User:Jobrot/sandbox

Cultural Marxism refers to the conspiracy theory that Political Correctness and multiculturalism as well as a number of other popular and widespread socially progressive movements have been created and popularized by Marxists with a view towards destroying Western society. Proponents of this theory often claim that Marxism controls much of Hollywood and the mass media. These claims are made despite much of the modern commercial media being transacted under capitalism. These claims are also made despite there being documentation for the origins of the modern usage of the term Political Correctness in the fortnightly literary journal La Quinzaine Littéraire in which French philosopher Michel Foucault coined the term in a 1968 interview response to Jean-Paul Sartre, stating "a political thought can be politically correct ("politiquement correcte") only if it is scientifically painstaking" and doing so several years before he learned of the often cited Marxism of The Frankfurt School which conspiracy proponents claim influenced this usage.

The definitive use of "Cultural Marxism" comes from William S. Lind in his essay 'What is Cultural Marxism?' in which Lind claims Cultural Marxists conceal "their work" in terms like Multiculturalism and Political Correctness, Lind also refers in this essay to the writings of Paul Weyrich in his capacity as founder of the conservative think tank The Free Congress Foundation where the Conspiracy Theory finds institutional support. Weyrich wrote in a 1999 Letter to a separate Conservative think tank The National Center for Public Policy Research calling for a "quarantine" as to "separate ourselves from this hostile culture [Cultural Marxism]" and suggests a "legitimate strategy" towards Cultural Marxism is 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.". Some have suggested this usage by the The Free Congress Foundation went on to inspire the Mass Murderer Anders Behring Breivik's 2011 manifesto, in which he uses the term prolifically,  with others going so far as to claim that the killings were a publicity stunt aimed at raising awareness of 'Cultural Marxism'.

The accusation Cultural Marxist is used by conservatives in a pejorative sense and can be seen as a form of Neo-McCarthyism fitting Michael Barkun's description of a Systemic conspiracy theory:


 * Systemic conspiracy theories. The conspiracy is believed to have broad goals, usually conceived as securing control of a country, a region, or even the entire world. While the goals are sweeping, the conspiratorial machinery is generally simple: a single, evil organization implements a plan to infiltrate and subvert existing institutions. This is a common scenario in conspiracy theories that focus on the alleged machinations of Jews, Freemasons, or the Catholic Church, as well as theories centered on Communism or international capitalists.

History and popularization of the conspiracy usage
Although the term 'Cultural Marxism' didn't come to widespread conservative usage until the Culture Wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Michael Minnicino's 1992 essay "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'" (published in Fidelio by the Schiller Institute) can be seen as laying the foundations for the modern conspiratorial usage. Jay (2010) notes that Daniel Estulin's book cites this essay and that the Free Congress Foundation's program was inspired by it. The Schiller Institute, a branch of the LaRouche movement, further promoted the idea in 1994. The Minnicino article charges that the Frankfurt School promoted Modernism in the arts as a form of Cultural pessimism, and played a role in shaping the 1960's counterculture. In 1999 Lind led the creation of an hour-long program Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School, in which the term was used more explicitly. According to historian Martin Jay the 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 You Tube, 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.'"

The term was brought to public prominence in the news media by the 2011 Norway attacks which provided the term media attention in the form of Anders Behring Breivik's manifesto.

Variations on the theory
Whilst the generic form of the conspiracy theory states that Cultural Marxists have created and popularized Political Correctness and Multiculturalism in the modern American context, each author on the subject adds their own variations to these themes.

Lind
William S. Lind, a writer for The Free Congress Foundation, is probably the most prolific advocate for the existence of a Cultural Marxist conspiracy. As one of the earliest progenitors of the conspiracy usage many of Lind's claims set lasting precedents for the theory. Lind considers himself a Christian as well as a Historian, and offers a Christian reading of history. Lind believes that traditional Western sexual morality has helped protect western Christian society from Cultural Marxism. Lind pays particular attention to homosexuality (often discussing the subject separately from other interest groups) and is of the view that "homosexuality is abnormal", but suggests Cultural Marxism may "normalize" it:""Today, when the cultural Marxists want to do something like “normalize” homosexuality, they do not argue the point philosophically. They just beam television show after television show into every American home where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual (the Frankfurt School’s key people spent the war years in Hollywood)." -William S. Lind" Lind rallies against notions of Political Correctness, claiming "Political Correctness is intellectual AIDS" and that The Frankfurt School "would become the place where political correctness, as we now know it, was developed. The basic answer to the question “Who stole our culture?” is the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School."

The Southern Poverty Law Center has claimed Lind is an anti-semite, pointing out that Lind seemed to have been "cultivating friends in some remarkable places. This June 15 [2002], at a major Holocaust denial conference put on by veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto in Washington, D.C., Lind gave a well-received speech before some 120 "historical revisionists," conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites, in which he identified a small group of people who he said had poisoned American culture. On this point, Lind made a powerful connection with his listeners. "These guys," he explained, "were all Jewish."''"

Weyrich
Paul Weyrich has been considerably more reserved in expressing his views on Cultural Marxism, but still played a crucial role in expounding the conspiracy theory - both by giving William S. Lind space to publicize his version (Weyrich and Lind previously wrote on the subject of public transport together ) as well as by expressing his own views in a pivotal letter to the The National Center for Public Policy Research.

In this letter Weyrich mourns the decline of conservatism as an influence on culture "The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer" and repeats the generic form of the conspiracy stating "Those who came up with Political Correctness, which we more accurately call "Cultural Marxism," did so in a deliberate fashion." Weyrich goes on to suggest a new strategy for conservatism, one of separatism and retraction to private cultural institutions stating:""I think that we have to look at a whole series of possibilities for bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy. If we expend our energies on fighting on the "turf" they already control, we will probably not accomplish what we hope, and we may spend ourselves to the point of exhaustion. The promising thing about a strategy of separation is that it has more to do with who we are, and what we become, than it does with what the other side is doing and what we are going to do about it." Paul Weyrich"

This was widely interpreted as Weyrich calling for a retreat from politics, but he almost immediately issued a clarification stating this was not his intent. }}

Talk radio host Mike O'Meara in a review of Weyrich and Lind's book, 'The Next Conservatism'  suggests The Free Congress Foundation "advocates the creation of parallel institutions to counter the dominant left cultural forces", O'Meara goes on to criticise Lind and Weyrich conception of Cultural Marxism directly, stating: ""What Lind and Weyrich call “cultural Marxism” and blame for much of the current disorder ought, more accurately in my view, to be seen as a form of “cultural liberalism." -Mike O'Meara" He also points out that much of The Frankfurt School's writings were not yet translated into English when the 60's cultural revolution occurred. O'Meara also compares Weyrich and Lind's reductionist conception of Cultural Marxist to "the vulgar anti-Semitism often found in white nationalist ranks — the sort that thinks everything wrong with white society is attributable solely to the omnipotent Jews."

Breivik
Anders Behring Breivik's use of Cultural Marxism comes mostly from his Manifesto '2083 – A European Declaration of Independence'  in which he often equates Cultural Marxism to other political concepts, often simply by bracketing one term after another as if to associate them, or as if to equate them by separating terms with a simple backslash, such instances pervade his Manifesto and may suggest how all-pervasive he believed the conspiracy to be.

Unlike other proponents of the term, Breivik has shown sympathies with far-right versions of Zionism, and leans more towards an anti-islamic perspective.

In his Manifesto Breivik parallels the words of William S. Lind very closely, at times verbatim:""Just what is “Political Correctness?” Political Correctness is in fact cultural Marxism (Cultural Communism) – Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms." -Anders Behring Breivik" ""Just what is Political Correctness? The "Politically Correct" people on your campus really, really don't want you to know the answer to that question. Why? Because Political Correctness is nothing less than Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms." -William S. Lind" Breivik also shares the view that "cultural Marxism is to destroy or deconstruct Western Civilisation (where the Christian European patriarchy has dominated historically) and instead create the USASSR/EUSSR, a communist utopia based on Marxist-Leninist principles."

On top of the generic claims, Breivik adds a number of new ideological and religious concepts to his conception of the conspiracy theory, some of which appear to be uniquely European, claiming:
 * "[The] Sexually transmitted disease (STD) epidemic in Western Europe [is] a result of cultural Marxism"
 * "Cultural Marxism defines... ...Muslims, Feminist women, homosexuals and some additional minority groups as virtuous and they view :ethnic Christian European men as evil"
 * "The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg is a cultural Marxist controlled political entity"

Near the end of his Manifesto Breivik reveals his opinion of how twisted such Cultural Marxists are, stating:"They will label me as a racist, fascist, Nazi-monster as they usually do with everyone who opposes multiculturalism/cultural Marxism. However, since I manifest their worst nightmare (systematical and organized executions of multiculturalist traitors), they will probably just give me the full propaganda rape package and propagate the following accusations: pedophile, engaged in incest activities, homosexual, psycho, ADHD, thief, non-educated, inbred, maniac, insane, monster etc. I will be labeled as the biggest (Nazi-)monster ever witnessed since WW2." Going on to lord himself for as a modern day Saviour of Europe:"Regardless of the above cultural Marxist propaganda; I will always know that I am perhaps the biggest champion of cultural conservatism, Europe has ever witnessed since 1950. I am one of many destroyers of cultural Marxism and as such; a hero of Europe, a savior of our people and of European Christendom – by default. A perfect example which should be copied, applauded and celebrated. The Perfect Knight I have always strived to be. A Justiciar Knight is a destroyer of multiculturalism, and as such; a destroyer of evil and a bringer of light. I will know that I did everything I could to stop and reverse the European cultural and demographical genocide and end and reverse the Islamisation of Europe."

According to Matthew Feldman of the BBC, Breivik wanted his actions to serve as a form of "terrorist PR" for his manifesto.

Buchanan
One time Presidential Candidate Pat Buchanan made his views on Cultural Marxism known in a 2006 documentary by James Jaeger entitled Fiat Empire. In it Buchanan claims that an "anti-christian, anti-god, anti-traditionalist" form of "militant secularism" has caused a cultural revolution that was partly a sexual revolution, resulting in Cultural Marxism being the dominant form of Culture in the USA. He echoes his 1992 speech in which he called for a "...cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself." this time stating "we are, those of us who are traditionalists, are now the counter culture" In the documentary Buchanan can be seen committing the common mis-attribution of Rudi Dutschke's "Long march through the institutions" quote wrongfully to Antonio Gramsci. Buchanan reissues several claims of the generic forms of the conspiracy theory, but does so with a religious spin claiming that the aim of Cultural Marxists is to create an anti-christian culture which would leave the population open to a take over "not by political Marxists, but by Cultural Marxists". 

Pat Buchanan restated his belief that a Cultural Marxists conspiracy had taken over America on the Sean Hannity show in October of 2011, just 4 months after the 2011 Norway attacks. In the show Buchanan parrots William S. Lind's viewpoint that "the West’s traditional sexual morals" are part of what protects it from Cultural Marxism. He also repeats his prior mis-attribution of Rudi Dutschke's "Long march through the institutions" quote once again mis-attributing the words to Antonio Gramsci, and claims that Cultural Marxist have caused a "transvaluation of all values in society".

Jaeger
James Jaeger is an independent researcher who has made notable contributions to spreading the conspiracy viewpoint of Cultural Marxism by producing several documentary films which advocate for it, he won a Telly award and has been working in the film industry for over 25 years. Jaeger also runs the website The Jaeger Research Institute which contains many of his personal views.

Jaeger is of the belief that Critical Theory is used by Cultural Marxists in order to repeatedly ask seemingly innocent questions of individuals with the hope that these questions become associated to the individual in order to taint the public's perception of them. Jaeger believes Cultural Marxists came up with the concept of Androgyny, and that "every major Hollywood motion picture is green-lit by the same 21 politically liberal, not-very-religious, Jewish males of European heritage who police the screenplays to make sure 'androgyny' and 'critical theory' are properly implanted in the writing."

Jaeger has featured in his films such notable personalities as Pat Buchanan Ron Paul Alex Jones and fellow conspiracy theory advocate (of "What in the World Are They Spraying?" fame) G. Edward Griffin.

The academic usage and its limits
The term Cultural Marxism has found intermittent usage within academia and is most likely what the conspiracy usage has been built around. In academia it's used to refer to The Frankfurt School's early influences on the development of Cultural Studies, but is firmly restricted by academic consensus to Cultural Studies prior to 1980s Post Modernism.

A variant of the term exists as "British Cultural Marxism" and is used to refer to the influences of The Birmingham School.

Ph.D Professor Douglas Kellner cites the influence of socialist and revolutionary political strands on Critical theory as coming to an end in the 1980s, stating in his essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies"

""During this phase -- roughly from the mid-1980s to the present -- cultural studies in Britain and North America turned from the socialist and revolutionary politics of the previous stages to postmodern forms of identity politics and less critical perspectives on media and consumer culture.""

The term's emphasis on Culture, is in direct conflict with the view that Marxism focuses on Historical Materialism as it's mode of analysis. Making a "Cultural" Marxism, an oxymoron.

Additional Resources
- Nicolea Ceausescu promoting feminist policies (english sub)

- KUHNER: America, ‘home of the gay’

- 'Cultural Marxism': a uniting theory for rightwingers who love to play the victim

- Making friends with the frightbats

- Christian Nazi website promoting the 'Cultural Marxism' conspiracy theory.

MotherJones article looking at a conspiracy theorists book on the subject (mostly anti-islamic).

=Quotes= "The homosexual agenda is cultural Marxism masquerading as “progress.” Its goal is to redefine the family into an appendage of the homosexual movement, seeking to transform men and women into interchangeable parts. Children don’t need two daddies or two mommies. They need a father and a mother. Same-sex marriage is not just wrong. It goes against nature, morality and God. That’s why — like every other attempt at social engineering — it is doomed to fail. The cultural wreckage, however, will be immense. America is sliding toward Sodom and Gomorrah." 

"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." ... "These guys," he explained, "were all Jewish".

"The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the 'ocal black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble". 

"Today, when the cultural Marxists want to do something like “normalize” homosexuality, they do not argue the point philosophically. They just beam television show after television show into every American home where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual (the Frankfurt School’s key people spent the war years in Hollywood)". 

Modern usage of the term Political Correctness
An early definition for the modern usage of the term Political Correctness comes from the fortnightly literary journal La Quinzaine Littéraire in which French philosopher Michel Foucault states as part of a 1968 interview response to Jean-Paul Sartre, that "a political thought can be politically correct ("politiquement correcte") only if it is scientifically painstaking" A decade later in Duccio Trombadori's book Remarks on Marx Foucault stated of the Frankfurt School "...their influence on me remains retrospective, a contribution reached when I was no longer at the age of intellectual “discoveries.” And I don’t even know whether to be glad or to feel sorry about it.

People Who Say Cultural Marxism isn't Marxist

 * Jérôme Jamin, Anders Breivik et le « marxisme culturel » : Etats-Unis/Europe, Amnis, vol. 12, 2013-07-01, DOI:10.4000/amnis.2004


 * The Strange Death of Marxism- The European Left in the New Millennium - Paul Gottfried - Google Books


 * "Nothing intrinsicaly Marxist, that is to say, defines "cultural Marxism," save for the evocation or hope of a postbourgeois society."


 * "The mistake of those who see one position sequeing into another is to confuse contents with personalities."


 * C.L.R. James's Notes on Dialectics- Left Hegelianism Or Marxism-Leninism? - John H. McClendon - Google Books


 * Paul Gottfried former student of Herbert Marcuse - "In my memoirs Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers, I recall Herbert Marcuse’s perplexed reaction to ardent feminists in his class as they expounded their sexual liberationist views. He may have been a Stalinist but he was not a total maniac. Although chaos had to be unleashed to destroy a repressive capitalist society, Marcuse thought (at least before he went out to California and became dotty) that something would have to be put in the place of what had been subverted, and that something would require social order." -Paul Gottfried

New References and text to add
Dr Heidi Beirich Hate Across the Waters: The Role of American Extremists in Fostering an International White Consciousness

Dr Heidi Beirich and Kevin Hicks White Nationalism in America ''

John E. Richardson

Jason Wilson of The Guardian has described the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory as "a uniting theory for rightwingers who love to play the victim" and has counted the Gamergate movement among it's proponents, and Dr. Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center has traced the idea from White Nationalist movements back to William S. Lind and Paul Weyrich, claiming it's used to demonise various conservative bête noire (black beasts) "feminists, homosexuals, secular humanists, multiculturalist, sex educators, environmentalist, immigrants, and black nationlists."

Page 5 Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain "significan differences existed between the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxist approaches to politics."

"My account is the first intellectual history to study British cultural Marxism conceived as a coherent intellectual discipline" (pg. 3)

Gottfried, Paul - VDARE:

""In my memoirs Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers, I recall Herbert Marcuse’s perplexed reaction to ardent feminists in his class as they expounded their sexual liberationist views. He may have been a Stalinist but he was not a total maniac. Although chaos had to be unleashed to destroy a repressive capitalist society, Marcuse thought (at least before he went out to California and became dotty) that something would have to be put in the place of what had been subverted, and that something would require social order."" 

"Today, when the cultural Marxists want to do something like 'normalize' homosexuality, they do not argue the point philosophically. They just beam television show after television show into every American home where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual (the Frankfurt School’s key people spent the war years in Hollywood)." -William S. Lind

"every major Hollywood motion picture is green-lit by the same 21 politically liberal, not-very-religious, Jewish males of European heritage who police the screenplays to make sure 'androgyny' and 'critical theory' are properly implanted in the writing." -James Jaeger (producer of multiple 'documentaries' on the subject)

"The homosexual agenda is cultural Marxism masquerading as 'progress' Its goal is to redefine the family into an appendage of the homosexual movement, seeking to transform men and women into interchangeable parts. Children don’t need two daddies or two mommies. They need a father and a mother. Same-sex marriage is not just wrong. It goes against nature, morality and God. That’s why — like every other attempt at social engineering — it is doomed to fail. The cultural wreckage, however, will be immense. America is sliding toward Sodom and Gomorrah." -Jeffrey T. Kuhner

Buchanan says in his book The Death of the West: "Political Correctness is Cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance."(p. 89)

The Frankfurt School were western, and critical of Soviet Communism
The proponents of the theory are claiming The Frankfurt School aims to DESTROY western civilization - this is of great irony as The Frankfurt School comes from an academic tradition within western civilization. Even Marx himself is from the area now known as modern Germany (a western country), Marx later lived in France (a western country) and then London (a city in a western country). The American christian right's attempt to paint The Frankfurt School as the foreign invader to the west is absolutely part of the conspiracy theory viewpoint. But they're all from the west! --Jobrot (talk) 09:16, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

ADORNO

"Adorno, the arch-critic of capitalism, is no advocate of communism, actually existing or not. Indeed, he is serverly critical of Soviet communism."

''Adorno is highly critical of the Soviet Union for its use of state terror. Adorno, GS 20.1, 391. Speaking in private to Horkheimer in 1956 he goes so far as to say that the "Russians are fascists" and not socialists. T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "Towards a communism by implication when he claims that the abolition of private property leads to "a loveless disregard for things, which necessarily turns against people too." Adorno, Minima Moralia, 39. C.d.Adorno, "New Manifesto," 59.''

HORKHEIMER

"The barbarity of fascism, the establishment of Soviet state capitalism with the tyranny of Stalinism, and the stability of capitalism through the integrative power of mass culture together led to a radical reexamination of the underlying assumptions that informed the [Frankfurt School's] concept of critique employed in the 1930s."

Marcuse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Marxism:_A_Critical_Analysis

"Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious." -William S. Lind showing his awareness of KulkuralBolshivmis

Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory
"Cultural Marxism" originated in the 1970s as an informal niche term describing certain Western Marxists who were transitioning away from structural Marxism and towards cultural analysis. During the late 1990s the term became part of an ongoing culture war through which it has now become synonymous with a conspiracy theory that regards the Frankfurt School as the origin of a contemporary movement in the political left to take over and destroy Western culture. The conspiracy theory advocates the idea that The Frankfurt School had a unanimous set of beliefs and were deliberately attempting to engineer the collapse of the West via multiculturalism and political correctness. The theory is associated with American religious paleoconservatives such as William S. Lind, Pat Buchanan and Paul Weyrich.

Weyrich first aired his conception of Cultural Marxism in a 1998 speech to the Civitas Institute's Conservative Leadership Conference, later repeating this usage in his highly publicized Open Letter to Conservatives. 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 media and claims that Herbert Marcuse considered a coalition of "blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals" as a vanguard of Cultural revolution. Lind has since published his own depiction of a fictional Cultural Marxist apocalypse written under the Pen name Thomas Hobbes. Lind and Weyrich's writings on this subject advocate fighting 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.

In 1999 Lind led the creation of an hour-long program entitled "Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School". Some of Lind's content was later reproduced by James Jaeger in his YouTube film "Original Intent" which wrongly attributes quotes from Pat Buchanan's "Death of the West" as having come from The Frankfurt School themselves. The intellectual historian Martin Jay commented on this phenomena saying 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.'"

Dr. Heidi Beirich likewise claims the concept is used to demonize "feminists, homosexuals, secular humanists, multiculturalist, sex educators, environmentalist, immigrants, and black nationalists."

According to Chip Berlet, who specializes in the study of extreme right-wing movements, the 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.

In 2003 The Southern Poverty Law Center made the claim that William S. Lind attended a Holocaust Denial conference in 2002 to give a lecture on his conception of Cultural Marxism, but was careful to note that he did not "question whether the Holocaust occurred" and was there in an official capacity "to work with a wide variety of groups on an issue-by-issue basis".

Although it became more widespread in the late 1990s and 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. The Schiller Institute, a branch of the LaRouche movement, further promoted the idea in 1994. 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.

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 about 90 minutes before the 2011 bomb blast in Oslo for which Breivik was responsible. Segments of William S. Lind's writings on Cultural Marxism can be found within Breivik's manifesto.

Philosopher and political science lecturer Jérôme Jamin has stated that "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". 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. William S. Lind confirms this as his period of interest, claiming 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."

New text should it become a mainstream news story
In February 2016 Australian journalist Chris Uhlmann, writing in The Australian, attributed criticism of former prime minister Tony Abbott's address to the Alliance Defending Freedom to the influence of Gramsci's ideas on the West, saying:


 * Frankfurt School academics fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany transmitted the intellectual virus to the US and set about systematically destroying the culture of the society that gave them sanctuary.

Writing in The Guardian, journalist Jason Wilson described Uhlmann as repeating the details of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. Wilson says that the use of the concept by Uhlmann - who is also the political editor for Australia's national broadcaster the Australian Broadcasting Corporation - indicates that the conspiracy theory has penetrated "mainstream conservatism", as predicted by the Southern Poverty Law Centre in 2002. Wilson says that before Uhlmann, Kevin Donnelly and Nick Cater also gave potted versions of the story. Wilson stresses that there is "no suggestion" that Uhlmann is anti-Semitic, but "his metaphors of infection and internal subversion are exceptionally poorly chosen [and he] should have not got himself entangled in a theory that the right – mainstream and extreme – are increasingly happy to use to paint themselves as history’s victims."

Safe Schools program referred to as "Cultural Relativism" and "Marxism"

How the alt-right fell in love with art theory (ie. the whole "StarWars is Cultural Marxism thing":

Cultural Marxism as connected to GamerGate and Congress-edits:

A credible recent article from Al Jazera:

The far right political parties Golden Dawn Australia and the Australia First Party  have decried Cultural Marxism as the origin of a decline in Western Civilization.

The national review claim Rio Olympics is Cultural Marxism

Mises Institute

Vox on Breitbart Breitbart calling Cultural Marxism a push for Necrophilia/brainwashing

Another Jason Wilson:

The Guardian, Al Jazeera , Salon , Fair Observer , The New Matilda , ArtNet , Buzzfeed , The Huffington Post.

some quotes and some ordering of arguments
"Those who spent their money in the nineteenth or the early twentieth century to see a play or to go to a concert respected the performance as much as the money they spent."

"As is well known, the major reorganisation of the film industry shortly before World War I, the material prerequisite of its expansion, was precisely its deliberate acceptance of the public’s needs as recorded at the box-office – a procedure which was hardly thought necessary in the pioneering days of the screen."

"This raises the question whether the culture industry fulfils the function of diverting minds which it boasts about so loudly. If most of the radio stations and movie theatres were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so very much. To walk from the street into the movie theatre is no longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there would be no great urge to do so. Such closures would not be reactionary machine wrecking. The disappointment would be felt not so much by the enthusiasts as by the slow-witted, who are the ones who suffer for everything anyhow. In spite of the films which are intended to complete her integration, the housewife finds in the darkness of the movie theatre a place of refuge where she can sit for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she used to look out of the window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in the great cities find coolness in summer and warmth in winter in these temperature-controlled locations. Otherwise, despite its size, this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man’s lives. The idea of “fully exploiting” available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger."


 * I accept the fact that your edit was not an intentional violation of policy; but you have to accept the fact that there's a reason why I keep mentioning that WP:FRINGE is in play. We both seem to agree that a partial quote from Pat Buchanan is being passed off as a Marcuse quote in James Jaeger's "CULTURAL MARXISM: The Corruption of America" (starting from 14:35 and going to approximately 15:55 ) - and we both seem to agree that Buchanan and Jaeger are non-academic sources who are biased in the pro-conspiracy direction (as in they believe The Frankfurt School were an intentional threat to Western Society rather than a part of Western Societies academic and human rights traditions). Here is where we disagree, with your statement that I'm:


 * ...the one who is on shaky ground policy-wise, between your OR on the actual source of the quote, your determination that the video narrator is "attributing" the quote to Marcuse, and your reliance on analysis from an anonymous you-tube vlog.


 * First of all let's get the question of attribution and a "you-tube vlog" out of the way: Let's say I go on National TV talking about a certain "evil" Wikipedia editor named Jerry Russell (obviously I don't think your evil, I know you're a good editor so this is just a silly example) - and on National TV I make up stuff about your politics and your intentions and then I say "but don't take my word for it let's listen to Jerry Russell himself!" Then comes up a photo of your face; and over it is a friend of mine who does a very good impersonation of you and your national accent - wouldn't you say I'm trying to attribute what ever words are then dubbed over your image to YOU yourself; Jerry Russell's account hold/user - the person behind the screen who is reading this now? Isn't that enough to say I'm ATTRIBUTING it to you (whether wrongly or rightly). Isn't that the nature of attribution through the medium of video... and doesn't that appear to happen in both the long-form documentary as found on James Jaeger's official channel on the subject; AND within the smaller clip of that longer documentary?  All of this would seem to confirm that yes indeed we have a video documentary which whether correctly or incorrectly IS (by common techniques found within the medium of video documentary) trying to attribute a quote to Herbert Marcuse. That to me seems plain as day.


 * So I think that clarifies that 'attribution' can indeed be performed visually using the common language of video-documentaries and news media (where a picture combined with voice over or text is the method of attribution), and that it's fine to use this terminology. Also let's establish that this terminology is fine to use; even if the original quote is false or does not exist (and that in that case it would be an 'incorrect attribution').


 * Now your counter-claim to this attribution being called 'incorrect' (which you suggest may be WP:OR on my part) is that "well it may be a lost recording of Marcuse we just haven't found yet" this in part conflicts with your seeming agreement that there's at least partial overlap between the video's claim and Pat Buchanan's text (by the way this is circumstantial; but Pat Buchanan does appear in Jaeger's video - the two know each other) - and for my own policy arguments this is really where WP:FRINGE comes in.


 * It's commonly accepted on Wikipedia that "no policy works alone" so WP:FRINGE is intended to function "hand in glove" with WP:RS and WP:NPOV - and in particular WP:FRINGE seeks to use WP:RS sources in order to decide what statements can and can't be declared 'neutral' in terms of adopting a 'neutral' point of view. Specifically WP:RS seeks ACADEMIC sources to vet WP:FRINGE sources against. Put simply; if a claim from a non-WP:NEUTRAL source or a WP:FRINGE source seems suspect; it should be weighed against WP:RS academic sources in order to verify the likelihood of it being true or false. To my mind; this policy is in place as it helps avoiding instances (common when arguing with proponents of conspiracy theories) - where an editor is asked to prove a negative; or in this instance; asked to prove someone DIDN'T say something.


 * Just for a moment; I'd like you to visit this snopes page which I believe presents a relevant case-study for this sort of thing: . It is in fact quite common for historical Marxists to be misquoted or for false-quotes to be manufactured by conservatives. If you direct your attention to the dot points on that snopes page; you might see some familiarity with what we're dealing with here; in that we've already discussed whether the quote in question is "characteristic of Marcuse". To that end I'd like to submit this clip of Herbert Marcus speaking on this topic (particularly starting at time index 3:20): Source


 * "'Well, I was not the mentor of the student activists of the 60s and early 70s, what I did is forumulate and articulate some ideas and some goals that were in there at that time. That it is about it. The student generation that became active during these years did not need a father figure or a grandfather figure in order to lead them to protest a society which revealed daily its inequality, injustice, cruelty and its general dystopicness. They could experience it; they see it before their own eyes. As the features of this society I only mention the heritage of fascism. Fascism was militarily defeated. The potential for a repetition was still there. I would like to mention racism, sexism, the general insecurity, the pollution of the environment, the degradation of education, the degradation of work and so on and so on. In other words what exploded in the 60s and early 70s was a blatant contrast between the tremendous available social wealth, and its miserable, destructive and wasteful use.' -Herbert Marcuse"


 * What is apparent to me in this clip is that Marcuse is a) very capable of discussing these topics dispassionately. He never raises his voice, never appeals to concepts like 'evil', doesn't get emotional and has no hate or cringe to his voice. He also b) indicates that he's an anti-fascist and c) claims no ownership over the student movements of the 1960s and in no way initiated them; he was merely writing about the same social pressures.


 * On that last point I believe it's important to keep in mind that Marcuse had a very strong role in the de-nazification of Germany. That in many ways went on to inform his broader social critiques and thinking. But as you can tell it was always done with a view to understanding wealth gaps in society, and how wealth and economic class privileges in the construction of culture were used and abused (this is a tradition which Nancy Fraser continues today). Likewise in Adorno's writings when he says in relation to the emergent decadence of the 1960s and 70s Hollywood film industry:


 * "'this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man’s lives. The idea of “fully exploiting” available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger.' -Theodore Adorno"


 * Again you can see it's a criticism of society in terms of how it treats the poor. It's not merely the continuous claim that society is "evil" or "racist or sexism" and it doesn't mention genocide of xenophobia as are mentioned in the clip.


 * My point is that sources have to be classed by their level of bias. I believe Marcuse and Adorno are the only reliable sources for Marcuse and Adorno quotes. James Jaeger I'd say is a conspiracy nut, he's probably the lowest quality source in the whole section next to Lind; and Pat Buchanan being pre-alt-right is probably just above Lind and Jaeger but is still on the conservative side; still conspiratorial in his viewpoint of The Frankfurt School and still non-WP:Neutral and not WP:RS. So where as Pat Buchanan and James Jaeger can be used in reference to Pat Buchanan and James Jaeger I don't believe they can be used to provide accurate sources for anything The Frankfurt School actually said.


 * So yes; I would like to invoke the WP:BLUESKY policy you mentioned earlier; and take these sources and quotes as a whole and in context. The intention behind the Buchanan/Jaeger sources is obviously to mischaracterize and misattribute a quote that's been constructed to sound like Marcuse - but is demeaning and far from what he actually said (and likewise the "documentary" is intended to demean The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory in general). So I think the current section is a legitimate use of policy and particularly in reference to the functions of WP:FRINGE and WP:BLUESKY. The onus is not on us to prove a negative; it's on these documents to provide proper sourcing. --Jobrot (talk) 03:12, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory
Cultural Marxism is The Frankfurt School's critique of The Culture Industry. It is a form of anti-capitalist cultural critique which specifically targets those aspects of culture that are seen as profit driven and mass produced by capitalism. As an area of discourse it has commonly considered the industrialization and mass-production of culture by The Culture Industry as having an overall negative effect on society, an effect - it is claimed - that can reify the audience away from developing a more authentic sense of human values.

Traditional targets of criticism for this school of thought have been forms of mass communication such as the Hollywood cinema industry, radio, news media, and television. Pioneers of this mode of analysis include The Frankfurt School thinkers, The Birmingham School and E.P. Thompson, all of whom have their backgrounds within the Marxist and Neo-Marxist traditions.

Within more recent history Cultural Marxists have critiqued post modernism in favour of 'communicative reason' and identity politics (also known as recognition politics), in favour of redistributive politics.

Cultural Marxism has been slandered by Cultural Conservatives and mistaken for Cultural liberalism, a separate and more permissive strain of cultural thought. The hyperbole and misinterpretation involved in this Culture War has led to Cultural Marxism being seen as a kind of Conspiracy Theory. Also see the Frankfurt_School section.

History of the term
'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.

The term 'cultural Marxism' started out as having a niche academic usage within cultural studies where it refers to a form of anti-capitalist cultural critique which specifically targets The Culture Industry. 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.

The term remained niche and did not find wider use until the late 1990s when it was misappropriated by paleoconservatives as part of an ongoing Culture War in which it is claimed 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. 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.

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. 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. Lind has since published his own depiction of a fictional Cultural Marxist apocalypse. 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. Paul Weyrich and his protégé Eric Heubeck later openly advocated a more direct form of "taking over political structures" by the "New Traditionalist Movement" in his 2001 paper The Integration of Theory and Practice written for Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation.

In 1999 Lind led the creation of an hour-long program entitled "Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School". Some of Lind's content went on to be reproduced by James Jaeger in his YouTube film "CULTURAL MARXISM: The Corruption of America".

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.'"

Dr. Heidi Beirich likewise claims the conspiracy theory is used to demonize various conservative “bêtes noires” including "feminists, homosexuals, secular humanists, multiculturalist, sex educators, environmentalist, immigrants, and black nationalists."

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.

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".

Adherents of the theory often seem to mean that the existence of things like modern feminism, anti-white racism, and sexualization are dependent on the Frankfurt School, even though these processes and movements predate the 1920s. 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.Jay, Martin (2010), "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe". Salmagundi (Fall 2010-Winter 2011, 168–169): 30–40. Quote:"On August 18, 2010, Fidel Castro contributed an article to the Cuban Communist Party paper Granma in which he endorsed the bizarre allegations of an obscure Lithuanian-born conspiracy theorist named Daniel Estulin in a 2005 book entitled The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club ... what makes his embrace of Estulin's book especially risible is the subordinate argument—and this is the part that most concerns me here—that the inspiration for the subversion of domestic unrest came from Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal and their colleagues at the Institute for Social search in the 1950's. Here we have clearly broken through the looking glass and entered a parallel universe in which normal rules of evidence and plausibility have been suspended. It is a mark of the silliness of these claims that they [were] even subjected to ridicule by Rush Limbaugh on his August 20, 2010 radio show ... Limbaugh, to be sure, ignored the other most blatant absurdity in Estulin's scheme, which was attributing to the Frankfurt School a position precisely opposite to what its members had always taken. That is, when they discussed the "culture industry" it was with the explicit criticism, ironically echoed here by Castro, that it functioned to reconcile people to their misery and dull the pain of their suffering ... But the opening salvo had, in fact, been fired a decade earlier in a lengthy essay by one Michael Minnicino called "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'," published in 1992 in the obscure journal Fidelio.[4] Its provenance is particularly telling: it was an organ of the Lyndon Larouche movement cum cult, one of the less savory curiosities of nightmare fringe politics ...What began as a bizarre Lyndon Larouche coinage has become the common currency of a larger and larger public of addled enragés ... The Schiller Institute, a branch of the LaRouche movement, further promoted the idea in 1994. 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. The Larouche movement is otherwise mostly known for believing that the British Empire still exists, is trying to take control of the world (mostly, but not exclusively by economical means), and, among other things, also controls the global drug trade.

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. Segments of William S. Lind's writings on Cultural Marxism have been found within Breivik's manifesto.

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". 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. William S. Lind confirms this as his period of interest, claiming 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."

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.

The term 'cultural Marxism' had an academic usage within cultural studies where in the 1970s it referred 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. 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. 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.

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 claimed 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. 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.

Weyrich first aired his misappropriation of the term '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. 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. Lind has since published his own depiction of a fictional Cultural Marxist apocalypse. 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.

In 1999 Lind led the creation of an hour-long program entitled "Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School". Some of Lind's content went on to be reproduced by James Jaeger in his YouTube film "CULTURAL MARXISM: The Corruption of America".

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.'"

Heidi Beirich likewise claims the conspiracy theory is used to demonize various conservative “bêtes noires” including "feminists, homosexuals, secular humanists, multiculturalist, sex educators, environmentalist, immigrants, and black nationalists."

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.

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 claims 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".

Adherents of the theory often seem to mean that the existence of things like modern feminism, anti-white racism, and sexualization are dependent on the Frankfurt School, even though these processes and movements predate the 1920s. 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.Jay, Martin (2010), "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe". Salmagundi (Fall 2010-Winter 2011, 168–169): 30–40. Quote:"On August 18, 2010, Fidel Castro contributed an article to the Cuban Communist Party paper Granma in which he endorsed the bizarre allegations of an obscure Lithuanian-born conspiracy theorist named Daniel Estulin in a 2005 book entitled The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club ... what makes his embrace of Estulin's book especially risible is the subordinate argument—and this is the part that most concerns me here—that the inspiration for the subversion of domestic unrest came from Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal and their colleagues at the Institute for Social search in the 1950's. Here we have clearly broken through the looking glass and entered a parallel universe in which normal rules of evidence and plausibility have been suspended. It is a mark of the silliness of these claims that they [were] even subjected to ridicule by Rush Limbaugh on his August 20, 2010 radio show ... Limbaugh, to be sure, ignored the other most blatant absurdity in Estulin's scheme, which was attributing to the Frankfurt School a position precisely opposite to what its members had always taken. That is, when they discussed the "culture industry" it was with the explicit criticism, ironically echoed here by Castro, that it functioned to reconcile people to their misery and dull the pain of their suffering ... But the opening salvo had, in fact, been fired a decade earlier in a lengthy essay by one Michael Minnicino called "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'," published in 1992 in the obscure journal Fidelio.[4] Its provenance is particularly telling: it was an organ of the Lyndon Larouche movement cum cult, one of the less savory curiosities of nightmare fringe politics ...What began as a bizarre Lyndon Larouche coinage has become the common currency of a larger and larger public of addled enragés ... The Schiller Institute, a branch of the LaRouche movement, further promoted the idea in 1994. 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.

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. Segments of William S. Lind's writings on Cultural Marxism have been found within Breivik's manifesto.

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, "inter-operating with" Islamists, globalists, bankers, the media and members of the Republican and Democratic parties.

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". 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. William S. Lind confirms this as his period of interest, claiming 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."

---

"The analysis of the culture industry recognizes that cultural commodifaction is the extension of the logic of commodity production within a commodity-fetishistic framework to a seemingly non-economic terrain. In this regard, Horkheimer and Adorno give the lie to a dualist-Marxist separation of base and superstructure or economics and culture." p63

"Cultural Marxism turns Marxist economism upside down not in order to reverse the purarive structural priority of base ove superstructure (with culture now becoming predominant 'in the last instance') but to win culture a realm of theoretical" p43