Ted Cruz’s new book Unwoke is as incoherent as it is insincere

“Policies will end in futility, if the propagandists can put a painted screen where there should be a window to the world. Without protection against propaganda, without standards of evidence, without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation. The desire to know, the dislike of being deceived and made game of, is a really powerful motive, and it is that motive that can best be enlisted in the cause of freedom.” — Walter Lippman, Liberty and the News, 1920

It’s tempting not to take U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s new book, Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America, seriously.

Neither reading Cruz’s litany of sensationalized, cherry-picked clickbait culled from the anti-woke outrage machine, nor the review which follows, is liable to make for a more informed, or less rancorous, discussion around the Thanksgiving dinner table. But Texans do take Cruz seriously enough to keep re-electing him to Washington, and countless millions across the country seem eager to disseminate his neo-McCarthyite hypothesis that “Cultural Marxism” — whatever that’s supposed to mean — is a dominant force in American politics and life.

But does even your crazy uncle, at his most tipsy, truly believe that “in the eyes of your average climate change activist, human beings are a disease that has been inflicted upon the planet?” That’s what Cruz claims, without survey data. Do any nutty relatives of yours wager that “if we do not retake journalism from the neo Marxists who have captured it, American capitalism cannot survive much longer?”

Do your kooky friends on barstools think that “even in the face of legislation that makes Critical Race Theory illegal, and an all-out assault on the worst books and ideas by parents, Marxist ideas still dominate American education?”

Or when President Joe Biden remarked at an event honoring national and state Teachers of the Year, “You’ve heard me say it many times about our children, but it’s true: They’re all our children. And the reason you’re the Teachers of the Year is because you recognize that. They’re not somebody else’s children; they’re like yours when they’re in the classroom,” did your crazy uncle decipher, as Cruz did, that what the president really meant was “children are effectively property of the state?”

“Rather than raising a generation of kids who have fun, play outside, and care about one another, they hope to raise a revolutionary class of young Marxists eager to tear down the United States and everything it stands for,” Cruz writes. Does that sound remotely plausible to someone you know?

Can anyone, in short, sincerely contend that “K-12 education and the universities, Big Tech, Big Business, science and entertainment have all been overtaken by the Cultural Marxists” with the Chinese Communist Party pulling the strings behind the scenes as the “central nexus?”

That’s some John Birch Society-pedigree horseshit. And after voluntarily exposing myself to nearly 300 pages of it, I’m still unclear whether our theocratic Senator from Texas even buys what he’s selling. Are the conspiratorial references to George Soros and Jeffrey Epstein, Loudon County and the Wuhan Institute of Virology sprinkled throughout the text to grab the attention of the fringe of the Republican Party? Or has the fringe gnawed through the ropes tethering themselves to reality and lifted Cruz off into cloud Cuckoo Land along with them? And what could a transgender influencer like Dylan Mulvaney, gleefully posing with a flavorless beer, have to do with Marxist scholarship?

Despite all the fancy book-learning, Harvard Law graduate Rafael Edward Cruz is still prone to mental lapses that give the grift away.

When describing a conversation with an anonymous CEO who spoke out against voter suppression laws in Texas, Cruz recalls himself saying, “Bob, every time the Democrats come after your company, proposing new taxes or regulations that would hammer your profitability, you’re immediately on the phone to me and others asking for help, and yet you’re more than willing to baselessly condemn the Republican governor, lieutenant governor, and the state legislature all as bigots. What the hell is wrong with you?”

And there it is, in plain Washington-ese. That’s the GOP’s unspoken contract with Corporate America. “Let us dilute the electoral power of minority voters — whether by chipping away at ballot access or locking them up and busing them to prisons in rural communities to pad the census-allotted number of representatives; that will appease our base of overwhelmingly white voters who fear their impending loss of social status in a soon-to-be minority-majority country. In return, you’ll get deregulation and tax breaks with which to line your already-overflowing pockets.”

This spells out the sweetheart deal Christian nationalists struck with neoliberals since at least Saint Reagan.

One is almost tempted to doubt that Cruz is as dumb as he sounds. For example, the senator criticizes Major League Baseball for moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in protest of a similar voter suppression law in Georgia, noting “nearly 50% of the people in Atlanta are Black compared to 9% in Denver. Thus, MLB denied
African-American small businesses in Atlanta tens of millions of dollars in revenue, moving those profits over instead to one of the whitest cities in America.”

So, Republicans are capable of adopting an “equity lens” when it suits them. Then why can’t Cruz consider that seemingly neutral requirements written into election laws might disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color? Surely a ballot is more sacred than a hot dog sale.

Throughout his disingenuous screed Cruz likes to play race cards but then asks incredulously why the county is so obsessed with race.

“Why, in the year 2023, with the long shadow of overt racism receding further into the past every day, do we constantly hear stories about ‘racial tension’ in the media?” he asks.

Because y’all keep stoking those tensions for your political advantage and refusing to right the wrongs of the past once and for all.

“After a good 20-plus years of talking day in and day out to white people about racism, I feel very confident to say that nothing seems to turn white people’s cranks of resentment like thinking Black people got something over on us that they didn’t deserve,” much-maligned diversity educator Robin DiAngelo explained.

From aid to Black farmers to the boogeyman of CRT to the portrayal of the George Floyd protests as little more than riots, white grievance politics is the wedge issue that keeps on giving to the GOP and their exorbitantly rich donors.

“If originally whiteness was race, now it is racelessness, with white privilege being conceptually erased,” late Northwestern University professor Charles W. Mills, who is also dismissively cited in Cruz’s book, wrote back in 2007. “Indeed, the real racists are the Blacks who continue to insist on the importance of race. In both cases white normativity underpins white privilege, in the first case by justifying differential treatment by race and in the second case by justifying formally equal treatment by race that — in its denial of the cumulative effects of past differential treatment — is tantamount to continuing it.”

All Cruz’s flashy rhetorical pyrotechnics — from calling renowned journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates a “race-baiting charlatan” to referring to the New York Times’ bestselling kids book Antiracist Baby, as “neo-racist propaganda for children” — serves as a gigantic distraction from the simple truth: Cruz is a plutocrat.

“Conservative business leaders should buy newspapers in major cities across America, along with major networks like ABC or NBC,” the senator advocates upon revealing the “How To” part promised in his book’s subtitle. “Buying these institutions could dramatically — and instantaneously — transform the media landscape, as we saw in 2022 when Elon Musk invested $44 billion and purchased Twitter.”

And what a success that’s been — advertisers jettisoning the platform in droves as the civil discourse devolves into a morass of spam bots and racist bile.

“For any conservatives with resources: BUY a damn movie studio, BUY a network. BUY CNN or Paramount Pictures or Universal or Warner Bros or MGM or somebody. BUY a country music label. BUY a streaming service,” Cruz urges his right-wing brethren.

Yet when the Senator hauls purportedly left-leaning staffers from prominent social media companies to his committee to testify, he claims to worry about “the full panoply of disastrous consequences that might come from allowing one group of like-minded people to control and curate all the information in the world.”

So which is it, Citizen Cruz? Should right-wing billionaires expropriate the entire media and entertainment landscape, or are you genuinely concerned about one group of like-minded people controlling the information we receive?

Cruz feigns democratic consternation that three enormous investment firms — BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard — currently hold a combined $20 trillion in assets. But his real qualm is that Big Business pretends to be environmentally conscious instead of unabashedly wrecking the planet for future generations. Cruz has zero issue with wealthy elites provided they back his party’s commitment to
obliviousness.

And the double-standards don’t end there. Cruz loathes when conservatives are tagged as fascists, but he loves to call everyone he disagrees with Marxist totalitarians. Here again, however, he accidentally lets the cat out of the bag. Towards the end of the book, he describes China as “a country that is run by actual Marxists” (italics-emphasis his). You mean “actual Marxists” as opposed to everyone you falsely and conveniently accuse of being Marxists? QED.

Cruz’s retelling of the history of 20th century economics is similarly low-resolution and brainlessly partisan.

“A handful of right-wing academics would tell the story of economics as a struggle of the free market against government constraints and central planning, claiming that a free market combined with only occasional intervention from the government was the way to run an effective society,” he explains. “This philosophy, which became known as ‘neoliberalism,’ was popular at schools such as the University of Chicago, which trained some of the most prominent free-market thinkers in the world. On the other side, there were Marxist economists who would teach students that the opposite was true. In the seminar rooms of Berkeley and Harvard, students learned the story of economics as a continual battle between the haves and have-nots. The goal of economics was to help the proletariat — also known as the ‘workers of the world’, the Left’s first class of permanent victims — to seize the means of production by armed revolution.”

Uh, there’s one tiny problem with this account: where the fuck did John Maynard Keynes go? Keynesian economics was the standard-bearing macroeconomic model after the Great Depression until the mid-1970s and beyond. To this day, most economists are neither acolytes of Milton Friedman nor Karl Marx, and reforms movements short of violent revolution have contributed massively to quality of life, even in capitalist regimes. Cruz basically vanished the bulk of the economics profession in an clumsy effort to mislead his readers into believing that anyone who does not worship the sanctity of minimally-regulated markets must be a Bolshevik.

Yet the admiring neoliberal is also proud to violate the tenets of market liberty when the outcome doesn’t go his way.

“I almost always stay out of fights in the Texas legislature. But Texas Senate Bill 13 — to prohibit state pension funds or endowments from investing in firms that boycott oil and gas — was one of the very few exceptions to that rule,” he writes.

So, if a business refuses to submit to the reign of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” apparently that’s the appropriate time for the long arm of state bureaucracy to intervene.

For Cruz, being conservative means never having to say you’re sorry. You can accuse any minority of being a diversity hire while claiming victim status when others say the same about you. But why isn’t red-baiting also a form of “political correctness?”

“I’ve cheered on several efforts to ban CRT at the state and local levels, including in
Florida and my home state of Texas,” Cruz admits.

Why isn’t outlawing an academic field of research the worst kind of “cancel culture” — outright state censorship?

“According to the laws of woke,” Cruz proclaims, “whoever is most offended, or can claim the greatest oppression, gains the most status; the incentive, therefore, is to take offense at everything and never give anyone the benefit of the doubt.”

But isn’t Ted Cruz’s skin even thinner than the bluest of blue-haired baristas? If a straight couple kisses in an animated feature intended for kids, that’s traditional family values; if a lesbian couple does likewise, Cruz will throw a hissy fit over what he calls “relentless propagandizing.”

When Cruz’s daughter detailed the crimes against humanity of one Christopher Columbus, his first reaction was to ask if she might be able to think of anything good about Columbus, according to his recounting.

“Do we typically create federal holidays for racists and genocidal maniacs?” he queried.

Yet Cruz feels compelled to inform us that, according to Che Guevara’s cousin, the Cuban leader “enjoyed torturing small animals as a child.” However, in the senator’s view, the fact that many of the armed revolutionaries who founded our country enjoyed torturing other human beings — as adults, mind you — does not count as a similarly weighty strike against them.

Karl Marx, we learn from Cruz, was “a slob.” Still, to my knowledge, he never chopped off the hands of any Native Americans for failing to bring him a sufficient quota of gold.

Marx was one of the three great classical economists, alongside David Ricardo and Adam Smith. Marx’s two greatest historical works, The Civil War in France and “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” are near-universally praised across the political spectrum. He also was a labor organizer of some consequence and served as European correspondent for the most widely circulated periodical of the time, the New York DailyTribune.

“It is worth nothing that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely,” another American awarded a federal holiday once said when commemorating the 100th birthday of a communist named W.E.B. Du Bois. “Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.”

That man who offered that quote was Martin Luther King Jr.

Of course, none of this makes it into Cruz’s book, only that Che was a “monster” and Marx a “racist,” while Columbus was “a man of his era.”

After lambasting moralistic oversensitivity, Cruz goes on to compare re-education camps in North Korea to a public business owner being forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding and to pop-psychologist Jordan Peterson’s clinician society requesting he enroll in an internet savviness course after a dozen complaints of conduct unbecoming a professional therapist. To Cruz, those are legitimate examples of totalitarianism coming home to roost.

But when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project drew a parallel between metrics designed to squeeze the most productivity out of plantation slaves and the surveillance of modern warehouses run by Amazon, Cruz lost his turkey stuffing.

“The implication is that the people who work in Amazon factories today — who, in fact, make decent wages and live in nice apartments in major cities such as New York City and Seattle — are somehow comparable to the slaves who were denied all human rights and were forced to suffer horrific abuses in the 18th and 19th centuries,” Cruz claims. “The comparison is absurd. And it is also unadulterated Marxism.”

Know who else made the “absurd comparison”  between wage servitude and enslavement proper? A former slave named Frederick Douglass, whom Cruz quotes favorably elsewhere.

“Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other,” Douglass stated. “The individual who has it in their power to say to another, you must work for me for such wages as I choose to give, has a power of slavery over them as real, if not as complete, as those who compel toil under the lash.”

Must we now cancel the most persuasive abolitionist orator in U.S. history for the crime of “unadulterated Marxism”?

Cruz has forfeited any claim to either conservatism or populism. He’s sinned against the Christian injunction for humankind to act as responsible stewards of nature’s bounty and only a lost cynic who abandoned the dream of American democracy entirely would suggest the path to salvation lay in handing the keys to all earthly power to the next enlightened billionaire.

Cruz may feign a workingman’s ethos for the cameras by frightening churchgoers with tales of transgender Satanists, but any small-r republican attempt to substantively empower ordinary citizens to accomplish big things he will oppose in advance as woke Marxist utopianism, or whatever other buzzwords are trending that month.

The Cruz of the 1930s would never have enacted Social Security for senior citizens, and indeed he’s done what he could to privatize the entitlement. Cruz of the 1960s would never have signed the Civil Rights Act into law, and he’d likely have agreed with his philosophical romance Ayn Rand in calling it “the worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history.” And Cruz of the 21st century will
continue to load up on guns and inhale car exhaust as a point of grisly pride until we the people send him packing back to the acceleratingly warming waters of Cancún.

And if we find ourselves embroiled in a world war with China sometime this century, we’ll have saber-rattlers like Cruz to thank. Just like a competitive debater crafting an argument, all he knows is that he can. He doesn’t bother to stop and question whether he should.

When you’re dealing with woke, Cruz says, the truth is whatever it needs to be at that very moment. By that criteria, Ted Cruz is damn near the wokest man in America.

Don’t let you or your loved ones get made game of.

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