Dr. Michael Rectenwald is the author of eleven books, including Thought Criminal (2020); Beyond Woke (May 2020); Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (2019); Springtime for Snowflakes: “Social Justice” and Its Postmodern Parentage (an academic’s memoir, 2018); Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature (2016) and others.

Michael is the Chief Academic Officer and co-founder of American Scholars, a pro-American education platform. He was a Professor of Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies at NYU from 2008 to 2019. He also taught at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Case Western Reserve University. He holds a Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master's in English Literature from Case Western Reserve University, and a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh.

Michael has appeared on major network political talk shows (Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox & Friends, Fox & Friends First, Varney & Company, The Glenn Beck Show), on syndicated radio shows (Coast to Coast AM, Glenn Beck and many others), on The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders series, and on numerous podcasts (The Tom Woods Show, The Leighton Smith Podcast, and many others).

Thought Criminal (A novel by Michael Rectenwald)

New! Thought Criminal: “The 1984 of the COVID era.”

A distinguished Professor of AI-neuroscience and Theory of Mind, Cayce Varin has dissident thoughts. He differs from acceptable opinion on matters of grave importance to respectable Human Biologicals and the Federation of Pandemos, the global state. Upon confessing his divergent theories to a Graduate Student Assistant, his life is never the same. He is labeled a Thought Deviationist, among other damning designations. He is arrested by a Robot Police Agent and soon released but remains a covert Thought Deviationist living under the constant fear of future arrest, the treachery of friends, and the loss of his identity.

Praise for Thought Criminal

“Michael Rectenwald has written a thought experiment for our time, the 1984 of the COVID era, where we can step back and view today's America for what it is: a society infected not by a virus but by collective hysteria. Thought Criminal explores the meaning of individualism in an increasingly collectivist society, where our thoughts are not our thoughts but those infused in us by the media and the Collective Mind, and the very notion of free will becomes a distant memory. This is fiction that makes us think and makes us dream.” — Kenneth R. Timmerman, NY Times best-selling author of The Election Heist, and other books.

With Beyond Woke, Michael Rectenwald returns with his characteristic sharp wit and incisive analysis and continues to fine-tune his critique of modern leftism. In Beyond Woke, he brings his unique perspective as an ex-Marxist and civil libertarian to bear on leftist culture, with its abandonment of traditional morality and emphasis on collective social identities - which are ironically increasingly atomized, as overwhelming centrifugal forces break up any previously stable social cohesion. The revolution is here and it’s winning. Find out why, and how to combat it.

Praise for Bey0nd Woke:

“The definitive explainer of the twenty-first century's cancerous cult of woke.” — Milo Yiannopoulos, author of Dangerous.

“What you hold in your hand is a rare specimen indeed: the work of someone honest enough to rethink his entire ideology late in his career, when he stood to gain nothing by it. But in Beyond Woke we readers gain plenty: as a former academic leftist himself, Rectenwald knows the whole racket inside and out, and in this book he lays it bare in all its absurdity. If you thought you knew all about this, think again. You need to read Rectenwald.” — Tom Woods, senior fellow of the Mises Institute and host of The Tom Woods Show.

“Michael Rectenwald writes about woke mania with clarity and with a former insider's deep knowledge of its intellectual roots, ideological assumptions, and corporate methods. He has produced an essential, enjoyable guide to the new collectivism.” — Janice Fiamengo, retired Professor of English, University of Ottawa, Canada; author of Sons of Feminism.

Google Archipelago argues that Big Digital technologies and their principals represent not only economic powerhouses but also new forms of governmental power. The technologies of Big Digital not only amplify, extend, and lend precision to the powers of the state, they may represent elements of a new corporate state power.

Praise for Google Archipelago:

“When I read Springtime for Snowflakes and interviewed Michael Rectenwald, I recognized an extremely well-versed insider, a vital source confirming long-standing suspicions while deepening our understanding regarding the hijacking of American higher education by leftist indoctrination. An accomplishment in itself, Michael's analysis has taken a quantum leap in Google Archipelago, tracing leftist ideology to almost all quarters of society, including corporate America and particularly Big Tech, the leading edge of wokeness. With meticulous sourcing and literary eloquence, Rectenwald makes a compelling case that Big Digital represents a leftist authoritarianism, providing appendages for state control of populations, if not representing the makings of a new corporate state itself. Here, Rectenwald establishes himself as an innovative and important public intellectual whose original insights we would ignore at our peril.” — Glenn Beck, political commentator, radio host and television producer.

“Professor Rectenwald's insightful and illuminating book shows how and why Big Digital monopolies becomes ever more dictatorial as they select and control information and thus shape our thoughts and culture. Google Archipelago exhibits blatant double standards, egregious bias, politically motivated designations of fake news, and tilted search engine algorithms, all manifestations of ingrained authoritarian leftism. While totalitarian Marxism failed as state organization, it has succeeded as the Google Archipelago which systematically imposes globalist, identity-politics, gender-pluralist, transgender, anti-toxic-masculinist, anti-cisgender, anti-family, anti-nativist, anti-conventionalist, and anti-traditionalist leftism, blocking people and ideas that do not conform, making non-persons and non-facts of them. The ever expanding Big Digital acts governmentally, but its subjects have no rights, and no alternatives. Rectenwald shows how we are being carried along to our fate as prisoners of Google Marxism, or totalitarian corporate socialism, which is arriving as a fait accompli with no votes from us and no means to dissent. Don t say you haven’t been warned.” — Philip Carl Salzman, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, McGill University

Springtime for Snowflakes: 'Social Justice' and Its Postmodern Parentage is a daring and candid memoir. NYU Professor Michael Rectenwald - the notorious @AntiPCNYUProf - illuminates the obscurity of postmodern theory to track down the ideas and beliefs that spawned the contemporary social justice creed and movement. In fast-paced creative non-fiction, Rectenwald begins by recounting how his Twitter capers and media exposure met with the swift and punitive response of NYU administrators and fellow faculty members. The author explains his evolving political perspective and his growing consternation with social justice developments while panning the treatment he received from academic colleagues and the political left.

Praise for Springtime for Snowflakes:

“This fiercely honest memoir will upset many people. Those who just attack its author over it (whether or not they've actually read it) will thereby reconfirm his point: that 'social justice,' as now preached and practiced on most campuses (and not just there) in the United States, is not a legacy of earlier mass movements for (real) social justice, but a religious creed with an effectively totalitarian agenda, birthed in the vast hothouse of postmodern theory. Here's hoping that this book will start real arguments, whether they elaborate its thesis, or modify it, or whatever else it takes to drive the counter-movement that all of us so very badly need.” — Mark Crispin Miller, NYU Professor of Media, Culture & Communication. Author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV, The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder, and Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform.

“This book may be the first of its kind--an academic's 'tell all' of the politicization and collapse of the American Academy. Once an Allen Ginsberg acolyte and leftist fellow traveler, Rectenwald exposes the intellectual origins and fundamental flaws of postmodernism, social justice, identity politics, and many other theories and ideologies of the modern left. Springtime for Snowflakes is the first direct challenge to the world of leftist deconstructionism in which safe spaces are everywhere and intellectualism and learning are slaves to rigid ideology, partisanship, and intolerance to alternative views.” — Daniel L. Mallock, Author of Agony and Eloquence: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and a World of Revolution—New English Review