Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory

"Cultural Marxism" redirects here. For "cultural Marxism" in the context of cultural studies, see Marxist cultural analysis.

Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims that Western Marxism is the basis of continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture. The theory claims that an elite of Marxist theorists and Frankfurt School intellectuals are subverting Western society with a culture war that undermines the Christian values of traditionalist conservatism and promotes the cultural liberal values of the 1960s counterculture and multiculturalism, progressive politics and political correctness, misrepresented as identity politics created by critical theory.

A contemporary revival of the Nazi propaganda term "Cultural Bolshevism", the conspiracy theory originated in the United States during the 1990s. While originally found only on the far-right political fringe, the term began to enter mainstream discourse in the 2010s and is now found globally. The conspiracy theory of a Marxist culture war is promoted by right-wing politicians, fundamentalist religious leaders, political commentators in mainstream print and television media, and white supremacist terrorists. Scholarly analysis of the conspiracy theory has concluded that it has no basis in fact.

Aspects of the conspiracy theory

The Role of the Frankfurt School

See also: Frankfurt School

Joseph Goebbels views the Degenerate Art exhibition. The Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is often compared to the antisemitic Nazi propaganda about "cultural Bolshevism" and "degenerate art".

The conspiracy theory claims that an elite of Marxist theorists and Frankfurt School intellectuals are subverting Western society. While parts of the conspiracy theory make reference to actual thinkers and ideas selected from the Western Marxist tradition, they severely misrepresent the subject and give an exaggerated interpretation of their effective influence. In reality, a group of German Marxist scholars, the majority of whom were Jewish, founded the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1923, which came to be known as the Frankfurt School. In their research, they sought to explain the failure of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, why capitalism remained the economic system in Germany, and, eventually, why German workers turned to Nazism instead. After 1933, the majority of the Frankfurt School intellectuals relocated to the United States, where their theories had a limited impact on left-wing circles. While the influence of the Frankfurt School and critical theory are generally viewed by most political scientists to have had a considerable range within academia, they were directly in opposition to the theories promoted by postmodern philosophers, who are frequently identified by proponents of the conspiracy theory as leading examples of Cultural Marxism. In addition, none of its members were part of any kind of international conspiracy to destroy Western civilization.

Academic Joan Braune explains that Cultural Marxism in the sense referred to by the conspiracy theorists never existed, and does not correspond to any historical school of thought. She also states that Frankfurt School scholars are referred to as "Critical Theorists", not "Cultural Marxists", and points out that, contrary to the claims of the conspiracy theory, postmodernism tends to be wary of or even hostile towards Marxism, including towards the grand narratives typically supported by Critical Theory.

The British scholar Stuart Jeffries noted that the theories promoted by the Frankfurt school had "negligible real-world impact", and have been criticized for what Jürgen Habermas called a "strategy of hibernation", noting that they were mostly content to complain about the world rather than attempting to change it. Jeffries wrote: "The Frankfurt conspiracy theory, which has captivated several alt-right figures including Trump, Jordan Peterson and the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous news service, turned this history on its head. Rather than impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads from the academy, the likes of Adorno, Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse were a crack cadre of subversives, who, during their American exile, performed a cultural takedown to which 'Make America Great Again' is a belated riposte."

New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness' (1992)

In the essay "New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'" (1992), Michael Minnicino explains the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory on behalf of the Schiller Institute, a political organization affiliated with conspiracy theorist and perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. Minnicino said that the Jewish intellectuals of the Frankfurt School promoted modern art in order to make cultural pessimism the spirit of the counterculture of the 1960s. The historian Martin Jay pointed out that Daniel Estulin's book cites Minnicino's essay as political inspiration for the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation.

Minnicino argues that late twentieth-century America has become a "New Dark Age" as a result of the abandonment of Judeo-Christian values and Renaissance ideals, which he claims have been replaced with a "tyranny of ugliness." He attributes this to a purported Counter-Renaissance campaign, an alleged plot to socially and psychologically weaken America, carried out in three stages by Georg Lukács, the Frankfurt School, and elite media figures and political campaigners.

According to Minnicino, there are two aspects of the Frankfurt School plan to destroy Western culture: firstly, a cultural critique, by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, to use art and culture to promote alienation and replace Christianity with socialism, including the development of opinion polling to brainwash the populace and the development of advertising techniques to control political campaigning; and secondly, an attack on the traditional family structure by Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse by promoting women's rights, sexual liberation, and polymorphous perversity to subvert patriarchal authority.

To achieve these aims, Minnicino claims, the Frankfurt School initiated, and supported, a "psychedelic revolution", distributing hallucinogenic drugs to encourage sexual perversion and promiscuity amongst young Americans.

The Roots of Political Correctness (1999)

In William Lind's version of the conspiracy, Cultural Marxism is synonymous with political correctness, a supposedly un-American and barbaric project opposed to Christian values. According to Lind's analysis, Lukács and Gramsci aimed to subvert Western culture since it was an obstacle to the Marxist goal of proletarian revolution. According to Lind, the "Cultural Marxists" of the Frankfurt School, began to focus (under Max Horkheimer) on psychological repression within Western societies, aiming to remove social inhibitions (and destroying Western culture) using four main strategies. First, Horkheimer's critical theory would undermine the authority of the traditional family and government institutions and segregate society into opposing groups of victims and oppressors. Second, the concepts of the authoritarian personality and the F Scale, developed by Adorno, would be used to accuse Americans with right-wing views of having fascist principles. Third, the concept of polymorphous perversity would undermine Western culture by promoting free love and homosexuality. Finally, Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance is caricatured by Lind as an argument to silence the right, and allow only the left to be heard. Thus, Lind interprets the Frankfurt School's move to America from Nazi Germany as a sinister plot to establish a totalitarian system in the United States based on political correctness.

The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to Corrupt (2008)

In Timothy Matthews' version of the conspiracy, originally published in The Wanderer in December 2008, the Frankfurt School came to America to carry out "Satan's work". According to Matthews, the Frankfurt School, under the influence of Satan, seek to destroy the traditional Christian family by starting a culture war, using critical theory and Marcuse's polymorphous perversity to encourage women's rights, homosexuality, and the breakdown of patriarchy by creating a female-centered culture.

The article accused the Frankfurt School of instigating:

1. The creation of racism offences
2. Continual change to create confusion
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
4. The undermining of schools' and teachers' authority
5. The destruction of American national identity through immigration
6. The promotion of excessive drinking
7. Emptying of churches
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits
10. Control and dumbing down of media
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family

Despite a lack of a link between the list and any academic movement, conspiracy theorists use Matthews' allegations to promote the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory in right-wing and alt-right news media as well as in far-right internet forums such as Stormfront.

Othering of political opponents

In "Taking On Hate: One NGO's Strategies" (2009), the political scientist Heidi Beirich said that the Cultural Marxism theory demonizes the cultural bêtes noires of conservatism such as feminists, LGBT social movements, secular humanists, multiculturalists, sex educators, and environmentalists, immigrants and black nationalists. In Europe, the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik quoted Lind's culture war conspiracy in his 1,500-page political manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, stating that the "sexually transmitted disease (STD) epidemic in Western Europe is a result of cultural Marxism"; that "Cultural Marxism defines Muslims, feminist women, homosexuals, and some additional minority groups, as virtuous, and they view ethnic Christian European men as evil"; and that the "European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg is a cultural-Marxist-controlled political entity." About 90 minutes before killing 77 people in the 2011 Norway attacks, Breivik e-mailed 1,003 people his manifesto and a copy of Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology.

In "Collectivists, Communists, Labor Bosses, and Treason: The Tea Parties as Right-Wing, Populist Counter-Subversion Panic'" (2012), the journalist Chip Berlet identified the culture war conspiracy theory as the basic ideology of the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party. As a self-identified right-wing movement, the Tea Party claims they are suffering the same cultural subversion suffered by earlier generations of white nationalists. According to Berlet, the populist rhetoric of regional economic elites encourages counter-subversion panics, by which a large constituency of white middle-class people are deceived into unequal political alliances to defend their place in the middle class. Moreover, the failures of free-market capitalism are scapegoated onto the local collectives, communists, labor organisers, non-white citizens and immigrants by manipulating patriotism, economic libertarianism, traditional Christian values and nativism.

In "Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right" (2014) and in "Cultural Marxism: A Survey" (2018), the political scientist Jérôme Jamin refers to conservative politician and media pundit Pat Buchanan as the "intellectual momentum" of the conspiracy theory, and to Anders Breivik as the "violent impetus". Both of them relied on William Lind, who edited a multi-authored work called "Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology" that Jamin calls the core text that "has been unanimously cited as 'the' reference since 2004." Jamin further explains:

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. As such, Cultural Marxism is innovative in comparison with old styled theories of a similar nature, such as those involving Freemasons, Bavarian Illuminati, Jews or even Wall Street bankers. For Lind, Buchanan and Breivik, the threat does not come from the migrant or the Jew because he is a migrant or a Jew. For Lind, the threat comes from the Communist ideology, which is considered as a danger for freedom and democracy, and which is associated with different authoritarian political regimes (Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc.). For Buchanan, the threat comes from atheism, relativism and hard capitalism which, when combined, transform people and nations into an uncontrolled mass of alienated consumers. For Breivik, a self-indoctrinated lone-wolf, the danger comes from Islam, a religion seen as a totalitarian ideology which threatens liberal democracies from Western Europe as much as its Judeo-Christian heritage. In Lind, Buchanan and Breivik, overt racism is studiously avoided.

In 2017, it was reported that advisor Richard Higgins was fired from the United States National Security Council for publishing the memorandum '"POTUS & Political Warfare" that alleged the existence of a left-wing conspiracy to destroy Donald Trump's presidency because "American public intellectuals of Cultural Marxism, foreign Islamicists, and globalist bankers, the news media, and politicians from the Republican and Democratic parties were attacking Trump, because he represents an existential threat to the cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative in the US."

In "Liberalism and Socialism Mortal Enemies Or Embittered Kin?" (2021), professor Matthew McManus said that "the objectives of proponents of conspiratorial views about Cultural Marxism were (and are) not to give a current account of Critical Theory, but to advance a conservative version of US liberalism against the scapegoat of global conspiracy theory." and "In short, what Critical Theory provides to those who use "critical theory" to signal a socialist threat to liberalism is not only a link to Marxist thought, but also a straw man against which to advance neoliberal politics."

Political correctness and antisemitic canards

In the speech "The Origins of Political Correctness" (2000), William S. Lind established the ideology and the etymology of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. Lind wrote:

If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. 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.

Concerning the real-life political violence caused by the conspiracy theory, law professor Samuel Moyn called it an antisemitic canard in the 2018 editorial "The Alt-Right's Favorite Meme is 100 Years Old". About the origins and history of the conspiracy theory, Moyn wrote:

Originally an American contribution to the phantasmagoria of the alt-right, the fear of 'cultural Marxism' has been percolating for years through global sewers of hatred. Increasingly, it has burst into the mainstream. Before President Trump's [NSC] aide Rich Higgins was fired last year [2017], he invoked the threat of 'cultural Marxism' in proposing a new national security strategy. In June, [retired congressman] Ron Paul tweeted out a racist meme that employed the phrase. On Twitter, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's newly elected strongman, boasted of meeting Steve Bannon and joining forces to defeat 'cultural Marxism.' Jordan Peterson, the self-help guru and best-selling author, has railed against it, too, in his YouTube ruminations.

According to Moyn, "[t]he wider discourse around cultural Marxism today resembles nothing so much as a version of the [Jewish Bolshevism] myth updated for a new age." Moyn concludes: "That 'cultural Marxism' is a crude slander, referring to something that does not exist, unfortunately does not mean actual people are not being set up to pay the price, as scapegoats, to appease a rising sense of anger and anxiety. And for that reason, 'cultural Marxism' is not only a sad diversion from framing legitimate grievances but also a dangerous lure in an increasingly unhinged moment."

In Fascism and Culture (2003), historian of fascism Matthew Feldman argues that the term Cultural Marxism is derived from the antisemitic term Kulturbolschewismus (Cultural Bolshevism), with which the Nazis claimed that Jewish cultural influence caused German social degeneration under the liberal régime of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) and was the cause of social degeneration in the West. Doctoral researcher Maxime Dafaure makes a similar point in "The 'Great Meme War:' the Alt-Right and its Multifarious Enemies" (2020).

In the essay "Cultural Marxism and the Cathedral: Two Alt-Right Perspectives on Critical Theory" (2019), the academic Andrew Woods notes that such comparisons are the most common way to analyze the antisemitic implications of the conspiracy theory, but he takes issue with calling it nothing more than a modern iteration of Cultural Bolshevism, saying that its antisemitism is nonetheless "profoundly American". According to philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the term Cultural Marxism "plays the same structural role as that of the 'Jewish plot' in anti-Semitism: it projects (or rather, transposes) the immanent antagonism of our socio-economic life onto an external cause: what the conservative alt-right deplores as the ethical disintegration of our lives (feminism, attacks on patriarchy, political correctness, etc.) must have an external cause—because it cannot, for them, emerge out of the antagonisms and tensions of our own societies."

Rachel Busbridge, Benjamin Moffitt and Joshua Thorburn describe the conspiracy theory as being promoted by the far-right, but that it "has gained ground over the past quarter century" and conclude that "[t]hrough the lens of the Cultural Marxist conspiracy, however, it is possible to discern a relationship of empowerment between mainstream and fringe, whereby certain talking points and tropes are able to be transmitted, taken up and adapted by 'mainstream' figures, thus giving credence and visibility to ideologies that would have previously been constrained to the margins."

History

Origins

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

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

These, in turn, led to a plethora of new videos, now available on YouTube, which feature an odd cast of pseudo-experts regurgitating exactly the same line. The message is numbingly simplistic: All the 'ills' of modern American culture, from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation, racial equality, multiculturalism and gay rights to the decay of traditional education, and even environmentalism, are ultimately attributable to the insidious intellectual influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930s.

Main promoters

According to Joan Braune, Lecturer in Philosophy at Gonzaga University, Paul Gottfried, William S. Lind and Kevin MacDonald are three of the main proponents of the conspiracy theory. According to political scientist Jérôme Jamin, the three people most responsible for originating and promoting the conspiracy theory are William Lind, Pat Buchanan and Anders Breivik.

Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News, was a proponent of the conspiracy theory. Breitbart News has published the idea that Theodor Adorno's atonal music was an attempt at inducing the population to necrophilia on a mass scale. Pat Buchanan has promoted the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory as meant to "de-Christianize" the United States. Paul Weyrich promoted the conspiracy theory as a deliberate effort to undermine "our traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture" and the conservative agenda in American society, arguing that "we have lost the culture war" and that "a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture."

Anders Behring Breivik

The counterfeit police identity card used by Breivik to commit the 2011 Norway attacks, which he justified as defense against Cultural Marxism.

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

Fomentation

Following the Norway attacks, the conspiracy was taken up by a number of far-right outlets and forums, including alt-right websites such as AltRight Corporation, InfoWars and VDARE which have promoted the conspiracy. The AltRight Corporation's website, altright.com, featured articles with titles such as "Ghostbusters and the Suicide of Cultural Marxism", "#3 — Sweden: The World Capital of Cultural Marxism" and "Beta Leftists, Cultural Marxism and Self-Entitlement". InfoWars ran numerous headlines such as "Is Cultural Marxism America's New Mainline Ideology?" VDARE ran similar articles with similar titles such as "Yes, Virginia (Dare) There Is A Cultural Marxism—And It's Taking Over Conservatism Inc."

Neo-Nazi and white supremacists also promoted the conspiracy and help expand its reach. Websites such as the American Renaissance have run articles with titles like "Cultural Marxism in Action: Media Matters Engineers Cancellation of Vdare.com Conference". The Daily Stormer regularly runs stories about "Cultural Marxism" with titles such as "Jewish Cultural Marxism is Destroying Abercrombie & Fitch", "Hollywood Strikes Again: Cultural Marxism through the Medium of Big Box-Office Movies" and "The Left-Center-Right Political Spectrum of Immigration = Cultural Marxism". Similarly, Richard B. Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute, has promoted the conspiracy theory.

Entering the mainstream discourse

In the late 2010s, Jordan Peterson popularized Cultural Marxism as a term by moving it into mainstream discourse. Several writers stated that Peterson blamed the conspiracy for demanding the use of gender-neutral pronouns as a threat to free speech, often misusing postmodernism as a stand-in term for the conspiracy without understanding its anti-semitic implications, specifying that "Peterson isn't an ideological anti-Semite; there's every reason to believe that when he re-broadcasts fascist propaganda, he doesn't even hear the dog-whistles he's emitting". Former Breitbart contributors Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, have promoted the conspiracy theory, especially the claim that Cultural Marxist activity is happening in universities.

Spencer Sunshine, an associate fellow at the Political Research Associates, stated that "the focus on the Frankfurt School by the right serves to highlight its inherent Jewishness." In particular, Paul and Sunshine have criticized traditional media such as The New York Times, New York and The Washington Post for either not clarifying the nature of the conspiracy theory and for "allowing it to live on their pages." An example is an article in The New York Times by David Brooks, who "rebrands cultural Marxism as mere political correctness, giving the Nazi-inspired phrase legitimacy for the American right. It is dropped in or quoted in other stories—some of them lighthearted, like the fashion cues of the alt-right—without describing how fringe this notion is. It's akin to letting conspiracy theories about chem trails or vaccines get unearned space in mainstream press." Another is Andrew Sullivan, who went on "to denounce 'cultural Marxists' for inspiring social justice movements on campuses." Paul and Sunshine concluded that failure to highlight the nature of the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory "has bitter consequences. 'It is legitimizing the use of that framework, and therefore it's coded antisemitism.'"

The theory was embraced in a National Security Council memo written in August 2017 by Rich Higgins entitled "POTUS and Political Warfare". Higgins wrote: "Cultural Marxism relates to programmes and activities that arise out of Gramsci Marxism, Fabian socialism and most directly from the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt strategy deconstructs societies through attacks on culture by imposing a dialectic that forces unresolvable contradictions under the rubric of critical theory." Higgins claimed that a variety of groups opposed to the Trump administration were all influenced by what he called "cultural Marxism" and that "attacks on President Trump...operate in a battle-space prepared, informed and conditioned by cultural Marxist drivers." The memo was read by Donald Trump Jr. who passed on a copy of it to his father.

Sociologists Julia Lux and John David Jordan assert that the conspiracy theory can be broken down into its key elements: "misogynist anti-feminism, neo-eugenic science (broadly defined as various forms of genetic determinism), genetic and cultural white supremacy, McCarthyist anti-Leftism fixated on postmodernism, radical anti-intellectualism applied to the social sciences, and the idea that a purge is required to restore normality." They go on to say that all of these items are "supported, proselytised and academically buoyed by intellectuals, politicians, and media figures with extremely credible educational backgrounds." Dominic Green wrote a conservative critique of conservatives' complaints about Cultural Marxism in Spectator USA, stating: "For the Nazis, the Frankfurter [sic] School and its vaguely Jewish exponents fell under the rubric of Kulturbolshewismus, 'Cultural Bolshevism.'"

Australia

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

Brazil

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

United Kingdom

During the Brexit debate in 2019, a number of Conservatives and Brexiteers espoused the conspiracy theory.

Suella Braverman, the Conservative Member of Parliament (MP), said in a pro-Brexit speech for the Bruges Group, a Eurosceptic think tank, that "[w]e are engaging in many battles right now. As Conservatives, we are engaged in a battle against cultural Marxism, where banning things is becoming de rigueur, where freedom of speech is becoming a taboo, where our universities — quintessential institutions of liberalism — are being shrouded in censorship and a culture of no-platforming." Her usage of the conspiracy theory was condemned as hate speech by other MPs, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the anti-racist organization Hope Not Hate. After meeting with her later, the Board of Deputies of British Jews said that she is "not in any way antisemitic." Braverman was alerted to this connection by journalist Dawn Foster, but she defended using the term. Braverman denied that the term Cultural Marxism is an antisemitic trope, stating during a question and answer session "whether she stood by the term, given its far-right connections. She said: 'Yes, I do believe we are in a battle against cultural Marxism, as I said. We have culture evolving from the far left which has allowed the snuffing out of freedom of speech, freedom of thought.'" Braverman further added that she was "very aware of that ongoing creep of cultural Marxism, which has come from Jeremy Corbyn."

Nigel Farage has promoted the cultural Marxist conspiracy theory, for which he has been condemned by other MPs and Jewish groups such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who said he used it as a dog-whistle code for antisemitism in the United Kingdom. Farage said that the United Kingdom faced "cultural Marxism", a term described in its report by The Guardian as "originating in a conspiracy theory based on a supposed plot against national governments, which is closely linked to the far right and antisemitism." Farage's spokesman "condemned previous criticism of his language by Jewish groups and others as 'pathetic' and 'a manufactured story.'"

In The War Against the BBC (2020), Patrick Barwise and Peter York write how the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory has been pushed by some on the right as part of an alleged bias of the BBC. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown cites Dominic Cummings, Tim Montgomerie and the right-wing website Guido Fawkes as examples of "relentlessly [complaining] about the institution's 'cultural Marxism' or left-wing bias. This now happens on a near-daily basis."

In November 2020 a letter signed by 28 Conservative MPs published in The Telegraph accused the National Trust of being "coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the 'woke agenda'". The use of this terminology in the letter was described by the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, Jewish Council for Racial Equality, anti-racist charity Hope Not Hate and the Campaign Against Antisemitism as antisemitic.

United States

While acting as an aide to the then-President Donald Trump, Rich Higgins wrote a memo framing Trump's 2016 presidential campaign as "a war on Cultural Marxism that needed to be sustained during his presidency." Higgins wrote of a "cabal", an antisemitic trope, promoting Cultural Marxism that included "globalists, bankers, Islamists, and conservative Republicans" and had captured control of the media, academia, politics and the financial system as well as controlling attempts to tamp down on hate speech and hate groups through the Countering Violent Extremism government programs. Higgins also asserted that the Frankfurt School "sought to deconstruct everything in order to destroy it, giving rise to society-wide nihilism." Matt Shea, a Washington Representative from the Republican Party, is a proponent of the conspiracy theory as outlined in a conspiracy-minded seven-page memo by Higgins, the National Security Council staffer in the Trump administration who was fired after the document became public in July 2017.

Terrorism

A number of far-right terrorists have espoused the conspiracy theory. Other than Anders Behring Breivik, Jack Renshaw, a neo-Nazi child sex offender convicted of plotting the assassination of Labour MP Rosie Cooper, promoted the conspiracy theory in a video for the British National Party. John T. Earnest, the perpetrator of the 2019 Poway synagogue shooting, was inspired by white nationalist ideology. In an online manifesto, Earnst stated that he believed "every Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race" through the promotion of "cultural Marxism and communism."

See also

• Andinia Plan
• Antisemitic canard
• Blood libel
• Cultural Bolshevism
• Doctors' plot
• The Eternal Jew (art exhibition)
• The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
• Franklin Prophecy
• The International Jew
• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
• Jewish Bolshevism
• Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory
• Kosher tax conspiracy theory
• QAnon
• Rootless cosmopolitan
• Stab-in-the-back myth
• Well poisoning
• Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory
• Żydokomuna

Further reading

• Catlin, Jonathon (2020). "The Frankfurt School on Antisemitism, Authoritarianism, and Right-wing Radicalism: The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism, by Lars Rensmann, Albany, NY, SUNY Press, 2017, xv + 600 pp., $25.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-43846-594-4". European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology. 7 (2): 198–214. doi:10.1080/23254823.2020.1742018. S2CID 216306994.
• De Bruin, Robin (2021). "European union as a road to serfdom: The Alt-Right's inversion of narratives on European integration". Journal of Contemporary European Studies: 1–15. doi:10.1080/14782804.2021.1960489.
• Grumke, Thomas (2004). "'Take this country back!': Die neue Rechte in den USA". Die Neue Rechte — eine Gefahr für die Demokratie? (in German). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. pp. 175–185. ISBN 978-3-322-81016-8.
• Jamin, Jérôme (2013). "Anders Breivik et le "marxisme culturel": Etats-Unis/Europe". Amnis (12). doi:10.4000/AMNIS.2004.
• Jamin, Jérôme (2014). "Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right". The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right: A Special Relationship of Hate. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 84–103. ISBN 978-1-137-39621-1.
• Jamin, Jérôme (2018). "Cultural Marxism: A survey". Religion Compass. 12 (1–2): e12258. doi:10.1111/REC3.12258.
• Mirrlees, Tanner (2018). "The Alt-right's Discourse on 'Cultural Marxism': A Political Instrument of Intersectional Hate". Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice. 39 (1): 49–69. ISSN 1715-0698.
• Paternotte, David; Verloo, Mieke (2021). "De-democratization and the Politics of Knowledge: Unpacking the Cultural Marxism Narrative". Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society. 28 (3): 556–578. doi:10.1093/sp/jxab025.
• Richardson, John E. (2015). "'Cultural-Marxism' and the British National Party: A transnational discourse". In Copsey, Nigel; Richardson, John E. (eds.). Cultures of Post-War British Fascism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-53937-7.
• Richards, Imogen; Jones, Callum (2021). "Quillette, classical liberalism, and the international New Right". Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-003-10517-6.
• Woods, Andrew (2019). "Cultural Marxism and the Cathedral: Two Alt-Right Perspectives on Critical Theory". Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right. Springer International Publishing. pp. 39–59. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-18753-8_3. ISBN 978-3-030-18753-8.
• Tuters, M. (2018). "Cultural Marxism". Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy. 2018 (2): 32–34. hdl:11245.1/7b72bcec-9ad2-4dc4-8395-35b4eeae0e9e.