I'm glad someone with a sizeable and growing contemporary audience is relating the story of woke origins and the way neo-Marxists have been operating in plain sight for nearly sixty years. Mr. Rufo's high profile work at the New College has widened his reach, I think. Between him, James Lindsay at New Discourses, and Jordan Peterson, more people than ever are becoming aware of the lies motivating the conflicts of the last few chaotic years: race riots and the demonization of police; advancement of the trans agenda, its violation of children, and the chaos of identity that denies the body; demonization of white people under the camouflage of an allegedly abstract concept called whiteness," slandering historical figures and interpreting American history as a series of evil schemes to keep black people enslaved and subservient . . . and so forth.
The colossal blunder of assuming universities are "ivory towers" with zero impact on the wider culture and on our institutions is now glaringly apparent. Where did this dismissive notion come from in the first place? I'd say much of it comes from the deliberate creation of an intellectual mystique used to deflect critics of critical theory that goes something like, "Your criticisms can be dismissed out of hand because you're too dim to understand our arguments" (see the reaction of academics to criticisms of critical race theory for a recent example). This arrogance makes the parody "studies"of Lindsay, Boghossian and Pluckrose such a satisfying and persuasive demonstration of neo-Marxist identity conflict taken to its absurd extreme.
I look forward to reading Rufo's book in its entirety.
Whenever I need a little dark comedy, I think of the Pluckrose et. al. hoaxes: "Comedy Gold" which went to the heart of the matter.
An earlier version was James Frey fooling "Oprah" about his novel - hilarious! The criticism of him was that he was a "liar" - pure moralism; what he did was publicly hoax an enormously pompous/arrogant rich/famous lady. In so doing, Frey created a little "performance art" - a little drama in the form of a comedy of manners. After that "performance," I didn't care whether his novel was good or bad!
What was controversial was it was as dishonest as the shit Steven Glass did because he said it was autobiographical. He could have just left it as a fictional story. He pissed off people who really struggled with his subject matter. Just as dishonest as what Brian Williams did.
Of course he was a liar - all hoaxers are liars. I can't compare it to Brian Williams except as being hiliarious - Frey intentionally and Williams as an unwillingly exposed figure-of-fun. Unlike Williams' earnest stunt for establishment money and clout, Frey's works either as unexposed fake-Brian-Williams or exposed as Punk! Frey was not earnest - he was parodic, and expressed contempt for the fat rich lady and her whole fake-cultural project. What's not to love?
Glass, Rolling Stone, etc. - how can we take any of it seriously? The whole culture is a butt of its own joke. People crying over a novel parading around in undeserved-bio drag is very Nathaniel West - and I really cannot not laugh at the thought.
While I'm all for sticking it to the man Frey's movie version looks ehh never saw where he made a pardon intentionally about addiction. Glass wrote for The New Republic which at the time was on Air Force One. At that time one expected it from Rolling Stone albeit around that time RS would have good articles along with pieces about music which I can't say I've been interested in opening a RS in a decade. Please don't say Brian Williams did that unwillingly. You know better.
Jessica - no, I don't mean that Brian Williams is innocent in any way - not at all! He was exposed contrary to his wishes - to his great embarrassment. He was guilty-as-hell and got busted - he got his pants pulled down in public. He became a figure-of-fun - deservedly!
Agreed. What Glass did is abhorrent due to it being on Air Force One. BDubb totes got his pants pulled down with some mpe( think BDE with micro p inserted) 🤣. Imo Frey has no credibility bc he should have never acted like he went through that kind of darkness when he didn't.
At my university in the early '70s, if you fancied yourself as hip you were 'a Maoist'. Most student 'Maoists' probably had little idea (or even interest) in what this meant. It was just groupthink; fashion following to increase your peer-group standing.
I think it is mistaken to conceive of our wokefied Western culture as mostly the product of some hard-left conspiracy. That's a cop out really because the truth is way worse than that. Most people (and especially 'highly educated' people} are intellectual sheep. They want to be liked; they want to fit in; they want to have the cache of 'having opinions' (without bothering much with the hard work needed to educate those opinions). That's how the lefty academia sheep-dip has operated for decades now and the really stupid thing is that conservatives didn't really notice until quite recently so naively obsessed were they about the illusory power of the pluralist ballot box. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Since I am 73 , was schooled at a large liberal university and was radical at the time, I can promise you that the information that Chris Rufo is sharing is truth. I had a role in training up students to infiltrate the educational system. The slow walk was the plan. When we couldn't offer our workshops through the university we ran them through a non profit organization who had offices on campus. I finally cut the cord with the radicals when the Marists tried to convince us that Pol Pot was a great leader. Thankfully I did my research and saw through that one. Thanks so much Chris for taking the time to share this information.
One can argue that three of the seminal moments in this march were the 1968 NYC teachers strike in which African American radicals and progressives attempted to break the back of a strongly Jewish teachers' union ,the attempt to build scatter site housing projects in middle class neighborhoods that had refused to leave the City of New York., and the battle for open admissions in CUNY which ruined one of the greatest public universities in the US and turned it into a remdial diploma bill governed by social promotions .
A personal story but one that I think speaks to our times and how well the WU strategy worked. On my first visit home as a college student in the 70's at a major university, I got into a big argument with my parents after extolling the virtues of Marxism. My dad went fairly ballistic over the thought that his daughter had transformed into a communist (I hadn't but that is how he read it). Decades later -- i.e., now -- my parents are throughly imbued and on board with the woke narrative. Yes, they are very old but still cognizant and of this world. How odd it is to me to see my parents now spout an ideology that they railed against many years ago and call me right wing because I don't agree with them.
Except that our contemporary radicals are collectivist nihilists. In order to justify attacks on individuals, in order to reject individual rights, they attack on behalf of an amorphous collective who they conveniently claim to represent and defend.
Thank you! This triangulation manipulation is something we can call them on. Every time this comes up I ask the wokester if they know anybody in the phantom victim category they defend. Often there is a prolonged silence, then they manage to come up with, "Of course, I have a few such friends." I then ask them if they have talked to these friends about what their positions are on the issue in question. The wokester then says, in every case so far, "Why would I EVER ask my friends how I feel about this issue when it is so traumatizing for them to even have to hear about?"
I then point out that if the wokester has never asked anyone in the victim group for their perspective on an issue, and has never asked for permission to speak for that entire group, the wokester is disrespectful towards the victim group and is overstepping her rights in presuming to speak for someone else without their permission. I try to laugh at them at this point, and comment on how they had better learn to speak for themselves because they don't know what they are talking about with regard to anyone else.
I was a teen in 1970s Madison Wisconsin, and I realize now that the radical professors I heard about were part of this. My dad working for Lincoln Life insurance and they branched out into tax deferred annuities. I heard about the hypocrisy of these professors, doing their pension investments through my father! They all want their 401Ks.
The economy of this summary astonishing - and it includes the links to theory as needed.
For myself, I was not aware of the factual history/details of Marcuse's late career - I have treated his consorting with activists as the embarrassing finale to a once philosophic career of trying to apprehend truth - which it is. But this is not what Marcuse would have said...
Explicitly identifying the connection to Maoism is of the greatest value - that element has remained. Mao via Gramsci?
One can also see the connection to the organizing eras of the other ideological movements - Bolshevism, Fascism and the National Socialist movement.
Chris, the same thing happened in India, where the leftists were given a free hand to run amok through all the institutions since independence but especially after the 1960s. They used that power to try to balkanize India from the inside and hollow out the culture, in collaboration with violent left wing extremist groups, domestic radical Islamists, and Pakistani military intelligence agencies. Indian nationalists have clawed back since 1980s to relevance and are politically ascendant, even dominant, now but the rot among the bureaucrats is still deep. I hope you consider interviewing author Arun Shourieto discuss the parallels one day. Thanks for the history lesson in this piece. As scary as it is to see how deep the rot runs in American institutions, I think there is a way back to normalcy.
If all of these public opinion-shaping institutions, such as the media, academia, corporations, and so on, have been taken over by the left (which they certainly have), the question becomes: How does one actually deal with them? Is the solution to build counter-institutions to Harvard and The New York Times? Perhaps it's using federal and state power to reduce their influence (i.e., seizing university endowments). Or maybe it's even using federal and state power to tear down these institutions (tanks at Harvard Yard, so to speak).
The successful boycott of Budweiser in response to their pimping for trans activism suggests this method might work against other woke corporations. Same with the poor box-office and negative popular reviews of woke films.
It's slow in starting, but signs of a pendulum shift are gathering, I think.
I'm glad someone with a sizeable and growing contemporary audience is relating the story of woke origins and the way neo-Marxists have been operating in plain sight for nearly sixty years. Mr. Rufo's high profile work at the New College has widened his reach, I think. Between him, James Lindsay at New Discourses, and Jordan Peterson, more people than ever are becoming aware of the lies motivating the conflicts of the last few chaotic years: race riots and the demonization of police; advancement of the trans agenda, its violation of children, and the chaos of identity that denies the body; demonization of white people under the camouflage of an allegedly abstract concept called whiteness," slandering historical figures and interpreting American history as a series of evil schemes to keep black people enslaved and subservient . . . and so forth.
The colossal blunder of assuming universities are "ivory towers" with zero impact on the wider culture and on our institutions is now glaringly apparent. Where did this dismissive notion come from in the first place? I'd say much of it comes from the deliberate creation of an intellectual mystique used to deflect critics of critical theory that goes something like, "Your criticisms can be dismissed out of hand because you're too dim to understand our arguments" (see the reaction of academics to criticisms of critical race theory for a recent example). This arrogance makes the parody "studies"of Lindsay, Boghossian and Pluckrose such a satisfying and persuasive demonstration of neo-Marxist identity conflict taken to its absurd extreme.
I look forward to reading Rufo's book in its entirety.
Whenever I need a little dark comedy, I think of the Pluckrose et. al. hoaxes: "Comedy Gold" which went to the heart of the matter.
An earlier version was James Frey fooling "Oprah" about his novel - hilarious! The criticism of him was that he was a "liar" - pure moralism; what he did was publicly hoax an enormously pompous/arrogant rich/famous lady. In so doing, Frey created a little "performance art" - a little drama in the form of a comedy of manners. After that "performance," I didn't care whether his novel was good or bad!
What was controversial was it was as dishonest as the shit Steven Glass did because he said it was autobiographical. He could have just left it as a fictional story. He pissed off people who really struggled with his subject matter. Just as dishonest as what Brian Williams did.
I just can't Jessica...no I can't.
Of course he was a liar - all hoaxers are liars. I can't compare it to Brian Williams except as being hiliarious - Frey intentionally and Williams as an unwillingly exposed figure-of-fun. Unlike Williams' earnest stunt for establishment money and clout, Frey's works either as unexposed fake-Brian-Williams or exposed as Punk! Frey was not earnest - he was parodic, and expressed contempt for the fat rich lady and her whole fake-cultural project. What's not to love?
Glass, Rolling Stone, etc. - how can we take any of it seriously? The whole culture is a butt of its own joke. People crying over a novel parading around in undeserved-bio drag is very Nathaniel West - and I really cannot not laugh at the thought.
While I'm all for sticking it to the man Frey's movie version looks ehh never saw where he made a pardon intentionally about addiction. Glass wrote for The New Republic which at the time was on Air Force One. At that time one expected it from Rolling Stone albeit around that time RS would have good articles along with pieces about music which I can't say I've been interested in opening a RS in a decade. Please don't say Brian Williams did that unwillingly. You know better.
Jessica - no, I don't mean that Brian Williams is innocent in any way - not at all! He was exposed contrary to his wishes - to his great embarrassment. He was guilty-as-hell and got busted - he got his pants pulled down in public. He became a figure-of-fun - deservedly!
Agreed. What Glass did is abhorrent due to it being on Air Force One. BDubb totes got his pants pulled down with some mpe( think BDE with micro p inserted) 🤣. Imo Frey has no credibility bc he should have never acted like he went through that kind of darkness when he didn't.
At my university in the early '70s, if you fancied yourself as hip you were 'a Maoist'. Most student 'Maoists' probably had little idea (or even interest) in what this meant. It was just groupthink; fashion following to increase your peer-group standing.
I think it is mistaken to conceive of our wokefied Western culture as mostly the product of some hard-left conspiracy. That's a cop out really because the truth is way worse than that. Most people (and especially 'highly educated' people} are intellectual sheep. They want to be liked; they want to fit in; they want to have the cache of 'having opinions' (without bothering much with the hard work needed to educate those opinions). That's how the lefty academia sheep-dip has operated for decades now and the really stupid thing is that conservatives didn't really notice until quite recently so naively obsessed were they about the illusory power of the pluralist ballot box. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Bingo!
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
Since I am 73 , was schooled at a large liberal university and was radical at the time, I can promise you that the information that Chris Rufo is sharing is truth. I had a role in training up students to infiltrate the educational system. The slow walk was the plan. When we couldn't offer our workshops through the university we ran them through a non profit organization who had offices on campus. I finally cut the cord with the radicals when the Marists tried to convince us that Pol Pot was a great leader. Thankfully I did my research and saw through that one. Thanks so much Chris for taking the time to share this information.
the question I have for you is what made you do that in the first place?
next is what made you see through their BS and did anyone else you knew also see through it like you did?
One can argue that three of the seminal moments in this march were the 1968 NYC teachers strike in which African American radicals and progressives attempted to break the back of a strongly Jewish teachers' union ,the attempt to build scatter site housing projects in middle class neighborhoods that had refused to leave the City of New York., and the battle for open admissions in CUNY which ruined one of the greatest public universities in the US and turned it into a remdial diploma bill governed by social promotions .
They are also assuming positions in NGO’s which funnel funding to specific “causes” and ideological political movements.
A personal story but one that I think speaks to our times and how well the WU strategy worked. On my first visit home as a college student in the 70's at a major university, I got into a big argument with my parents after extolling the virtues of Marxism. My dad went fairly ballistic over the thought that his daughter had transformed into a communist (I hadn't but that is how he read it). Decades later -- i.e., now -- my parents are throughly imbued and on board with the woke narrative. Yes, they are very old but still cognizant and of this world. How odd it is to me to see my parents now spout an ideology that they railed against many years ago and call me right wing because I don't agree with them.
The underlying premise is that the radical left exploits minorities to gain power for themselves, and it’s all done in service of revolution.
Ironically, these radicals are exploitative bigots who abuse minorities to gain power for themselves.
Personally, I think they’re motivated by hatred.
You raise the spectre of Dostoevsky's nihilist revolutionaries - perhaps the darkest theme in Western Civilization. Perhaps...
Except that our contemporary radicals are collectivist nihilists. In order to justify attacks on individuals, in order to reject individual rights, they attack on behalf of an amorphous collective who they conveniently claim to represent and defend.
Thank you! This triangulation manipulation is something we can call them on. Every time this comes up I ask the wokester if they know anybody in the phantom victim category they defend. Often there is a prolonged silence, then they manage to come up with, "Of course, I have a few such friends." I then ask them if they have talked to these friends about what their positions are on the issue in question. The wokester then says, in every case so far, "Why would I EVER ask my friends how I feel about this issue when it is so traumatizing for them to even have to hear about?"
I then point out that if the wokester has never asked anyone in the victim group for their perspective on an issue, and has never asked for permission to speak for that entire group, the wokester is disrespectful towards the victim group and is overstepping her rights in presuming to speak for someone else without their permission. I try to laugh at them at this point, and comment on how they had better learn to speak for themselves because they don't know what they are talking about with regard to anyone else.
Ideology always reduces human persons to categories.
hatred and nietzschean ressentiment
Congratulations on your new book, Mr. Rufo! I am looking forward to reading it!
I was a teen in 1970s Madison Wisconsin, and I realize now that the radical professors I heard about were part of this. My dad working for Lincoln Life insurance and they branched out into tax deferred annuities. I heard about the hypocrisy of these professors, doing their pension investments through my father! They all want their 401Ks.
This looks pretty interesting. I'll probably pick up that book eventually. Sounds like it would go well with James Lindsay's, Race Marxism.
The economy of this summary astonishing - and it includes the links to theory as needed.
For myself, I was not aware of the factual history/details of Marcuse's late career - I have treated his consorting with activists as the embarrassing finale to a once philosophic career of trying to apprehend truth - which it is. But this is not what Marcuse would have said...
Explicitly identifying the connection to Maoism is of the greatest value - that element has remained. Mao via Gramsci?
One can also see the connection to the organizing eras of the other ideological movements - Bolshevism, Fascism and the National Socialist movement.
Chris, the same thing happened in India, where the leftists were given a free hand to run amok through all the institutions since independence but especially after the 1960s. They used that power to try to balkanize India from the inside and hollow out the culture, in collaboration with violent left wing extremist groups, domestic radical Islamists, and Pakistani military intelligence agencies. Indian nationalists have clawed back since 1980s to relevance and are politically ascendant, even dominant, now but the rot among the bureaucrats is still deep. I hope you consider interviewing author Arun Shourieto discuss the parallels one day. Thanks for the history lesson in this piece. As scary as it is to see how deep the rot runs in American institutions, I think there is a way back to normalcy.
Great read. I'm very interested to read more of this book. Thank you for all your hard work bringing these ideas to light and fighting against them!
If all of these public opinion-shaping institutions, such as the media, academia, corporations, and so on, have been taken over by the left (which they certainly have), the question becomes: How does one actually deal with them? Is the solution to build counter-institutions to Harvard and The New York Times? Perhaps it's using federal and state power to reduce their influence (i.e., seizing university endowments). Or maybe it's even using federal and state power to tear down these institutions (tanks at Harvard Yard, so to speak).
Mr. Rufo's efforts at Florida's New College illustrate one point of attack. It seems like a logical place to begin. Have you read this?--https://rufo.substack.com/p/recapturing-higher-education.
The successful boycott of Budweiser in response to their pimping for trans activism suggests this method might work against other woke corporations. Same with the poor box-office and negative popular reviews of woke films.
It's slow in starting, but signs of a pendulum shift are gathering, I think.
Capitalists definitely respond when their shareholders seriously complain!
The invention of ESG scores suggests that capitalists have listened to the wrong complaints. They're getting whiplash from the backlash.
The capitalists were better off before they started pretending that they care about things that don’t concern them.
Also, using the internet to route around the old media institutions.
This appears to be a must read on the long march of the left through American institutions
Do you have a preference for donations to effective anti-woke organizations? Manhattan Institute?
Brownstone?