Book Review: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, by Chris Rufo

Review by Dr. Rob Williams

‘I have seen the hideous face of revolution,” observes journalist Christopher Rufo, and “it radicalized me.”

So begins America’s Cultural Revolution, a historical account of the rise of the “radical left” researched by a self-described “political moderate” who found himself and his family targeted by Seattle’s “left wing activists” who (as Rufo explains) “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.”

Rufo’s “crime” in the Emerald City?

Reporting on Seattle’s homelessness crisis.

“Their objective was simple,” Rufo writes of being targeted by Seattle’s extreme leftists: “silence, marginalize, and suppress – all, somehow, in the name of tolerance and an open society.”

Rufo’s eyes opened, he turned his attention to what he dubs “Marxist radicals” and their role in national politics, highlighting the excesses of “critical race theory” on the September 1, 2020 episode of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight (TCT), where he called on the federal government’s Executive Branch to “take action.” “The president and White House, it’s within their authority and power to immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government,” Rufo advised. “I call on the president to immediately issue this executive order and stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology at its root.”

Rufo’s September 2020 TCT appearance propelled him into the national spotlight, and catalyzed the writing of America’s Cultural Revolution. An “instant New York Times” bestseller , Rufo’s book deftly traces the historical origins of the radical left, focusing on four figures – Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell – who shepherded evolving extreme leftist ideology from Sixties street fights to ascendency in the hallowed halls of 21^st century US higher education circles, corporate boardrooms, national news publications, and indeed, the US federal government itself. The White House is now funding so-called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) initiatives with untold millions of taxpayer dollars, while the Pentagon requested more than $100 million for 2024 DEI programming.

So exactly how did the radical left, as Rufo notes, “conquer everything?” Rufo divides his book’s analysis into four sections. Part I (Revolution) chronicles “Father of the Revolution” Herbert Marcuse’s influential role on the “New Left” during 1960s foment, detailing how their “Burn and Loot and Destroy” message morphed into a Mao-inspired strategy of “The Long March Through The Institutions” during subsequent decades. Part II (Race) spotlights radical black feminist/activist Angela Davis, “The Spirit of Racial Revolt,” who helped transform 1960s’ Black Revolutionaries’ “Kill The Pigs” message of “Black Liberation” into late 20^th century “Black Studies” programs and the early 21^st century “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement. Part III (Education) explores how Pedagogy Of The Oppressed author and “Master of Subversion” Paulo Freire influenced the “conquering” of US public school classrooms and the ideological indoctrination of impressionable young American school children – “the engineering of humans souls” – in Blue State bastions such as Portland, Seattle, and New York. Part IV (Power) chronicles the influence of “Prophet of Racial Pessimism” Derrick Bell, a Harvard University law professor whose 1970s founding of “critical race theory” in scholarly legal circles fueled the rise of “DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order” by the early 21^st century.

Curiously, while many US mainstream news outlets dismiss Rufo’s work (The New Yorker claims Rufo is a “conservative activist” who “invented the conflict over critical race theory,” while the New York Times and the New Republic accuse Rufo of “fueling” a “Republican frenzy” over CRT, prominent US public intellectuals of color have emerged as the radical Left’s most vocal critics. Among them are Thomas Chatterton Williams; Coleman Hughes; Glenn Loury; Chloe Valdery; John Wood; and John McWorter, all of whom joined evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein for a historic July 2020 “US black intellectuals” round table discussion in the wake of the spring 2020 George Floyd tragedy.

“I think this is a moment of extraordinary opportunity and extraordinary danger,” observed John Wood, co-founder of Braver Angels and the former Vice Chair of the Los Angeles Country Republican Party. “Right now there is this zealous pursuit of an ideological victory in favor of a certain version of social justice which is calling for the vast condemnation of a white supremacist state – it gives the impression that America is irredeemable because its Whiteness imbues it with a certain guilt that can only be removed by a sort of mass atonement and capitulation to a series of demands.”

“What we’re seeing right now is [the rise of] a certain radical strain of anti-racism that has been present for decades,” observes John McWorter, Columbia University Professor of Linguistics and author of a 2021 book entitled Woke Racism: How A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. This anti-racism strain, McWorter notes, is “intellectually mediocre but extremely frightening to other people because one of its main tenets is that to not agree with it makes you a ‘racist’ – we’re in a society now where to be called a ‘racist’ is the equivalent of being called a ‘pedophile.’”

Subtitle hyperbole (“conquered everything”?) aside, Rufo’s book is a vital read for any thinking US citizen interested in how extremist revolutionary ideologies historically take root and propagate within American culture, and how all US citizens of good will can engage in a “counter revolution” to “re-secure the rights of the common citizen, allowing him to live as an equal, raise a family, participate in the Republic, and pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful.”

Based in Vermont’s Mad River Valley, Dr. Rob Williams is a professor, musician, author, breath coach, retired grass-fed yak farmer, and founding publisher of now “deplatformed” news journal Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence. Reach him via contact@doctorrobwilliams.com.