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Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory

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History

Origins

The conspiracy theory of Marxist cultural warfare originated in the essay "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'" (1992) written by Michael Minnicinno, published in the Schiller Institute, a LaRouche movement organization journal associated with the fringe American right-wing political activist Lyndon LaRouche. In a speech to the Conservative Leadership Conference of the Civitas Institute in 1998, Paul Weyrich presented his conspiracy theory equating Cultural Marxism to political correctness. He later republished the speech in his syndicated culture war letter. In the United States, the conspiracy theory is promoted by religious fundamentalists and paleoconservative politicians such as William S. Lind, Pat Buchanan and Paul Weyrich as well as the alt-right, neo-Nazi and white nationalists organizations.

For the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, Weyrich commissioned Lind to write a history of Cultural Marxism, defined as "a brand of Western Marxism commonly known as 'multiculturalism' or, less formally, Political Correctness" which claimed that the presence of openly gay people in the television business proved that Cultural Marxists control the mass media; and that Herbert Marcuse considered a coalition of "Blacks, students, feminist women, and homosexuals" as a feasible vanguard of cultural revolution in the 1960s. Moreover, the historian Martin Jay said in the Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe (2011) that Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School (1999), Lind's documentary of conservative counter-culture, was effective Cultural Marxism propaganda because it "spawned a number of condensed, textual versions, which were reproduced on a number of radical, right-wing sites". He further writes:

These, in turn, led to a plethora 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, racial equality, multiculturalism and gay rights to the decay of traditional education, and even environmentalism, are ultimately attributable to the insidious intellectual influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930s.

Today the conspiracy theory of Marxist culture war is promoted by right-wing politicians, fundamentalist religious leaders, political commentators in mainstream print and television media and white supremacist terrorists.

Anders Behring Breivik

The counterfeit police identity card used by the far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik while executing his terrorist 2011 Norway attacks which he justified as defense of the Western world against Cultural Marxism

In 2011 the conspiracy theory received renewed attention after 77 people were murdered during the Norway attacks. On 22 July 2011Anders Behring Breivik justified his terrorism by citing Marxist cultural warfare as the primary subject of his political manifesto. Breivik wrote that the "sexually transmitted disease (STD) epidemic in Western Europe is a result of cultural Marxism", that "Cultural Marxism defines Muslims, feminist women, homosexuals, and some additional minority groups, as virtuous, and they view ethnic Christian European men as evil" and that the "European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg is a cultural-Marxist-controlled political entity."

Fomentation

Following the Norway attacks, the conspiracy was taken up by a number of far-right outlets and forums including Alt-right sites AltRight Corporation, InfoWars and VDARE, alt-right sites that promoted the conspiracy. The AltRight Corporation's site, altright.com, featured articles with titles such as "Ghostbusters and the Suicide of Cultural Marxism", "Sweden: The World Capital of Cultural Marxism" and "Beta Leftists, Cultural Marxism and Self-Entitlement". Vdare ran similar articles with similar titles, like "Virginia (Dare) There Is A Cultural Marxism—And It’s Taking Over Conservatism Inc". While InfoWars ran numerous headlines like "Is Cultural Marxism America's New Mainline Ideology?"

Neo-Nazi and white supremacists also promoted the conspiracy and help expand its reach. Sites like American Renaissance have run articles with titles like "Cultural Marxism in Action: Media Matters Engineers Cancellation of Vdare.com Conference" The Daily Stormer regularly runs stories about "Cultural Marxism" with titles like "Jewish Cultural Marxism is Destroying Abercrombie & Fitch", "Hollywood Strikes Again: Cultural Marxism through the Medium of Big Box-Office Movies" and "The Left-Center-Right Political Spectrum of Immigration = Cultural Marxism" and the White supremacist think tank and lobby group National Policy Institute (NPI), promotes the conspiracy theory via its website, Radix Journal.

Entering the mainstream discourse

Australia

Shortly after the Norway Attacks mainstream right-wing politicians began espousing the conspiracy. In 2013 a member of the ruling Liberal Party, Cory Bernardi, wrote in his book The Conservative Revolution that "cultural Marxism has been one of the most corrosive influences on society over the last century". Five years later Fraser Anning, former Australian Senator, initially sitting as a member of Pauline Hanson's One Nation and then Katter's Australian Party, declared during his maiden speech in 2018 that "Cultural Marxism is not a throwaway line but a literal truth" and spoke of the need for a "final solution to the immigration problem”.

Brexit

During the Brexit debate a number of conservatives and Brexiteers espoused the conspiracy theory. Suella Braverman, the British Conservative Party MP, said in a pro-Brexit speech for the Eurosceptic thinktank the Bruges Group that "e are engaging in many battles right now. As Conservatives, we are engaged in a battle against cultural Marxism, where banning things is becoming de rigueur, where freedom of speech is becoming a taboo, where our universities — quintessential institutions of liberalism — are being shrouded in censorship and a culture of no-platforming." Her usage of the conspiracy theory was condemned as hate speech by other MPs, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the anti-racist organization Hope Not Hate. Braverman dismissed that the term Cultural Marxism is a antisemitic trope, stating: "We have culture evolving from the far left which has allowed the snuffing out of freedom of speech, freedom of thought. I'm very aware of that ongoing creep of cultural Marxism, which has come from Jeremy Corbyn."

Nigel Farage promotes the cultural Marxist conspiracy as dog-whistle code for antisemitism in the United Kingdom.

Bolsonaro government

In Brazil the government of Jair Bolsonaro contained a number of administration members who promoted the conspiracy theory, including Eduardo Bolsonaro, the Presidents son who "enthusiastically described Steve Bannon as an opponent of Cultural Marxism".

Trump administration

Rich Higgins, while acting as an aide to Donald Trump, wrote a memo framing Trump's presidential campaign as "a war on Cultural Marxism that needed to be sustained during his presidency". Higgins wrote of "a 'cabal' (an antisemitic trope) promoting Cultural Marxism that included 'globalists, bankers, Islamists, and conservative Republicans,' and had captured control of the media, academia, politics, and the financial system, as well as controlling attempts to tamp down on hate speech and hate groups through CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) government programs." Higgins also asserted that the Frankfurt School "sought to deconstruct everything in order to destroy it, giving rise to society-wide nihilism." Matt Shea, a Washington Representative from the Republican Party, is a proponent of the conspiracy theory as outlined in a conspiracy-minded seven-page memo by Rich Higgins, a National Security Council staffer in the Trump administration who was fired after the document became public in July 2017.

Terrorism

A number of far-right terrorists have espoused the conspiracy theory. Other than Anders Behring Breivik, Jack Renshaw, a neo-Nazi convicted for plotting the assassination of Labour MP Rosie Cooper and threatening to kill a policeman as well as being accused of criminal pedophilia, promoted the conspiracy theory in a video for the British National Party.

Media personalities

  • Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News, was a proponent of the conspiracy theory.
  • Pat Buchanan promotes the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory as meant to "de-Christianize" the United States.
  • Paul Gottfried is one of the three main proponents of the conspiracy theory.
  • Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, has promoted the conspiracy theory.
  • William S. Lind, the principal promoter of the conspiracy, said that Marxists control much of the mass communications media and that political correctness can be directly attributed to Karl Marx.
  • Kevin MacDonald is one of the three main proponents of the conspiracy theory.
  • Jordan Peterson blamed the conspiracy for demanding the use of gender-neutral pronouns as a threat to free speech. Peterson often misuses the term postmodernism as a stand in term for the conspiracy.
  • Ben Shapiro promotes the theory, especially that "Cultural Marxist" activity is happening in universities.
  • Paul Weyrich promoted the conspiracy theory as a deliberate effort to undermine "our traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture" and the conservative agenda in American society, arguing that "we have lost the culture war" and that "a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture. We need to drop out of this culture, and find places, even if it is where we physically are right now, where we can live godly, righteous and sober lives.
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