Cultural Marxism: A Primer

During World War One, Marxists thought that the brutality of the war along with the class structure of the military would cause Marxist revolutions throughout the Western World. Instead only Russia went communist. Ironically, Russia did not have an industrial economy, and was the only country that they did not think would go communist.

Perplexed, some of the top communist thinkers settled in the 1920s at Goethe University, in Frankfurt, Germany, where they studied the ‘problem’. They found several things.

First and foremost they found that the West had a highly individualistic culture that was incompatible with collectivist ideals. They also found that Western societies were far too wealthy to want to change cultures. In America even that long ago for example, almost every family had a car…

They considered the wealth of the people, rich and poor alike, a problem because they put the ideology of communism ahead of the wealth of flesh and blood people.

They also came up with what they considered a solution, which they called ‘Critical Theory’. Critical Theory says, in a nutshell, that because of the relative wealth of the west, it will be impossible to get the proletariat to rise up against the bourgeoisie, and thus class warfare is not a viable thing to press for.

They threw out the notion of the rich oppressing the poor, and instead started slicing society into ever smaller slices, each of which was turned against the German culture. Jewish people were the obvious first choice.

When Hitler came to power, largely as a counter-weight to Critical Theory, he oppressed communism. The Frankfurt School fled, primarily to the United States, where they entrenched themselves in American universities.

They made only small inroads until the Vietnam War. Then, with the turmoil of the late 60s, their teachings began to catch on. Also, a new generation of writers and theorists emerged, such as Saul Alinsky. The new generation focused more on the implementation of Critical Theory, with books such as Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

Jewish people were not the most obvious group in America to turn against the societal culture. Rather, African Americans were, and this is where they started. The concept of ‘white privilege’ was born.

Hillary Clinton, in the meantime, who was a close friend of Alinsky (she called him her ‘mentor’), came up with the idea of flipping Rules for Radicals on its head. Alinsky’s book was about using social agitation to strangle government. Clinton came up with the idea of using government to strangle society into agitation – using Rules for Radicals ‘from the inside’.

The Reagan Revolution put a damper on Cultural Marxism, but then when Bill Clinton became President, Hillary Clinton was able to start using and honing her techniques.

When Dubya became President, we had another remission, but then Obama became President, and he was another Alinsky follower. As much as Obama and HRC hate each other, they have the same basic ideology, and after he won the Presidency, she became SecState, and the two worked on Cultural Marxist ideals.

Internally, suddenly ‘privilege based oppression’ has now spread far further than ethnicity. In addition to white people oppressing ‘people of color’, we are told that men oppress women, that straight people oppress gay people, that sys-gendered people oppress trans-gendered people (and all other supposed genders, of which there are now 54 in New York), Christians oppress non-Christians and particularly Muslims, healthy people oppress fat people, and on and on and on. Each supposedly oppressed group is told that our society and its culture are the reason they are oppressed, with the obvious goal of destroying that society and its culture.

The destabilization of the Islamic world in the meantime, leading to the largest migration of people in human history, from the Islamic world into Western Europe, may be looked at from a different light. It was intentional, and the goal to destabilize and destroy Western European culture.

America is a tougher nut to crack. We are not yet as far along as Europe is, but we are in the cross hairs too, and though a Trump Presidency might slow things down, Cultural Marxism is not going anywhere. They will be very vocal for the next four years, and will then try to put another of their leaders into the White House.

The end goal of all of this is a communist world government.

It is important to note that the ‘theory’ part of ‘Critical Theory’ is not that the majority ‘in power’ will always utilize their freedom to oppress the minority. The actual theory is that if you can get a society to BELIEVE this nonsense, then the society and its culture will collapse. The notion that any majority ‘in power’ will invariably be oppressive is a necessary underlying assumption, and this assumption makes freedom the primary cause of oppression.

Early Cultural Marxists had plenty of examples of majorities oppressing minorities, and of minorities ‘in power’ oppressing majorities (hence the need to say ‘in power’ all the time), but they also realized that there were far more examples of majorities and minorities getting along. Furthermore, they realized that oppression was almost universally grounded in law, which was a clear indicator that the people, if left alone, tended to become less oppressive over time.

The people who wrote Jim Crow laws did not write them because they thought the white people of the time were overly racist, but because they were concerned that white people were not racist enough. Jim Crow laws forced people to act more racist than they otherwise would.

Similarly with homosexuals, while most of society may have looked down on homosexuality in the past, most of the actual oppression was caused by the fact that homosexual behaviors were illegal.

The underlying nature of oppression is not in freedom, but in law. Law restricts freedom, and free people tend to become less oppressive over time. This is exactly the opposite of what Critical Theory needs people to believe, and Cultural Marxism cannot exist without Critical Theory.

Critical Theory is wrong. It cannot stand up to critical analysis, and the early Cultural Marxists knew it.

Luckily for Cultural Marxism, the early Cultural Marxists had a brilliant solution: Political Correctness.

Political correctness is the notion that only an oppressed group has the right to discuss its oppression, and that any oppressed person who questions their oppression is a traitor to their group. Critical analysis of Critical Theory is thus rendered impossible without becoming politically incorrect, and anything that is not politically correct can be dismissed out of hand.

There is a reason social justice warriors shout down their opposition rather than trying to reason with them: reason is not on the side of the social justice warrior. Political Correctness is supposed to be a replacement for factual correctness, forcing the public to believe what is ‘proper’ such that it will ignore what is true. Reason works with truth, so the Social Justice Warrior must use emotion rather than reason.

We see Political Correctness all around us, in society at large, and even in the media. How for example do we know that the Russians have dirt they can use to extort President Elect Trump? Because a ‘potentially credible source, paid by the DNC, has unverifiable allegations’, according to CNN.

I would think that people would laugh at a news story that says that ‘a potentially credible source’ has ‘unverifiable allegations’. Unfortunately few people get past the headline, and today a very large percentage of the public really does believe that Trump is a Russian plant.

And because saying that Trump is NOT a Russian plant is not ‘politically correct’, if you question the narrative you become just as bad as Trump.

He or she who controls what is ‘politically correct’ controls the discussion. Anyone who crosses the lines of political correctness is disqualified from continued discussion, and once you cross the line there is no crossing back. The politically incorrect person is viewed as vile, evil – an outcast from polite society.

If you mention Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams to someone who believes in ‘privilege’ (the modern term for Critical Theory), notice how quickly they discredit them. Followers of Political Correctness will not discuss anything Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams say; they are presumed wrong simply because of who they are. And if you quote them, you become just as bad as they are.

Similarly, the new term, ‘fake news’, is nothing more than a way to spin sources such that factual news can be dismissed out of hand.

Followers of Political Correctness change the ‘proper terminology’ constantly, such that anyone who does not devote enough time to keeping up with the current crop of politically correct phrases can quickly be exposed as being a bad person. Speak and you will offend. Offend and you will be dismissed.

Political Correctness is designed to make opponents recoil and back down, and it largely works. When someone is called a racist, the natural reaction is to go on the defensive. As such, conservatives often retreat.

A better reaction would be to force the person charging ‘racism’ or some ‘phobism’ to defend their charge. Put THEM on the defensive, and let them try to rationally defend an irrational belief.

The great irony is that the belief that white men are somehow the pinnacle of society is also by definition the belief that woman and people of color are somehow inferior – that they cannot compete in any open and honest competition. The great irony of political correctness is that if you analyze it rationally, by its own rules it is not politically correct.

Most people fighting for Cultural Marxism have no idea that communism is the end goal. They subscribe to these beliefs because they are told in our public schools and universities that they are evil if they do not. They believe for purely emotional reasons.

Just as Cultural Marxism needs Critical Theory to survive, so too Critical Theory needs Political Correctness. Political Correctness in the meantime needs the majority to recoil whenever it is charged with being evil. Political Correctness is the weak link in the chain. We need only stand our ground and turn the tables to win.