Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America
By Ted Cruz
(Regnery, 368 pages, $33)
Are you woke? The very word elicits chuckles. As it should.
In fact, I’m actually grateful for the word woke. It’s a silly-sounding word that nicely expresses the silliness — and silly leftists — it’s describing. Wikipedia (which a friend refers to as “Woke-pedia”) has an entry for “woke.” Quite conveniently for the, well, woke, Wikipedia claims the word is “an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.’ Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights.”
The best parts of Cruz’s book, however, come through his autobiographical recounting of the story of his family’s life in Castro’s Cuba.
That definition is convenient for the wokesters. Connecting their word’s roots to something allegedly African American allows them to respond to criticism by screaming at the top of their lungs, “RACIST!!!” They do that very well.
Wikipedia further notes (rightly) that the word has become “shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice…. The term became popular with millennials and members of Generation Z. As its use spread internationally, woke was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.” Perhaps most appropriate, Wikipedia notes, as does Merriam-Webster and Oxford, “By 2020, many on the political right and some in the center in several Western countries began using the term sarcastically as a pejorative for various leftist and progressive movements and ideologies.” (READ MORE from Paul Kengor: Face to Face with the Shroud of Christ)
I don’t know if we can declare the year 2020 as definitive in the annals of wokedom, but there’s no question that “woke” has become a sarcastic pejorative widely used to make fun of goofy left-wingers, and most certainly not by the political right exclusively. The label is now widely employed by anyone looking for a good word to capture the silliness of the sillies it’s describing. It’s no coincidence that a liberal comedian like Bill Maher, who’s very independent-minded, uses the word to tag the goofiest liberals.
All of which brings me to someone decidedly unwoke. He might be the most unwoke member of the U.S. Senate — one Ted Cruz.
Cruz has just published a book titled simply, Unwoke. The book doesn’t do a deep dive into the word’s etymology, though as Cruz works through his life of experiences with wokeness, one gets a clear understanding of what it is. As Justice Potter Stewart said in trying to define pornography, you know it when you see it. When you see a hysterical blue-haired, pierced, tattooed, LGBTQed, 20-something, college-educated white woman hyperventilating at a BLM rally, you know woke.
And Ted Cruz shows woke, often painfully so.
In fact, at one point in Cruz’s book, namely, the section on CRT on K-12 education, I had to skip ahead. Encountering wokeness full throttle is difficult to endure. Cruz details his own fight against CRT in schools and how he’s often met with objections from Democrats who insist such rot isn’t being taught. “These people usually claim that real Critical Race Theory is nothing more than an obscure graduate-level set of ideas that isn’t taught outside of a few university departments,” writes Cruz. “Then, of course, often in the course of the same sentence, these same Democrats will insist that Critical Race Theory is vital, and that it must continue to be taught in elementary schools all over the country.” Precisely. Cruz adds: “Whatever it’s called, the ideas on race being taught in our schools are nonsensical and downright evil.” Precisely again. Cruz gives examples that are difficult to read precisely because they’re so evil.
The book has chapters on education, media, Big Tech, Washington, woke corporations and boardrooms, entertainment, “The Science,” the Left’s “long march through the institutions,” and our toxic universities, which Cruz cleverly calls “The Wuhan Labs of the Woke Virus.” Of that there is no question. This virus germinated at the universities, from where it spread everywhere else — to the media, Big Tech, Washington, corporations, Hollywood. Those discussions by Cruz are valuable. As readers here know, he has taken the lead in the Senate in dealing with Big Tech’s censorious wokeness. Big Tech has become a big woking disaster.
The best parts of Cruz’s book, however, come through his autobiographical recounting of the story of his family’s life in Castro’s Cuba, including his father’s escape and grandmother’s suffering in Fidel’s banana-republic dystopia. The situation became so bad for Cruz’s abuela as a teacher in the totalitarian state that she had to fake madness to avoid arrest and imprisonment. “She feigned insanity,” writes Cruz. “One day in class, she began foaming at the mouth, tearing out her hair, screaming and wailing like a madwoman.” (Actually, a good image of the woke.) They removed her from the classroom and she escaped punishment.
Cruz also talks about his father, Rafael. Those sections struck me because I spent several hours with Rafael Cruz at Grove City College in April 2016. I interviewed him on stage at our Crawford Hall. It was one of the most interesting interviews I’ve ever done. Rafael told us about arriving in America with $100 sewn into his underwear and a slide rule in his suit pocket. He knew no one, nor any English, which he learned largely from watching movies in theaters.
Especially interesting are Ted Cruz’s tales of his undergrad life at Princeton and law school years at Harvard in the 1990s. I was likewise in college in those years. What Cruz and I both experienced from the Left was dubbed “political correctness,” which in retrospect looked increasingly like the seeds of modern wokeness.
In some ways, the PC movement arguably morphed into the woke movement, though what it needed for that evolution was — as Cruz points out — an ugly marriage to the pernicious ideology of critical theory and its hideous bastard son, critical race theory. Critical theory was bequeathed by various leftist maniacs, especially the weirdos of the Frankfurt School. Once the PC monster copulated with the CRT beast sometime around the new millennium, today’s woke Frankenstein arose.
We can denote other parts of this chimera. Cultural Marxism animates it. Speaking of maniacs, if you Google “cultural Marxism” a nasty little box pops up that makes the astonishingly ignorant claim that cultural Marxism is some sort of “antisemitic conspiracy theory.” That claim is so shockingly stupid that I’ve written about it several times (click here and here). As to whoever is responsible for that claim, here’s my response: your profound ignorance of what you attempt to write about doesn’t make us bigots; it makes you a fool. Anyone knowledgeable of this ideological rot knows what cultural Marxism is. Ted Cruz knows it, and he boldly doesn’t flinch from calling the ogre what it is. The full title of Cruz’s book is actually, Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.
(Highly recommended is Ted Cruz’s discussion with Mark Levin on Life, Liberty, and Levin. Also, read Levin’s likewise excellent book, American Marxism, as well as my review of Levin’s book.)
“The Cultural Marxists have been able to spread these ideas largely thanks to an administrative structure (which they control),” notes Cruz, “that typically protects them from the consequences of their censorship, intolerance, and abuse.”
That’s indeed what they are. Despite their claims of tolerance and diversity, they’re abusers and censorers. They’re the bullying architects of cancel culture. This allows them to spread their awful ideas through the larger cultural super-structure they control. (READ MORE: Gutting Jesus: Feminist Cabrini, Secular Saint)
Kudos to Ted Cruz for his brilliance and bravery in the U.S. Senate and in writing this book. This is a must-read for you, your friends, your kids, and especially high school and college students. Get this book and get unwoke.
