Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has a deep understanding of the perils born from communism.
That’s because his father, Rafael Cruz, joined the revolution under Fidel Castro in Cuba at 14 years old. He was totally unaware of the horrors of communism at the time, because “Marxist revolutions begin with children.” He had to fight for his freedom.
Cruz opens with the scene of his father — beaten and bloodied on a prison floor at the hands of Cuban forces — at the beginning of his latest book, “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America,” which was exclusively provided to Fox News Digital.
“Communist revolutions begin with young people because they’re naive, they don’t understand how the world works,” Cruz told Fox News Digital in an interview. “They’re easily deceived, and the book describes how my father was thrown in prison in Cuba and tortured in Cuba and beaten almost to death and how he fled Cuba and came to America seeking freedom.”
In his book that releases Tuesday, Cruz describes how Marxism — the political and socioeconomic theories of German philosopher Karl Marx — has seeped into nearly every aspect of American society.
Universities, K-12 education, journalism, big tech, entertainment and science, Cruz writes, are all being impacted by Marxist ideology, which forms the basis of communism.
“The universities are where the Marxists got their first foothold, where they developed the woke virus and where it mutated and ultimately spread to institutions throughout America,” Cruz said.
The book delves into the history of Marxism, starting with Karl Marx’s perspective of an inevitable conflict between the wealthy and the less privileged, Cruz said.
He outlines the classical Marxist approach involving violent revolution, where the working class seizes control of production and the government redistributes wealth.
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Cruz then traces the evolution of Marxism, particularly in the 1960s, highlighting how it transitioned into critical legal studies. This new perspective applies the same Marxist framework to law, viewing it as a tool of oppression used by the powerful against the vulnerable. This shift began at Harvard, his alma mater, which became a focal point for the spread of Marxism in the United States, he said.
“Cultural Marxism is a method of saying the never ending struggle between victims, and oppressors can only be corrected through force by the government punishing the oppressors and rewarding the victims,” Cruz said. “And what the modern left has done, so that it’s applied that approach oppression matrix to race, gender, to sexual orientation to transgenderism, and that worldview, enforced through brute force is what has seized control of so many of our institutions across the country.”
Each chapter of the book outlines where the ideology infiltrated and “lays out a strategy for fighting back and winning” through a sort of civil boycotting.
In the book, Cruz pointed to the Bud Light and Target cases, where both companies suffered significant losses after attempting to impose their own moral viewpoints on their customers.
Bud Light’s attempt to lecture its customers through “woke marketing” backfired, causing them to plummet from the top-selling beer in America to losing billions of dollars. Similarly, Target’s decision to push radical transgender ideology on young children led to a massive loss in revenue.
“The result was immediate,” Cruz said. “And one of the things really striking that I talked about in the book is in the early discussions of the executives at Target, what they were saying was, ‘We don’t want to be another Bud Light, we want to avoid what happened to Bud Light.'”
“That is an example of changing the incentives where the downsides, giving into the woke mob, have been elevated … Maybe, just maybe they’ll stay out of politics and just sell their damn products to the customers,” he said.
The text also traces the evolution of Marxism into critical legal studies and critical race theory, which apply similar oppressive frameworks to law and race respectively, emphasizing government intervention as a solution.
Additionally, Cruz pointed to the significance of tech billionaire Elon Musk taking over Twitter, calling it “the single most important step forward for free speech in modern decades.”
China — which Cruz writes about in his concluding chapter — also plays a role in bolstering communism in America.
“I think understanding China’s role in all of this is important to fighting back which I believe we can fight back,” he said. “And this book is a roadmap on how to fight back, but it also tells stories. It’s interesting, it’s not some dry academic treatise, it is real world, what’s happening and what you can do about it and fight back.”