I have seen the hideous face of revolution.
My first encounter was in Seattle, Washington, where I began my career as a political journalist. When I started reporting on the city’s homelessness crisis, Seattle’s left-wing activists 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.
Their objective was simple: silence, marginalize, and suppress—all, somehow, in the name of tolerance and an open society. At the time, I thought of myself as a moderate. But that experience opened my eyes to the real nature of left-wing politics. It radicalized me.
A few years later, when my reporting shifted to critical race theory, I discovered the same dynamic at a national scale: American institutions were playing the same cynical game, marshalling the forces of guilt, shame, and scapegoating in order to enforce a left-wing political orthodoxy. Government agencies were teaching that “all white people” are racist. Public schools were separating children into “oppressor” and “oppressed.” Fortune 100 corporations were pushing the idea that the United States was a “white supremacy system.”
Just as it had been in Seattle, most Americans—liberal, moderate, and conservative—could see the falsehood and danger in these ideas, but they were too afraid to speak out. They were not “oppressors” or “white supremacists”; they were normal people raising their families and trying to do right by their neighbors. And they needed a voice.
During this period, as I was doing my reporting, I also discovered a way to fight back. In the summer of 2020, I went on the television program Tucker Carlson Tonight, laid out my reporting on critical race theory in the federal government, and directly asked President Donald Trump to take action. “The president and the White House, it’s within their authority and power to immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government,” I said. “I call on the president to immediately issue this executive order and stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology at its root.”
I made the ask at precisely the right moment. At 7 a.m. the following day, I received a telephone call from the president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who told me the president had watched the segment and instructed him to take immediate action. Three weeks later, the president issued an executive order abolishing critical race theory in the federal government, nationalizing the issue, and sending American politics into a period of contentious and consequential debate.
I have been at the center of that debate since the beginning. As a journalist, I broke the stories exposing critical race theory in America’s institutions and, as an activist, I led the successful campaign to ban critical race theory from the public school systems in twenty-two states. I was lionized in the conservative press, which hailed my work as writer and policy leader. Even my enemies were forced to acknowledge my influence, with the New York Times calling me the “architect of the right-wing crusade against critical race theory” and Vox calling me “the most important intellectual entrepreneur on the political right today.”
This book is an effort to understand the ideology that drives the politics of the modern Left, from the streets of Seattle to the highest levels of American government. Over the past two years, as I fought against left-wing ideologies in the political arena, I was also studying my adversaries through deeper research. I read hundreds of books, papers, studies, and newspaper articles that revealed the historical development of the modern Left and its ideological foundations. Over time, I began to see the bigger picture: the campaign to embed critical race theory in American life was only one facet of the radical Left’s “long march through the institutions,” which had begun fifty years ago.
America’s Cultural Revolution tells the full story. I outline the progression of the left-wing ideology from the student radical movement of the 1960s to the so-called anti-racism movement, which set fire to the country in 2020. As an activist, I often have to communicate in small bursts of simplified rhetoric. As an author, I’m able to be expansive, tracing the patterns of history, exploring the intricacies of ideology, and plumbing the depths of the personalities that have shaped the way we think, feel, and act.
The lesson of this book is a serious one. There is a rot spreading through American life. The country’s foundations are starting to shake loose. A new nihilism is beginning to surround the common citizen in all of the institutions that matter: his government, his workplace, his church, his children’s school, even his home. He knows we have been given a gift—the American Republic—but there is no guarantee that it will last. He can feel it in his bones.
My hope in writing this book is to substantiate these intuitions and to reveal the inner history of America’s cultural revolution. It is a genealogy of darkness: an attempt to establish the human lineage of the new nihilism that threatens to overwhelm the country. But it is also a work of determined optimism: if we are to save this country from disintegration, we must first see the crisis clearly and confidently. We cannot look away.