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Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory
"'Cultural Marxism" in modern political parlance refers to a conspiracy theory which sees the Frankfurt School as part of an ongoing movement to take over and destroy Western society.[54][55][56][57]
The term 'cultural Marxism' has an academic usage within cultural studies, where it refers to a form of anti-capitalist cultural critique which specifically targets those aspects of culture that are seen as profit driven and mass-produced under capitalism.[58][59][60][61][62] As an area of The Frankfurt School's discourse 'Cultural Marxism' has commonly considered the industrialization and mass-production of culture by The Culture Industry as having an overall negative effect on society, an effect which can reify an audience away from perceiving a more authentic sense of human values.[63][59] British theorists such as Richard Hoggart of The Birmingham School developed a working class sense of 'British Cultural Marxism' which objected to the "massification" and "drift" away from local cultures, a process of commercialization Hoggart saw as being enabled by tabloid newspapers, advertising, and the American film industry.[64]
The term remained academic until the late 1990s, when it was misappropriated by paleoconservatives as part of an ongoing culture war in which it is argued that the very same theorists who were analysing and objecting to the "massification" and mass control via commercialization of culture were in fact working in a conspiracy to control and stage their own attack on Western society, using 1960s counter culture, multiculturalism, progressive politics and political correctness as their methods.[56][65][66] This conspiracy theory version of the term is associated with American religious paleoconservatives such as William S. Lind, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Weyrich, but also holds currency among alt-right/white nationalist groups and the neo-reactionary movement.[66][57][67] Adherents of the conspiracy theory often seem to suggest that the existence of things such as modern feminism, civil rights, gay rights and atheism are dependent on the Frankfurt School, even though these movements predate The Frankfurt School.[citation needed]
Weyrich first aired his misconception of Cultural Marxism in a 1998 speech to the Civitas Institute's Conservative Leadership Conference, later repeating this usage in his widely syndicated Culture War Letter.[66][68][69] At Weyrich's request William S. Lind wrote a short history of his conception of Cultural Marxism for The Free Congress Foundation; in it Lind identifies the presence of homosexuals on television as proof of Cultural Marxist control over the mass media and claims that Herbert Marcuse considered a coalition of "blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals" as a vanguard of cultural revolution.[56][65][70] Lind has since published his own depiction of a fictional Cultural Marxist apocalypse.[71][72] Lind and Weyrich's writings on this subject advocate fighting what they perceive as Cultural Marxism with "a vibrant cultural conservatism" composed of "retroculture" fashions from the past, a return to rail systems as public transport and an agrarian culture of self-reliance modeled after the Amish.[56][72][73][74][75][76][77][excessive citations]
In 1999 Lind led the creation of an hour-long program entitled "Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School".[54] Some of Lind's content went on to be reproduced by James Jaeger in his YouTube film "CULTURAL MARXISM: The Corruption of America".[78]
The intellectual historian Martin Jay commented on this phenomenon saying that Lind's original documentary:
... spawned a number of condensed textual versions, which were reproduced on a number of radical right-wing sites. These in turn led to a welter of new videos now available on YouTube, which feature an odd cast of pseudo-experts regurgitating exactly the same line. The message is numbingly simplistic: all the ills of modern American culture, from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation and gay rights to the decay of traditional education and even environmentalism are ultimately attributable to the insidious influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930's.[54]
Heidi Beirich likewise holds that the conspiracy theory is used to demonize various conservative “bêtes noires” including "feminists, homosexuals, secular humanists, multiculturalist, sex educators, environmentalist, immigrants, and black nationalists."[79]
According to Chip Berlet, who specializes in the study of extreme right-wing movements, Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory found fertile ground within the Tea Party movement of 2009, with contributions published in the American Thinker and WorldNetDaily highlighted by some Tea Party websites.[80][81][82]
The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that William S. Lind in 2002 gave a speech to a Holocaust denial conference on the topic of Cultural Marxism. In this speech Lind noted that all the members of The Frankfurt School were "to a man, Jewish", but it is reported that Lind claims not to question whether the Holocaust occurred and suggests he was present in an official capacity for The Free Congress Foundation "to work with a wide variety of groups on an issue-by-issue basis".[83][84]
Although the theory became more widespread in the late 1990s and through the 2000s, the modern iteration of the theory originated in Michael Minnicino's 1992 essay "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'", published in Fidelio Magazine by the Schiller Institute.[54][85][86] The Schiller Institute, a branch of the LaRouche movement, further promoted the idea in 1994.[87] The Minnicino article charges that the Frankfurt School promoted Modernism in the arts as a form of Cultural pessimism, and shaped the Counterculture of the 1960s (such as the British pop band The Beatles) after the Wandervogel of the Ascona commune.[85]
More recently, the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik included the term in his document "2083: A European Declaration of Independence", which along with The Free Congress Foundation's "Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology" was e-mailed to 1,003 addresses approximately 90 minutes before the 2011 bomb blast in Oslo for which Breivik was responsible.[88][89][90] Segments of William S. Lind's writings on Cultural Marxism have been found within Breivik's manifesto.[91]
In July 2017, Rich Higgins was removed by US National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster from the United States National Security Council following the discovery of a seven-page memorandum he had authored, describing a conspiracy theory concerning a plot to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump by cultural Marxists, as well as Islamists, globalists, bankers, the media and members of the Republican and Democratic parties.[92][93][94]
Philosopher and political science lecturer Jérôme Jamin has stated, "Next to the global dimension of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, there is its innovative and original dimension, which lets its authors avoid racist discourses and pretend to be defenders of democracy".[55] Professor and Oxford Fellow Matthew Feldman has traced the terminology back to the pre-war German concept of Cultural Bolshevism locating it as part of the degeneration theory that aided in Hitler's rise to power.[95] William S. Lind confirms this as his period of interest, writing that "It [Cultural Marxism] is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I."[84]
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