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This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations: McKinney, Kara (2021-11-29). "Tipping Point". One America News Network. David Auerbach (11 December 2014). "Encyclopedia Frown". Slate.

Woods misused in lede

A contemporary revival of the Nazi propaganda term "Cultural Bolshevism", the conspiracy theory originated in the United States during the 1990s.

uses Woods 2019 as evidence of the first clause; however, what Woods says is (emphasis mine),

(Several commentaries) claim that the paleoconservative myth of cultural Marxism is simply an updated version of NAZI propaganda about “cultural Bolshevism” and “Weimar degeneracy” (both tropes depended on obscene and offensive anti-Semitic caricatures). While the Frankfurt School conspiracy has anti-Semitic components, it is inaccurate to call it nothing more than a modernization of cultural Bolshevism propaganda.

In short the article says the opposite of the source. Sennalen (talk) 01:51, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

I'd say that the source says it is an updated version of Cultural Bolshevism, along with some other novel features, wouldn't you? Perhaps we should add these details?  Tewdar  07:48, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps 'has some similarities to Cultural Bolshevism' would be a more accurate summary?  Tewdar  07:54, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

We do have Jay calling it "a recycling of the old Weimar conservative charge of 'cultural Bolshevism'"...  Tewdar  08:03, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Woods elaborates that it's not related to Cultural Bolshevism because it's not related to any kind of German or foreign ideology, but a distinctively American homegrown point of view. In fact, that's something he elaborates on in a magazine article about how the conspiracy theory originated with LaRouche. Sennalen (talk) 12:18, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Okay, so how about 'some similarities with Cultural Bolshevism, but a distinctively American ideology (originating in the 1990s...) or something like that? (provisional text) 🤔  Tewdar  13:04, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

It's a start. Finer nuances can be parsed in the body. I've been thinking that scattered bits about how the CT relates to anti-Semitism and Nazism could be collected from all around the article into a more coherent treatment. Sennalen (talk) 17:20, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Not that anyone would require my blessing, but I'm fine with this approach. Newimpartial (talk) 17:57, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Not that anyone would require my blessing... - right. We just need your blessing, TFD's blessing, Aquillion's blessing, MVBaron's blessing, NorthBySouthBaranof's blessing, that IP from Australia's blessing... 😭  Tewdar  18:33, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Here's a first pass at it. Things have been pulled from around the article to make top level sections of "Terrorism" and "Antisemitism". diff of changes on a userspace draft I think what's left in the rump of "Aspects of the conspiracy theory" could also be distributed differently, but I'll pause here for the spirit of incrementalism. Sennalen (talk) 14:42, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

phase 2 finished parceling out "Aspects of the conspiracy theory" to other headings Sennalen (talk) 00:21, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

The changes are in article space now. If it stays stable I'll move on to WP:SOURCEMINEing Jay's Dialectic of Counter-enlightenment. The book version is considerably expanded from the web version, and a lot of it should land in the new Antisemitism heading. Sennalen (talk) 18:08, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.8.137.102 (talk) 18:45, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Comment

• A general comment from somebody who knows a thing or two about (neo-)Nazi (and adjacent) ideologies and their history (including after the defeat of Nazi Germany): While it is fine to state that the idea of cultural Marxism originated in the US, I would be careful to use the word "homegrown", since that obscures the substantive interactions between American and European right-wing extremists, which continued after 1945. The far-right is surprisingly international, so nothing after World War One is truly "homegrown" with them. TucanHolmes (talk) 07:23, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

If you have a source explicitly making this link, then we should probably add this to the article. If not, we probably shouldn't. 😁👍  Tewdar  20:58, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Also, 'homegrown' is straight from the cited source, I believe...  Tewdar  20:59, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

I think the article could explain the anti-semetic/white supremacist connection a bit more.

Here's an early post from 2010 on Stormfront.org: https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t741129/

There's also the 2002 speech at a holocaust denial conference given by Lind: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2002/ally-christian-right-heavyweight-paul-weyrich-addresses-holocaust-denial-conference

Neither of which are mentioned in the current article. 60.242.247.51 (talk) 06:16, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi, 60.242.247.51; thanks for your suggestions. Unfortunately, we can’t use the Stormfront source because the content is self-published and user-generated, and also, Stormfront isn’t a reliable source for Misplaced Pages’s purposes (see WP:RS). What we would need is a reliable secondary source commenting on the Stormfront content in order to include it here, otherwise, we would be engaged in WP:OR, which is forbidden by policy. While the SPLC is generally reliable (although by consensus at WP:RSN, needs to be attributed in text), I’m only seeing one brief mention in that piece about something related to the topic of this article, the “Cultural Marxism Conspiracy Theory.” Here’s the mention: “Lind's theory was one that has been pushed since the mid-1990s by the Free Congress Foundation — the idea that a small group of German philosophers, known as the Frankfurt School, had devised a cultural form of ‘Marxism’ that was aimed at subverting Western civilization.” I’ll see what other editors think of the SPLC piece, but my worry is that including any of the rest of that piece’s content in this article would run afoul of WP:OR, specifically, WP:SYN. Do you, by chance, have any secondary WP:RS that make the connection and provide the specific content you’re hoping to see here? ThanksForHelping (talk) 00:15, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

The Joan Braune source covers the fact that William S Lind spread the Cultural Marxism conspiracy at a holocaust denial conference in 2002.

Another major purveyor of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is “paleo-conservative” William S. Lind. Unlike MacDonald, Lind does not focus his critique of Cultural Marxism explicitly on “the Jews,” but his theory does have antisemitic dimensions. In fact, in 2002, Lind spoke to a Holocaust denial conference organized by Willis Carto, and in his talk on the Frankfurt School, Lind pointed out, “These guys were all Jewish.” Instead of “the Jews,” however, Lind’s professed antagonist is the “globalists,” a term that conflates capitalists (supporters of capitalist “globalization”) with socialists and communists (supporters of a “global” working class revolt against capitalist globalization). Attacks on “globalists” (as well as “cosmopolitans,” or to use an earlier term,“internationalists”) are often used to make antisemitism more palatable fora wider audience. Antisemitism has long leaned on an equation of Jews with both capitalists and communists; a frequent element of antisemitic belief has been the portrayal of the Jew as both “banker and Bolshevik.”(This two-sided nature of antisemitism also helps to explain some of the frenzied agitation against George Soros, the liberal capitalist and philanthropist; in Soros, antisemites have hit upon an ideological jackpot poster child for their purposes: an influential left-leaning capitalist Jew,whose leftism and influence they exaggerate.32) By presenting Jews as secretly both capitalists and communists, antisemitism harnesses legitimate working-class anger against capitalism (including a corrupt and exploitative financial system) and redirects that anger towards the left and scapegoated groups, including Jews. Although antisemitism pre-dates capitalism, the tendency of modern antisemitism to cast Jews as both capitalists and communists has made it possible for fascist movements to present themselves deceptively as “workers” movements (think National Socialist “Workers” Party) while still being fiercely oppositional towards the left.

There's also a Salon piece which includes the information about Lind and the holocaust denial conference, as well as comparing "Cultural Marxism" to "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (a touchstone of White Supremacists).

In many ways, Lind's "cultural Marxism" tracks the famous anti-Jewish hoax “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and at a 2002 Holocaust denial conference (Lind, I'd note, says he rejects Holocaust denial) told attendees, of the "cultural Marxism" conspirators, that "These guys were all Jewish". Like the Protocols, Lind's cultural Marxism idea purports to expose a secret Jewish plan for world domination.

As for Stormfront being an early source of the conspiracy theory, Paul Jackson and Anton Shekhovtsov hit both topics in their 2014 "The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right" (DOI: 10.1057/9781137396211) :

Meanwhile, in the same way, according to Bill Berkowitz, Lind’s thesis on Cultural Marxism has been well received in the Holocaust denier community too, including being discussed in 2002, at a conference organised by the anti-Semitic newspaper Barnes Review. Cultural Marxism has also been the subject of many discussions and exchanges on forums such as Stormfront.org, a site more clearly associated with white racial nationalism, and espousing the platform ‘White Pride World Wide’.

I think the latter half of the above quote really gets to the point of the matter - that the conspiracy theory has had wide usage on stormfront since at least 2010. However the first half does seem to be referencing the SPLC source (whose author is Bill Berkowitz). But that latter half seems viable.

Martin Jay mentioned that The Frankfurt School is often used as a stand in for The Jewish Conspiracy in his "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe" (2010) , Skidmore College, NY.

A number of years later a fringe neo-Nazi group called "Stormfront" could boldly express what had hitherto only been insinuated, and in so doing really spill some foul-tasting beans:

Talking about the Frankfurt School is ideal for not naming the Jews as a group (which often leads to a panicky rejection, a stubborn refusal to listening anymore and even a "shut up") but naming the Jew by proper names. People will make their generalizations by themselves - in the privacy of their own minds. At least it worked like that with me. It was my lightbulb moment, when confusing pieces of an alarming puzzle suddenly grouped to a visible picture. Learn by heart the most important proper names of the Frankfurt Schoolers - they are (except for a handful of minor members and female "groupies") ALL Jews. One can even quite innocently mention that the Frankfurt Schoolers had to leave Germany in 1933 because "they were to a man, Jewish," as William S. Lind does.

Of less relevance, but perhaps more forward looking are these two references, linking to the wider diffusion of the concept into the conservative right:

Sven Lütticken, writing in "Cultural Marxists Like Us" for the journal "Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry" (2018) (DOI 10.1086/700248):

Cultural Marxism largely came to function as a code word for the challenging of racial hierarchies and traditional gender identities.

Chamsy El-Ojeili of the University of Wellington connects Cultural Marxism to various aspects of "Crusader Christianity" here . Saying:

I have already noted post-fascist borrowings from the philosophical vocabulary of liberalism—for instance, free speech, individual freedom over equality, opposition to leftist social engineering. Elements of socialist philosophy and anti-systemic good sense, from opposition to centrist political parties, corporate and intellectual elites, globalist (neo)liberalism, right up to challenges to global capitalism and its materialist culture, are equally characteristic features of the post-fascist imaginary. But these elements of anti-systemic good sense are bound to emotionally charged dystopian and conspiracist !gures. Two central conspiracist notions within post-fascism provide some insight into the ways this potentially intertwines with apocalyptic Christian appeals. First, Bat Ye’Or’s Eurabia conspiracy (a plot to establish Muslim control of Europe), mentioned 171 times in Breivik’s manifesto, and related counter-jihadist ideas are noted by Strømmen and Schmiedel. However, they fail to link them clearly to post-fascist Christian-identity claims, historical anti-Semitism, and attempts to cognitively map the world and power; nor do they take up the connections between this and a second major conspiracist notion, that of ‘cultural Marxism’. Arguably connected to the classical fascist notion of ‘cultural Bolshevism’, which was also taken up by certain churches in the interwar period, the aims of cultural Marxism, according to the neo- Nazi Stormfront website, include ‘Huge immigration to destroy identity mptying of churches’. is theory is now widely available, deployed in mainstream media by political parties (UKIP, for instance, but also the Conservative party), and the likes of Jordan Peterson

So again, it is mentioned that the term has had widely acknowledged usage on the neo-nazi website stormfront. I Hope that's enough reliable sources. Let me know what your interpretation is. Just to clarify, I'm not trying to make the case that William S. Lind is anti-semetic, just that the conspiracy theory had been spread early among Holocaust Deniers (back to 2002), and on the neo-nazi website, Stormfront (back to 2010, as the Martin Jay source, and others note). 60.241.70.177 (talk) 05:54, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Except for El-Ojeili, I believe all of this information is already approprately summarized in the article. Sennalen (talk) 16:00, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

I don't think it's really overt enough, especially considering how many high quality academic sources there are for these two statements. 60.241.70.177 (talk) 13:07, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

None of these are valid sources. Theories of "Cultural Marxism" conspiracies are extremely simple: a marriage of Marxism and post-modernism is conspiring to destroy all that is good. Citing cases of the far right co-opting the idea for their own hateful ends is evidence of exactly nothing. It's the fallacy of composition. Joeedh (talk) 04:58, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Conveying what current and reliable academic sources are saying, is generally highly approved of on Misplaced Pages. See these two policy pages WP:RELIABLESOURCES and WP:SOURCETYPES. 220.245.153.214 (talk) 13:32, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

QAnon

For some reason, QAnon is only a link in the see also section. For what it's worth, cultural Marxism conspiracy theory plays a huge role in their messaging. Much more should be said about it here. Viriditas (talk) 01:19, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

There is no mention of cultural Marxism in the Qanon article. Could you please provide sources that explain the connection. TFD (talk) 04:23, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

Neutral point of view

This article is in clear violation of Misplaced Pages's neutral point of view policies. There is nothing intrinsically anti-semitic about "Cultural Marxism" or even criticism of the Frankfurt School (Not one of the conservative influencers I listen to has ever listed their names, the act of which according to one of the linked sources is what makes this an anti-semitic conspiracy thoery). Joeedh (talk) 04:48, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Anti-semitism is a very important part of the topic, but the inclusion of the big anti-Semitism banner at the top of the article is (intentionally) unduly prejudicial. There are other categories/series that are equally or more applicable, such as socialism, conservatism, 20th century American politics, etc. Sennalen (talk) 20:20, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

While its main proponents are less overt than their predecessors and instead use coded language, the core of the theory is to accuse the Jews of trying to overthrow Western civilization, which is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. TFD (talk) 02:51, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Mortensen and Sihvonen

@Llll5032 Here are the relevant parts of the source you requested: Negative Emotions Set in Motion: The Continued Relevance of GamerGate Bold emphasis is mine, highlighting the parts supporting contested claims.

In addition to feminism, the term cultural Marxism is continuously used in the context of #GG to refer to the ideology of academia and of the DiGRA connected researchers. In subsequent videos, SoA kept returning to this term, inflating it with the Frankfurt School of thought. The connection to the Frankfurt School is to a certain degree correct, as the ideas of the Frankfurt School held sway with the British cultural studies tradition, which emphasized the importance of a contextualized knowledge brought up through a variety of methods, quantitative and qualitative, and critical reading of the cultural expressions in question. The emphasis on understanding the context of an expression of popular culture, described in seminal works such as Raymond Williams’study of television (Williams 1974) or outlined in Stuart Hall’s classic encoding/decoding model (Hall 1980), has been deeply influential on contemporary studies of games and game culture.

Game studies has similarly been shaped by the early call for understanding games and play independent of existing academic paradigms, by studying a game as its own object, and not a version of literature, television, or other pre-existing modalities (Aarseth 2001). This is, however, not how SoA understood the influence of Marxist thinking in game studies. Instead, it was presented in much the same manner as Anthony Walsh (2018, p. xii) presents cultural Marxism, as an old and deeply embedded conspiracy that is toxic, anti-capitalist, anti-moral, and the purpose of which is to destroy the Christian core of American (or more widely, Western) culture.

From a Nordic point of view, this is sinister indeed. The terrorist attacks in Oslo and on the Utøya island on July 22, 2011, were carried out as a deliberate attack on cultural diversity and the social democratic political ideals of inclusivity and openness, and the terrorist’s manifesto contained several direct references to cultural Marxism (Tromp 2018). During #GG, cultural Marxism was used as a dog whistle for anonymous messages from online audiences using radical free speech as their justification for the often aggressive and hate-filled content with which they crammed the mailboxes and social media feeds of their targets. We can still see traces of this when we look at the current Twitter feeds of the accounts that were among the 50 most active #GG tweeters in 2014 and 2015. The connection between #GG and a public reaching back to fascist ideology is a recurrent theme in articles discussing the event. Mortensen (2016) referred to #GG proponents as hooligans, although mostly to point out that aggressive mass movements surrounding games are not new. #GG does however come up again and again in articles discussing misogyny and racism online. Madden, Janoske, Winkler, and Edgar (2018, p. 72) point out how race and gender intersects in the harassment caused by significant participants of #GG, using the example of how Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart associate editor during #GG and prominent participant in the #GG event, “sparked a barrage of comments” of harassment and racist slurs targeting black comedian Leslie Jones for her role in the movie reboot of Ghostbusters. Topics concerning the intersection of racism and misogyny keep coming up in several discussions of #GG, either together or separately (Nieborg and Foxman 2018; Massanari and Chess 2018; Gray et al. 2017). Racism and misogyny associated with #GG are also regularly brought up in discussions of gender and geek masculinity (Ortiz 2019; Salter 2018; Condis 2018, p. 3). Sennalen (talk) 04:03, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Free speech is directly named as the concern in the intersection of Gamergate and cultural Marxism. Also, Salter's work on masculinity is name dropped at the end of the section on cultural Marxism. That in itself would give license to link the work, although I don't think it needs the justification. Merely being in the intersection of Gamergate and the Frankfurt School makes Salter's work due a mention. Sennalen (talk) 04:14, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the explanation, Sennalen. I WP:BOLDLY condensed the section further because in my opinion it interpreted the sources too selectively and was somewhat tangential to the subject of the article. I see you have reverted the pargraph to your version. Do other editors agree? Llll5032 (talk) 04:23, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

The expanded version reads like it was written by someone with an ideological ax to grind. Not what I expected to read in an encyclopedia article, but please keep it so people know what they're dealing with. BrianH123 (talk) 23:59, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

The paragraph is edited substantially now, but in my opinion the two sentences naming Salter are still tangential. Is his work being used as a WP:BESTSOURCE about Gamergate, or as something else? If he is a BESTSOURCE, then should the two sentences focus more on what he said and less on how he said it? Llll5032 (talk) 17:47, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

I also thought it was worth letting the reader know that there is this work out there that applies Frankfurt School critical theory to Gamergate. If they want to know more, they can follow up on those citations. Actually explaining what Salter had to say would require introducing a host of players and ideas that would be a WP:COATRACK on this article. If someone can strike a better Goldilocks balance of due weight, I'd be happy to see it. Sennalen (talk) 17:57, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

If the main purpose for inclusion is not explaining what Salter had to say but rather letting the reader know that there is this work out there that applies Frankfurt School critical theory to Gamergate, then perhaps we would need an additional secondary source to confirm the importance of that aspect per WP:PROPORTION. Llll5032 (talk) 18:31, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

It doesn't take an extra source to say claims about a topic are about the topic. I've written more on that theme at Misplaced Pages:Write the Infinite Article. Salter's technological rationality paper has been cited 193 times according to Google and is a fairly ubiquitous reference in post-2017 Gamergate scholarship. Sennalen (talk) 20:30, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

That number of citations may support the work's use as a WP:BESTSOURCE, but we should be wary of providing an original slant (per WP:PSTS and WP:OR: "Articles must not contain any new analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to reach or imply a conclusion not clearly stated by the sources themselves.") What could make such an interpretation more DUE is if a WP:BESTSOURCE devotes its own words to letting the reader know that there is this work out there that applies Frankfurt School critical theory to Gamergate; perhaps such a BESTSOURCE exists among the 193 sources that cite Salter. Llll5032 (talk) 20:44, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

I think the edits are okay, but you still have an infinite regress problem in your justification. It's not an original analysis to select relevant sources and summarize their main points. Sennalen (talk) 17:42, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Here is a WP:BOLD simplified and condensed version of the language per WP:DUE and WP:PSTS. Llll5032 (talk) 17:00, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

• Support Sennalen's original, more expansive wording (which has been reverted to), as it adds a greater level of nuance and helps highlight a less conspiratorial mode of viewing The Frankfurt School. This version is in alignment with the Marxist cultural analysis article, which I think a relevant point of contrast. 60.242.160.243 (talk) 04:47, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

I WP:BRB'd some of the interpretation to possibly arrive at a consensus. Llll5032 (talk) 05:01, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

I also added the SPLC. Here is a link with the edits. Llll5032 (talk) 12:13, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Sennalen, can you cite the source's context for describing Gamergate as a social movement? The Gamergate Misplaced Pages article top appears to dispute that description. Llll5032 (talk) 09:35, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Gamergate is a controversy which contains a movement that has engaged in a harrassment campaign. A lot of ink has been spilled about the false dichotomies of trying to decide which of the three things it "really" is. There are sources that focus on each aspect, and most of the sources emphasize ambiguity. There was a local consensus on the Gamergate page to diverge from the treatment in best sources in favor of polemical ones. That article's deficiencies are a matter for another time, but it's why I specifically cited here the definitions as a controversy and movement. Sennalen (talk) 14:09, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

I think unbiased, cited definitions are important, but I don't find anything else objectionable about your recent edits. Sennalen (talk) 14:22, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, Sennalen. I've removed that phrase for now because it appears to be disputed by some RS, but as I wrote in the summary, in my opinion the phrase could be restored in some form if its use in academic WP:BESTSOURCES that also discuss the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is clarified with contextual refquotes. Llll5032 (talk) 18:16, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

A summation dispute between reliable sources shouldn't generally be resolved by simply removing some of them. Mortenen and Salter aren't the entire top echelon of Gamergate sources, but they are in it, and representative of it. Sennalen (talk) 17:51, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Sennalen, can you quote the context for the paywalled source's use of the phrase "social movement", as you did for the other phrases above? Llll5032 (talk) 17:55, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Sure. The particular use I had in mind was #GamerGate was a far-reaching and significant online movement even in contexts that are seemingly disengaged from video games or gaming cultures. There's also In this kind of a research setting, the hashtag #GG has many functions: it is the name of this online movement, a contextualizing tag for the discussion, a shorthand for discussing certain convoluted internet politics, as well as a practical search tool. and a dozen off-handed uses of "movement" to refer to Gamergate in passing. Sennalen (talk) 20:23, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. That usage may be sufficient to warrant the phrase "online movement" in one of the sentences in the paragraph, perhaps not the first one. Llll5032 (talk) 20:28, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

I WP:BOLDly added "online movement" to the third sentence. Llll5032 (talk) 20:32, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

References

1. Mortensen, Torill Elvira; Sihvonen, Tanja (2020). "Negative Emotions Set in Motion: The Continued Relevance of #GamerGate". In Holt; Bossler (eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1353–1374. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-78440-3_75. ISBN 978-3-319-78440-3.

This article was written by a cultural Marxist.

Calling cultural Marxism a "conspiracy theory" is a prime example of how cultural Marxism works. Any idea that these assholes don't want promulgated they mislabel in this way, sort of like calling abortion "health care".The whole article needs to be rewritten with more sensitivity to the POSSIBILITY that some of the claims are actually true.

Geez, this is just one example of why Misplaced Pages is so untrutworthy. The bias is extraordinary. 66.173.7.27 (talk) 04:58, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

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