Missive #244

“For decades, left-wing radicals patiently built a revolution in the shadows. Then suddenly, after the death of George Floyd, their ideas exploded into American life.

Corporations denounced the United States as a “system of white supremacy.” Universities pushed racially segregated programs that forced students to address their racial and sexual “privilege.” And schools injected critical race theory in the classroom, dividing children into “oppressor” and “oppressed.”

If you want to read about how the United States became Woke this is a good book. I have grown up with this history so it was just a mind refresher but for younger people it will seem like ancient history. A suggested read.In this stunning new book, Christopher F. Rufo exposes the inner history of the left-wing intellectuals and militants who slowly and methodically captured America’s institutions, with the goal of subverting them from within. With profiles of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell, Rufo shows how activists have profoundly influenced American culture with an insidious mix of Marxism and racialist ideology. They’ve replaced “equality” with “equity,” subverted individual rights in favor of group identity, and convinced millions of Americans that racism is endemic in all of society. Their ultimate goal? To replace the constitution with a race-based redistribution regime, administered by “diversity and inclusion” commissars within the bureaucracy.

America’s Cultural Revolution is the definitive account of the radical Left’s long march through the institutions. Through deep historical research, Rufo shows how the ideas first formulated in the pamphlets of the Weather Underground, Black Panther Party, and Black Liberation Army have been sanitized and adopted as the official ideology of America’s prestige institutions, from the Ivy League universities to the boardrooms of Wal-Mart, Disney, and Bank of America. But his book is not just an exposé. It is a meticulously-researched and passionate refutation of the arguments of CRT—and a roadmap for the counter-revolution to come.” — Book promo @ goodreads.com

Some quotes from the book.

The long march through the institutions has wrought a strange kind of revolution. The images of the old revolts—soot-covered laborers burning down prisons and sacking ministry buildings—do not apply. The critical theory revolution, by contrast, was almost invisible. The long march through the institutions was so gradual, so bureaucratic, it went nearly unnoticed. But today, after it has come to a conclusion, the dynamics of this new ideological order have become clear. It is revolution from above, rather than from below. It is revolution in the abstract, rather than the concrete. It is a revolution of information, rather than production—and it is a revolution no less significant than the great revolutions of the past.

This revolution has now run its course. Marcuse established the ideology with his critical theory of society. His disciples developed the model for elite capture in the universities. And the next generation of leftwing activists expanded it everywhere. 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. This regime is decentralized and diffused. It functions through the maintenance of myths, beliefs, and incentives, rather than central leadership or direction.

Marcuse’s “dictatorship of the intellectuals” and “dictatorship of politicians, managers, and generals” have now converged. His critical theory has become the normative ideology of the universities and his “counter-institutions” have become, at least as a matter of public affirmation, the dominant institutions across every domain. This represents a change in regime—a cultural revolution. The victory of the critical theories has displaced the original ends, or telos, of America’s institutions. The university no longer exists to discover knowledge, but rather to awaken “critical consciousness.” The corporation no longer exists to maximize profit, but to manage “diversity and inclusion.” The state no longer exists to secure natural rights, but to achieve “social justice.”

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. They synthesized, reduced, and euphemized the intellectual work of Derrick Bell and his disciples for mass adoption in school curricula, government bureaucracies, and diversity training programs. 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.” 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. They first developed these techniques in the confines of the university, then moved laterally through weak points in the bureaucracies of other institutions, most notably the federal diversity apparatus, corporate human resources departments, and the sprawling administration of the public schools. They created a circular, selfreinforcing 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.

This quote is from a good article about the US’s bully policies in Africa not working out very well.

Langley, however, did not meet with the same success in Africa on Saturday when he and an entourage of Beltway bureaucrats stormed into Niger—without even bothering to inform the local authorities—to negotiate US presence at an obscure fort in the Sahara Desert which the Nigerien Government intends to close. The President of Niger snubbed the Junta’s henchmen, sending them home empty-handed. Today, their official spokesman announced that all previous military agreements between Niger and the United States were cancelled. Apparently, Nigerien politicians have a little more self-respect than their American counterparts and don’t simply jump when ordered.
“The government of Niger therefore strongly denounces the condescending attitude combined with the threat of reprisals by the head of the American delegation against the government and the people of Niger,”  Col. Amadou Abdramane said, in an official statement yesterday. — Arrogant US Deep State Humiliated Again by The Night Wind