Into this scorcher of a summer comes a scorcher of a book that is at once a blistering manifesto and a blunt surgical diagnosis of the terminal condition ailing this country. I can describe Christopher Rufo’s new insta-bestseller in one word: clarity. There’s been so much written about the “roots of wokeism” and how we ended up here, but America’s Cultural Revolution is a machete through the thickets. After reading his book, I finally get it. I can see the whole smoking battlefield in a glance, piled with the corpses of every once-great meritocratic institution.

At last, I can see clearly exactly how this multi-decade psyop came together—and how it succeeded so wildly.

Allow me to attempt briefly to summarize the path to total victory that wokeism took. It started as the fever dreams of Marxist loonies on the fringe of the academy, whose spectacularly stupid ideas infiltrated the professoriate by masquerading as “theory.” One by one, university classrooms succumbed to the irresistible pull of this One Ring of Power Relations Among Aggrieved Minorities. Once the professors and the students were in its thrall, the bureaucracy caved, too. Then the model was applied to the government, another elite bureaucracy upon which the virus could easily take hold.

[DS–I’ve read and intend to write a review of Rufo’s book, which is an excellent intellectual history of DEI and wokism]