Cultural Marxism Is No Conspiracy Theory
In light of our Albini coverage, and some other recent trends in the wider culture, we thought we would offer some coverage of an ideology that resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths over the course of the 20th century, but which people now claim is some kind of myth or conspiracy theory. Our Murder Talk Radio episode based on this article will go out in the morning.
According to her website, Abbie Richards graduated from Colorado College in 2018 with a bachelor's degree in environmental science and in 2022 earned a master's degree in climate studies researching “the intersection between climate change and misinformation.”
She is a senior video producer at Media Matters for America, a leftist non profit activist group that say that they are engaged in "Comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media," presumably by running campaigns like "Drop Fox,” and by making bad satire about the idea that socialists are attempting to undermine existing values of liberal democracy.
Abbie also sits on the Environmental Media Association's activist board, the Hollywood Climate Summit's advisory board, the NEST Foundation's advisory board, and is a research fellow with the Accelerationism Research Consortium.
Abbie Richards is a self styled “mis and disinformation researcher,” and she is actively spreading mis and disinformation. According to her pyramid chart, Abbie believes that Iran Contra, something which is thoroughly documented to have actually happened, and which men went to prison over, rates at the same level of credibility as “Charles Manson was a CIA asset.”
She places it in the category of “we have questions,” diagonal from, and closer to “leaving reality” than “Epstein didn’t kill himself,” above “UFOs,” and adjacent to both “Area 51” and “Denver Int’l Airport,” which I’m sure is a reference to something exceptionally stupid. The day before this article was scheduled to publish, Abbie’s bio on X changed, and she retweeted this post from her former colleague about layoffs at the non profit.
Media Matters was sued by the Missouri Attorney General on allegations that they manipulated X/twitter's algorithm in order to force ads to appear next to posts they deemed controversial in an effort to pressure advertisers to leave the platform, causing X to suffer financial losses. There was a similar action by the Texas Attorney General but it has been quashed by a preliminary federal injunction barring the investigation on free speech grounds. Media Matters is also facing a “thermonuclear” lawsuit over this from Elon Musk. It is unclear at this time if Abbie remains under the employ of Media Matters.
Abbie clarifies in a tweet that she’s not saying Iran Contra didn’t happen, but that the positioning is meant to imply questions about the involvement of Reagan, someone who admitted publicly to funding the operation; the “disinformation” expert was fact checked by community notes as you can see below.
She also lists “cultural Marxism” as being above the “anti-Semitic point of no return” realm of conspiracy theory, and she is certainly not the only person to make claims of this nature.
Another non profit outlet that has dismissed cultural marxism is Jacobin, a socialist magazine that pushes Marxist viewpoints in the west while paying its authors starvation wages to critique the pay rates of other companies that pay better than they do.
The Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University Samuel Moyn argued in the New York Times that “cultural Marxism is inseparable [from] the most noxious anti-Semitism.”
Previously, Moyn was a professor of history at Columbia University and a professor of history and of law at Harvard University. Moyn himself is also Jewish.
His false claims regarding cultural Marxism seem darkly ironic in the aftermath of performative activism by Marxists and Anarcho-Communists advocating on behalf of the would be Islamist caliphate of Hamas in the name of peace while threatening Jews on college campuses across the United States, declaring “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and committing blood libel.
While there are anti semitic conspiracy theories that incorporate the idea of cultural marxism, that does not make cultural marxism itself an anti semitic conspiracy theory, nor does it make it an also-ran of cultural bolshevism or Jewish bolshevism, anti semitic dog whistles from the World War II era Nazi movement that blamed Jews for communism, and served as an ideological justification for both the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Holocaust.
Edward Said is not Max Ernst, and white supremacist conspiracy theories that blame Jews for cultural marxism, Black Lives Matter, and other social justice movements don’t exactly square up with the idea that Black Lives Matter believes Israel is a “white colonialist state,” which is the result of the influence of both cultural marxism and Islamist teachings on black activist groups. It also doesn’t square with the fact that white supremacists do not believe that Jews are white.
Activists will tell you that “anti-zionism isn’t anti-semitism” as they spread blood libel while remaining curiously silent about ongoing genocides in Myanmar (which will always Burma to us), China, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Syria.
As we mentioned in an earlier article on Russian disinformation, it is believed that the anti semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion was created by Russian intelligence in the early 1900s, and has since been endorsed by many prominent Islamists, including Hamas along with other Palestinian leadership, as well as the Russian aligned Iranian government.
Another thing activists won’t tell you is that Palestine is a completely arbitrary cultural construction made up of different fragments of Arab Islamists who were once part of the Ottoman empire caliphate that collapsed in the early part of the 20th century after it was forcibly ejected from large swathes of greater Europe, starting from the middle ages. The Ottoman Empire seized most of Greece in the 1450s, and it took repeated attempts culminating in an 8 year civil war to successfully eject them from Greece, which they had controlled for nearly 400 years before the Greek war of Independence that ran from February 1821 – September 1829.
In the 1950s, Malcolm X said that Black Americans "would be completely in sympathy with the Arab cause," and the FBI opened a file on him after he wrote a letter to President Truman from prison in which he declared he was a communist. In the 1940s, he had joined the Nation of Islam, which has often criticized Israel, and promotes the idea that black people are the original people of the world, that white people are "devils" and that the death of the white race is near at hand.
After leaving the Nation of Islam due to internal political conflicts, Malcolm X was assassinated by then Nation of Islam member Thomas Hagan, also known as Mujahid Abdul Halim. The Black Panthers, who developed in part after the founders were inspired by Malcolm X, developed relations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Eldridge Cleaver met personally with Yasser Arafat and gave a speech supporting the Palestinian cause.
In an online interview with Jared Ball of the Real News Network in 2015, Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of BLM, described the leaders of the organization as “trained Marxists… super-versed on ideological theories.”
Cullors identifies as a “black queer activist,” and as a prison, police and "militarization" abolitionist, which she says is inspired by the "legacy of black-led anti-colonial struggle in the United States…" and laments "the historical pains and damage caused by European settler colonialism."
"Palestine is our generation's South Africa… if we don't step up boldly and courageously to end the imperialist project called Israel, we're doomed," Cullors said in a resurfaced video from a panel at the Harvard Law School.
In addition to the “legacy of black-led anti-colonial struggle,” Cullors cites the activist and formerly incarcerated Weather Underground member Eric Mann as her mentor during her early activist years.
Mann was elected to the national committee of SDS in 1968, and told the Associated Press that he believed in "continuous resistance" against "institutions and policies of corporate capitalism" and that SDS chapters had to transition from campus protests groups to community groups guiding students as a "de facto government.”
Mann himself wrote that,
Another example of the effort to synthesize revolutionary black nationalism and Marxism was the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), which operated from 1978 until 1990. It was the largest and in my view most effective of the groups that comprised the New Communist Movement. As Dawson explains, the New Communist Movement included groups that believed the United States needed a new Communist party, allied with the People’s Republic of China…
Cullors studied for a degree in religion and philosophy at UCLA, where some of the worst violence has erupted in student protests surrounding the conflict in Gaza.
In one instance at UCLA in late April, a Jewish student was beaten unconscious and taken to the hospital with a head injury. In another incident at UCLA, a Jewish student was chased down, knocked to the ground, and held captive for an hour in an area where protestors said “Zionist Jews aren’t allowed.”
Earlier in April 2024, CNN published an article that said, “Columbia University is facing a full-blown crisis heading into Passover as a rabbi linked to the Ivy League school urged Jewish students to stay home and tense confrontations on campus sparked condemnation from the White House and New York officials.”
Events like these, and a lack of any real meaningful response from the leadership of these universities or police in dealing with them, led to pro-Israel demonstrators attacking the protest encampment at UCLA.
The article that the New York Times published about this was titled “How Counterprotesters at U.C.L.A. Provoked Violence, Unchecked for Hours.”
In this NYT version of events, “The clashes began after counterprotesters tried to dismantle the encampment’s barricade. Pro-Palestinian protesters rushed to rebuild it, and violence ensued.”
The Times also said that,
…violence ebbed and flowed for nearly five hours, mostly with little or no police intervention. The violence had been instigated by dozens of people who are seen in videos counterprotesting the encampment… attacking students in the pro-Palestinian encampment for several hours, including beating them with sticks, using chemical sprays and launching fireworks as weapons. As of Friday, no arrests had been made in connection with the attack.
Many videos emerged from the conflict at UCLA that showed this melee of violence.
At a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism, muslim Representative Ilhan Omar berated the Chancellor of UCLA not for failing to ensure the safety of all of it’s students, but for October 7th video footage being played outside the anti-Israel encampment on campus to educate protesting students about the Oct 7th atrocities, which Omar called “vile and disturbing.”
Referring to video of the Jewish student blocked from walking on campus by a group of mask-wearing Hamas supporters and detained, Ilhan suggested that the student should have used an alternate route.
Contrary to the claims made by people like Moyn and Richards, the movements supported by people like Cullors and Mann are explicitly built on a foundation of cultural Marxism. The Cultural Revolution in Marxist China saw violence and chaos of exactly this sort erupt across Chinese society as the Maoist Red Guards sought to destroy the “Four Olds” (old ideas, culture, customs, and habits) and replace them with the "Four News" (new customs in a new culture with new habits, and ideas).
This was accomplished by destroying property and targeting people seen as representative of the “Olds”, like landlords, wealthy peasants, intellectuals, journalists, and other dangerous types. Estimates of the death toll vary widely, at the high end ranging towards a hundred million people murdered by the new Marxist regime. By contrast, the “Reign of Terror” after the French revolution killed about 30,000 people.
Millions of Chinese were violently persecuted during the cultural revolution through “struggle sessions,” violent public spectacles in which people who were accused of being "class enemies" were publicly humiliated and accused of various crimes, subjected to state sanctioned imprisonment, torture, rape, beatings, harassment, and other abuses such as property confiscation, medical neglect, and the erasure of their social standing and identity.
This included the active participation and support of complicit journalists like Wang Shiwei, who joined the May Fourth Movement, a Chinese anti-imperialist political movement which grew out of student protests in Beijing that began on May 4, 1919, and then later joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1926. After becoming critical about aspects of the Chinese Communist Revolution, and writing criticisms of Mao Zedong, he was executed after being expelled from the CCP on the order from Mao Zedong in 1947.
The terminology of cultural revolution, along with the oppressed/oppressor dynamic for understanding the world, appears in communist discourse and literature well before the founding of the People's Republic of China and subsequent Chinese cultural revolution, which has been compared to the Soviet cultural revolution, a similar radical restructuring of culture and society within Soviet Russia and the USSR that took place between 1928 and 1931 with the goal of forming a new culture to support a new socialist society.
China exported this same style of revolution all across Southeast Asia just as Russia did in Eastern Europe, including in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who were responsible for the Cambodian genocide which took the lives of nearly 3 million people.
Leftist activists would have you believe that the United States military was responsible for the true horrors in Cambodia, but after the United States withdrew from Vietnam and Cambodia, no one was left with the power to stand against the Khmer Rouge. Inspired by Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Communist China, Pol Pot sought to “purify” Cambodia, targeting different ethnic groups and those considered remnants of the “old society,” leading to the murder of intellectuals, former government officials, and even Buddhist monks in the name of “progress.” The Khmer Rouge had a slogan: “What is rotten must be removed.”
Benedict F. "Ben" Kiernan, a historian who is the Whitney Griswold Professor Emeritus of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, has compared the Cambodian genocide to both the Armenian genocide which was perpetrated by the caliphate of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, as well as the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Racism was a major part of the ideology of all three regimes, which also targeted religious minorities and "idealized their ethnic peasantry as the true 'national' class, the ethnic soil from which the new state grew."
This has parallels to the cultural revolution in Russia, which idealized the same peasantry it brutalized as it created a new ruling class in the Politburo, Kremlin, and KGB/GRU military intelligence apparatus.
A version of this same cultural movement exists within America today, born out of the the fabric of counterculture radicalism popularized by students and the music and arts scenes under a variety of left leaning ideologies. The parts of it that have seeped into mainstream American culture are known by many names; many have claimed that it ruined college and also comedy as “political correctness,” or “woke-ness.”
It was skewered in the 1994 film PCU, starring Jeremy Piven and David Spade, which is based on experiences that the writer of the script had while attending Wesleyan University, a “little Ivy” located in the somewhat downtrodden Middletown, CT.
It’s all the same basic paradigm as “cultural marxism,” which just as it did in China and Soviet Russia, uses a constructed hierarchy built on classes of personal identity as a kind of trojan horse to build a coalition that can usurp existing power structures and eventually help establish a socialist state.
This style of student radicalism and the obsession with the perceived oppressed other developed gradually over the period between the end of the civil war and the hippy movement, as various social justice movements merged in support of each other and spread throughout the youth counterculture, music, and art scenes, primarily by way of the beatniks, many of whom were also central figures in the hippy movement, and later by way of antifa in the punk scene.
The New York Times claims there’s no evidence that adversarial nations have engaged in material support of student protestors. It is true that there is no “smoking gun” in this regard, although the article itself notes that Russia is known to have engaged in these kinds of activities, even within the last few years.
It’s also true that adversarial nations have given over $13 billion dollars to American universities since 2012, and that this money is largely concentrated among the Ivy League schools where these protests have been most prolific.
Carnegie Mellon University received the most at just shy of $1.5 billion; Cornell University was close at over $1.25 billion, followed by Harvard University at $894 million and MIT at $859 million, according to a report in the New York Post. The article also includes claims that over 200 of the colleges were alleged to have withheld donation information from the federal government despite being legally required to report this information.
This is the problem of expert-ism as it relates to Moyn and Richards; part hubris, part inability or unwillingness to see beyond their own silo of information and ego, and that’s giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are acting in good faith in their utterances on this topic.
Specialization has value, quite a lot of value, and experts *do* have expertise, but expertise is not and can not ever be evidence of truth in itself. The appeal to authority fallacy is actually an appeal to the modesty of both the speaker and the listener in their unwillingness to admit expertise in the topic being discussed. The latin name for this fallacy is Argumentum Ad Verecundiam; verecundia meaning "coyness", "modesty" or "shame," implying that experts have none of these qualities.
Hamas is explicitly a Marxist group; so is the PLO. Many Islamist groups are. Below, you can see video of Joshua Luito Molal, a 21-year-old Tanzanian student who had been working as an agricultural intern who was kidnapped from his workplace in Nahal Oz on October 7th. He begged for his life, but Hamas militants shot him dead in cold blood, shooting his corpse again and again for the crime of being employed in Israel.
This is what they mean by intifada; this is what they mean when they chant “From the river to the Sea…”
When they chant “Globalize the Intifada,” they are telling you that they want to globalize this. This is the end result of cultural marxism, which casts the cause of Palestine as the oppressed other and Israel as the colonial tyrant guilty of the crime of white-ness.
This, a version of this, is what they want to bring to America, and the rest of the Western world. We don’t have to let them, and we don’t have to let them gaslight us about it, either.
Instead, PCU should have the last word. When there’s nothing meaningful left to transgress against, transgression itself is the only obvious target.