How did every aspect of American society lurch so far to the left seemingly overnight, and what can Americans do to restore sanity in an age dominated by cultural Marxism?

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, addresses those important questions in his powerful new book “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America,” published by Regnery.

The book, available in bookstores Tuesday, already has hit the No. 1 slot on Amazon for books on politics.

“How did we get so extreme and so radical? This book explains why,” Cruz told The Daily Signal in a Monday night interview. “Each chapter of the book focuses on a different organ of transmission of ideas that the Marxists seized: universities, K-12 education, journalism, big business, Big Tech, entertainment, and then science.”

“It lays out a battle plan for how to take these institutions back—where we’ve been successful—and lays out principles for how we can retake universities and journalism,” the senator noted.

Cruz’s book ends with a dire warning about China, which Cruz describes as “a central nexus intertwined with it all.”

The Texas Republican’s strategy centers on understanding Marxism in order to combat it. His book opens with the story of his father, a Cuban revolutionary who was imprisoned for following Fidel Castro before Castro took power in Cuba.

Cruz’s father fled Cuba for the U.S. and sang Castro’s praises in Texas—until he returned to Cuba and witnessed the devastation Castro’s government had caused. Then, he returned to Texas and begged forgiveness for misleading his audiences.

His son now describes universities as the Wuhan lab of the “woke” virus—incubating the virus and spreading it “to every institution in America.”

“Marxism, as originally laid out by Karl Marx, is an economic and political worldview that considers the world at fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between oppressors and victims,” Cruz told The Daily Signal when asked to define the ideology. “Marx drew that distinction in socioeconomic terms with the oppressors defined as the owners of capital and the oppressed as the workers, the proletariat. It aimed for the violent revolution of the proletariat, overthrowing the private system and using government to forcibly reallocate capital.”

“Those plain-vanilla Marxists began taking over universities as professors and administrators,” the senator explained. “From there, Marxism expanded to the world of culture.”

Cruz described cultural Marxism’s spread from Harvard, which he described as “ground zero” for where the ideology “transmogrified into other areas using the same oppressor-victim mentality.”

On race, cultural Marxism became critical race theory and “the argument that America is irredeemably racist.”

“They likewise shifted the Marxist prism to look at gender and at sexual orientation and gender identity,” he added.

Throughout the book, Cruz declares that Marxism has failed wherever it has been tried, but he notes that Marxists aim to indoctrinate the young before they can learn about the ideology’s tattered history.

“Fortunately, Marxism survives only in darkness,” Cruz writes in the book. “The more of us who stand up, who shine the light, who speak the truth, the more readily we’ll take our country back. The Berlin Wall fell, and so will the Woke Wall of Idiocy. America remains, I believe, a center-right country. Our people continue to have a deep reservoir of common sense. That’s why the cultural Marxists operate quietly, because they know their ideas are not widely shared.”

Cruz told The Daily Signal that “sunshine and transparency” are a key part of his strategy to combat cultural Marxism.

“The ideas of the radical Left are widely unpopular, which is why they have to resort to force and compulsion,” he said. “Reasonable people don’t think abolishing the police is a good idea. Reasonable people do not think that open borders is a good idea. Reasonable people do not think that 8-year-old children should be sterilized. Reasonable people do not have difficulty telling the difference between a woman and a man.”

Yet the senator went beyond urging Americans to unmask Marxism.

“The strategy is sunshine and transparency, but also empowering the people to press back,” Cruz noted.

He recounted how students at Stanford University School of Law harassed a federal judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan. After the incident, the Texas senator wrote to the administration at Stanford, and the administrator who allowed the harassment was fired. Cruz also wrote to the State Bar of Texas, and the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court responded by pledging to ensure that any student who participated in the harassment of a federal judge would face difficulty in qualifying for the bar.

Cruz recalled a “gender-fluid” youth’s sexual assault of a girl in a girls’ restroom at a high school in Loudoun County, Virginia, and the firestorm that erupted after the Loudoun County School Board covered up the scandal and had the girl’s father arrested for trying to speak up at a board meeting.

He noted that a parental rights movement sprung up across the country, leading parents to take back school boards and culminating in Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial election.

“Moms knew what was going on, were pissed off, and rose up against it,” Cruz noted.

The Texas Republican also cited the consumer boycotts against Bud Light and Target after they embraced transgender ideology.

“The woke marketing executives at Bud Light viewed customers with contempt,” the senator said. “I’ve never seen a brand light itself on fire as Bud Light did.”

Before those boycotts, “the cost-benefit analysis was skewed,” Cruz noted. “It made sense for the CEO to give in to the woke mob—the harms of saying no were frightening and the incentives were to give in to the angry radicals.”

“Now the cost side of the ledger of giving in has gotten far higher,” he said.

Cruz urged Americans to follow strategies such as the one passed by the Texas Legislature last year. “If a business boycotts oil and gas, which is a massive industry in Texas and provides for millions of jobs, then Texas will boycott you,” he explained.

Conservatives ought to “change the cost-benefit analysis so that big business stays the hell out of politics,” the senator said. “They should keep selling their damn widgets and leave politics to the people and their elected representatives.”

Finally, Cruz urged more conservatives to purchase the leading engines of culture.

“I encourage conservatives or libertarians with resources to go and acquire organs of transmission of ideas,” he said. “The Left understands the power of ideas and they invest. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post because he wanted to own the commanding heights of the arena of ideas in America.”

Conservatives don’t need to purchase every engine of culture, but “you just need a beachhead,” Cruz said.

“I describe Elon Musk’s buying Twitter as the single most important development for free speech in decades,” he explained.

The senator’s book also encourages a “clear vision and a detailed, systematic strategy” to defeat Communist China.

“Our approach should be modeled after [President Ronald] Reagan’s strategy that won the Cold War and defeated the Soviet Union,” he writes. “It should start by shining a light of truth on the communists. Reagan astonished the intellectual elites when he referred to the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire.’”

“We need to do the same with China,” Cruz urges in his book. “Speak with clarity. Call out their evil. Their murder, torture, thievery, concentration camps, oppression.”

Cruz’s book also reveals the dire threat that cultural Marxism poses across America’s institutions and in the malignant force of the Chinese Communist Party, and lays out a path for responding to these insidious threats. Readers may find “Unwoke” on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, and in bookstores across America.

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