The Great Reset. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Critical Race Theory. ‘Wokeness.‘ These are terms that have entered our everyday parlance, and concepts that increasingly influence almost everything around us, from education to culture and from business to politics. But where do they originate and how are they being used—or weaponized—to change the very fabric of society today and in the future?
Dr. Michael Rectenwald, having experienced ‘wokeness’ first-hand in academia, has since become a prominent voice on the Right and in libertarian circles, warning against the “long march through the institutions” that has resulted in what he describes as a “new McCarthyism”—only this time with the roles reversed. He is the author of several books, including Springtime for Snowflakes, The Google Archipelago, Beyond Woke, and Thought Criminal.
In a wide-ranging interview with The European Conservative, Rectenwald addresses this “long march through the institutions” and its various manifestations throughout society, looking at the extent to which the Right and conservatives abdicated institutions such as academia to ever more radicalized and ‘woke’ factions of the Left, the consequences of which have followed the normalization of these ideologies throughout society. He discusses what conservatives, libertarians, those on the Right, and free thinkers in general can do to stand up to an ever-encroaching ideological totalitarianism that is attempting to complete its “long march” and cement its position in society via the Great Reset.
Let’s start by discussing your metamorphosis, so to speak. You were on the Left. You were once what we could call a classical academic. You even, I believe, worked as an assistant for Allen Ginsberg back in your early twenties. Describe what led you to make this shift to the Right, to conservatism.
Once I was roundly attacked by all factions of the Left when I made a rather mild criticism of social justice, excesses and so forth, it just became very clear to me that what I was dealing with was totalitarianism, that these people were attempting to shut down my speech completely, demonize me, turn me into a pariah, and effectively destroy my academic life and career. I recognized that I’d been on this ‘side’ with this group of people who were totalitarian at base and that these people were against liberty, against freedom, against individual autonomy, against individual rights, against, basically, even intellectual independence.
And so, I thought, I can’t have anything further to do with them. I must renounce them all—and I renounced them all at once. Then I went on a journey of rediscovery and I came to read a lot of history regarding the Left’s leftist criminality, political tyranny and, just overall evil, really, through various sources: the Stalinist Digital Archive, the Black Book of Communism, and other sources. I started to do a deep dive into the economics of socialism, started reading about the Austrian School of Economics and especially Ludwig von Mises and his demolition of socialism in his book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. I realized that all the premises that I took for granted were actually flimsy at best, if not utterly false.
I started to realize that contrary to what leftists think, they’re not the beleaguered ‘underdogs’ that they take themselves to be. As a matter of fact, socialism and leftism in general have been pushed by a particular elite throughout history, and this elite has certain objectives that have to do with the total control and monopolization of the economy and the state, basically monopolization of people’s lives. I recognized that all this rhetoric coming from what I thought to be egalitarian, radical, grassroots movements was actually foisted on people from above, and that this indoctrination going on in the universities really wasn’t simply some radicals in the academy; it was perpetrated, allowed, and encouraged by this elite.
There’s a lot to unpack there. But one of the things that you’ve written about quite often in the past couple of years is this “long march through the institutions.” What is it? What does this mean? And how did the elite accomplish this “long march?”
The “long march through the institutions” is not Antonio Gramsci’s language, but it’s based on Gramsci’s idea of achieving cultural hegemony or dominance before a socialist revolution could take place. It was about taking over the ideological apparatuses, including education first and foremost but all the other institutions as well. He thought of it as an infiltration campaign, to infiltrate all these institutions and overthrow the dominant, or supposedly dominant, capitalist ideology in these places and spaces.
I’ve since recognized and done some research that suggests that this “long march” was never initiated by academics. It was actually initiated by this elite, who were positioned in very high places within the state, in the United States, in tax-exempt foundations, in major institutions—including banking and even in corporate America, and they had been foisting this ideology of collectivism. Their object was to make the United States like the Soviet Union. They were much more comfortable with collectivism than they were with the individualism of the United States. They didn’t like individualism because they can’t control people when people are acting autonomously.
So that’s the “long march.” Really, I‘d call it a “stampede from within the institutions,” not a “long march” into them. The grand irony is that these [are] well-positioned people, funding socialist ideology and research from these tax-exempt foundations such as the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other foundations [which] were founded and funded by capitalists, but then used to socialist ends. It’s a very curious twist in history.
Of course, you spent quite a while in academia. If we look at academia today in particular, it could be described as a ‘woke’ stronghold, so to speak, and you experienced this first-hand. What’s happening in academia and what are the consequences of this for the graduates that academia is churning out year after year?
Well, the “long march” has been thoroughly successful. Academia is no longer a neutral institution for the open inquiry into truth or knowledge or even wisdom, but rather it is a pack of activist camps who are effectively not trying to know the world but change it. They’re basically following the Marxist axiom: to date, philosophers have only attempted to understand the world, but the real mission—I’m paraphrasing, of course—is to change it. This is Karl Marx. These institutions no longer strive to reach truth, especially in the social sciences and humanities, which are completely overtaken by activists and so-called ‘educators’ who are really indoctrinating people into a cartoon version of history. They’re indoctrinating them into short-circuiting their thinking such that certain things are passed off as ‘givens‘ without examination. They’re now no longer to be examined: they have to be accepted as matters of faith. Now you have, basically, a short-circuited ideological loop running in academia; you can’t really enter it and try to examine any of the premises because you’ll be shocked, electrocuted by this electric loop that’s running within the universities.
One of the doctrines that’s permeating not just academia but also the corporate world is CRT, critical race theory, and along with that, its counterpart, DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion]. Tell us about these ideologies, if you will, and how they’ve made their way, not just into academia, but also into the corporate world.
Let’s start with critical race theory, because that then can lead to talking about DEI, or as I call it, “DIE.” Critical race theory came out of something called critical legal studies, which was birthed roughly in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Basically, it was a legal theory that suggested that facts, empirical facts, are not sufficient for understanding the predicament of racist ideology in the institutions and that the whole legal system, according to this theory, is shot through with racism from its very foundations. Even the Constitution of the United States is ‘racist’—it was written by ‘racist’ people and therefore it must be racist.
So, they basically talk about something called ‘institutional racism,’ which is really what they define as ‘racism’ when you can’t find any racists. It is this all-pervading ‘something,‘ but which can’t be located in individuals necessarily, and so it must be in the structures of society, in the system as such. So, they believe that this ineffable, ineluctable, but also basically indeterminable ‘racism’ is just pervasive in the structures of the society. These structures act in this way without people actually committing any particular acts of racism, verbally or otherwise. They’re chasing a “ghost in the machine,” as I put it, because there is no way to identify who is perpetrating this, and so it’s extremely anti-empirical. It is basically relying on so-called ‘stories’ about how people feel, and these are deemed epistemologically unassailable because they’re my truth and any other counter to that truth is deemed ‘white supremacist’ in itself. So, statistics are not allowed; investigations into the causes of the plight of African Americans are not allowed; any investigation into, say, the Great Society and how it produced or ripped apart the black family is not allowed. It all has to do with this one assumption, which you must accept prima facie—that is, there’s institutional or structural or systemic racism, and no matter what people do or say, it exists, and it acts on its own behalf and apparently without the volition of individual human beings.
So that’s the premise for CRT, and all the studies going on in there are just a ludicrous assemblage of nonsense. Academically speaking, it is a sham. I’ve called it academic fraud and malfeasance because it’s doing great damage to the institutions of higher education. This is also because these universities are effectively ideological state apparatuses—that is, they are generating the ideology that’s permeating the rest of society and polluting it with this crap which I deem to be indefensible intellectually—because if you look at it at all, you see how absurdly flimsy it is. They just make circular tautological statements about ‘racism’ and ‘whiteness’ and so forth. But ‘whiteness’ is what ‘whiteness’ does. I mean, there’s no way to even define it. They say ‘whiteness’ operates even in the absence of white people. I mean, this is nonsense. I don’t at all disavow the idea that racism exists, but it’s really individual, and it is not systemic in the sense they’re saying, unless, for example, you argue that the United States has an Anglo basis. Therefore the practices in the world, in the United States, everything that goes on, you could say has an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo basis and therefore everything else is deemed lesser. They [the ‘woke’] would point to society’s activist ethos or the idea that it’s about efficiency or production or timeliness or whatever, and everything now is ‘white supremacist,’ like being on time or excellence of any kind. It’s all deemed ‘white supremacist’ because the culture has certain values. But these are survival skills that have been passed along, so to call them ‘racist’ is really ludicrous, because it’s just people doing what they do to survive. Do without them if you wish. But to try to destroy the culture that holds them is, in effect, a racist assault. I mean, it’s impossible to say that everything is racist because the society was largely dominated by white people. It‘s simply their society, so it necessarily has a certain ethos.
So that’s what I think DEI, or “DIE,” is really for. Partly it’s just the institution’s guilt trip to try to insert as many minorities into the system as possible to deflect any criticism from itself on the basis of race and gender and gender proclivity and sexual orientation. Really, diversity, equity, and inclusion, to me, signifies conformity, inequity, and exclusion, because you have to conform to this particular ideology first. You have to buy into this idea that the system is structurally and systematically racist. This is where it borrows from CRT. Then you have to believe that in order to alter this, you must undertake a total overhaul, inclusive of not only affirmative action, but also deconstructing the very structures of society. And so, that’s what’s going on. Then, DEI is really a deadly campaign because it totally reduces everything to race and phenotype, really, without consideration and to the exclusion of ideas that don’t match this ideology. It’s a very exclusionary ideology in the sense that it forbids perspectives that don’t accord with it. So, it’s a phrase that’s quite ironic. It’s very Orwellian in my mind, because everything it says is quite the opposite of it: “Freedom is slavery,” etc., etc. and the Orwell 1984 dictionary that we‘re now living under.
If we listen to voices on the Left, we‘re told that corporations supposedly only care about profits, and yet we see that they’re so enthusiastically in favor of DEI and CRT and a whole range of ‘woke’ ideologies and movements. Why are they so fanatically in favor of them?
Well, first of all, they were simply attempting to assert some legitimacy by virtue of absorbing this ideology and suggesting that they were progressive and, likewise, basically trying to immunize themselves against criticism. But it has since become a demarcation device and a monopoly and cartel scheme, to basically exclude all outliers and to effectively prop up the corporation against all others. What they figured out is, we could use this whole ideology to our benefit, especially in terms of monopolizing our various sectors and creating a cartel. That would basically drive competitors out of the field. I call it “the woke cartel.”
So ‘wokeness’ in the corporate world is like a demarcation device or a shibboleth that these corporations use to gain an entrance into the world cartel, and to then bully all the others and exclude them from it. This is going on institutionally now through the stock market and the banking industry, and it will become legislated, more legislated as time goes on through the institution of the Environmental, Social and Governance [ESG] index on the stock market. So I think what started out as a guilt trip has now turned into a Monopoly game: if I get enough spaces on the board, or if I turn all the spaces ‘woke,’ then the non-’woke’ will pay when they land on those spaces, effectively.
All of these things also appear to relate to the Great Reset, which we’ve been hearing a lot about for the past two years. How do they relate to The Great Reset, which you’ve also described as “capitalism for the rich and socialism for the poor”?
I’ve called it “capitalism for the rich and socialism for the poor.” I’ve called it “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” I’ve called it “corporate socialism.” I’ve called it “economic fascism.” I’ve called it “neo-feudalism.” It’s all of those. The Great Reset is really this idea of monopoly and cartelization on a grand global scale. It is a means of destroying industries and businesses that are not aligned with the ‘woke’ agenda. It is about creating a corporate socialist state; that is, favored corporations on top along with the state, and, for everybody else, a kind of actually existing socialism on the ground. It’s about monopolizing all the resources, controlling them.
We can see this happening in the Netherlands, where farmers are going to be driven off their farms because they can’t keep their cattle or they can’t use nitrates for fertilizer. They’re going to create conditions such that these people will go out of business. Then the cartel members will swoop in and buy their farms and they‘ll do with them probably no better than the farmers that are there, in terms of so-called environmental issues. It’s just a shibboleth. It’s just a scheme to gain greater consolidation of capital, believe it or not, on the top, using socialist rhetoric and environmentalism to do it. Everything is twisted. So, to those socialists out there, I would say you should unite with others like myself, libertarians against the Great Reset, because it is a vast wealth consolidation scheme. And the elite are using socialism, and you, to bring it about.
If we look further into the Great Reset, where does it intersect with all these other sorts of things that we’ve seen gaining prominence or just being a part of our lives over the last few years: COVID, so-called ‘green’ policies, the metaverse, the Internet of Things. How does all of this fit into this idea that is called the Great Reset?
It all fits in very well. Let’s take the metaverse. I’ve just written about this: I’m working on a book on the Great Reset, and I’m dealing with the Fourth Industrial Revolution as one of the parts of the book. The metaverse is one of the elements in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The way I see the metaverse is as a virtual space that people will be basically consigned or relegated to, and in which they can explore the world: so-called travel, own things, have partners, basically everything that is being deprived of them in the actual world, in the real world—or the “meat world,” as it would be put by, say, Gibson—is being availed to them in the metaverse. So, this is an alternate universe compensation, compensating for what’s being taken away in the “meat world.” So everything that you know: “you own nothing and be happy” in the “meat world,” but in the metaverse, you could have your own house, you could have cars, you could have spouses, you could have all kinds of property, and you can move about freely—provided they don’t chase you around the metaverse with vaccines. But they could use the metaverse to kind of reinforce the dictates that are being perpetrated in the meat world. That’s one thing.
The Internet of Bodies and the Internet of Things: basically, the Internet of Bodies is a way to surveil upon human beings using wearables, but also invasive technologies, so that there is basically a complete surveillance system on people’s activities: not only their movements, but also their brain states and their organ states and pretty much everything about them. So, the Internet of Bodies is a massive surveillance scheme. It is a means by which they’re going to track, trace, and surveil every person on the planet, if possible, using wearables, but also ingestible and other technologies, like nanotechnology, to connect the brain to the cloud so that there will be two-way transmission between the brain and the cloud. That means they’ll not only be able to download things into you, but, also, you’ll be uploading things to the cloud, including your thoughts. This is all possible. In fact, they’re theorizing it and actually developing all this as we speak. This is not science fiction.
The Internet of Things is just being able to track every item that exists, but also to have data, to file items, the datafication of everything. They call it ‘smartification.’ It’s dumbification if you adopt it, because this has to do with not only all the items that you purchase having a data tag on them, but many of them that you’ll be wearing will have RFID tags, and all of this can be tracked and traced. It’s the complete datafication of the entire resource pool of the world. And that should make people wonder: why would they want such data? Well, they want total control.
This will be connected to things like the ‘digital identity,’ which is a database that will follow every person and include all of their acts—both online and if there can be thought of as an offline world. But an offline world won’t really exist anymore once the Internet of Bodies is rolled out: you’ll basically be in the Internet. There won’t be any going on it anymore. You’ll simply be an entity within the Internet, and likewise, the ‘digital identity’ will be a collection of all your behaviors. ‘Offline’ really will not apply anymore: there won’t be any offline behavior anymore. And so, it follows you. It can be used to track, trace, and to surveil, but also exclude people based on their proclivities.
Then there’s the central bank digital currency [CBDC], which will provide total surveillance of overall spending, debt, and savings, in centralized databases controlled by the central banks. And that will mean all transactions will be transparent to the central banks, and that means they can foreclose the possibilities of certain buying. This will help to monopolize the economy to the approved vendors that they basically admit into this approved cartel. See how all this fits together?
So, all of these are totalitarian technologies, and they will be used to that end, and they’re going to sell them as ‘enhancements’ or in terms of ‘inclusion.‘ Any time you hear the word ‘inclusion,’ you must realize you’re dealing with totalitarianism, because ‘inclusion’ means you can’t get out. Inclusion means there’s no other. There’s no ‘outside’ of this universe that they’re constructing.
You’re describing this new totalitarianism, basically a monopolistic system instead of a competitive capitalistic system. And yet, over the last couple of years—I’ll use COVID as an example—there was a contingent of individuals on the Right, some people who, regarding businesses that are enforcing mandates for instance, were saying “Oh, they’re private businesses, they can do whatever they want.” And they’ve extended this argument even to social media platforms that have been canceling conservative and libertarian voices in particular. Again, the argument that we hear is, “They’re private businesses, they can do whatever they want.” Do you find this to be a self-defeating argument on the part of those voices on the Right?
It’s not only self-defeating, it’s false, because, for example, in terms of social media and even other businesses, they’re effectively state apparatuses. They’re not strictly private enterprises. They are being enrolled into the state to extend and enhance and augment state power. You can see this recent article that came out about the fact that at Google, for example, there’s an enormous amount of ex-CIA agents working there. And if you go further into it, as I’ve tracked it, CIA money funded Google from the outset. They were funded by the CIA’s so-called private investment firm, In-Q-Tel. From the start, they were basically curated and brought into being by the intelligence community, the military intelligence community, and they’ve been serving that community ever since. These are not private enterprises. They are state apparatuses, or I call them, “governmentalities.” I borrowed that term from Foucault, but I altered the meaning to include corporations and companies and other adjuncts of the state who are otherwise called ‘private,’ but really are operating as state apparatuses, in that they’re enforcing state narratives and dictates.
In exchange for doing that, they get this favored business status that I’m referring to. They get to control information, like Google. And this gets rid of competing ideas and ideologies. This downgrades them or blacklists them and throws them off the internet, in effect, because Google controls some 80% or 85% of all searches. Basically, they’re controlling all information. So, in exchange for their function as a state apparatus, they get this favored business status. And this is why I call the Great Reset “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” because in China, you have a for-profit segment of the society, but which is state-sanctioned to operate and without which they couldn’t operate. In other words, they’re given some monopoly status based on their state functions. This is exactly what’s going on here in the West.
You’ve recently written about what you described as a “New McCarthyism,” and interestingly enough, Russia again is the bogeyman, but this time it’s so primarily for the Left. And ‘cancel culture’ also appears to be very much a part of this “New McCarthyism” that you describe.
In the ‘50s, of course, it was “Russia, Russia, Russia” with McCarthyism. And when it was the Soviet Union, it was the bogeyman. And now, it’s “Russia, Russia, Russia” for the Left, and interestingly, everything has switched sides, since Russia is no longer communist. Effectively, the Left has turned against them, and since Russia is no longer communist, much of the Right has embraced Russia to some degree while being, in my case, very critical of what they’ve done in terms of invading Ukraine. I think that was unnecessary, although they were definitely prompted or baited into it by the West, by NATO and the U.S. in particular.
With McCarthyism, McCarthy was trying to root out all the communists in the state. And indeed, there were many, and it turns out that he was pretty much right about the infiltration. Some would say he only scratched the surface, because the ideological indoctrination or propensity of the Left towards socialism was very, very strong. And as I said earlier, there has been a contingent since the ‘30s who have been trying to Sovietize the United States. So, it’s just an irony of history that we now have the Left demonizing Russia and basically reiterating almost verbatim the kind of language that the Right used with reference to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
If we shift gears now, if we look at conservatives today, do you believe that conservatives, for instance, have reacted to this “long march” through the institutions, the Great Reset, CRT, as much as they should have or as much as they could have? You’ve written, for instance, about a “crisis of faith” among conservatives. Where do you feel things may have gone wrong or where conservatives maybe have not done as much as they could or should have?
Well, as I wrote in that essay, The Failure of Liberalism and the Conservative Crisis of Faith, I think the failure on the Right was basically exonerating and apologizing for and effectively abdicating to the social democratic welfare state and the warfare state—the warfare and welfare state. And so, the criticism I wage against conservatism is that it’s failed to recognize that it has also been abetting the state and its growth through the warfare practices and then the Left through the welfare and now also the warfare. In other words, the Left is fully behind the Ukraine funding and the proxy war against Russia, which is almost a real war. It‘s very close when you start having your own military equipment being used by the Ukrainians. It goes to this ‘woke’ capitalism too: we don‘t have a clear understanding on the Right of the fact that ‘capitalism’ is not the same as crony capitalism. I consider myself a cultural conservative and a libertarian, and I think we should have been fighting the cronyism from the start much more strenuously. We wouldn’t have this ‘woke’ capitalism if it weren’t for this cronyism, this economic fascism in effect, where there’s collusion between the state and these corporations. In the case of the warfare state, it had to do with the funding of the military-industrial industry or complex.
So, what I think needs to happen is a return to free market enterprise practices and principles, and to extricate as much as possible the market from the politicization that it’s undergone, especially in the last 20 years with ‘wokeness.’ This will be very difficult to do, but the Right has to be more principled in doing it. They can’t be looking to the state, to ‘sic’ them on these corporations, because then they’re just playing into the very problem that they’re complaining about, because they’re asking for state sanctions against these corporations instead. We’ve got to depoliticize the economy entirely. We’ve got to get politics and the economy separate if possible. I mean, it’s not really possible entirely, so as I said in that essay, this is an asymptotic approach. You’re never going to get there, but you have to have a principle by which to operate, and that is free market separation from the political—that is, taking apart the political economy, as it’s been called, and isolating the economy from the political.
From your point of view, do you believe that conservatives have made a mistake, perhaps by eschewing for some decades now the liberal arts, the social sciences, teaching careers and careers in academia? Do you believe that this is sort of opened the door to this “long march through the institutions”?
Yes, I think they did abdicate this, but I think it was partly because the social sciences and humanities are state-funded enterprises. So, it’s more conducive to, basically, rent-seekers, to people that don’t want to produce real value in the marketplace but want to just basically operate on a semi-sinecure. And so, it’s not as attractive to the Right as to the Left, who really want all this statism—and the state has propped up these disciplines entirely, because without tuition funding and all that, these wouldn’t exist.
But I still think that there are a number of intellectuals out there that have carried the torch in terms of culture, cultural history, and intellectual history. Roger Scruton was one. There are a number of others whose names don’t come to mind right off the top of my head, which is not a good sign, but there’s not that many.
I think that giving up, abdicating the field of culture and society, social studies and cultural history, and literary and historical studies to the Left, has done a real disservice. As I said, these institutions are ideological state apparatuses, so whatever ideology dominates, it is going to spread to the social body, and that’s what’s happened. So, they [the Right] didn’t stem the tide early enough, and now it’s basically all awash. The water is well under the bridge where academia is concerned. I don’t think it can be turned back even in a decade. Probably not in two or three decades. It’s probably a counter-revolution that’ll take 50 years, frankly.
How does one, either as an individual or if we look at the Right and conservatives and libertarians as a whole, fight back against all of these trends? And on the contrary, if ‘cancel culture’, ‘wokeness,’ if the Great Reset are not defeated, what do we have to look forward to?
Well, we may only be a remnant to survive long enough to pass along the principles of the free market and individual rights, by virtue of the fact that we hopefully will survive this and pass a legacy on to the next generations. What I see is that we need to practice parallel economies. We need to establish and keep alive the free market and individual rights and freedom of association and self-determination by detaching ourselves as much as possible from these elite institutions and creating parallel structures, as they did in the Eastern Bloc during the Soviet era.
So, we’re looking at keeping alive a remnant, probably, and I don’t know that the Great Reset can be stopped. It can be avoided—by individuals who are aware of what’s happening and who are able to correspond with each other, set up networks of exchange, set up networks of culture, set up networks of ideology, and keep alive the principles of the free market, enterprising, individual rights, and autonomy. This may require even going to such lengths as forming separate communities.
As I see it right now, the Amish and to some extent the Mennonites in the United States are probably the best-positioned people in the whole world. They have systems that are independent of the broader state and the broader social order. This may be a model we may need to follow if it comes to it, you and I if you’re so inclined, and many others could join and create communities where we basically eschew and evade the technologies and the other mechanisms of invasive control, by virtue of simply removing ourselves from its domain, if possible. That’s a possibility that may need to be entertained as things progress.
Where can we find out more about your work, your writings, and your books?
Everything I do is kept track of on MichaelRectenwald.com. There you’ll find my essays, my interviews, my books, and I have a forthcoming book on the Great Reset. So, keep your eyes on that site, bookmark it, and get on my mailing list.
