Fascinating history of the 'woke' thingy

Fascinating history of the 'woke' idology that is currently sweaping the world. Well written, well read and insightful.

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Excellent

A must read for anybody trying to understand how the left took over the institutions.

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Loved it

I don't like giving my political opinion online. But I absolutely loved this book.

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Useful historical context of the "Cultural Revolution" in question

The look at the history of the ideas of the illiberal left and their spread through culture, the academy, and institutions is worth reading. It is a clearly uncharitable look at their ideas, however, some of which do in fact deserve some merit - especially on the side of observations rather than solutions. The proposed "counter revolution" is a hopelessly naive conservative perspective with no real life applicability.

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How Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion came into being

Rufo describes how Frankfurt School's Critical Theory and its offshoot ideologies such as Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance have enabled a Long March Through the Institutions that by 2023 is almost complete. This is what Rufo means by America's Cultural Revolution. Many still have little realisation of this, either believing "it's just political correctness" or denying its existence: "There is no culture war", having been gullibly deceived by MSNBC presenters such as Joy Reid, who gaslights her gullible audience "this is all a figment of the "far right's" imagination".

Rufo has described Herbert Marcuse as the anchor of his book, and Part 1, chapters 1 to 4 are some of the most fascinating. They explore how the Long March Through the Institutions was enabled based on Marcuse's intellectual theories and praxis. A prominent figure in the Frankfurt School, he escaped Germany and eventually ended up in the US as a controversial professor at Ivy League universities, universities which he and his Frankfurt School colleagues eventually ideologically captured.

The Long March is a term coined by Rudi Dutschke but based on an idea by Antonio Gramsci - his "war of position" and "cultural hegemony" - and that a Marxist revolution can best be achieved not by brutal violence and force from the abolition of private property, at least not in the first instance, but by a slow capture of a society's institutions over decades starting with the elite universities, and then moving to ideologically capturing the media, by first infiltrating the liberal intellectual newspapers, such as the New York Times, and moving on to the government institutions, and then the large corporations. The New York Times, which once savagely criticised Marcuse, is no longer liberal and instead now communicates in the language of Marcuse's new left, which I would describe as Identity Marxism.

And this is what has occurred throughout the US. "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" (DEI), which is essentially Critical Race Theory tailored to subvert corporations, has captured every Fortune 100 company, and similarly in the UK. A recent example has been the NatWest Banking Group, its subsidiary Coutts, and the Farage debacle, in which a new woke CEO had been installed at Natwest, obsessed with DEI and Net Zero. She endlessly preached the language and themes of wokism. The whole corporation was transformed by her DEI commissars, and as Identity Marxism worked its way down the organisational hierarchy, it targeted customers that did not comply with its values, compiling long Stasi-like dossiers of their dissent against woke and closing down accounts with little notice. The same had happened in most other banks, thereby cancelling such dissenting clients from banking services and ergo society.

Rufo explains that CRT was developed by Marxists such as Derek Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s, with the two main foundational books published in 1995. CRT was the precursor to "Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion" (DEI). Rufo argues that DEI is essentially CRT tweaked so that it can more easily infiltrate and capture profit maximising capitalist corporations, despite Critical Theory having the goal of subverting capitalism.

In his final chapter, "Conclusion: The Counter Revolution to Come", Rufo argues that the ongoing pernicious US cultural revolution, like most revolutions, is vulnerable to counter revolutions, and this is how it must be defeated. He presents a discussion written in rather abstract terms arguing that most Americans reject this new woke ideology and this is the basis for the fight back. He identifies DEI as the heart of the problem and calls for it to be "dismantled and turned to dust." Rufo calls for "excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over chaos" in a thorough rejection of DEI. It felt as if this last chapter was the one he laboured over the most.

There is scant mention of Antonio Gramsci, which is a little surprising given his influence over the new left despite his early death and that he came up with the idea of the Long March through the Institutions that Marcuse managed to put into operation from his professorial tenures at top universities and poisoning his student disciples with his theories and equipping them with the necessary ideological tools.

There is also scant mention of Barack Obama. As a non-American I would have liked some insights into his role in the Cultural Revolution that was ongoing through his presidency and exploded just three years after his final term with the death of the two-time convicted armed robber, George Floyd.

If you want to understand how the US, the rest of the Anglosphere, and western Europe, got to the point where the woke lunatics are running the asylum, you need to read this. If you want to understand what DEI is and how it has infiltrated every large corporation, look no further, If you want to figure out how schools are indoctrinating your children in so-called Gender Ideology, this is a must read. The system of the woke lunatics is a new form of Marxism that has been growing unseen and out of sight for fifty years. Like a virus it has evolved to infect even conservative parties and within a few years that party is conservative in name only and has adopted Marxian Equality of Outcome for candidate selection. Twelve years later it is funding far left radical groups infested with communists and has abjectly failed to protect the nation's culture, values, heritage, history, traditions.

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1 person found this helpful

Excellent

A brilliant narrative companion piece to Pluckrose and Lindsay’s (more academic though equally brilliant) Cynical Theories but a fabulous book in its own right. Of the two, however, this might be the one I’d urge people to read. Laser-guided.

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