As Christopher Rufo, the director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute, puts it, CRT is “America’s new institutional orthodoxy.”6 Moreover, he notes:
Its supporters deploy a series of euphemisms to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds nonthreatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important.7
Over twenty years ago, in my first two books—The New Thought Police8 and The Death of Right and Wrong9—I wrote of my time as a liberal “community organizer” and the troubling developments I witnessed as radical leftists were eclipsing classical liberals in both political and cultural activism. PC culture was part of this shift, and I, along with other classical liberals in the trenches, recognized that something more disturbing, consequential, and organized was happening. Censorship is always a control mechanism, and the politics of personal destruction soon emerged for those who do not comply or who dare to critique the agenda.
By the 1990s, it became clear that Marxists were also targeting our education system, from school boards to elementary schools to colleges and universities, in an organized effort to propagandize and shape the minds of impressionable students.
Writing about the Marxist origins of political correctness, professor and author Frank Ellis discusses official Soviet sources indicating the term and concept of political correctness were in use as early as 1921.
The suddenness with which political correctness entered the public domain in the period between 1989–1991, and the ensuing arguments about the legitimacy of Western culture which lasted until well into the mid-1990s, implies that the concept of political correctness is a very recent phenomenon . . . but . . . New Left and postmodernist writers were required reading on the campus, we find political correctness established as an ideological criterion of Marxism-Leninism. Official Soviet sources clearly show that the term was in use as early as 1921.10
Moreover, Ellis notes:
A review of a diverse and large body of Soviet and Western literature, written and published throughout the twentieth century, which was conducted in preparation for this article, repeatedly identifies the theme of correctness—ideological, political or theoretical—as a concern of exceptional importance for Marxist-Leninism and Maoism.11
For thousands of years, philosophers, writers, grifters, academics, politicians, and government officials (from kings to presidents and their underlings) contemplated how the lowly peasants and workers should be controlled and governed. In the twenty-first century, it’s clear not much has changed as the use of fear remains a favorite of ruling regimes.
While political philosophers Machiavelli and Hobbes wrote hundreds of years ago that fear must be a tool in a leader’s governing arsenal, for the modern left, and the Marxists in particular, fear itself is the end-game. Fear is the necessary element providing them the key to wealth and social, cultural, and political controversy.
The revolutionary left knows they can’t persuade most Americans to embrace social engineering, not after the infamously deadly and failed socialist and communist experiment of the twentieth century. They have never been able to maintain their grasp of power with the natural will of the people anywhere on Earth once they were exposed for what they are. So rather than overtly proposing their agenda to the American people, they instead use pressure to box Americans into a frightened, acquiescent silence on all things political and cultural so that they can implement their agenda without obstacles.
The Sinister Strategy of Political Correctness
It’s one thing to know that the bureaucratic elite and their triad of corporate, academic, and Big Tech enablers have decided that frightening us into submission is their best plan, but exactly how did they imagine implementing this? All we need to do is look around. Every cultural issue we’re battling relies on one thing to be established, to continue, and to prevail: the citizen being too afraid consciously—and even more importantly, subconsciously—to freely engage in social and political life.
The left is turning speech and, ultimately, thoughts into acts that can result in public shaming and expulsion from our modern tribes. A politically incorrect comment—or, more often, a benign comment purposely misread—can get any of us labeled a terrorist or bigot or hatemonger, or any one of the innumerable “phobes.” We’ve seen many cases where it gets someone fired or even arrested. The goal is to get us to censor ourselves and cower in fear, prompting our social and political retreat. Self-censorship is more powerful and effective than censorship imposed by government.
American intellectual historian L. D. Burnett examines the origin of political correctness at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History blog:
This history—at least as I have been able to piece it together so far—begins not in the 1980s nor even in the 1960s. The use of the term “politically correct” as first an ideal and then an insult, first an aspiration and then an accusation, goes at least as far back as the 1930s. The double-edged connotation of the term was forged and sharpened in internal debates on the Left.12
Now undeniable, the power of speech is becoming increasingly seen as dangerous, and Orwell’s nightmare of 1984 is becoming more of a reality in the twenty-first century. Academic researchers in Atlanta and St. Louis report, “Over the period from the heyday of McCarthyism to the present, the percentage of the American people not feeling free to express their views has tripled. In 2020, more than four in ten people engaged in self-censorship.”13
The reality of this retreat from public discourse is so apparent even for the liberal bastion of the New York Times. Noticing the growing fear surrounding speech and thought, the newspaper commissioned a poll14 to assess what has been wrought by cancel culture. “For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,” noted the newspaper. Their poll found, in part, “only 34 percent of Americans said they believed that all Americans enjoyed freedom of speech completely. . . . 84 percent of adults said it is a ‘very serious’ or ‘somewhat serious’ problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.”15
Moreover, a Cato Institute poll16 documented the same development, with an even more significant majority of Americans confirming that we have a self-censorship problem, noting “nearly two-thirds of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.” As an indicator of for whom the cancel culture bell tolls, “strong liberals,” at 58 percent, are the only political group that feels perfectly safe saying what they believe, while 77 percent of conservatives feel they cannot.
The number of Americans retreating from public discourse and speaking their mind is not entirely surprising, as young people are increasingly authoritarian and vocal on the issue. In a fall 2023 survey that shocked many, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) found17 that a quarter of college students felt using violence to stop someone from speaking on campus was acceptable.18
Political correctness, marketed by the left as humanitarian, has allowed a sinister and corrupt theory to invade every aspect of American society. Political correctness has metastasized into cancel culture and into the diseased CRT, becoming the left’s key to unlocking a door to a new social and political order, threatening the freedom of thought and expression, values at the core of the American way of life.
Many of the problems and divisions we face today are the result of the left having waged a battle for the minds of our children. Young people emerge from indoctrination-center campuses to take leading roles in the media, education (at every grade level), law, business, and politics. We see the alarming results with freshly indoctrinated leftist acolytes from the academies flowing into government, business, law, media, and journalism. It is a course we must confront and reverse.
The Leftist Stairway to Hell
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. inspired Americans with a familiar faith-based metaphor to dismiss fear and encourage trust. “Take the first step in faith,” the civil rights leader said. “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”19
When it comes to earthly matters such as our family’s security, the content of education, law and justice, crime, the economy, national security, the intention and goals of government, and personal freedom, it matters if that staircase leads to an optimistic future embodied by the American way of life or to a Marxist dystopian hellscape.
The dangerous staircase the left has constructed inevitably leads to a chaotic, lawless, and deadly human catastrophe. We are in the early stages of this now. We need to turn back before it becomes impossible to do so.
The purpose of political correctness was marketed by the left as a way to police the speech of the ostensibly powerful to keep them from offending the powerless. Accepting it means accepting that some discrimination must occur in order for equality to come about. The debate then becomes about segregating the American people into collectives based on immutable characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, and then assigning each to be among the powerful or the powerless (or as the oppressed versus the oppressor). Multiculturalism creates group, or collective, rights and entitlements, rejecting the concepts of individual rights and equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
In 2016, Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation explained multiculturalism within its proper context as a deliberate leftist strategy designed to strike at the heart of unity in the United States:
Multiculturalism as a social model is concerned with one culture and one culture only, the West, especially America and its heritage, because it wants to destroy or at least alter it and replace it with something else. The multiculturalism I am concerned with is the blueprint for replacing the American narrative with a counter-narrative that is animated by values of the left such as state control over our lives, dependence on government to apportion participation in society, and thinking of people as groups rather than as individuals and their families.20
Gonzalez continues on to note the importance of this Marxist strategy to infiltrate existing institutions like schools and media, helping to facilitate more rapid revolutions. Essentially, this is the strategy of “capturing the culture” and “delegitimizing” American norms. We are now seeing the success of that strategy every day.
This is the foundation of identity politics, a key part of the goal of annihilating the individual to achieve the new social order of collectivism.
Disrupt, Polarize, Politicize, Dismantle
The preparations by the left leading up to unleashing political correctness are clear. Disrupt the unity uniquely established by the United States as a nation of immigrants based on liberty and individual determination as opposed to a people’s historical, collective geographical origins. They start by balkanizing the citizenry through multiculturalism. The next step is to politicize those divisions with identity politics, inviting the next imperative step—political correctness, the “humanitarian” scheme to use the strain of carefully drawn divisions to introduce the cancer that speech and thought are now dangerous.
Growing up, we were taught in school that America was a great melting pot, where people from around the world came together and forged a common bond and national identity. While no one expected us to relinquish our group attachments and identities, it was vital that we maintain a shared identity as Americans.
That is the key that has made the great American experiment a success. Political and social coherence is of primary importance for our nation to continue to be the beacon it is for people around the world. Identity politics rejects that notion, telling us instead that we are members of separate subgroups. Instead of emphasizing our commonalities, political correctness today emphasizes our differences, and dictates that we be divided rather than united.
As we will discuss in the chapters ahead, political correctness is the first step to every major political, social, and cultural catastrophe unfolding in the twenty-first century. The Marxist stairway’s next steps grow increasingly bold and obvious in the left’s attempt to submerge American society into a Marxist crisis: racial separatism, social credit scores, censorship via Big Tech, open borders, decriminalization, defunding the police, organized urban violence, outlawing political opposition, arresting political opponents, indoctrination centers, politicizing public education, targeting parents who dissent, and weaponizing health emergencies and environmentalism to limit individual freedom while expanding the reach and control of government.
There is absolutely nothing redeeming or valuable in any of these agendas. They are squarely aimed at destroying the fabric of the American Dream, which has made our country the envy of the world and a magnet for immigrants seeking freedom and better lives. It’s as if we are seeing the Statue of Liberty blown to smithereens in New York Harbor, replaced with one of Karl Marx raising his fist in triumph.
It is now obvious why the left is desperate to keep us ignorant about the destination of their staircase into hell. Trickery is the only way to entrap Americans to take that first step of acquiescing to political correctness and submission to Big Government.
For a relatively small movement of radical leftists in America to have such an outsize impact, it’s important to recognize that being in influential positions in key institutions is of paramount importance in the left’s effort to deconstruct objective truth and reality. Unlike Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who openly admit they are socialists, the overwhelming majority of socialists in the US vehemently deny their embrace of Marxism. Like the Big Bad Wolf who pretends to be Little Red Riding Hood’s grandma in the fairy tale, most American socialists disguise themselves and their true intentions to swallow our freedoms.
Marxists do their handwringing, like most academics, in journals and books they expect will not be read by anyone other than their fellow travelers. But they’re wrong. Consider this confession in a 2001 essay called “The (Un)defining of Postmodern Marxism,” lamenting the growing irrelevance of Marxism and what the American left was doing in the last quarter of the twentieth century.21 Noting the initial importance of co-opting other social movements, like feminism and environmentalism, the cure for their failure to persuade Americans about the utopia of Marxism is to co-opt, or invent, even more social movements:
