. He believed the left-wing radicals could engage in a strategic retreat to the universities and, rebuilding their forces, turn defeat into victory.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 36 · Location 756
During the early 1970s, as the radical movement was disintegrating, Marcuse turned to the young activists in his political orbit, especially the German student leader Rudi Dutschke, who had helped spread the campus revolts across Europe and, after the failure of the terror campaigns, had proposed a new strategy of the “long march through the established institutions”—a direct allusion to Mao’s military campaign.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 37 · Location 763
They believed that the New Left needed to return to its origins: abandoning the radical path and, instead, rebuilding its power in the universities and turning the students into “potential cadres” who, over time, could move their “revolution in values” from university to society—
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 37 · Location 767
Marcuse outlined his theory in his final political book, Counterrevolution and Revolt.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 37 · Location 769
He encouraged the student radicals to put down their arms and burrow themselves in the universities, schools, media, and social services, capturing the means of knowledge production in order to subvert them—
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 37 · Location 781
Race politics, women’s liberation, radical environmentalism, the Great Refusal—all could be harnessed for the process of disintegration.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 39 · Location 811
They understood that public schools, which facilitated the transmission of values, could be co-opted by white, college-educated activists. They called on “radical teachers” to form an “anti-racist white movement”
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 41 · Location 854
Over the years, Marcuse’s students and followers gained professorships at dozens of prestigious universities, including Harvard; Yale; Georgetown; Duke; University of California, Berkeley; University of Pennsylvania; University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Los Angeles; University of New Mexico; University of Texas; Bard College; Rutgers; University of San Francisco; and Loyola University Chicago.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 41 · Location 858
The Weathermen, in spite of their participation in political terror campaigns, found a welcome home in the academy, too. Dohrn, who had promised to “lead white kids into armed revolution,” 26 became a professor at Northwestern. Ayers, who had laid bombs at the Pentagon and the US Capitol, became a professor at the University of Illinois. Even Kathy Boudin, who served a long prison sentence for her involvement in an armored car robbery that left one Brinks guard and two police officers dead, became a professor at Columbia.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 42 · Location 872
They were able to use their old tactics of manipulation—accusations of racism, evocations of guilt and privilege, rituals of criticism/ self-criticism—to push out more conservative scholars and delegitimize traditional conceptions of knowledge. Their revolution might have failed in society, but it worked all too well in academia.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 42 · Location 884
Today, Marcuse and Dutschke’s long march through the universities has reached its conclusion. The American university is now a “counter-institution” driven by the ideology of the New Left and the critical theories.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 43 · Location 893
“Once the apex of the disciplinary pyramid becomes predominately left-leaning, it will sweep left-leaners into positions throughout the pyramid,” they write. As a result, the ratio between liberals and conservatives in the social sciences and humanities increased from 3.5: 1 in 1970 to 10: 1 in 2016—
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 45 · Location 948
In order to initiate this shift, the New Left–inspired academics and activists worked to extend their power to the administration, which held the ultimate authority over the direction, hiring, training, and financing of the university. The process was simple. They took the basic building blocks of their academic program—a composite of critical theory, ethnic studies, racial quotas, civil rights compliance, and consciousness training—and formalized them in the bureaucracy. Over time, this regime of “liberating tolerance” came to be known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 46 · Location 967
Sherover-Marcuse designed a series of training programs that became the prototype for university DEI programs nationwide. In the 1980s, Sherover-Marcuse led workshops on “institutionalized racism,” “internalized oppression,” and “being an effective ally,” and invented the now-famous “privilege walk” exercise, in which participants sort themselves into an oppression hierarchy, then atone for their racial, sexual, and economic privilege.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 47 · Location 986
This move from critical theory to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” was a stroke of genius.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 47 · Location 991
They designed their programs to appear neutral while, in reality, they exist to promote left-wing orthodoxy, suppress dissent through the punishment of supposed “bias” crimes, and harness the university to a campaign of social activism.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 48 · Location 994
These newly created DEI initiatives have led to an explosion in college administration. Between 1987 and 2012, colleges and universities added more than 500,000 administrators56 and, by 2015, the total number of administrators was rapidly approaching 1 million57—vastly outstripping the growth of both students and professors.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 48 · Location 1005
The University of California, Berkeley’s Equity & Inclusion Division has 400 employees and an annual budget of $ 25 million. 60 The University of Michigan’s DEI programs have 163 employees61 and an annual budget exceeding $ 14 million. 62 The University of Virginia’s diversity programs have 94 diversity program employees and a multimillion-dollar budget.
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions > Page 49 · Location 1029
Existing faculty, too, must submit to a regular examination of their loyalties: candidates for leadership positions in academic departments must submit “diversity statements”
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 53 · Location 1097
The New Ideological Regime
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 53 · Location 1107
Marcuse proposed a third way, encouraging his predominantly white, college-educated followers to learn the methods
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 53 · Location 1110
the most urgent task was to constitute a new elite, rather than a new proletariat.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 54 · Location 1113
The result of this process is the creation of a new ideological regime—composed of a unity between the university, the media, the state, the corporation—that has coalesced around the critical theories, transmitted them through the public bureaucracy, and enforced the new orthodoxy through the top-down management of private life.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 54 · Location 1124
They framed their revolution in terms of the social sciences because, they believed, it would legitimize elite management of society—and freeze out the “antirevolutionary” working classes, which had, since Marcuse’s time, opposed their rule.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 55 · Location 1132
Marcuse believed that the university could serve as the “initial revolutionary institution” 4 but was not, in and of itself, powerful enough to transform the broader society.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 55 · Location 1138
The solution, then, was to extend the “long march through the institutions” to the media and to build a counter-narrative apparatus with the power to subvert the Establishment narrative and replace it with the narrative of the critical theories. He implored the students to learn “how to use the mass media,
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 55 · Location 1143
The triumph of this “long march through the media” can be represented in miniature through the conquest of the New York Times,
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 56 · Location 1155
the paper’s ideological shift began in the aftermath of the Great Recession, as executives laid off many veteran writers and began hiring hundreds of younger reporters who had been steeped in the critical theories at elite universities.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 56 · Location 1164
Between 2011 and 2019, the frequency of the word “racist( s)” and “racism” increased by 700 percent and 1,000 percent; between 2013 and 2019 the frequency of the phrase “white privilege” increased 1,200 percent and the frequency of the phrase “systemic racism” increased by 1,000 percent. This new sensibility quickly captured the op-ed page, as well as the hard news sections and the offices of management, human resources, and diversity programming.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 56 · Location 1172
the old stalwarts of free expression, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, have also succumbed
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 57 · Location 1180
As the Times changed, the other primary channels of left-leaning media followed suit: the Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC14—even the wire services15—all converged on the framing and language of the New Left.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 57 · Location 1191
The next conquest in the long march through the institutions was the state.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 58 · Location 1196
public agencies employ approximately 24 million Americans, 18 spend more than $ 1 trillion per year on means-tested welfare programs, 19 and subsidize approximately half of all households through entitlements and transfer payments.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 59 · Location 1229
the trainers explained that their intention was to expose the “roots of white male culture,” which consists of “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work,” and “striving towards success”—which might be superficially appealing but are, in fact, rooted in “racism, sexism, and homophobia” and “devastating” to women and minorities.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 60 · Location 1245
All of the major grantmakers in education, humanities, and sciences—the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation—have become permanent benefactors of the critical theories,
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 60 · Location 1247
For decades, these entities have showered hundreds of millions of dollars on universities, artists, researchers, writers, and cultural figures who echo the euphemisms of the revolution,
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 61 · Location 1264
Even the National Science Foundation, which one might assume to be insulated from the critical theories, has succumbed.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 62 · Location 1278
The final conquest in the long march through the institutions is the extension of the critical theories into America’s largest corporations.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 62 · Location 1280
Today, every one of the Fortune 100 corporations has submitted to the ideology of the critical theories, filtered through the language of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 63 · Location 1300
The major corporations have made a simple calculation: they have achieved all of their desires from the political right on economics—tax cuts, free trade, deregulation—and so they are looking to appease their potential enemies from the political left on culture.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 63 · Location 1304
This dynamic was crisply illustrated following the death of George Floyd, which inspired months of rioting, looting, and violence in American cities. As looters sacked retail stores and burned commercial districts to the ground, the CEOs of the great companies announced themselves not on the side of “law and order,” as they had in the 1960s, but on the side of the protestors and rioters.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 63 · Location 1311
These businesses understand there is always a tax: in the past, they might have paid the mob or the union to achieve peace; today they pay the equity consulting firm and the racial activist organization.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 67 · Location 1393
Marcuse’s “dictatorship of the intellectuals” and “dictatorship of politicians, managers, and generals” have now converged.
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime > Page 68 · Location 1396
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.”
Part II: Race
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 73 · Location 1428
Angela Davis
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 73 · Location 1432
For Davis, the matter was not merely theoretical; she had put Marcuse’s theories into practice.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 73 · Location 1434
She had been arrested on charges of kidnapping, murder, and interstate flight in relation to a botched prison break in San Rafael, California.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 74 · Location 1452
Davis was a devoted follower of Marcuse, having followed him around the globe, from the lecture halls of Brandeis University to the dust-covered stacks of European libraries to the graduate program at the University of California, San Diego.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 75 · Location 1465
Violence, Davis insisted, was a necessary, if regrettable, step in the revolutionary process.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 75 · Location 1480
In the months after her capture, Angela Davis transformed herself from a small-time student radical into an international cause célèbre.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 79 · Location 1550
“The Communist Manifesto hit me like a bolt of lightning,” she recalled. “I read it avidly, finding in it answers to many of the seemingly unanswerable dilemmas which had plagued me. I read it over and over again, not completely understanding every passage or every idea, but enthralled nevertheless by the possibility of a communist revolution here.” She was intoxicated by visions of “how capitalism could be abolished”
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 80 · Location 1565
With Marcuse’s encouragement, Davis finished her studies at Brandeis and enrolled in the graduate program at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt—the birthplace and spiritual center of the critical theories.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 81 · Location 1591
frustrated with the perpetual infighting of the black militant movements, Davis made up her mind: she would throw in her lot with the Communist Party USA.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 81 · Location 1602
In the spring of 1969,32 the University of California, Los Angeles, philosophy department offered Davis a temporary position as an acting assistant professor while she completed her doctoral thesis, “Kant’s Theory of Force.”
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 83 · Location 1627
“We have to learn to rejoice when pigs’ blood is spilled”;
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 83 · Location 1637
With this in mind, Davis and Jonathan Jackson began assembling an arsenal of weapons. In 1968 and 1969, Davis had purchased a .38-caliber automatic pistol and an M-1 carbine rifle, and then, accompanied by Jonathan in the spring and summer of 1970, purchased another M-1 carbine and 150 rounds of ammunition.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 83 · Location 1642
Two days later, on August 7, 1970, these guns became a part of history. Jonathan Jackson rose from his seat in the gallery of the Marin County Hall of Justice, pulled the Browning .38 pistol out of a satchel, threw it to one of the defendants, then pulled the M-1 carbine from his trench coat and yelled to the astonished crowd: “Freeze!”
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 84 · Location 1658
When the smoke cleared, Jonathan Jackson, James McClain, William Christmas, and Judge Haley were dead.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 84 · Location 1661
Jonathan Jackson had concealed some of the hostage-taking supplies in two books, Violence and Social Change and The Politics of Violence: Revolution in the Modern World, both of which were signed and dated on the inside cover by Angela Davis.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 85 · Location 1666
after running the serial numbers, they learned that all four of the weapons used in the siege traced back to one “Angela Y. Davis.”
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 85 · Location 1673
The FBI had placed Davis on the Most Wanted list for her role in the courthouse siege, and for the next two months the young professor utilized a network of wealthy left-wing benefactors, activists, and militants to disguise her physical appearance, move through a sequence of safe houses, and evade law enforcement.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 86 · Location 1702
As Davis captured the public imagination with her writing and interviews, her legal team prepared to defend her in court. They pursued a two-part strategy: frame the proceedings as a political persecution and sow doubt about the evidence against her.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 87 · Location 1709
The defense admitted that Angela was in love with George, that she was deeply involved with Jonathan, that she had purchased all of weapons, and that she was at the airport the day of the siege—but, because Jonathan and the prisoners never made it to the airport, prosecutors could not prove beyond all reasonable doubt that she was directly coordinating the escape. The evidence was overwhelming, but circumstantial.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 87 · Location 1719
The defense enlisted a team of prestigious attorneys, psychiatrists, psychologists, and a handwriting expert to aid in jury selection, and called in a procession of left-wing activists and Communist Party members to provide alibis for Davis during key moments.
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 87 · Location 1723
Davis and her attorneys had beguiled the all-white jury, persuading them that the Marin courthouse revolt was a “slave insurrection” and that Angela was a “symbol of resistance.”
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt > Page 88 · Location 1733
Later that evening, a majority of the jurors attended a rock-and-roll festival in celebration of Davis’s acquittal.
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 89 · Location 1739
Following her acquittal, Angela Davis embarked on a worldwide tour. She spoke to adoring crowds in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and New York City, then traveled throughout the Soviet Union, with stops in Russia, Central Asia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, and Chile.
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 89 · Location 1742
The state bureaucracies in the communist nations, which had previously sent “a million roses for Angela,” assembled the masses in her honor, with fifty thousand welcoming her to East Berlin2 and hundreds of thousands celebrating her in Havana, where she delivered a speech in tandem with the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 90 · Location 1771
the real ideology of Angela Davis was simple: total war against American society, justifying any atrocity, from the prison camps of the Soviet Union to the cold-blooded murder of an IRS manager—all in the name of the revolution.
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The person who most embodied the life and spirit of the black Marxist revolution was a man named Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver’s personal biography contains the entire arc of the revolution: he was radicalized in the California prisons, served as the Black Panther Party’s minister of information, and led the movement down its final, apocalyptic path. He was the masculine, hot-blooded complement to Angela Davis’s feminine, cold-blooded intellectualism.
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He had spent long stretches of his youth in juvenile detention and, as an adult, was sent to San Quentin after a conviction for rape and assault with intent to murder.
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 91 · Location 1788
“I became a rapist,” he wrote. “To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of the day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey.”
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 91 · Location 1793
“Rape was an insurrectionary act,” Cleaver wrote.
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Cleaver recanted while in prison, claiming that he had transcended the anti-morality of rape and found salvation in Marxism-Leninism.
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The Panthers’ manifesto, the “Ten-Point Program,” translated Newton and Cleaver’s Marxist-Leninist synthesis into a tangible political agenda, demanding that the federal government provide blacks with cash reparation payments, guaranteed monthly income, free high-quality housing, racialist ideology in schools, an end to police brutality, and the immediate release of all black men held in the nation’s jails and prisons.
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 96 · Location 1893
Then the assassinations began. In the spring of 1971, the BLA launched its first offensive, strafing two New York City policemen with a machine gun, leaving them in critical condition.
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 96 · Location 1898
Two nights later, BLA gunmen ambushed two patrolmen, instantly killing the first, a black man, with a shot to the back of the head, and slowly killing the second, a white man, who was hit with thirteen shots to the body and bled out as a radio car rushed him to the hospital. 45
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 96 · Location 1900
Over the next two years, the BLA would unleash a reign of terror: the militants assassinated five more police officers, 46 robbed a series of banks, 47 kidnapped and ransomed a bar owner, 48 orchestrated multiple prison escapes, 49 hijacked commercial airplanes, 50 and ran a series of criminal enterprises, ranging from drug-running to street robbery.
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 97 · Location 1919
The public quickly recoiled from the bloodshed. Even in black neighborhoods, where the BLA had hoped to build support, the movement alienated residents. The “revolutionary executions” 54 of black police officers was met with horror.
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 98 · Location 1928
By 1974, the movement was exhausted.
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 98 · Location 1949
One by one, the leadership of the black liberation movement succumbed to their vices. Huey Newton fell into a life of addiction, crime, violence, and desperation. He embezzled funds, 68 was suspected in the murder of a prostitute, 69 and spent his time in the crack cocaine dens of the Oakland ghettos. Eventually, a dealer affiliated with the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang shot him in the head outside a drug house and left him to die in a pool of his own blood. 70
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 99 · Location 1954
Cleaver contemplated suicide and, with a gun in his hand, had a mystical vision
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 99 · Location 1957
But the demons were always at his heels. Like Newton, he became a crack addict in the gritty neighborhoods of Oakland and, after his health slowly failed, died of a heart attack. 72
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 99 · Location 1959
Angela Davis, too, followed the black liberation line to its grim conclusions.
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 99 · Location 1963
Davis raised funds, wrote pamphlets, and organized rallies for her comrades, insisting that they were “freedom fighters” and “political prisoners.”
Chapter 6: “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes > Page 99 · Location 1966
In 1979, when Davis announced her campaign for the vice presidency of the United States on the Communist Party ticket, nobody was listening.
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 100 · Location 1971
From Black Liberation to Black Studies
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 100 · Location 1972
After the collapse of the black radical movement, Angela Davis retreated to the permanent refuge of the failed revolutionary: academia.
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 100 · Location 1974
Davis would serve as a professor and lecturer at UCLA, Rutgers, Claremont, Syracuse, Vassar, San Francisco State University, San Francisco Art Institute, and, most permanently, at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 100 · Location 1978
The influence of Davis’s long march through academia is profound. When Davis broke down the door of the UCSD registrar’s office as a graduate student, she demanded racial quotas, critical theory, Marxist ideology, and “white studies” to unmask the oppressive nature of European culture, and a general critique of “capitalism in the Western world, including the crucial roles played by colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and genocide.” She wanted a reading list of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara, and a curriculum designed to “reject the entire oppressive structure of America.” 1 All of this has come into being. Davis’s radical curriculum has become the standard humanities program in the American university.
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 104 · Location 2057
The next objective in Davis’s project of rationalization was to demolish the founding myths of the United States,
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 105 · Location 2067
Cleaver understood the power of establishing a mythical void. He declared that the great figures of American life—the Founding Fathers who had established the Republic in the name of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—had “acquired new names” and been reduced to a sequence of “slave-catchers, slaveowners, murderers, butchers, invaders, oppressors.”
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Cleaver had realized that every society has a pantheon of heroes and, if the radicals could tear it down, the pain would become unbearable and men would rush to find new heroes to replace them.
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 105 · Location 2076
“For today the heroes of the initiative are people not usually thought of as white: Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah, Mao Tse-tung . . . Ho Chi Minh, Stokely Carmichael, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Forman, Chou En-lai.”
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Even Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, could not escape this critique.
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 108 · Location 2146
The solution, according to Cleaver, was to dust off the books of Karl Marx—“ A smart, smart cat”—and apply the “universal principles of socialism” to the American regime, using any means necessary.
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 109 · Location 2150
After gaining this initial foothold, the black radical movement sought to convert the universities into a more durable power center. Rather than individual professorships and one-off lectures, they wanted their own departments, their own curricula, and their own academic programs, which could legitimize and promote black nationalist ideology. Their first target was San Francisco State University.
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 109 · Location 2162
The campaign was remarkably successful. Within a few years, the coalition opened a student-led Experimental College and, through an agreement with the administration following the strike, secured automatic admission for nonwhite students and established the nation’s first ethnic studies and black studies programs,
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 110 · Location 2172
By the mid-1970s, there were upwards of five hundred black studies programs in universities across the country.
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“The black studies movement is an example of a social movement targeting bureaucracies,”
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 110 · Location 2179
These departments, however, were not models of academic rigor. 37 According to the black scholar Shelby Steele, who had once worked in the movement to establish black studies departments, the programs were filled were “crooks” and “hustlers” who were more interested in obtaining lucrative sinecures than in doing meaningful academic work.
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 110 · Location 2184
the universities, captured by a spirit of “white guilt,” rushed to meet their demands.
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 111 · Location 2189
Today, the discipline of black studies has been universalized: 91 percent of public universities have black studies programs and 42 percent have solidified them into full-time academic departments.
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies > Page 112 · Location 2224
In one sense, the movement has achieved its goals. The United States has created a sprawling welfare state, with massive outlays for jobs, housing, health, education, and direct support. The universities have installed affirmative action and racialist pedagogy as key pillars of their administrative programs.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 114 · Location 2246
BLM
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 114 · Location 2248
The black liberation movement, which had been left for dead in the Nixon era, was reborn in the new millennium with the founding of Black Lives Matter. The rhetoric, the ambitions, and even the acronym of the movement are identical: although the media and corporate public relations departments have framed the Black Lives Matter movement as an extension of the civil rights movement, the ideology of the organization is, in truth, more in line with the revolutionaries of the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, and the Marxist-Leninist black liberation movement more broadly.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 114 · Location 2254
“Professor Angela Y. Davis—philosopher, Marxist, and former Black Panther whose work on prisons, abolition, and Black struggle has proven relevant over time—has informed our movements and communities for decades,” explained BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors in the Harvard Law Review.
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Cullors and Garza have used their status as queer black women to mobilize the entire constellation of oppressed identities.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 116 · Location 2283
The great coup of BLM was to secure the acceptance of the prestige institutions, but its philosophy, its aesthetic, and its ambitions are unchanged from the earliest days.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 117 · Location 2310
The great innovation of Black Lives Matter was not political, but linguistic. They did not change the content—anti-racism, anti-capitalism, anti-patriarchy, anti-imperialism—they changed the presentation. The best way to understand BLM is as a delivery mechanism for Black Panther ideology, passed through a filter of marketing language that makes it palatable to American elites.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 117 · Location 2322
As the Black Panther Party had learned when it was still a small street gang in Oakland, the best recruiting tool for the movement is to whip up anger against the police. And for Black Lives Matter, this method has become even more powerful. Activists now have mobile phone or bodycam video for nearly every police shooting, which can be edited for maximum emotional impact and replicated across social media at a cost and scale that was unimaginable five decades ago. The media then sears the violent images into the minds of the public and BLM activists read out litanies of the dead—“ Say their names”—to establish their moral position and elicit a response in the broader population. 16
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 118 · Location 2329
Unlike their counterparts of the past, Cullors, Garza, and Black Lives Matter leaders seek to engage the emotions of guilt and shame rather than anger and fear, adopting a therapeutic rather than militant tone.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 118 · Location 2331
The goal is no longer to rouse the fury of the black lumpenproletariat, a strategy that proved to be self-destructive, but to arouse the sentiments of the professional class, including the stratum of liberal white women who now command powerful administrative positions in corporations, philanthropies, universities, and schools, and often mimic the rituals first created by activists.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 118 · Location 2340
They used individual incidents of police brutality as proof of the existence of “systemic racism.” The enemy was no longer the individual police officer, but an abstraction that implicates the entire society.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 120 · Location 2369
The old vocabulary of the Black Panther Party has become the new vocabulary of the New York Times. Between 2010 and 2020, the paper’s usage of terms such as “structural racism,” “white supremacy,” “police brutality,” and “antiracism” has exploded.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 120 · Location 2374
mind. In 2009, only 32 percent of Democrats believed that racism in the United States was a “big problem”; by 2017, that number had more than doubled to 76 percent.
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This dramatic change in public perception seems self-contradictory. Racism, by almost any measure, has declined in the United States from the days of the Black Panther Party.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 120 · Location 2380
Police killings of black men decreased by 72 percent between 1965 and 200529—and the absolute numbers obscure the fact that the vast majority of these incidents are in response to deadly threats and, therefore, justifiable. 30 Finally, in 2008, the United States elected its first black president, Barack Obama, which, at the time, was heralded as a racial watershed.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 120 · Location 2384
According to Gallup, from 2001 to 2013, approximately 70 percent of adults rated black-white relations positively. 31 Then, as the Black Lives Matter narrative began building influence in response to a series of high-profile police shootings, it suddenly collapsed. By 2021, the number of Americans with a positive assessment of race relations plummeted to 42 percent. Among African-Americans, the number fell from 66 percent to 33 percent—the lowest share on record.
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Even among self-described “moderate” voters, more than one-quarter believed that the police had killed at least 1,000 unarmed black men over the course of the year. 32 The real number, according to the Washington Post database of fatal police shootings, was 14—
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 122 · Location 2408
The fuse was lit on May 25, 2020.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 122 · Location 2408
That evening in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a white police officer named Derek Chauvin arrested a black man named George Floyd on suspicion of using counterfeit currency to purchase cigarettes. Floyd, who had a long rap sheet including trespassing, theft, drug possession, and holding a gun to the stomach of a young woman during a home invasion robbery, was acting erratically and asked the officers to lay him on the ground.
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It was the perfect confirmation of the narrative loop established by Black Lives Matter activists over the previous five years: a white police officer extinguishing the life of a poor black man, in full view of the public—brutally, senselessly, without remorse.
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By the following month, protests had erupted in all fifty states, unleashing a wave of riots, violence, and destruction.
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As the rioting spread, it seemed that Marcuse’s old two-part proletariat had been revived—and, under the banner of Black Lives Matter, it yielded devastation.
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 124 · Location 2455
There were more than ten thousand demonstrations nationwide, with protestors engaging in violence, looting, arson, and vandalism in all fifty states. 49 Police arrested more than ten thousand protestors and recorded twenty-five deaths connected with the unrest. 50 Rioters inflicted more than $ 2 billion in property damage—the single largest insurance loss due to civil disorder on record. 51
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 126 · Location 2492
In all of these cities, the mobs turned violent after sundown: looting, arson, vandalism, and destruction. As these threats escalated, national retail chains began publishing statements of loyalty to the movement and local shopkeepers hung “Black Lives Matter” placards and photographs of George Floyd in their windows—in some cases, out of conviction, but in most cases, out of fear. The message: “We submit. Please do not burn down this establishment.”
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn > Page 127 · Location 2525
After the death of George Floyd, Davis, at seventy-six years old, was resurrected by the press and restored to her position as the conscience of racial revolt. Her photograph graced the pages of Time magazine, where she was celebrated as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the year.
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 129 · Location 2552
The spectacular looting and violence in Minneapolis and Portland might have dominated the headlines, but under the surface, activists in Seattle launched an unprecedented campaign to turn the street protests into a new political regime.
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 129 · Location 2557
This campaign was decades in the making. In the years leading up to 2020, the city’s radical-progressives had slowly gained control over the entire apparatus of local politics, from the media to the academic institutions to the philanthropic foundations to the city council to the public bureaucracy. There was, however, one notable exception: the criminal justice system.
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 129 · Location 2561
institution of criminal justice, they believed, they could finally begin to establish the new society that has escaped their grasp.
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 129 · Location 2563
Following the activist line, elected officials in Seattle and King County announced their intentions to simultaneously defund the Seattle Police Department, permanently close the county’s largest jail, and gut the municipal court system.
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 130 · Location 2569
Nikkita Oliver, the self-described “abolitionist” who became the figurehead of the movement to dismantle Seattle’s justice system, self-consciously modeled her politics and aesthetics on Angela Davis, shouting to the crowds that they must join the struggle to overthrow “racialized capitalism” and smash “patriarchy, white supremacy, and classism” once and for all.
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 130 · Location 2573
For a brief moment, they established their own Paris Commune—the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ—
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 130 · Location 2580
The highest officials in the region knelt to their demands,
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 131 · Location 2588
The first commandment of the new abolitionists is to “abolish the police.”
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 132 · Location 2611
the government weighed in on behalf of the mob. At the same time that the demonstrators were extending their control of the streets, the city council passed legislation to deprive the police department of essential crowd control tools,
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 132 · Location 2620
Incredibly, in the midst of rising street disorder and intimidation of public officials, a majority of Seattle voters supported the plan to “defund the police.”
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 133 · Location 2630
The second commandment of the new abolitionists is to “abolish the prisons.”
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 133 · Location 2633
policymakers were busy laying out the rationale for permanently closing the region’s largest jail and ending all youth incarceration—including for minors charged with serious crimes such as rape and murder.
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The question facing these officials was obvious: What will replace the jails in this new regime?
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 134 · Location 2655
The activists highlighted three nonprofit programs as models for the new justice system—Community Passageways, Creative Justice, and Community Justice Project—that offer programs such as “healing circles,” “narrative storytelling,” art-based therapy, and community organizing.
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The third commandment of the new abolitionists is to “abolish the courts.”
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 136 · Location 2724
“We are preparing the ground for a different kind of society,” declared socialist city council member Kshama Sawant at the height of the unrest. “We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism—this police state. We cannot and will not stop until we overthrow it and replace it with a world based instead on solidarity, genuine democracy, and equality—a socialist world.”
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 137 · Location 2730
Protestors had been relentlessly attacking the city’s East Precinct police headquarters,
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 137 · Location 2731
The mayor had made the decision to abandon the precinct to the mob.
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 137 · Location 2733
groups of armed men associated with Antifa, the John Brown Gun Club, and other left-wing militant organizations established a new security perimeter around the neighborhood and declared the territory the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ,
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 139 · Location 2769
Within days of the People’s Assembly, the most heavily armed and aggressive factions in the CHAZ started to exert dominance over the neighborhood and became the de facto police power.
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 139 · Location 2774
The police, having ceded control of the CHAZ to activists, did not respond to any calls for service. 39 Then the killings began.
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In a cruel irony, all of the identified victims were black men—
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle > Page 140 · Location 2795
Following the George Floyd riots, the United States witnessed the greatest single-year rise in homicides since record keeping began in 1960: a total of 21,500 people shot, stabbed, poisoned, beaten, and bludgeoned to death;
Part III: Education
Chapter 10: Paulo Freire: Master of Subversion > Page 145 · Location 2825
In the fall of 1969, a Brazilian Marxist educator named Paulo Freire arrived on the Harvard University campus with a suitcase full of clothes and a Portuguese-language manuscript of a book he called Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Chapter 10: Paulo Freire: Master of Subversion > Page 145 · Location 2831
The book sold more than one million copies1 and is now the third-most-cited work in the social sciences. 2 It has become a foundational text in nearly all graduate schools of education and teacher training programs.
Chapter 10: Paulo Freire: Master of Subversion > Page 146 · Location 2846
The most-cited political figures in the Pedagogy are Lenin, Mao, Guevara, and Castro, all of whom mobilized violence to advance their political cause.
Chapter 10: Paulo Freire: Master of Subversion > Page 150 · Location 2932
Even after the atrocities of Freire’s heroes were revealed, he continued to idealize them. In 1974, he called China’s Cultural Revolution—which led to the death, starvation, and persecution of millions of innocent people—“ the most genial solution of the century.” 24 In 1985, he described Che Guevara as the incarnation of “the authentic revolutionary utopia”
Chapter 10: Paulo Freire: Master of Subversion > Page 150 · Location 2936
Revolutionary violence, Freire maintained, was best understood as “an act of love.” 26
Chapter 11: “We Must Punish Them”: Marxism Conquers the American Classroom > Page 159 · Location 3105
For Paulo Freire, America was the ultimate oppressor—and for that reason, he accepted a position at Harvard University, in order to study the enemy from within.
Chapter 11: “We Must Punish Them”: Marxism Conquers the American Classroom > Page 159 · Location 3108
Between 1969 and 1970, Freire spent six months as a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Chapter 11: “We Must Punish Them”: Marxism Conquers the American Classroom > Page 159 · Location 3110
His work, despite being anti-capitalist, was funded by two of the great titans of American industry: the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation.
Chapter 11: “We Must Punish Them”: Marxism Conquers the American Classroom > Page 163 · Location 3186
In total, Freire’s oeuvre has generated nearly 500,000 academic citations and his disciple, Henry Giroux, has generated another 125,000.24 Freire’s concepts—“ Mythologization,” “cultural invasion,” “codification-decodification,” “critical consciousness”—have reshaped the language of pedagogical theory and dominated the discourse in the academic journals. Over time, these ideas have become part of the official architecture of higher education: UCLA sponsors an official Paulo Freire Institute; Chapman University hosts an annual Paulo Freire Democratic Project Awards; McGill University runs a Paulo and Nita Freire Project for Critical Pedagogy; and similar initiatives have been established in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Germany, Finland, Austria, England, and Brazil.
Chapter 11: “We Must Punish Them”: Marxism Conquers the American Classroom > Page 163 · Location 3194
“The turn to critical Marxist thought is a defining moment in the past 40 years of educational scholarship, especially for educational scholars who identify as part of the political left,”
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Over time, the scholarship that began in the universities trickled down to the primary and secondary education systems. The result is that thousands of public schools are now training American schoolchildren, explicitly or implicitly, to see the world through the lens of critical pedagogy.
Chapter 11: “We Must Punish Them”: Marxism Conquers the American Classroom > Page 163 · Location 3202
In California, America’s vanguard state, Freire’s ideas have reshaped the curriculum entirely. In 2021, the state Board of Education approved a sweeping Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, with the goal of transforming education in ten thousand public schools, serving a total of 6 million students. The curriculum, which is based in large part on Freire’s framework of critical consciousness, decolonization, and revolt, begins with the assumption that students must learn how to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/ colonial beliefs” and critique “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.”
Chapter 11: “We Must Punish Them”: Marxism Conquers the American Classroom > Page 164 · Location 3217
The ultimate goal is to “decolonize” American society and establish a new regime of “countergenocide” and “counterhegemony,” which will challenge the dominance of white Christian culture and lead to the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”
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Students clapped and chanted to the deity Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to become “warriors” for “social justice.”
Chapter 11: “We Must Punish Them”: Marxism Conquers the American Classroom > Page 166 · Location 3248
The method of critical pedagogy is now mandatory statewide. After releasing the model curriculum, the California state legislature quickly passed a bill making ethnic studies a graduation requirement for all high school students, which will make the “pedagogy of the oppressed” the official ideology in every school district in the state. 34
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Following the model of the universities, the largest school districts have all begun to entrench the critical pedagogies into the bureaucracy under a variety of names, such as “Diversity and Inclusion,” “Racial Equity,” and “Culturally Responsive Programs.” These departments fulfill a dual purpose. First, they serve as a mechanism for ideological enforcement. Second, they serve as a jobs program for college graduates with degrees in the critical theories.
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Seattle Public Schools provides a model for how deeply the bureaucracy can entrench itself. The district, which has a $ 1 billion annual budget for 52,000 students, has created a Department of Racial Equity Advancement; a Division of Equity, Partnerships, and Engagement; a Department of Ethnic Studies; Office of African American Male Achievement; and an Equity and Race Advisory Committee.
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Seattle Public Schools explains that the United States is a “race-based white-supremist society,” that public schools are guilty of “spirit murder” against minorities, and that white teachers must confront their “thieved inheritance”;
Chapter 11: “We Must Punish Them”: Marxism Conquers the American Classroom > Page 168 · Location 3289
Even math and science have been captured. According to the district’s Math Ethnic Studies Framework, students must learn to reject “‘ Western’ mathematics,” which has been used to “oppress and marginalize people and communities of color,” and adopt the superior theory of “ethnomathematics,” developed by the Brazilian postmodernist and student of Paulo Freire, Ubiratan D’Ambrosio.
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 172 · Location 3378
Freire and his disciples believed that the critical pedagogies could reengineer the human soul and inspire a revolution from the bottom up. But in contradiction to their counterparts in the East, the dividing line between oppressor and oppressed in the West was not social class, but racial identity.
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 173 · Location 3388
Their primary pedagogical strategy was to pathologize white identity, which was deemed inherently oppressive, and radicalize black identity, which was deemed inherently oppressed. In the academic literature, this technique is sometimes referred to as “revolutionary pedagogy,” “critical multiculturalism,” or “decolonization,”
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 173 · Location 3396
McLaren contended that the ultimate end of critical pedagogy was to use the power of identity politics in order to “gain control of the production of meaning” 5 and to usher in a “democratic socialist society”
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 175 · Location 3435
Applebaum argues that all white people are “infected” by a cluster of psychological evils: “white ignorance,” “white complicity,” “white privilege,” “white denial,” and “white supremacy.”
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 176 · Location 3450
The running theme of this pedagogy is the production of guilt.
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 178 · Location 3493
the Western concepts of “‘ rationality,’ ‘liberalism,’ ‘capitalism,’ ‘secularism,’ [and] ‘rule of law’” are “white mythologies” that are used to justify, extend, and perpetuate white domination.
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 179 · Location 3512
The pedagogy for minority students—the true “pedagogy of the oppressed”—is the mirror image of the pedagogy of whiteness.
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 181 · Location 3560
students are taught that America has created a “school-to-grave pipeline” for black children and that, as adults, “one million Black people are locked in cages.” In middle and high school, students learn the theory of “systemic racism,”
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 181 · Location 3563
perpetuating
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 181 · Location 3567
Schools are instructed to promote the fourteen “Black Lives Matter principles,” which teach students to disrupt “Western nuclear family dynamics,” dismantle “structural racism and white supremacy,” challenge “cisgender privilege,” break “the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” and abolish “sexism, misogyny, and male-centeredness.” In their place, schools must become “unapologetically Black,” support “Black villages,” create “queer-affirming network[ s],” embrace “Black families,” uplift “Black trans folk,” and hire “more Black teachers.”
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 182 · Location 3581
“The re-education of Blacks and a possible solution of racial crises can begin, strangely enough, only when Blacks fully realize this central fact in their lives: the white man is their bitter enemy,”
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul > Page 182 · Location 3584
The pedagogy of blackness quickly becomes naked political activism, which is often smuggled under the label of “anti-racism.”
Chapter 13: The Child Soldiers of Portland > Page 197 · Location 3882
The anti-racism program “was the battering ram,” but the ultimate goal, according to the teacher, is the “dismantling of Western culture” and the ushering in of a new left-wing utopia.
Chapter 13: The Child Soldiers of Portland > Page 201 · Location 3961
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.
Chapter 13: The Child Soldiers of Portland > Page 201 · Location 3962
They might get what they wish for, although not in the way they imagine.
Part IV: Power
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 205 · Location 3974
Derrick Bell remained a pessimist until the bitter end. He had risen from humble origins to become the first black professor at Harvard Law School. He had published bestselling books and won the praise of the national media. And he had been a mentor to a promising young student named Barack Obama, who would later win the presidency.
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 205 · Location 3985
Bell had provided legal support to Angela Davis at her murder trial, studied the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and maintained a close relationship with Black Panther Party members such as Kathleen Cleaver, the wife of Eldridge Cleaver.
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 206 · Location 3991
During his long career at Harvard, Bell cultivated a cadre of young intellectuals beneath him—law students who would go on to establish the discipline of critical race theory—and encouraged them to challenge the institutions from within.
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 206 · Location 4006
In Bell’s fantasies, whites traded blacks to space aliens, assassinated all of the black employees at Harvard, and paid license fees in order to practice open discrimination. Bell believed that progress was an illusion,
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 210 · Location 4074
by all accounts, he was a remarkable lawyer. He argued in the courts on behalf of James Meredith, who would become the first black student at the University of Mississippi, and crisscrossed the rural counties helping local blacks fight for school integration.
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 212 · Location 4113
A number of law schools, feeling pressure to recruit racial minorities onto the faculty, had reached out to Bell with offers of a teaching position. Soon enough, the golden ticket arrived: Harvard Law School wanted to make Bell its first full-time black professor.
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 212 · Location 4121
Bell understood the politics of racial hiring in elite institutions—a kind of proto–affirmative action—and saw it without illusion.
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 212 · Location 4126
In 1973, he published his landmark casebook, Race, Racism, and American Law.
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 212 · Location 4128
The book, originally published for a limited audience of legal scholars, contained the entire seed of what would become known as “critical race theory.”
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 213 · Location 4132
Bell was dissatisfied with the regime of legal colorblindness and began searching for more radical solutions. He devoured the works of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci30 and Paulo Freire31—
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 213 · Location 4140
Bell had always seen racism and capitalism as mutually interconnected.
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism > Page 216 · Location 4207
Bell suddenly became a star among the white intelligentsia, which has always had an affinity for messages of white racism and American evil. He went on radio and television expounding his unitary theory of racial catastrophe. A major publisher bought the rights to Bell’s Chronicles and asked him to expand them into a series of books that would become And We Are Not Saved and Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Both would become New York Times bestsellers, and the latter included a story that was optioned and turned into a film by the premium cable outlet HBO.
Chapter 15: “I Live to Harass White Folks”: The Politics of Eternal Resentment > Page 221 · Location 4299
After his strike on behalf of Regina Austin and lurid assassination fantasies, the administration decided that it would no longer submit to the professor’s racial blackmail campaign.
Chapter 15: “I Live to Harass White Folks”: The Politics of Eternal Resentment > Page 221 · Location 4303
And so, the administration iced him out.
Chapter 15: “I Live to Harass White Folks”: The Politics of Eternal Resentment > Page 231 · Location 4493
The economist Thomas Sowell described Bell’s philosophical descent in blunt terms. “He’s turned his back on the ideal of a colorblind society and he’s really for a getting-even society, a revenge society,” Sowell said. “It’s particularly ironic in the case of Bell because, at one point in his career, he fought against racism. And now he seems to have metamorphosed into someone who thinks that racism should not be eliminated, but simply put under new management.”
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 232 · Location 4506
The Rise of Critical Race Theory
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 233 · Location 4528
Derrick Bell provided their anchor, but the young scholars dreamed of moving beyond critique and establishing a method for surpassing the regime of colorblind equality. They saw the new discipline as a way to revitalize the study of law and infuse it with a pastiche of critical theory, racialist ideology, and Marxist politics. They hoped to transform the American constitution to achieve, if not justice, then retribution.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 233 · Location 4535
This work was collated, condensed, and contextualized in two books, Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge and Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, both of which were published in 1995 and, together, comprised the core of the new philosophy.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 234 · Location 4546
In the early years, the critical race theorists imagined their academic theories serving the same function as Marxist ideology, with race replacing class as the key axis of oppression and resistance.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 234 · Location 4555
The elements of critical race theory are, in fact, a near-perfect transposition of race onto the basic structures of Marxist theory. “White supremacy” replaces “capitalism” as the totalizing system. “White and black” replaces “bourgeoisie and proletariat” as the “oppressor and oppressed.” “Abolition” replaces “revolution” as the method of “liberation.”
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 235 · Location 4570
Since the beginning, critical race theory was designed to be a weapon.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 235 · Location 4575
By the mid-1990s, the young law professors who were affiliated with the movement had absorbed a thoroughly postmodern epistemology, arguing that Western rationality was a mask for power and domination. They followed the fashionable line of French post-structuralist philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, arguing that “truth is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant group”
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 236 · Location 4608
This is the nebulous epistemological foundation of critical race theory: personal offense becomes objective reality; evidence gives way to ideology; identity replaces rationality as the basis of intellectual authority.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 237 · Location 4613
race theorists intended to take it. The second key element of critical race theory, which builds on the foundation of racial reasoning, is the concept of “intersectionality.”
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 238 · Location 4630
the affluent, able-bodied, heterosexual, white male—is the ultimate oppressor,
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 238 · Location 4635
“Identity continues to be a site of resistance for members of different subordinated groups,” Crenshaw wrote.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 239 · Location 4658
The critical race theorists based their political strategy on the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist who pioneered the concept of “cultural hegemony”
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 245 · Location 4787
The final critique of critical race theory during its initial formation came from Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor of African-American studies who arrived at Harvard in 1991, as Derrick Bell was engaging in his academic strike.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 246 · Location 4812
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.”
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 247 · Location 4818
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.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 247 · Location 4824
Hence a new model of institutional racism is one that can operate in the absence of actual racists.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 247 · Location 4828
The critical race theorists had substituted verbalism for meaning, and symbolism for substance.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 247 · Location 4832
three critiques—from Kennedy, Clark, and Gates, all published by 1995—represented a significant intellectual challenge to critical race theory. They did not, however, represent a significant political challenge. One by one, Bell and his disciples dispatched their black critics through smears and character assassination.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 248 · Location 4840
the critical race theorists managed to vanquish their opposition one by one and begin the process of installing their ideology in elite enclaves. The real brilliance of critical race theory was not intellectual, but tactical.
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory > Page 248 · Location 4843
After the ideological foundations were set, the critical race theorists turned to the next phase of their campaign: conquering the institutions.
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 249 · Location 4846
DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 249 · Location 4849
Over the course of thirty years, the critical race theorists and their allies in left-wing social movements seeded this ideology in nearly every elite knowledge-making institution in America, from the university academic department to the Fortune 100 corporation.
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 249 · Location 4852
Over time, the ideology transformed itself from the abstract principles of the academic theory into the concrete policies and practices of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 249 · Location 4854
This move was inevitable—and brilliant. In order to achieve hegemony within the institutions, the critical race theorists had to create a means of attaching their ideology to administrative power.
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 249 · Location 4857
They created a circular, self-reinforcing system that created its own demand and installed a new, universal class of “diversity officials” across the institutions, which seeks to break down the old protections of individual rights, colorblind equality, and private property and replace them with a substitute morality and system of government based on the principles of critical race theory.
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 251 · Location 4894
Their output has been enormous: the academic databases yield 390,000 results for “critical race theory,” including thousands of papers, reviews, articles, studies, books, and conference presentations. The movement’s key figures—Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, Mari Matsuda, and Gloria Ladson-Billings, who founded critical race theory in education—have notched nearly 200,000 citations in a broad range of academic journals. 4 There are now entire departments, majors, and minors in critical race theory at dozens of American universities.
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 252 · Location 4908
The states of California, Oregon, and Washington have all incorporated the principles of critical race theory into the official state curriculum. 8 Children as young as kindergarten are studying the theories of “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “intersectionality,” whether directly or through euphemism. 9 In Detroit, the superintendent of schools said that his district’s “curriculum is deeply using critical race theory” in all of its humanities and social science courses.
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 253 · Location 4929
the euphemism of “diversity” is built on the intellectual foundations of intersectionality, which argues that the individual represents not only a demographic reality, but a political imperative—that person must check the boxes of identity and also advance the “victim perspective” as an ideology.
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 253 · Location 4941
Equity is the other side of the coin. It would replace the regime of individual rights with a regime of group entitlement,
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 254 · Location 4944
The word “inclusion” has the surface meaning of tolerance for a wide range of people and opinions. But, following the epistemology of the oppressed, the true meaning of “inclusion” is the regulation of speech and behavior to protect the subjective well-being of the intersectional coalition.
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 254 · Location 4948
Since the beginning, the critical race theorists argued that the restriction of “racist” and “sexist” speech and behavior was essential to the governance of the university and, by extension, to the governance of society. 15 The bureaucracies internalized this philosophy and used the language of critical race theory—“ microaggressions,” “microinequities,” “unconscious bias,” “hate speech”—to construct policies that replaced the rule of free expression with the rule of limited expression.
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 255 · Location 4967
Over the past decade, the entire range of federal agencies, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has adopted critical race theory as an in-house ideology.
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 262 · Location 5116
How would this proposed system of group-based rights and racialist redistribution be enforced? The answer was clear: through the regulation of “harmful” speech. 49 In a book titled Words That Wound, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw laid out the case for dramatically restricting the First Amendment in order to suppress individuals and institutions that represent the forces that would “advance the structure and ideology of white supremacy.”
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 263 · Location 5133
In order to adjudicate guilt, the critical race theorists argued that the concept of “harmful speech” must be interpreted through the lens of intersectionality, with the victim-perpetrator distinction offering a rubric for culpability. The writers of Words That Wound were explicit in their argument that whites, and whites only, had the capability of committing speech violence.
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 263 · Location 5141
In addition to racial speech, the critical race theorists would also regulate political speech. Under their ideal regime, Marxist speech would be protected by the First Amendment; “racist,” “fascist,” and “harmful” speech would not. 56
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order > Page 264 · Location 5157
Taken together, the three pillars of the 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.
Conclusion: The Counter-Revolution to Come
Page 269 · Location 5221
The critical theories have become the dominant frame in the academy. The long march through the institutions has captured the public and private bureaucracy. The language of left-wing racialism has become the lingua franca of the educated class.
Page 269 · Location 5225
During the rise of the New Left, Marcuse, Davis, and Freire all expressed unalloyed support for the communist revolutionary movements, which were putting their theories into practice. They heaped praise on Lenin, Mao, Che, Castro, and Cabral. But this dream quickly changed into a nightmare. Within a few years of the emergence of the New Left, the cultural revolutions from Beijing to Havana to Bissau devoured themselves. Mao’s government annihilated millions of its own citizens in pursuit of cultural revolution. Castro’s regime degenerated into state tyranny. Cabral’s state fell into a decades-long pit of stagnation, failure, and dependency. Yet the critical theorists were unrepentant.
Page 270 · Location 5237
Although communism has all but vanished from modern life, the theories that justified it have taken power in the heart of capitalism. In the United States, Marcuse’s critical theory has dissolved the national narrative down to the foundations. Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and their imitators have recast the country’s “greatest heroes as the arch-villains.” 3 The followers of Paulo Freire and Derrick Bell have ensured that the institutions repeat these themes ad nauseam and transmit them to the next generation. 4
Page 270 · Location 5253
Beneath the appearance of universal political rule, their cultural revolution has an immense vulnerability: 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. These structures are taken for granted, but with sufficient will they can be reformed, redirected, or abolished through the democratic process. What the public giveth, the public can taketh away.
Page 271 · Location 5257
The most urgent task for the enemies of the critical theories is to expose the nature of the ideology, how it operates within the institutions, and devise a plan for striking back.
Page 271 · Location 5262
The opposition must stand in the breach between the cultural revolution’s utopian abstractions and concrete failures. It must devise a strategy for laying siege to the institutions, severing the link between ideology and bureaucracy, and protecting the common citizen from the imposition of values from above.
Page 273 · Location 5300
There will be a reckoning. 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.
Page 273 · Location 5306
The working class is more anti-revolutionary today than at any time during the upheaval. The common citizens have seen the consequences of elite ideology as public policy.
Page 275 · Location 5337
The ugly secret is that the radical Left cannot replace what it destroys.
Page 275 · Location 5340
Then the vultures swoop in.
Page 275 · Location 5342
The looters get a box of sneakers and a flat-screen television. The intellectuals get permanent sinecures in the universities. The activists get a ransom payment, disguised as a philanthropic contribution, from the corporations and the local government.
Page 278 · Location 5411
seems to have captured the edifice of America’s elite institutions, might not be as strong as it appears. It has created a series of failures, shortcomings, and dead ends—and in this gap of contradiction, a counter-revolution can emerge.
Page 279 · Location 5423
This new counter-revolution will not take the form of the counter-revolutions of the past: it is not a counter-revolution of class against class, but a counter-revolution along a new axis between the citizen and the ideological regime.
Page 281 · Location 5462
The ultimate objective of this campaign must be the restoration of political rule. The deepest conflict in the United States is not along the axis of class, race, or identity, but along the managerial axis that pits elite institutions against the common citizen. The revolution, which seeks to connect ideology to bureaucratic power and to manipulate behavior through the guise of expertise, is ultimately anti-democratic.
Page 281 · Location 5465
The counter-revolution, on the other hand, seeks to channel public sentiment and restore the rule of the legislature, executive, and judiciary over the de facto rule of managers and social engineers.
Page 281 · Location 5468
The anti-democratic structures—the DEI departments and the captured bureaucracies—must be dismantled and turned to dust.
/// the end ///
Ben Slivka 