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The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy feat. A.J.A. Woods (E378)
01:04:50
Travis and Annie are joined by intellectual histo…
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- [00:00]
A
Sam, if you're hearing this, well done.
- [00:34]
B
You found a way to connect to the Internet. Welcome to the qaa podcast, episode 378, the Cultural Marxism Conspiracy featuring Aja Woods. As always, we are your hosts, Travis
- [00:46]
A
View and Annie Kelly.
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B
Father's Day was this past weekend and that's why on Friday I traveled down to the city of Oceanside, California to spend some time with my in laws. When I was walking and driving around there, I was struck by how much it had changed since I was a teenager. It used to be this working class and military town was the cheapest place in San Diego county to have a beach day. Now there's a lot more upscale housing, fine dining, restaurants, museums and galleries. And maybe it's for the best. I really don't know enough to say, but that's not the point. The point is that it made me a little uncomfortable that my understanding of the city acquired from decades ago, doesn't match what I was seeing in 2026. Now, I assume there are some complex economic and policy reasons for the changes. And of course things always change, and remembering how things were different is just a byproduct of living long. But during his time I was also reading and thinking about the new book the Cultural Marxism why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the west by Aja Woods. And that led me to consider another possibility. Perhaps the changes to the city were not caused by a combination of the priorities of the local residents and capitalist incentives. Perhaps Oceanside had changed as part of a decades long plot dreamed up by people who hated that. I was once able to fill up on fish tacos for pocket change, easily find a free parking spot and spend half a day catching small waves with a washed up boogie board. And so corrupt city administrators, motivated by this poisonous ideology, made it their life's mission to change the area in ways to irritate me specifically. Consequently, if we want to return Oceanside to its past glory, meaning of course, as a place where I'm younger and have fewer responsibilities, it's just a matter of identifying this ideology and rooting it out. Now, maybe that won't work, but that is roughly how generations of some people on the right responded to cultural and political changes that they didn't like. As the Cultural Marxism conspiracy explains, conservatives and far right activists have placed a lot of blame on the Frankfurt School, which was founded by a group of mostly German Jewish intellectuals who studied capitalism, culture, authoritarianism and modernity. Especially after the rise of fascism, the Frankfurt School served as a scapegoat for the cultural changes associated with the long 1960s feminism, anti racism, LGBTQ visibility, environmentalism, multiculturalism and student Protestant. More recently, the specter of cultural Marxism has driven anxiety around what conservative media calls political correctness, wokeness and gender ideology. Today I am joined by woods to discuss the genealogy of cultural Marxism and why is still such a popular and pervasive kind of concept today. AJ thank you so much for joining us.
- [03:25]
C
Indeed, thank you very much for having me on. This is another instance of sort of longtime listener, first time caller. So I'm very glad that you invited me to talk.
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B
Yeah, I mean, like I was telling you before, Recording is like my favorite kind of book that explains where these ideas come from. Because whenever there's an idea that sort of simultaneously pervasive and like popular and odd, I was like, I always want to know who came up with it come up. This didn't come out of the ether. And this certainly helps demystify the whole concept of cultural Marxism that's, that's so, so, so embedded in a lot of right wing ideology.
- [04:03]
C
What I specify in the book is that our idea of cultural Marxism, that we're famil comes from a whole bunch of places. I mean, it's. The book itself is almost a kind of patchwork history of bringing together all of those different patches that we kind of know in our minds as the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. It comes a bit from sectarian battles in the American New left in the 1960s. It comes through different ideas of what the American conservative movement should do in the 1980s and 1990s in the aftermath of Reaganism and the end of the Cold War. And also, I mean, it also has to do with kind of the lingering presence of anti Semitism in the far right in the United States and how it kind of adapted itself to the age of the Internet in the sort of late 90s and early 2000s.
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D
Yeah.
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A
When you first got in touch with me to tell me about the book, my first thought was that I was so glad that somebody was writing about the Frankfurt School, but not the, not the real Frankfurt School, if you know what I mean, but the Frankfurt School as it exists in the imagination of the reactionary mind. Because I think that actually might have been where I first was introduced to it. I think I came across the Frankfurt School as a, as a kind of reactionary online enemy before I actually read any Frankfurt School theorists. In fact, for a while, I think during, oh gosh, this is really dating me. I think during like Gamergate and all stuff like that And I think I even had in my bio, Frankfurt School Janitor, which I don't think I even. Yeah, I think maybe I'd read some Gramsci at that point, but I really hadn't had much familiarity, but mainly just because I was fascinated with the way that it became such a trope in that, I guess, proto alt. Right sphere that this. Yeah, this school of theorists were responsible for why ladies in their video games weren't sexy anymore, essentially.
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D
Yeah.
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C
I mean, thinking it back to gamergame, the first time I ever encountered any of these narratives around the Frankfurt School was immediately after Trump's 2016 election. And I was doing a bit of research on Breitbart.com to figure out how they were portraying the left. And I would often scroll through the comments at the bottom of the articles and I kept seeing again and again this sort pseudo document, as I would later find out, called the 11 Aims of the Frankfurt School. And it would attribute to these proposals to Adorno and Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin of, you know, trying to encourage people to drink more or not go to church or to sort of dumb down the media. And in some cases, when you're looking at the agenda that the right imputes to the Frankfurt School, it's almost the kind of opposite of what they wanted and almost rhymes in weird ways with their own critique about, you know, mass culture in a capitalist society and how it affects the way. Way we think and affects the possibilities for like, fulfilling lives.
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A
Yeah, these guys would have hated being held responsible for like popular Hollywood movies do, you know, and they would have hated that idea that they were the
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B
ones behind it sometimes, like they're very strange. Important component of a lot of conspiracist narratives is the idea of sort of a hyper competent and a hyper powerful villain. And I always thought it was this kind of like a strange idea that they would focus in on a group of like intellectuals. Yeah. That formed like the TW20s and the 30s at a university.
- [07:16]
C
Like so much with American conservatism, it all goes back to the 60s, or at least a backlash to the 60s, and particularly with the figure of Herbert Marcuse. So Marcuse was probably the most prominent Frankfurt School member in the United States context. There was certainly a lot of reporting at the time, after his book One Dimensional man sold a lot of copies, that he was this kind of guru or father of the new left or the American student movement at the time, who were protesting against the Vietnam War, criticizing the kind of the alienating nature of American consumerist society at the time. And it aligned quite nicely with right wing critiques of the student movement of saying, oh, these students aren't actually complaining about anything. That's a real problem. They're being manipulated by some sort of master controller or some figure with sort of a large nefarious goal. I think that that sort of specter of Marcuse ends up persisting through the decades when, you know, once people realize that he's part of a larger set of German intellectuals, that's when it sort of grows into this kind of Frankfurt School conspiracy that we're more used to largely through the, the act of kind of cherry picking quotes and sometimes doing retrospective readings of their works to try and interpret elements of political correctness into their work. Because I mean, admittedly there's a lot in the Frankfurt School's theoretical approach that jails work quite well with progressive movements. And for sort of right wing intellectuals, right wing commentators, it's easy to say, oh, these movements wouldn't have existed without the work of the Frankfurt School. But really when you look at the history properly, it's people who are already mobilizing or active in these move turn to the Frankfurt School to inform them, but not to necessarily inspire them or just sort of like to kind of be brainwashed by them, I would say.
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B
And discussing the sort of like how this, this concept of cultural Marxism became like such, I guess, a boogeyman and sort of a way to explain all the, all the changes that the right doesn't like. You really identify the LaRouche movement as key. There's a lot to explain, but it was a, it was a, started as a kind of a Marxist left wing movement itself, but shifted very hard to the right and very paralyzed, paranoid and conspiratorial and sort of offering a lot of all encompassing ideology to college students. So explain how this idea really, I guess like built up momentum in the LaRouche movement.
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C
Yeah, and it's, it's, it's really difficult to kind of summarize the history of the LaRouche movement because they kind of change from decade to decade. But the decades that I'm most interested in are from the late 60s to the early 90s. And as you said, Travis, they did start off as a Marxist Leninist sect in the American student movement largely around New York. They got into a number of sort of factional struggles with other groups at the time, largely because they felt that they had the best agenda for creating a revolution in the United States. So LaRouche himself around that time was in his 50s and became this kind of guru figure for a number of student militants in the area. He would give these very long and apparently quite fascinating lectures about revolutionary theory and history and the role of psychology and politics and all of these different things. Eventually did sort of gather together quite a tight gang of student radicals who were ready to do essentially whatever he asked them to. And they sort of went on a campaign of trying to establish total hegemony on the American left. I mean, there was a period that's known as Operation Mop up where they would go to the meetings of other left wing groups and beat people up with nunchucks and baseball bats. This was also around the time when LaRouche developed sort of paranoid fantasies that the CIA and MI5 were sort of planning to assassinate him and bring wash some of his own followers to kill him and take over his own organization. Because he had this sort of grandiose conception of himself as the only person who had like the vision for transforming the world, for sort of averting humanity from a global catastrophe and the incoming imposition of a sort of fascistic genocide of the whole human race. And as part of this kind of factional warfare of other groups, him and his followers were quite suspicious of other student radicals who'd been influenced or sort of in conversation with Herbert Marcuse. Herbert marcuse during the 60s wrote quite a bit about how in American society the working class or the industrial proletariat was not in a position to perform its revolutionary role to transform society into a socialist state. And that movements like the student movement or the Black Power movement or the movement for women's liberation represented kind of disintegrating forces of kind of the late capitalist administered society. And for LaRouche, LaRouche saw this as a challenge their own position as kind of Leninist intellectuals who were able to sort of guide the working class to their new utopia. So they drew on a series of articles that had been put out not only by the Soviet newspaper Pravda, but also by another sort of Maoist group in the United States called the Progressive Labour Party. Talking about how Marcuse had intelligence links from his time when he was working in the State Department to combat the Nazis during World War II and also perform intelligence work on the opportunities for denazification after Germany had been defeated. And they used these to suggest that Marcuse was still part of the sort of CIA network and his role was to divert student radicals away from their actual revolutionary goals, which in the LaRouche's eyes would be just to sort of follow LaRouche and pushing them towards helping to install fascism in the United States. And so over the following decades they would then sort of take this idea and build on this idea as they shifted further to the right in the 1970s and 1980s, you know, forming links with people in the Reagan administration, more sort of radical right groups like the neo Nazi Liberty Lobby, to the point in the sort of 1980s and 1990s where they would be arguing that the Frankfurt School had been like it was an intelligence operation set up by the Soviet Union to destroy Western civilization and bring political correctness into the United States to sort of drive Americans away from their Judeo Christian values.
- [13:20]
A
It's such an interesting part of the book because I talked in my PhD thesis, which was about digital anti feminist subcultures, I talked a little bit about the kind of recurrence of the Frankfurt School on cultural Marxism. But basically every history up until then that I had read sort of starts it all with William Lind and the Paleo conservative. So I know you go into later and we'll cover them, but I think this was my first time reading about the kind of origins of a conspiratorial view of, of the Frankfurt School as originating on the left. And I know, yeah, I know the laroucheites are actually pretty hard to plot politically because as you say, they move. But they sort of start off with a critique which is essentially, I guess, a leftist sounding one, which is that the Frankfurt School are not revolutionary enough, that they're actually counter revolutionary. And it's so interesting how that changes over the decades to being like. No, they are actually completely subversive and want to destroy Western civilisation even from the same. Yeah. The same figurehead, the same organisation.
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C
Yeah, certainly. I mean, although the trajectory from left to right is so striking in the LaRouche movement, what is also very striking is the consistency in like how their ideology operates. I mean, in the book I say that what is always Central to the LaRouche movement is a notion of elitism. Even when they're sort of starting to talk about themselves as kind of Platonists or as, in a classical sense, Republicans rather than Leninists, they still see themselves as an elite that has a kind of plan to save humanity. And the Frankfurt School continues to be sort of portrayed as the kind of evil counter elite, even if the sort of surface details of that change. I mean, in the 1960s it's because they're seen as sort of counter revolutionary or as fascist, but in the 80s and 90s it's because they're perceived as, you know, Soviet subversive. And also in a peculiar way that would take a long time to explain because of the weirdness of the Laroucheite worldview. Aristotelians. But, yeah, I mean, in the 80s, the Larouchites saw all of world history as a contest between, you know, two secret factions of the Platonists and the Aristotelians. And that was their, you know, their framework for understanding all world events.
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B
Yeah, I was really interested in the role of Lind because he was someone that seemed to be in the sort of the. I guess, the narrative or the genealogy of your book of someone who acts as a bridge from sort of these fringe laroucheite figures into a little bit more mainstream conservatism. Because Lind, he was associated with major conservative think tanks and he was a war theorist. And so he was. He was published and written, you know, respectable places. And so he was taken seriously. And he also took this idea of cultural Marxism and gave it a name and sort of held it up as. As a great ideological enemy.
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C
Yeah, you can quite easily contrast the LaRouche and Lind based on, like, how they present their work. The Rushites were almost kind of like intellectual snobs who sort of wrote these very long esoteric articles because they felt that they were sort of world historical geniuses. Whereas Lind is kind of more of a sort of cultural war mercenary. He's interested in, like, getting messages out there that's going to be very effective. That's going to shift public opinion and sort of win policy battles. In the book, I characterized Lind as a type that I call the new right think tank intellectual. That is the sort of political fighter that kind of grows out of the sort of modern conservative movement in the 70s and 80s who are very opportunistic, so very media savvy, very, very intelligent in their own right, but sort of much more pragmat. The way that they tell narratives, the way that they tell stories. And so, yeah, what you get with Lind is the kind of classic rhetorical setup of the cultural Marxism idea that we have today. I mean, the refrain that we're quite familiar with of, you know, the Frankfurt School shifting Marxism from economic to cultural terms. That is Lind. The kind of association of Gramsci and Lukacch to the Frankfurt School, which doesn't necessarily make sense historically, that comes from Lind. So a lot of the weird, kind of rhetorically effective, but sort of factually inaccurate notions of the Frankfurt School that we live with today do come from this Particular sort of new right think tanker. And it's partially because he was just really great at his job and knew how to sort of develop a story that could be sort of more effective in the sort of American political landscape.
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B
It's interesting because as you mentioned, he was someone who discussed what they call like fourth dimension warfare. The idea of like a warfare as a total cultural with like, you know, environmental kind of like practice, rather than something that's just fought with munitions and like, you know, I guess like conventional armies. But I mean, did he like apply this kind of like thinking to like his conception of cultural Marxism? Whereas like all where cultural Marxism was like a weapon of war that ought to be fought with similar ideological and media weapons?
- [18:14]
C
Yeah, it was peculiar when I was looking through Lin's biography and saying in the 1980s that he should shifts from sort of being a military theorist and also like someone who lobbies on Capitol Hill about, you know, defense spending changing almost quite dramatically to being a person who writes predominantly about culture. But when you sort of look into it a lot more like, for him there's a. There's a continuum there, because with fourth generational warfare, he sees it as warfare no longer being the exclusive domain of the state to the point where it's sort of. It's a return to what he sees as war. What it was like before the sort of treaty of filia to return to all warfare being wars between cultures. He's seeing this in particular in the 90s as a way to sort of explain Al Qaeda. And he explained the growth of Islamist terrorist cells as well as the patriot movement in the United States of kind of what he would see as a sort of homegrown sort of libertarian reaction to the over extension of federal power in the United States. And for him, so cultural Marxism, or in his military writings in the 1990s, who would describe it as social and cultural Marxism or multiculturalism, he saw that as like the ruling ideology of the American state, of the federal government, and that it was kind of an expression of sort of a desire for elite control over ways of speaking, ways of living. You know, this is the whole sort of political correctness complaint of, you know, they're controlling how you can speak, and so they're not letting us live, you know, our traditional lifestyles and, you know, where women or wives and, you know, sort of homemakers sort of imposing this sort of cultural Marxist ideology on it. And so for him, fourth generation warfare, particularly coming from the right, is a way to liberate the sort of American people or you know, when he's writing about Europe as well as, you know, the people of the west from a kind of totalitarian cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxist ideology of the state.
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A
There's a really funny bit in your book where I had no idea that William Lind, I obviously knew about William Lyndon coining kind of cultural Marxism and sort of popularizing it on the Paleo conservative right. But I had no idea that he wrote a novel and a novel called A Novel of Fourth Generation War. And the fact that this novel basically is a speculative fiction in which William Lynde is proven right about everything and not even in a subtle way. It's literally like the characters are going to his website and using him as an authoritative source to understand the events that are unfolding around them. And I just found that so funny because. Because it's not even the first time I've heard of a right wing think tank guy doing this, just going ahead and just writing a little story in which they are proven right about the world. And I don't know, I just find it so illustrative of how this faction sees art, do you know? And how they kind of see culture just in general as this kind of just purely political battleground. Yeah. Did you read the book?
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C
Yeah, I read it three times.
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A
Oh my God. Thank you for your service.
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C
Indeed. No, thank you. It's also so funny because, like, one of the main characters is so clearly modeled after him and it's a character that never does anything wrong who is like totally badass all of the time. And so that is quite amusing. But I mean, it's because they also see culture as quite didactic. Like culture is a way to model right ways of living. You know, that there are morals. And Victoria itself is almost a kind of instructional manual to become a fourth generational warfare told through a very thin veneer of fiction. He does refer to it very specifically. You know, it's almost exactly like reading an Ayn Rand novel because, I mean, all the characters are very flat and they're largely there to work as mouthpieces for either Rand's own sort of philosophical work or what the kind of views that she attributes to her opponents. It's not necessarily a kind of a naturalistic approach to literary fiction. I mean, it is sort of very didactic.
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B
You also talk about how these ideas got a lot more traction and sort of, I guess, widespread awareness through the Tea Party movement. This was sort of a conservative populist movement that happened that coincided with Obama's administration starting around 2009 or so. But you have an interesting perspective because you seem to describe the Tea Party as a kind of real media driven movement as you discuss a lot of like documentaries in their blogs and Fox News and Breitbart, which is also central, we'll get to momentarily. So like, why did cultural Marxism flourish in this, in this Tea Party media ecosystem?
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C
A lot of the Tea Party's gripes revolved around the idea of a kind of conflict with mainstream media, I suppose you'd say, particularly in the sense that they felt like CNN and the New York Times weren't kind of representing them in a truthful or impartial manner. There's plenty of work on this of how, you know, actually the New York Times and CNN were actually quite sympathetic in its reporting of the Tea Party. So that the Tea Party, a sense of it was not, not like accurate, but it felt quite true to them. They felt like they were in this sort of classic rhetorical term like the forgotten majority, or at least kind of like a maligned majority. And they weren't able to sort of express their views or advocate for their own interests because of a kind of pervasive political correctness. And of course, when you then look through what they're writing and you know, what they're making documentaries about, then it's no surprise that they are receiving charges of, you know, being called sort of sexist or racist. I mean, especially when you sort of look at the Tea Party rallies and their depictions Barack Obama. I mean, it's quite blatant and explicit there. But the cultural Marxism narrative worked for them because in some ways it is a story of the media. It's a story that the Frankfurt School came here. These German guys, Adorner and Hawkheimer, started to write all of this stuff about the culture industry. And instead of in the real world, them actually critiquing the culture industry, Adorner and Hawkheimer actually want to create a culture industry, an industry that sort of controls people's minds and determines what they think and, and helps to create the fertile ground for a sort of socialist authoritarian state. And so when you're looking at like films like Agenda Grinding America down or Cultural Marxism the Corruption of America, the two films that I look at in the book, it's a story about how the Frankfurt School sort of took over American media to corrupt the, to corrupt the people. And in particular it's almost sort of focused on an idea that there are subliminal messages in movies or mainstream news that are sort of there to seep into people's consciousness almost In a way that is kind of undetectable. But thanks to, you know, the activists who work so hard in the Tea Party movement, they are able to uncover this.
- [25:16]
A
Yeah, I just had a question because I think one thing that I've always been struck by reading William Lynde and kind of people who've been inspired by William Lynde is their focus on the Frankfurt School and Hollywood being connected somehow. I remember reading a William Lynde essay where he said, like, many of their key people moved to Hollywood and being like, what? I don't think that's true. And I guess this is a good opportunity for us to bring this up because I'm not actually sure if we've even discussed it so far. The fact that cultural Marxism has a kind of anti Semitic double meaning as well. Do you know that? Not necessarily everybody using it means Jews, but some people using it do mean Jews. And I guess. Yeah, I was kind of curious to get your take on this. Whether William Lind is saying that because he kind of just means, well, there's lots of Jewish people in Hollywood, so they're probably, you know, so kind of. So they probably have a similar worldview or if there is any actual connection there at all. Yeah, I always found it confusing, I guess.
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C
Yeah, there is a degree of truth to it because, you know, people like Adorno and Horkheimer did move to LA during exile. I think they also hung out with Charlie Chaplin at parties. I think that Adorno would play the piano for Charlie Chaplin.
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A
Right.
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C
I think also Adorno sort of, while he was there co wrote a book about film music that no one ever reads but does exist. So I mean, there are these sorts of grains of truth. But I mean, I think that you are right that especially in the sort of circles that Lind moves around in, and certainly some of the people who promote the idea of cultural Marxism in the Tea Party, there is that kind of anti Semitic component to it where the Frankfurt School is sort of genetically predisposed to produce or like inspire cultural artifacts that are designed to sort of corrupt the pure white European. I mean, you see it very particularly in the film sort of Cultural Marxism, the Corruption of America by James Yeager. I mean, because he very explicitly believes that like all of Hollywood is controlled by Jewish people, that they are producing sort of propaganda to kind of corrupt ordinary Americans and also, you know, give women the wrong ideas about, you know, their capacities for independence and, you know, freedom, all that sort of stuff. And so, I mean, it aligns very well with all of those sort of very typical anti Semitic tropes, but also, I mean, with like the kind of the classic wish of sort of American conservatives of wishing that they could sort of be in charge of all media output. I mean, you are sort of seeing that in the United States at the moment with, you know, things like sort of Barry Weiss taking over the editorial roles and, you know, Trump wanting to, you know, be in charge of the Kennedy center and, you know, put Cats on forever because that's his favorite musical. Which is the cutest fact about Trump.
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A
Yeah.
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C
This is why, especially over the last few decades, there has been a kind of moment of convergence between portions of the American conservative movement and the sort of more anti Semitic far right. Because in both cases it is a narrative of, you know, these others have taken, you know, the cultural institutions that should be ours away from us and we need to retake them, you know, sort of forcibly either in some instances of, you know, resorting to actual violence about it. When you're sort of looking at the cases of mass shooters or going through the legislative level.
- [28:33]
A
Yeah, I mean, there's something quite fundamental to the narrative that struck me when I was reading this book about how it's also an anti refugee narrative as well. One in which these people come claiming asylum, but they actually, you know, bring with them these like polluted ideologies. Do, you know, these, these subversive ideas which, with which they kind of like take advantage of the freedoms and liberties of the their host country and then kind of use it against itself. And I guess reading this, I was like, oh, this, this feels a lot like how people will often talk about Muslim immigrants as well today. You know, there's a kind of parallel there and the so called ideologies are different between cultural Marxism and I don't know what they call Islamo leftism and things like that, but they rhyme. Right. I kind of wondered if, yeah, if you could see that as being, you know, as someone who's traced the genealogy of this, of this ideology, if you could see that as being a further permutation to come, maybe, or a next step.
- [29:31]
C
Yeah, no, I'm always alert to how the notion of cultural Marxism gets taken up at particular inflection points. And the one that I've noticed most recently is immediately after the Henry Novak murder in the uk. So for those who don't know, Henry Novak was a guy in Southampton who was stabbed and when he sort of told police officers who turned up to the scene that he had been stabbed, the police officers didn't believe him and didn't realize this until a few minutes after. And the reason this is becoming like a big, big story in the UK is that the person who stabbed Henry Novak was sort of was a Sikh man and that they had initially reported to the police that Henry Novak had racially abused him. The killer has now sort of been tried and I think sentenced as well. But the British right has basically exploited this case to sort of to bang on about what they call sort of two tier policing, which is the idea that racial minorities are policed in a much more soft, softly fashion than white British people, which is completely untrue. But they like to use cases like this to demonstrate that as of white Britons are persecuted by the police forces and that they have sort of been taken over by the ideology of cultural Marxism and that it has sort of meant that they have been sort of pushed away from their so called sort of neutral mission of just sort of maintaining law and order, while also ignoring that, you know, the police until quite, I mean, the police even, even now has sort of been declared to be for many years an institutionally sort of racist and sexist institution. And you could very much say that the same about the sort of UK migration system. But it is, to build on your point, Annie, just another instance of how sort of cultural Marxism is used to sort of fuel anti refugee or anti migrant sentiment by saying, you know, cultural Marxism is not just sort of the ideas that foreign people have brought over here, but it's now kind of of infected the system to prevent it from working, quote unquote properly to actually sort of help us see sort of migrants or refugees as a threat. And underpinning all of this is the idea that there was once kind of a healthy system that was entirely neutral when that simply wasn't the case. I mean, if you look through not only the sort of British history, but American history and the way that kind of police, but also other kind of sort of structures of state power and control have sort of, sort of helped to sort of further sort of instantiate sort of racism, sexism and sort of Islamophobia and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, it's simply not the case that, you know, everything was fine and then, you know, some Frankfurt school ideas got into the immune system of the nation and fucked everything up.
- [32:07]
B
Yeah, I really want, I'm curious about the role of Andrew Breitbart in his Breitbart publication because one of his big ideas that he talks a lot about is that politics is downstream from culture, which is, you know, it sounds, it Sounds like a simplistic kind of inversion of like the sort of, the sort of, kind of the Frankfurt school ideas about the interplay between media and culture and power. So I'm curious, I mean, did he. Was this, was this, was this a kind of deliberate kind of like hijacking of that concept and then. And then sort of a rallying call, or was it, I mean, what exactly was the function of that kind of idea?
- [32:45]
C
Yeah, I mean, in the book, I sort of suggest that Breitbart got his famous, famous dictum from Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, because in a 1993 book that Rush Limbaugh wrote, he's writing about sort of how Clinton was able to win the presidency. And he starts sort of talking a lot about Gramsci and sort of saying how, you know, Clinton won because the Democrats and the left are all in charge of the cultural institutions. And what the right needs to do is to realize that sort of we need to take the culture first and then politics will follow. And so it seems to me that Breitbart's famous line is actually a Limbaugh ism. It is also kind of a sort of self just victory motto, because Andrew Breitbart is sort of not a politician. He's a kind of media activist. And he has the sense that, you know, what, what we need to do at this moment in the 2000s, when, you know, certain social media platforms are picking up, there's the rise of things like YouTube and WordPress. There's no longer. The traditional media gatekeepers are no longer able to maintain the role at the they once did. The potential for political transformation is no longer in the sort of more typical electoral process. It can actually be in this more kind of participatory media landscape. And so I do see that that's what sort of Breitbart is trying to sort of suggest to his comrades on the American right. More so than, I guess, him saying, you know, what we need to do is we need to, we need to write more novels, we need to write more films, we need to do some ballets. It is more like get a digital recorder, get a, get a BlackBerry, start a blog, you know, do a YouTube program, all of that sort of stuff of actually take advantage of this sort of burgeoning infrastructure of more kind of participatory and easy to access media to sort of shift people's minds. I think we see the kind of, the outcome of that now where even people who are hired by right wing think tanks now have to act online like they are like an influencer. They have to have a sort of certain kind of profile on Twitter or do the podcast circuit rather than sort of perform the kind of, the kind of roles that they used to do.
- [34:53]
B
Now I think most relevant to a podcast that talks about online reactionary movements, you also discuss the role of Gamergate and. Well, first of all, it's like there's a, there's a lot of like, there's a lineage going on here. Like what, what exactly was the, the connection between Breitbart and their folks philosophy and Gamergate?
- [35:13]
C
Oh yeah. My editor almost recommended that I didn't include this in the book because in a way it's kind of so hard to. The way of tracing one to the other is almost so windy, windy. And it has a lot to do with an event that's now become almost like a point of obsession for a lot of people on the online right. And that is certain changes to the Wikipedia page on cultural Marxism. So you'll often see on Twitter that an image circulating of, you know, know what, a screen grab of the Cultural Marxism wikipedia page from 2014 and what it looks like now and people saying, ah, it used to just be sort of a page on cultural Marxism, but now it's a page on cultural. The cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. This is an example of how the left took over Wikipedia. And with Gamergate in 2014, what happened was Wikipedia editors decided to delete the Cultural Marxism page because it was splitting in two different directions. Because originally the page was about the use of the term Cultural Marxism as a scholarly idea. There have been a number of books that have used the term Cultural Marxism in a relatively neutral way. But there was also that second use that was now becoming much more popular by the mid 2010s that has this sort of right wing, anti Semitic reactionary history. And the editor said, you know, the content splitting in two ways, we can't have one page about this. We'll put some content here, some content there. But people on the Gamergate Reddit page are Kotaku in action, I think was the name, name of it said, you know, this is just a plot to distract from or from the fact that Anita Sarkeesian is like a feminist blogger who will sometimes talk about the Frankfurt School in her work. And so what they did was pester Jimmy Wales to reopen this page and stage a whole debate about it. And they tried to sway the debate about, you know, keeping it open and introducing all of these sort of Gamergate ideas. But they picked up this idea idea that The Frankfurt School was bad. From Milo Yaniopoulos, who at the time was sort of a young Breitbart reporter and sort of immersed in that kind of Breitbart worldview that had sort of been adopted from the Tea Party days, who saw a lot of kind of opportunity to further his own career in Gamergate coverage and so would often pepper some of his reporting on sort of, with these kind of classic sort of cultural Marxism narratives. And so what eventually happens is, you know, the cultural Marxism page is shut down, but you have a, almost an army of kind of Reddit gamer gate trolls who are now very passionate about this idea that the Frankfurt School caused political correctness, later informing some of the subreddits that would go on to sort of support Donald Trump in 2015, 2016, and also producing a number of memes to that effect as well.
- [37:57]
B
I thought it was really interesting, that whole episode about the Wikipedia edit war and generally the trolling and sort of the participatory element of Gamergate in which they felt that they, they were fighting back against it, like an imposition of their, of their, their hobby through these vicious means that they thought were justified because they saw behind these efforts that they, that they imagined was this kind of like cultural Marxist style ideology. You know, I thought, I thought that was an interesting, you know, just the connection between sort of like online participatory posting in politics taken with such grave seriousness and sincerely believing that doing it enough can change the. Of a nation in a way that even like, like mere voting or more conventional political participation cannot. The way that, yeah, this belief in fighting cultural Marxism can sort of like make people think that they're these online digital soldiers.
- [38:55]
C
Yeah, and the history of cultural Marxism in itself is almost like a story of alternative media. I mean, with the LaRouche ITES, they sort of saw the newspapers and the TV stations as, you know, infected by this kind of, this global fascistic Frankfurt School ideology. And so they set up their own newspapers, they set all of these different institutions to get their own ideas out there. With Lind and his own think tank at Free Congress foundation, they even set up their own satellite network TV station. And that then continues on with the Tea Party and Gamergate, with the adoption of Reddit forums, where it's not something that sort of requires a big kind of financial investment or a large team of people to be working on it. You can sort of just log into your computer and then there you are, you are sort of involved in the media world against a kind of cultural Marxist edifice.
- [39:45]
A
Yeah. And I think one thing I really got the sense from reading your book is how cultural Marxism often provides this kind of quite heroic identity for the person who's participating in this stuff where you are David against Goliath. Right. This has infected every single institution on the planet near enough. And therefore, you know, it. It is so powerful and so pervasive that almost no action that you take personally can be too much in response, I think.
- [40:20]
C
Yeah.
- [40:20]
A
At one point you said something like, you know, I'm kind of paraphrasing someone where it's like, your opponents don't bother with truth, so why should you? And I thought that was like a really nice way of articulating this kind of struggle that people who subscribe to this theory will end up seeing themselves as part of. And, you know, it's not exclusive to this. I think it's very common with lots of conspiracy theories similar to QAnon, as we discuss on here, people calling themselves digital soldiers. It's the same kind of idea, essentially, which is that you cannot be overly committed. You cannot be overly aggressive.
- [40:56]
C
Yeah. I sometimes say that my book reads like a comedy, but is actually structured like a tragedy in a sense that all of the different episodes and characters that I discuss in the book, there's something a bit farcical about them. But in the end, their plight is a tragic one because there's nothing that they can do to really overcome the kind of cultural Marxist overlord that they see. It's almost always a sort of receding horizon. There's no point where they've actually won.
- [41:21]
A
Yeah. Because the winning point is what it's just like. I mean. Yeah. William Lynn does actually outline it at one point, and it's just so ridiculous. Right. You kind of mentioned it in this book. It's just women all just kind of, you know, give up. Give up that silly feminist ide idea. Black people all kind of give up the silly, silly civil rights idea and they all kind of just, you know, go back to being happy. Happy and subservient. And that's just. I mean, that's just not going to happen, really. That's not like a genie you can put back in the bottle, so to speak. So, yeah, it's an unrealisable kind of fantasy.
- [41:52]
C
Yeah. Yeah. And it's never enough for some people. I mean, I think we see this a bit in the UK and there are parallels in the US too, with, like, the rivalry between Reform and Restore. Nigel Farage and a Reform Party. Can the far right. You know, every policy that they want, but it's never going to be extreme enough. It's never going to be the fiery race war that they really desire and eventually restore, who are now sort of seen as that sort of natural, the natural representatives of the far right, soon they will no longer be enough. And it's just always sort of chasing that, sort of scratching a niche that can never sort of actually be satisfied. I think.
- [42:27]
A
Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the UK context because that was actually one thing I wanted to ask you about. So in one of your chapters you do a kind of separate case studies of cultural Marxism as it's discussed in American politics, in British politics and Brazilian politics. And one thing I noticed was that with both Bolsonaro's administration and Trump's that politicians can discuss cultural Marxism as a accepted, respectable term. But that's not quite the case here yet. I mean, I think it's changing. I think there is a slow move towards respectability. But right now, even, yeah, you know, right wing politicians such as Suella Braverman, I think you also mentioned Miriam Cates. If they do bring up cultural Marxism, they do get a scolding, essentially, and not just from woke cultural Marxists like ourselves, but, you know, from figures of authority saying, you know, that's a, an anti Semitic term, that's a conspiracy theory, you shouldn't use it, it degrades public discourse. And as I say, I think this is changing. I think just in the. I think the Yankification of our political culture does just continue apace. But I was curious as to why you think that is. What is the cultural difference here?
- [43:41]
C
Oh, that's such a fascinating question. I think it has to do with. Because, I mean, because British political culture revolves around the idea of decorum, right. There's also like in the journalist and political world, a sense of superiority over America in a way. I think that anything that maybe does seem too reminiscent of kind of American rabble rousing is seen as maybe a bit too crass. But also I think that Britain itself just has a very thick sort of civil society in itself. And I think that also we have way too many sort of opinion columnists who are kind of desperate for, desperate for stories. And so I think that you can whip something up into a frenzy immediately. And I think this was the case with Suella Braveman. Right. And I wrote a whole like academic article about it called the bravemaninst. And you know, various British journalists were talking about it for three weeks because it garnered attention. And so I think that partially what it also has to do with is the incentive to sort of keep the English journalist opinion generation machine going. But I think that why it's sort of slowly becoming more acceptable in British conservative circles is because there is also a reward for kind of having the balls to say it. I think that, I mean, Rupert Lowe, for better or worse, is kind of leading the British right wherever it's going to go next. And his line is, you know, you call me racist, I just don't care anymore. I think that people will then start using phrases like cultural Marxism or you know, sort of start banging on about George Soros, for instance, to show, look, you should really vote for me because I actually have have the guts to sort of stand up to the establishment. That's my feeling of where it's going and that's particularly where like Nigel Farage is going. This is why he's done that big sort of shift to the right recently to try and win back some people who moved over to restore to say, you know, I'm no longer doing the kind of the reactionary respectability politics. I'm no longer going to try and pretend just to be a, to be a Tory. I'm actually going to be the kind of racist you want to vote for.
- [45:46]
B
He also trace cultural Marxism to a more recent evolution, which is the sort of the opposition to like critical race theory or they call wokeness and these kinds of ideas. I mean, you explain that it's not really kind of like a direct lineage like you talk about. It's a kind of a complicated history, but it's more of sort of like a revision or like recontextualization of these ideas for this particular moment. Right, Yeah.
- [46:15]
C
I mean, as we were discussing earlier, I mean, even William Lin's version of cultural Marxism is a kind of strange piecing together of different tropes and ideas that he sometimes borrows, Larouche sometimes borrows from other bits of the American right. And that is what you see in like the work of people like Christopher Ruffo and James Lindsay of sort of pulling things together and seeing what works. And I think that Ruffo is almost kind of the modern day William Lind. I mean, he doesn't really care about sort of what the Frankfurt School actually said or what critical race theorists actually said. As long as, you know, it helps him raise his own profile and helps him actually gain the popular support for the laws that he wants to put forward. And I think that this is also the result of the right wing influences sort of stage of the conservative movement. It Kind of replicates like how people sort of search for information now of sort of searching through sort of Google and sort of piecing together all these different bits of information to form something new.
- [47:14]
B
It was interesting the particular manner in which these kinds of labels like wokeness are designed to help sort of delegitimize any kind of reform and even sort of like, sort of like mild ones. People sort of like put this label on it and the subtext is like, well this is, this is the byproduct of some sort of poisonous ideology that's like illegitimate and astroturf and not even real. And therefore I don't even have to like discuss the substance of the policy itself because it's part of this, this poisonous ideological tradition. I reject it. In fact, we need to exercise any resources we have available to us to oppose it.
- [47:50]
C
Yeah, I mean, Rufo and Lindsay are obsessed with the idea that they are uncovering some secret behind the surface. So I mean, you see this particularly with Lind Lindsay's project of I think translating woke terms or translating wokish into English of him saying equity is a term that is ultimately kind of like a Marxist smokescreen for sort of wanting to send everyone to the gulags. Right. And then that eventually leads to those kind of lists of terms that you see sort of circulated around by Doge of saying, you know, if any sort of research project has the word woman in it, then you know, we have, we have to cut the funding for it. And so the aim and also the outcome of the kind of anti critical race theory or anti wokeness crusade was to sort of build a project where people become kind of skeptical about sort of language itself and whether people are using words in an explanatory way or in a way to kind of deceive you and sort of trick you into supporting an agenda that you wouldn't otherwise support. And this also goes back to the way that Lind describes what's useful about the term cultural Marxism. When Lind came up with the term cultural Marxism, he says, well you this term to make people distrust anything that they see as political correctness, to sort of suggest that, you know, affirmative action or speech codes aren't, you know, a way to sort of include people in society or sort of prevent us from causing offence to others. It's actually a step towards, you know, a sort of Marxist dystopia.
- [49:16]
A
Yeah, I really got the sense when I was reading your bit about James Lindsay who I have to say I've never really read much of his work, work because it's always struck me as just like really, really incoherent. But I guess it kind of. It almost emerged to me. I was like, it kind of almost feels like there's two different types of cultural Marxism conspiracy theories here. And there's the first one, which you talk about with William Lind's TV show, and then subsequent kind of Tea Party documentaries about cultural Marxism where it's kind of like the classic conspiracy theorist crazy board, right, where you're like, Karl Marx starts cultural Marx starts, starts Marxism. Then the Frankfurt schools start cultural Marxism. Then they come to the US and have all of these connections with us activists. Then those activists mentor modern democratic politicians. And through this we can create this thorough line from Karl Marx to Barack Obama or someone similar. But then there's also this other kind, which I guess is like the. I mean, in QAnon terms, I would call it like the baking kind of cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. You're like, you know, I'm gonna delve into the original texts and I'm gonna find their secret meanings, their secret subliminal messages which they're hiding underneath all of this fancy academic language. And I guess, yeah, I really got the sense. It's the first time I think I've like, really understood what the whole James Lindsay thing is about reading your book. Cause I was like, oh, he's baking. He's just like baking critical theory. Basically.
- [50:47]
C
There is that outstanding clip of the interview that he did with Jordan Peterson where Jordan Peterson is saying something about I think maybe a Paradise Lost and Lucifer, you know, sort of referring to him as the Morning star. And Lindsay says, let me hold you there for a second. The Morning Star is what rises in the morning. And you know, what do you do in the morning? You wake up and then he says woke. And so it's him trying to connect sort of, you know, wokeness to the devil, just sort of through word association games. And when you were reading any of his work, that's almost entirely his only kind of argumentative strategy. And when people are, you know, baking in the Frankfurt School from a right wing perspective, I don't know if that's the right way to use that parlance of our times. But when they're baking, that's precisely what they're doing. They're sort of using a kind of a socialist logic to sort of link sometimes in very arbitrary and vague ways what the Frankfurt School said to their sort of every everyday gripes. And, you know, it also kind of reminds me of another, another clip from Andrew Breitbart where he's giving a speech to the Heritage foundation, and he says, you know, the Frankfurt School is why, you know, your daughter comes home from college at Thanksgiving and says, you know, why are we having turkey? Don't you understand that this is, you know, like a colonialist holiday? And then he goes on to say, you know, the Frankfurt School is why we have whole foods or arugula. And so, you know, the Frankfurt School becomes like this ultimate culprit for all the things that kind of American conservatives feel uneasy or almost totally objectionable. And I guess it sort of goes back to Travis, your little anecdote at the beginning of this episode of, you know, sometimes these people walk around the world and look what's going on and go, you know, the Frankfurt School must be behind this, right?
- [52:23]
B
Yeah. I mean, the accusation of something being, I guess, illegitimate or destructive because is the byproduct of culture Marxism, I think it can introduce just, just a total, all pervasive paranoia in just everything you see, because it allows you to just be anxious that like, even if, even if it's not obvious that, for example, something might be descended or be the byproduct of this cultural Marxism, it might be in some sort of hidden way. And so it allows you, it gives you license to feel, just to feel like everything that anyone you like does is the byproduct of a vast conspiracy of sort of a kind of infohazard that has infected the brains of ev and well meaning people.
- [53:05]
C
This is precisely what Lind wanted to do when he coined the term cultural Marxism, too. He was interviewed in 2020 with Paul Gottfried about why he thought it was such an effective rhetorical tool. And he said, you know, it didn't really matter what the Frankfurt School said or what communism really is, what Marxism really is, as long as you can sort of feed into people's fears, feeding people's anxieties about what's happening in the world and sort of then attribute it to Marxism, then we can win. Precisely. I mean, it is just for him a matter of winning the political war. And cultural Marxism as a narrative is a means to do that. And it just could sort of be used to sort of be associated with anything. And I mean, what is almost kind of amusing in a kind of almost scary way in my book is just sort of how many things are associated with the Frankfurt School. I mean, you've got the film, the Graduate, you've got the Beatles, plenty of examples. I mean, the Rolling Stones is in there, but everything that you sort of encounter in Music, film, tv, in your newspapers, on your smartphones, even in your interactions with your kids, in your interactions with your co workers can then through this lens, be seen as a consequence of a Marxist conspiracy.
- [54:23]
B
Yeah, just like all preservations, I'm thinking about the constant sort of, the sort of the remnants of Gamergate still complaining about what they don't like in video games. In the Recent James Bond 007 first fight game, it's like, this is still, still James Bond. He's still a philanderer and he's childish and he still does action stuff and he fights, he does explosions. It seems like everything they would like. But they were still complaining because they didn't find the digital women attractive enough. That was, was the itself the byproduct of wokeness. It's absurd that you can, you can find like traces of this you believe to be some sort of pervasive ideology that's ruining everything you think you don't like in just everything.
- [55:05]
A
This is maybe quite a mean point, but I sometimes think when I see on social media, you know, somebody, presumably a grown adult, complaining that a video game character isn't sexy enough for him or their boobs aren't big enough or stuff, I feel like secondhand embarrassment for them. Do you know where I kind of feel like, oh, you know, of all of the things, of all of the things to get really worked up about, like this is it like, even from a reactionary point of view, surely this is quite trivial. And I guess maybe one thing that's really useful about cultural Marxism in this, in that context is you're like, it's not trivial actually. It's destroying the West. It's not childish and juvenile that I care about, you know, how big Lara Croft's boobs are in one game to another. It's not babyish. It's actually about the fall of Western civilization. So therefore it's actually very grown up that I care about this.
- [55:55]
B
Yeah. I think they say that they have this feeling that, oh, this sort of cultural force or the ideology that's making these video games not attractive enough for me is part of the same ideology that wants to put me in gulags for being a straight white male.
- [56:11]
C
Yeah.
- [56:12]
B
And so they connect these two and so. So, yeah, this thing that seems trivial is like, because of this whole cultural Marxism idea, they're able to make these trivialities into these, these vast, very terrifying political realities for them.
- [56:27]
C
Mm.
- [56:28]
B
You talk a lot about how it's like, well, you know, the cultural Marxism is not a conspiracy theory in Sort of a more conventional sense. It's the sort of, sort of narrative that could be sort of shown to be false or baseless or that kind of thing. And as a consequence, like debunking, which I have to admit is not very effective counter rhetorical strategy in normal. In normal times is even less effective in this particular sense. So fact checking and like, debunking, sort of like the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory isn't enough. It isn't effective. What do you imagine, like would be a better way to kind of like, fill the void of like or to meet the kind of like, the needs, the narrative or psychological needs that the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is satisfying?
- [57:10]
C
This is my response to sort of Chris Ruffo, who in one of his talks said that, you know, a lot of people who started to care a lot about critical race theory didn't do that because they had sort of read a critique of Kimberle Crenshaw in a conservative magazine. But, like, they'd heard a story that sort of moved them emotionally. And a lot of the sort of responses in the kind of anti CRT scare had a lot to do with, you know, how the right was getting CRT wrong or how they weren't saying things that were factual about particular claims. And it didn't seem like that was effective because in a way what that does is still maintain the kind of division between I suppose, the 100% informed expert and the sort of quote unquote, uninformed public. I think that what a real response to the right and its narratives of cultural Marxism should be is to kind of really transform the political and intellectual culture into something that's much more sort of open and participatory and that actually has the kind of infrastructure to allow people to sort of come together and kind of create work or discuss ideas and actually sort of build community in a way. I think that this is something that could be done sort of in conversation with, you know, various sort of political and activist movements. But I think that if your only response to sort of cultural marks Marxism is that kind of more traditional debunking approach that kind of maintains the sort of hierarchy between sort of people who are quote, unquote, in the know and people who, you know, should be told what the facts are, then I think that we're always going to kind of come back to that basic conflict of people feeling kind of alienated or excluded from media, from the political process, from public culture. And I don't think that it's speaking in a UK context specifically. I Don't think it's surprising that the rise in, in kind of narratives around cultural Marxism or wokeness coincides with the stripping away of a lot of our public and cultural infrastructure. I mean, over the past 15 or so years, you're seeing hundreds of libraries closed down, you're seeing theaters closed down, you're seeing youth centers closed down. All of these institutions that helped to sort of keep together kind of social or cultural life have now kind of been demolished or sort of been dismantled. I think that was sort of a left wing response is to say if we are really kind of cultural Marxists like you say, we should actually try to try to do a bit of cultural Marxism. We should try to, you know, actually try to create a culture that's sort of egalitarian and inclusive and not sort of reserved specifically for those who can afford it.
- [59:38]
A
I think that's really true. And I think just in the spirit of not getting into left doomerism, you know, I think one thing that progressives are actually fairly good at is creating counter narratives. In fact, I think in a weird way, I think the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is almost the right working through their jealousy of this ability, of the fact that ideas like principles like egalitarianism, pluralism and democracy do actually have mass appeal. They do spread. And so almost like you kind of then in order to protect yourself from that psychologically damaging fact, if you oppose those things, you kind of have to turn this into the woke mind virus. Do you know? You kind of have to turn this into some kind of. It's not that this stuff actually appeals to people. It's that they've been brainwashed by evil, evil German Jewish intellectuals and things like that. So I think, I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm obviously not saying that we're doing everything perfectly because obviously we're not. But it's one of those things where I do think sometimes I think we on the left can almost underestimate because we look at the right and we see how powerful they are and how. Yeah. And how much ground they've gained. But we also can slightly miss the. That fact. Fact that they, they are envious of the left as well in lots of ways. And I think this is one of them. I think this book actually illustrates quite how. How envious they are in a certain regard.
- [61:00]
C
I agree with sort of a book that came out relatively recently by Anton Yeager called Hyper Politics, where he sort of explains why sort of conservatives have continued to sort of have a bit more political success than the left in a sort of time where the kind of political institutions are sort of in decline. And that's because the messages and narratives that they spread are incredibly compatible with the way that we live. I mean, in a capitalist society, the incentives are there for you to have a sort of more individualistic life where you're sort of cut off from other people and not wanting to be engaged in sort of collective action to sort of transform the conditions of your lives and sort of work towards securing more equality for everyone. And so as he puts it in the book, he quotes and old joke of a married couple who are honeymooning in Ireland who sort of go over to a farmer there in the middle of the countryside and they say, what's the best way to Dublin? And the farmer says, well, I wouldn't start here. And I think that's the sort of the, the predicament that's facing left of sort of, you know, we know where we want to go, but where we're starting from can sometimes place us at a disadvantage. But I think that that kind of vision for actually pushing for a country culture that's more kind of emancipatory and egalitarian and sort of brings people in and can actually sort of create the conditions for an alternative society is the cure for the rights of more facile. Talk about cultural Marxism.
- [62:26]
B
The book is the Cultural Marxism why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the west by AJA woods speaking to AJ Today. If I think it's super fascinating, it fills in sort of my gaps in sort of the understanding of like how, you know, the, the mode of operations of a lot of these right wing pundits operate from. And yeah, we're going to put a link in the show notes. And aj, where can people go to follow more of your work?
- [62:52]
C
They can go to my Twitter page, Dub woods on Twitter, but they can also follow my more political work on Instagram, ACR Brighton. That's the sort of Instagram for the Brighton branch of Anti Capitalist Resistance, which is the activist group I work with down here.
- [63:11]
B
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to the patreon.comqaa and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second premium episode for every regular episode, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. We have a miniseries network called Cursed Media. We produce some great content, including Annie Kelly's Truly Tradley Deeply. And also Julian has a solo podcast. Check it out. A lot of great people involved with that too. That superstructure. And for everything else, we have a website that's qaapodcast.com listener until next week. May the deep dish bless you and keep you.
- [63:59]
A
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- [64:03]
D
They call it political correctness. Came from the Frankfurt School, from 1928, where Marxists didn't know understand why Marxism wasn't taking over. So they said, what if we went from an economic system and turned it into a social social system? What if it's no longer the owners of the wealth and those who work for them? What if we turned them into identity groups? What if we said that let's now not make it the proletariat and the bourgeoisie? What if we make it the blacks against the whites and the women against the men, and the homosexuals against the straight? What if we turn each other against each other? Because a house divided always falls.