Ten years ago, claiming the United States was experiencing a cultural revolution would have met eyerolls and jeers. Now, it’s even obvious to normies. Perhaps no journalist has covered the rising iceberg tips of this phenomenon better than Christopher F. Rufo, a City Journal contributing editor and documentary filmmaker.
In America’s Cultural Revolution, out in July, Rufo connects the seemingly sudden wave of leftist extremism in the United States with its antecedents in Marxist philosophy and practice. He shows that today’s mass, often-silent censorship of public discourse combined with riots and antipathy toward police and prisons are not random accidents, but part of a cohesive political program concocted decades ago by successful communist true believers.
This is an important thing to demonstrate because comforting slogans have lulled many Americans, including many on the political right, into willful blindness to the mass infiltration of our own institutions by communist ideology and adherents. These include: “Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here,” “the Cold War is over,” and “Communism’s main threat to the United States is from potential military action from Red China.”
Many politicians, especially on the right, bluster about protecting the United States from Red China, both militarily and economically. Most of those same politicians are entirely silent about communist infiltration into U.S. institutions as everyday and deeply influential as public schools and workplaces.
There’s no way, for example, the majority of current Senate Republicans would support defunding Marxist outposts far
