Root of All Evil

Wikipedia Search Brainwashing Article Talk Language Download PDF Watch Edit Several terms redirect here. For other uses, see Brainwashing (disambiguation) and Mind control (disambiguation). Brainwashing[a] is the controversial idea that the human mind can be altered or controlled against a person's will by manipulative psychological techniques.[1] Brainwashing is said to reduce its subject's ability to think critically or independently, to allow the introduction of new, unwanted thoughts and ideas into their minds,[2] as well as to change their attitudes, values, and beliefs.[3][4] Mural depicting the "brainwashing" effects of television in Florencio Varela, Argentina The term "brainwashing" was first used in English by Edward Hunter in 1950 to describe how the Chinese government appeared to make people cooperate with them during the Korean War. Research into the concept also looked at Nazi Germany and present-day North Korea, at some criminal cases in the United States, and at the actions of human traffickers. Scientific and legal debate followed, as well as media attention, about the possibility of brainwashing being a factor when lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was used,[5] or in the induction of people into groups which are considered to be cults.[6] Brainwashing has become a common theme in popular culture especially in war stories, thrillers, and science fiction stories.[7] In casual speech, "brainwashing" and its verb form, "brainwash", are used figuratively to describe the use of propaganda to sway public opinion.[8] China and the Korean War edit See also: Thought reform in China The Chinese term xǐnǎo (traditional Chinese: 洗腦; simplified Chinese: 洗脑 lit. 'wash brain')[9] was originally used by early 20th century Chinese intellectuals to refer to modernizing one's way of thinking.[10] The term was later used to describe the coercive persuasion used under the Maoist government in China, which aimed to transform "reactionary" people into "right-thinking" members of the new Chinese social system.[11] The term punned on the Taoist custom of "cleansing/washing the heart/mind" (Chinese: 洗心; pinyin: xǐxīn) before conducting ceremonies or entering holy places.[b] The earliest known English-language usage of the word "brainwashing" in an article by a journalist Edward Hunter, in Miami News, published in 1950.[12] Hunter was an anticommunist and worked for the CIA.[13][14] Hunter and others used the Chinese term to explain why, during the Korean War (1950–1953), some American prisoners of war (POWs) cooperated with their Chinese captors, and even in a few cases defected to their side.[15] British radio operator Robert W. Ford[16][17] and British army Colonel James Carne also claimed that the Chinese subjected them to brainwashing techniques during their imprisonment.[18] The U.S. military and government laid charges of brainwashing in an effort to undermine confessions made by POWs to war crimes, including biological warfare.[19] After Chinese radio broadcasts claimed to quote Frank Schwable, Chief of Staff of the First Marine Air Wing admitting to participating in germ warfare, United Nations commander General Mark W. Clark asserted: "Whether these statements ever passed the lips of these unfortunate men is doubtful. If they did, however, too familiar are the mind-annihilating methods of these Communists in extorting whatever words they want ... The men themselves are not to blame, and they have my deepest sympathy for having been used in this abominable way."[20] Beginning in 1953, Robert Jay Lifton interviewed American servicemen who had been POWs during the Korean War as well as priests, students, and teachers who had been held in prison in China after 1951. In addition to interviews with 25 Americans and Europeans, Lifton interviewed 15 Chinese citizens who had fled after having been subjected to indoctrination in Chinese universities. (Lifton's 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, was based on this research.)[21] Lifton found that when the POWs returned to the United States their thinking soon returned to normal, contrary to the popular image of "brainwashing."[22] In 1956, after reexamining the concept of brainwashing following the Korean War, the U.S. Army published a report entitled Communist Interrogation, Indoctrination, and Exploitation of Prisoners of War, which called brainwashing a "popular misconception". The report concludes that "exhaustive research of several government agencies failed to reveal even one conclusively documented case of 'brainwashing' of an American prisoner of war in Korea."[23] Legal cases and the "brainwashing defense" Anti-cult movement Scientific research Other areas and studies In popular culture See also Further reading Notes References External links Last edited 5 days ago by Game4brains Wikipedia Wikimedia Foundation Powered by MediaWiki Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Privacy policy Contact Wikipedia Code of Conduct Developers Statistics Cookie statement Terms of Use Desktop

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logo Computer How it Works logo Ask an Expert Ask a Computer Technician Found 1 result(s) for your search Ask An Expert seems like a scam. They wanted access to my computer with no way to say no. Dedn't feel right. Id like a Technician's Assistant chatimg Customer: Ask An Expert seems like a scam. They wanted access to my computer with no way to say no. Dedn't feel right. Id like a phone number to speak to an HP Tech support person. Surely you must have one. Technician's Assistant: What HP model do you have? And the Operating System (OS)? Customer: Officejet Pro 6978 Don't know the operating system... Windows? Technician's Assistant: How long has this been going on with your HP? What have you tried so far? Customer: Since I changed out the color cartriges yesterday. I tried the Clean the Head program Technician's Assistant: Is there anything else the Computer Expert should know before I connect you? Rest assured that they'll be able to help you. 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Skip to main content Open Navigation Open Search Donate Report Progressivism How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—and How Americans Can Fight It November 14, 2022 Over an hour read Download Report Authors: Mike Gonzalez and Katharine Gorka Summary The United States has successfully confronted Marxist attempts to derail it from its historic path of liberty and order. The multifaceted effort to defeat the enemy, generally referred to as the Cold War, concentrated many of the best minds in the country. In 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, many Americans and others around the globe justifiably believed that communism had been defeated. However, American Marxists, making use of the complacency that victory often produces, have gained more influence than ever before. Cloaking their goals under the pretense of social justice, they now seek to dismantle the foundations of the American republic by rewriting history; reintroducing racism; creating privileged classes; and determining what can be said in public discourse, the military, and houses of worship. Unless Marxist thought is defeated again, today’s cultural Marxists will achieve what the Soviet Union never could: the subjugation of the United States to a totalitarian, soul-destroying ideology. Key Takeaways With the end of the Cold War, many Americans justifiably believed communism had been defeated. But American Marxists have gained more influence than ever before. Cloaking their goals under the pretense of social justice, these cultural Marxists want to distort America’s history and dismantle its very foundations. Unless Marxist ideas are defeated, their proponents will push the United States to follow a totalitarian ideology that obliterates freedom and opportunity. Copied Select a Section 1/0 Toggle open close 1989: The Watershed Year All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a Trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. —Abraham Lincoln, in his 1838 “Lyceum Address” In 1989, as the Soviet empire was crumbling, The New York Times noted an interesting new development: While millions who had lived under the brutal rule of communism for decades were finally throwing off their yoke, Marxist professors were taking over American academia: As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders. It could be considered a success story for the students of class struggle, who were once regarded as subversives.1 Felicity Barringer, “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in U.S. Colleges,” The New York Times, October 25, 1989, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/25/us/education-the-mainstreaming-of-marxism-in-us-colleges.html?fbclid=IwAR3N1H0Hr6l7fJzT5-AmMAZE5kSljxAl5Bm8KRGibJ7IY6x1FbHINA39T00 (accessed October 12, 2022). So began the article, which ran under the headline “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in U.S. Colleges.” It was penned by a journalist trained in understanding communists, the paper’s 1985–1988 Moscow correspondent, Felicity Barringer. Her piece highlighted an important turning point in the history of modern Marxism and shone a spotlight on emerging trends and evolutions that, generations later, have now blossomed into full bloom. One such trend was that American Marxism was being liberated from Moscow’s shackles. Indeed, communism’s defeat in the Soviet Union and its captive nations behind the Iron Curtain seemed not to faze the Marxist academics Barringer quoted. “I’m very happy with what’s happening in these countries. I think it’s going to save socialism, rather than kill it,” said John Roemer, professor of economics at the University of California, Davis.2 Ibid. Another trend was the fact that capitalism’s victory was reduced to its superior ability to satisfy man’s needs and wants, one of communism’s greatest failures. Capitalism’s advantage as a provider of goods and services was derided as an illusory good: Prosperity came at the expense of conforming to the dictates of the marketplace, forcing people to live lives of quiet desperation. Capitalism’s superior ability to provide goods and services was also cast by the new Marxists as the harbinger of ugly consumerism. The free market’s ability to liberate the creative spirit and allow individuals to pursue human flourishing with their families was never acknowledged, and certainly never contrasted with Marxism’s inevitable despotism, something that Karl Marx himself had averred would be necessary.3 In their Manifesto, Marx and Friedrich Engels write that collectivization “cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, February 1848, Marxist.org., p. 26, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf (accessed October 12, 2022). Barringer was therefore right to note that inside the academy Marxism was growing especially in those areas that had to do with culture, because it had failed so badly in its economics: Where Marxism is thriving, these scholars say, is less in social science courses, where there is a possibility of practical application than in the abstract world of literary criticism. It is also in this field that new radicals—from feminists who say class analysis leaves women out, to deconstructionists who say historical truth does not exist—have posed the sharpest challenge to those who back Marx’s theories of class struggle. But that still left them with the problem that workers in the West were refusing to wage a revolution that they intuited would hinder their own economic interests and diminish their freedoms. Because of that, Marxism had to evolve to find other revolutionary agents: “'Marxism and feminism, Marxism and deconstruction, Marxism and race—this is where the exciting debates are,” Jonathan Wiener, professor of history at the University of California at Irvine said. That insight from Professor Wiener was important, as it foreshadowed the identity-based Marxism of the 21st century. The struggle would no longer be based on economic class but on identity—based on ascribed characteristics, such as race, sex, or national origin, that are inherited at birth and over which the individual has no control. The reasons were simple: Economic classes fluctuate, especially under capitalism, where people can, and often do, change their stations in life. Race, sex, and national origin are, however, immutable. They are thus superior loci of revolutionary change. This is why the new Marxism emerged victorious on college campuses and elsewhere in American cultural centers starting in the late 1980s, whereas it had failed when it relied on social class and guns. This new mutation of Marxism was cultural—“cultural Marxism.” It began to be debated and written about in the 1920s and the 1930s, by Antonio Gramsci in Italy and the so-called Frankfurt School in Germany, but this cultural Marxism only came to full fruition in the late 1960s when Gramsci was first translated into English and the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse came to prominence among university students. Gramsci was translated by the British journal New Left Review, and Marcuse came to be known as the guru of the New Left. This Special Report discusses the dangers posed by this new mutation, one hatched by the 1960s’ New Left. On American, Canadian, Western European, and even Japanese college campuses in the early 1960s, rebellion found fertile ground in a rising generation of students. It was there that the New Left was born. Universities then continued to serve the revolution by providing a supportive ecosystem to those radical students as they entered adulthood and became professors, where they could indoctrinate subsequent generations. The strategy to achieve the new cultural Marxism was also no longer predicated on Marx’s original prescription, the violent overthrow of the system by the working class, or in Marx and Engel’s own words, “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, [and] conquest of political power by the proletariat.”4 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 50. Rather, the strategy now draws on Gramsci’s concept: Ideologues must infiltrate institutions and all of society and “raise the consciousness of” the “oppressed” with a new cultural worldview, or narrative. Marxism had failed in Western societies when it relied on economic status and violence.5 When it did succeed in Eastern Europe, it was as a result of occupation by Stalin’s troops and successive military interventions by the Warsaw Pact. But this time it had a real chance of succeeding. This is the reason that cultural Marxism today presents a far more serious and existential threat to the United States than did Soviet communism. Because of cultural Marxism’s inroads into the education system, many of America’s youth have already been raised on a diet of ideas that directly undermine the American Founding. They are not taught that all people are created equal; they are taught that some people are racially privileged due to structural racism. They are not taught individual rights so much as group rights. They are not taught that the United States, with its free markets and property rights, has brought more prosperity to more people than any other nation on earth. They are not taught that generation after generation has worked to achieve the Founders’ ideal that all men are created equal. They are taught that America is systemically racist, that its very laws were designed to uphold something called white supremacy—which refers not to the vile notion that the white race is supreme, but to all Western traditions, codes, societal arrangements, laws, and norms. Many Americans are today experiencing firsthand the effect of the poison that is being fed to their children in schools. The majority of Americans pays thousands of dollars in taxes to have their children indoctrinated in public schools and universities. Another significant portion of the population is paying additional thousands, even tens of thousands, to have their children indoctrinated in private schools and universities. And nearly all parents are allowing their children to be continually bombarded with these same anti-American, anti-reality, counter-factual ideas through movies, television shows, books, comics, games, social media, search engines, and the news feed on their iPhones. A growing number of Americans are aware of the depth of the infiltration of their culture by insidious ideas, but do enough understand the long-term ramifications? Americans’ first task therefore in reversing the tide of cultural Marxism is to ensure that more of the public understands both the roots and the consequences of these ideas. Background to the Present Crisis The year 1989 was an important inflection point in the nation’s history because it marked the start of a real takeover. Marxists had tried before to communize the United States, starting with Karl Marx himself. Indeed, in 1864 Marx wrote to congratulate Abraham Lincoln on his re-election, stating, “The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.”6 Karl Marx, “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America,” November 1864. But Marx was wrong in seeing the fight to end slavery as a movement into his communist ideal of a classless, godless society, as he was wrong about so many things. When Marx and Engels published the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848, they described a world defined by structural conflict based on economic inequalities and social class. They advocated an uprising of the working class—the proletariat—against the wealthy owners of capital—the bourgeoisie. They had already called on the proletariat to capture state power through “revolutionary terror,”7 Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, November 1848, translated by the Marx–Engels Institute, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm (accessed on July 19, 2022). and in the Manifesto repeated the need to introduce dictatorship through “despotic inroads,”8 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 26. and then to progress to a state of communal ownership through the “abolition of bourgeois property.”9 Ibid., p. 22. For nearly 70 years, Marx and Engels’s vision of industrial workers inevitably unleashing revolution never came about, however. In 1917, Lenin and his band of Bolshevik terrorists were able to bring this vision to fruition in Russia, and they did so through the self-conscious introduction of state terror. Using a similar combination of tyranny and terror, Mao was able to impose communism on China, as Castro did on Cuba, Kim Il-Sung on North Korea, and so on. None of these were industrialized societies, however, and Marx and Engels had so insisted that communism must come from industrialized nations that they called for a bourgeois transition before communists could attempt a revolution. In spite of extensive efforts to galvanize workers across the globe, the Soviets failed to bring about their communist revolution in developed, industrialized countries, such as France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States. Gramsci, the founder of Italy’s communist party, was one of the first to propose a solution to this conundrum. He argued that workers had accepted the cultural institutions of their bourgeois oppressors, and therefore effectively imposed their own enslavement on themselves. Gramsci wrote that the worker had developed a “false consciousness”—the worker remained faithful to God, loyal to his family, patriotic to his nation, and he liked his private property, all things that Marx had said needed to be abolished. As Marcuse wrote years later in his essay on “Repressive Tolerance,” “false consciousness has become the general consciousness.”10 Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 1969, https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html (accessed October 12, 2022). The implications for those wanting to wage revolution were immense. In Western Europe and North America, where strong civil society strengthened traditional relationships, Gramsci argued that communists should abandon the dream of violent revolution, what he termed the “war of maneuver.” Rather, Gramsci argued, they should undertake a “war of position,” or hidden conflict. The supposedly oppressed groups would gain influence and power by taking over existing institutions.11 From the Prison Notebooks, quoted by Perry Anderson in The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (New York: Verso, 2020), p. 36. It would be the job of communist intellectuals to undermine the state’s “hegemonic narrative” and introduce into the minds of the people a “counter-narrative.” A war of position “was the only form possible in the West,” Gramsci wrote in the 1930s in what came to be known as his Prison Notebooks.12 Ibid. Where the Soviets failed to mobilize workers to engage in violent revolution, Gramsci succeeded in laying the groundwork for revolutionary change by focusing on culture and education. Thus, it was intellectual elites and students who picked up the revolutionary baton in the 1960s and successfully carried it into the heart of America. A key moment came in 1960. C. Wright Mills, an influential sociologist at Columbia University, wrote a seminal article titled “Letter to the New Left,”13 C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review, No. 5 (September–October 1960). which appears to have provided a name—the New Left—for a movement that wanted to bring about radical change but independently of Moscow. He dismissed the Soviet focus on the worker as Victorian Marxism and even “vulgar” Marxism. Instead, Mills wrote, “Who is it that is thinking and acting in radical ways? All over the world—in the bloc, outside the bloc and in between—the answer’s the same: it is the young intelligentsia.”14 Ibid. He recognized that in many places around the world it was not workers but young people who were in fact sparking revolution, and by highlighting that fact, he provided inspiration to a generation of middle-class white students in the United States that they could be agents of revolutionary change.15 Daniel Geary, “‘Becoming International Again’: C. Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left, 1956–1962,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 95, No. 3 (December 2008), pp. 710–736. This type of argument was able to take root in no small part because the ground had been well tilled for years by the New Left’s precursors. American students had been fed a steady stream of content critical of American power and prosperity, mostly written by socialists or inspired by socialist ideas—Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903); Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906); Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922); John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939); Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953); J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951); Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956); Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957); and John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958), to name just a few. These books, among many others, entered the mainstream and helped to shape an image of America’s middle class as pathetically conformist, pawns of their own consumerism, superficial, spiritually dead, and unhappy (though it is known from opinion polls and surveys that Americans were by and large happy in the 1950s). The writer and satirist H. L. Mencken described them as the “booboisie.”16 For Mencken’s influence on one of the original SDS leaders, see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 1. These books also demonstrated how much easier it is to bring about change by influencing the culture rather than by trying to organize a violent revolution of workers. And it was not only books, but all forms of culture. Todd Gitlin, a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the pre-eminent institution of the New Left, wrote: The future New Left read David Riesman and C. Wright Mills and Albert Camus, and found in them warrants for estrangement, but nothing influenced me, or the baby-boom generation as a whole, as much as movies, music and comics did. On the big screen, on posters, and in popular magazines, America was mass-producing images of white youth on the move yet with nowhere to go. What moved the new sullen heroes was the famous rebellion without a cause.17 Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 31. America’s youth were thus primed to be discontent, to disparage the prosperity that had given them their safety and ease and lives of comfort that others around the world could only dream of—and disparage it they did. One has only to think of the seminal “Port Huron Statement,” the opening salvo from SDS, issued at its first national convention in 1962: We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit…. Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity—but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world?18 “Port Huron Statement,” The Sixties Project, University of Virginia at Charlottesville, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html (accessed October 13, 2022). The fact that Fidel Castro, fresh from law school at the age of 32 and surrounded by a band of youthful revolutionaries, had successfully ousted Cuban president Fulgencio Batista in January 1959 also helped to fuel the spirit of revolution. In case any of America’s elite youth had missed that fact, Harvard’s chief academic officer, McGeorge Bundy (later to be President John F. Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, and later still, president of the Ford Foundation), welcomed Castro to the campus in April 1959. So many students were interested in seeing Castro that the event had to be moved from an auditorium to the football stadium. Capturing that shift in focus from the worker to the student, Castro explained that he agreed to speak at Harvard, because, “That is where you find the real ‘military spirit:’ in students, not in the barracks.”19 Graham Allison, “Fidel Castro at Harvard: How History Might Have Changed,” The Boston Globe, April 25, 2015, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/fidel-castro-harvard-how-history-might-have-changed (accessed October 14, 2022). It should come as no surprise that within three years of Castro’s visit, Harvard’s chapter of SDS would have 600 dues-paying members and the mission of “shaking America to its roots.”20 Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 2. The year 1960 thus set the stage for the tumultuous decade that followed, though most Americans unwarily expected a continuation of the 1950s Eisenhower years. The New Left that emerged in the years that followed—not just in America, but also in Canada, Germany, Japan, and the U.K.—was made up of intellectuals, activists, and students who abandoned the economic determinism of Soviet communism and embraced the causes of civil rights and social democracy. This was a key steppingstone to today’s cultural Marxism. Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and Che Guevara replaced Lenin and Stalin as revolutionary icons. The Martinican revolutionary Frantz Fanon became the writer of choice for the New Left. Fanon popularized the phrase first written by Jean-Paul Sartre, “by any means necessary,” which epitomized Marxists’ dictum that the ends justify the means. In the U.S. it was further propagated by Malcolm X. Fanon gave expression to the relativism of the New Left when he wrote, “Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the natives, and ruins the foreigners.”21 Joy James, “‘Concerning Violence’: Frantz Fanon’s Rebel Intellectual in Search of a Black Cyborg,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 112, No. 1 (Winter 2013), https://sites.williams.edu/jjames/files/2019/06/black-cyborg.pdf (accessed August 1, 2022). Fanon’s championing of anti-colonialist rhetoric and denunciation of all things Western was then imported domestically, and the same dynamic was repeated, only this time casting in opposition Western whites and the new minority categories that were hastily being created by activists and the bureaucracy. The writer Susan Sontag claimed “critical distance” from the New Left, but she perfectly captured the philosophical vibe of her era when she wrote in 1966, “The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.”22 Robert Carson and Hollis Robbins, “Susan Sontag: Race, Class and the Limits of Style,” The American Interest, November 29, 2019, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/11/29/susan-sontag-race-class-and-the-limits-of-style/ (accessed October 13, 2022). This is exactly what Columbia’s Maxine Greene had in mind when she taught that the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through traditional schooling. In academia, after the late 1960s, the takeover was paved by Greene and other professors who prepared the radical students of the 1960s to become the radical professors of the 1980s. Studies show that teaching was one of the top occupations sought by members of the New Left, and that most maintained their ideological commitment for the rest of their lives.23 Cyril Levitt, “The New Left, the New Class and Socialism,” Higher Education, Vol. 8, No. 6 (November 1979), p. 642. Unsurprisingly then, a 2006 study of professors by Harvard’s Neil Gross and Solon Simmons shows that by far the most radical cohort that year were those professors born between 1942 and 1956, or those who went to college in the 1960s or the early 1970s. Fully 50 percent of them were either extremely liberal or liberal, whereas only 8 percent were either conservative or extremely conservative. The number would be even more lopsided had the authors not collapsed “slightly liberal” and “slightly conservative” into a moderate middle. By comparison, those born before 1942 were much less likely to be radically liberal. The radicals were also most highly concentrated in social sciences and the humanities, where they, respectively, outnumbered conservatives by 58 to 5 and 52 to 4.24 Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, Professors and Their Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 26 and 27. But, before going all in on Gramscian cultural indoctrination, the radical students of the New Left gave revolution one last try. The decisive turn toward totalitarianism and violence was not only noticed by intellectuals on the right. Irving Howe, one of the best-known socialist men of letters in the mid-20th century, wrote a searing 7,000-word essay for The New York Times Magazine in 1982 decrying how the New Left of the 1960s had turned American liberalism dogmatic and violent: Each day the New Left kept moving away from its earlier spirit of fraternity toward a hard-voiced dogmatism, from the ethic of nonviolence toward a romantic-nihilist fascination with a “politics of the deed.” In the years of the Vietnam War the New Left grew rapidly, mostly as a center of opposition, but by locking itself into a politics more and more like that of the old left-wing sects, it made certain that in the end it would do no more than reenact their collapse.” To see Stalin’s theory of “social fascism” refurbished by SDS leaders as a theory of “liberal fascism” played hell with one’s nerves. To see the Leninist theory of a “vanguard party” transformed into the New Left strategy of “confrontation politics” made one suspect nothing ever is learned from history. To see the Leninist–Stalinist contempt for liberal values elevated to Herbert Marcuse’s haughty formulas about “repressive tolerance”—formulas used to rationalize the break-up of opponents’ meetings by some New Left groups—made one despair of any authentic left in America. The authoritarian debauch was soon all-encompassing: Ideology hates free spaces.25 Irving Howe, “The Decade that Failed,” The New York Times Magazine, September 19, 1982, p. 83, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/19/magazine/the-decade-that-failed.html (accessed October 13, 2022). The SDS soon transfigured itself into a terrorist group known as the Weather Underground, while others created the equally violent Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican National Liberation Front, and other groups. They set off bombs, tried to kill policemen and politicians and overthrow society to implement, in the words of the Weathermen, “world communism.” The New Left’s violent stage was of short duration, however; eventually the Weathermen unwittingly helped to cut short the armed revolution stage. They were mostly wealthy white kids from the suburbs with no idea of how to carry out revolt, and therefore ended up killing each other in higher numbers than they killed policemen or members of the bourgeoisie.26 Mark Rudd, “I Was Part of the Weather Underground. Violence Is Not the Answer,” The New York Times, March 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opinion/weathermen-greenwich-village-explosion.html (accessed October 13, 2022). The Weathermen thus showed in stark form the futility of violent revolution, especially if it was not preceded by cultural indoctrination. Most of the terrorist groups that emerged in the late Sixties and early Seventies had disintegrated by the early 1980s. But the radicals did not abandon their dream of dismantling the United States. The radical students of the 1960s who had sought to emulate Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh by unleashing revolution in the United States, by the early 1980s were facing the reality that they would not topple the U.S. government through violence. Their acceptance that revolution was futile was soothed by their new understanding that they could still overthrow society, but they would do so by infiltrating the institutions and acculturating Americans to such Marxist ideas as abolishing the family, property, the nation-state, and God. They would have to burrow in. If violence came in at all—as Marx had written that it must—it would be more as a final coup-de-grace, after the institutions had been taken over, than as a bloody, regime-changing revolution. Rudi Dutschke, the West German radical and disciple of the Frankfurt School revolutionary kingmaker Marcuse, titled this Gramscian strategy “The Long March through the Institutions” (a communist nod to Mao’s Long March in China in the 1930s). This became the philosophy that guided how the Marxist penetration of American society and her institutions would be affected. No figure better personified this metamorphosis from armed revolution to cultural infiltration than Bill Ayers, who went from being one of the main architects of the Weather Underground, designated by the FBI as a domestic terrorist organization, to getting a PhD in education in the 1980s and being called “a school reformer” by such figures as NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw.27 Sol Stern, “The Bomber as School Reformer,” City Journal, October 6, 2008, https://www.city-journal.org/html/bomber-school-reformer-10465.html (accessed October 13, 2022). Ayers, however, knew what he was doing when he reposted on his website classic lines by Gramsci, such as: The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind. I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem.28 Bill Ayers, “Gramsci on Education,” November 26, 2018, https://billayers.org/2018/11/26/gramsci-on-education/ (accessed November 1, 2022). By 1989, the year that Barringer discovers it, that penetration of American citadels of thought had reached a tipping point. The now middle-aged radicals were deeply ensconced in the faculties of the campuses they had once disrupted. Not only did they have professorships, but they had also trained two decades of students in their radical ideologies. Now those students were developing their own radical ideas and casting aside the older generation. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the rejection of the mostly white, male professors of law who had established the critical legal studies (CLS) movement by the heavily minority and female professors of law who created critical race theory (CRT). This was key in the transition from the Marxism of the New Left, which was ascendent in the 1960s and 1970s, to the next generation of Marxism, which took hold in the 1980s and had its coming out party in 1989, when CRT was first named and formally founded. It happened at a convention held at a convent in Madison, Wisconsin, when black and other non-white law faculty and students who were members of the CLS movement decided to strike out on their own, establishing CRT as a race-based offshoot of CLS. Should there be any doubt about the foundational role of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci in the emergence of this new, cultural Marxism, one has only to recall an interview with Richard Delgado, a Mexican-American law professor who helped to found CRT, who said this of CRT’s ironic beginnings in a religious setting: “So we gathered at that convent for two and a half days, around a table in an austere room with stained glass windows and crucifixes here and there—an odd place for a bunch of Marxists—and worked out a set of principles.”29 “Living History Interview with Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic,” Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, Vol. 221 (2011), p. 225, https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=faculty (accessed October 13, 2022). Marx and Marxism comes up often in the writings that formed the movement. Gramsci, meanwhile, is quoted approvingly by several authors in the 1995 anthology of essays that serves as the bible of CRT, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement30 Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (eds.), Critical Race Theory, The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1995). —which CRT adherents, in another reference to Mao, refer to as the “Big Red Book.”31 Max B. Sawicky, “How the Critical Race Theory Scare-Mongering Failed in Virginia,” The New Republic, March 9, 2022, https://newrepublic.com/article/163467/critical-race-theory-loudoun-county (accessed October 13 2022). And, lest anyone forget, Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research, which originated from the German antecedent of CRT, critical theory, was founded by members of different communist parties in 1922 to help to promote Marxism in the West. The decade of the 1980s, which followed the political and social paroxysms of the 1960s and 1970s—and was ironically the decade of the Reagan revolution and the collapse of Soviet communism—was a halfway point between the cultural spasms of the 1960s and today’s near-total takeover of Western cultural institutions by the Left. It was also the point at which the Marxist Left made the all-important pivot from class-based or economic Marxism to cultural Marxism. Thomas Klingenstein, the chairman of the board of the Claremont Institute, has independently come up with an alternative name for the phenomenon: Woke Communism (Woke Comm for short).32 Thomas Klingenstein speech at the National Conservative Conference III, Miami, September 10–13, 2022. This Special Report presents a strategy to counter the threat to America’s liberties that this ideology poses. It is not a strategy to fix all the threats. It says nothing about the administrative state, or about the “Great Reset” economic strategy of the World Economic Forum. It examines the origins of today’s cultural Marxism as well as lessons learned from other great ideological conflicts, particularly the Cold War, to develop a strategy for turning back the radical takeover of American institutions and thus preserve American principles and freedoms, which are the only true path to equality and opportunity for all. The Fundamental Design of Cultural Marxism Today’s cultural Marxists believe that the reason economic, social, cultural, academic, and health outcomes (to name just a few) show persistent racial disparities is because of a pervasive, systemic racism that can only be eliminated by smashing the system itself. The quickest way to do that is to create a never-ending number of racial and country-of-origin categories (such as Hispanics and Asian Americans, both created by government fiat in 1977 at the insistence of leftist activists), the members of which would be instilled with grievances about the disparity of these outcomes, to the point that they will want to become active soldiers in smashing the system. The Marxist narrative that all of society for all of history has been divided into categories of the oppressed and their oppressors is played over and over. The government, and all society, the purveyors of CRT say, must thus treat people not as individuals with liberties, but as categories that deserve special treatment and benefits as members of these categories. What is happening today, therefore, is nothing more than this age’s identity category version of Marx’s 19th-century claim that, because individuals have different abilities, and because they belong to different classes, their rights must differ. According to Marx, if government or society in general were to grant people equal individual rights (such as to consumption and services), material inequality (the bugaboo of all Marxists then and now) would ensue. Another reason why Marx thought that government needed to distribute goods and services unequally until the point that communism reached its final stage (a completely elusive target date), was that “socialism inherits inequalities from capitalism that can’t be wished away.” Fast forward to today, and famed “anti-racist” Ibram X. Kendi declares that “[t]he only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”33 Conference attended by one of the authors. The government, Kendi—a retail promoter of CRT—is saying, must discriminate in favor of the members of the categories deemed oppressed. But, as Klingenstein rightly observed at the Third National Conservative Conference, held in Miami in September 2022, “A free society will necessarily lead to different outcomes. The more outcome equality, the less freedom there is.”34 Eric Mann, “Building an Anti-Racist, Anti-Imperialist United Front: Theory and Practice From the L.A. Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union,” September 16, 1996, https://thestrategycenter.org/1996/09/06/building-the-anti-racist-anti-imperialist-united-front-theory-and-practice-from-the​-l-a-strategy-center-and-bus-riders-union/ (accessed October 24, 2022). Marx, an economic determinist, believed that the different outcomes depended on different classes, and these depended on their relationship to the factors of production. Basing their views on race and other immutable traits, America’s cultural Marxists explain the different outcomes in terms of categories that are racial and sexual. To them, the racial disparities that so bedevil today’s society happen because the dominant sets of practices and institutions, the rules for the construction of all authorized institutions and activities, codify “white supremacy.” To cultural Marxists, all the rules, norms, behaviors, traditions, and mores of Western civilization constitute white supremacy. White supremacy is totalizing—it is the American Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Reformation—everything. It is that which needs to be torn down. Capitalism, for both earlier Marxists as well as today’s, must be demolished—for Marx because he sought “the abolition of private property,” for cultural Marxists, because it rewards the wrong norms and forms of conduct. The revolution as originally envisioned by Marx and Engels would not only abolish private property and the right of inheritance; it would also centralize credit and communications; factories and instruments of production would be communally owned; it would abolish the family and create “an openly legalized community of women.” It would even abolish countries and nationality. All this, theoretically, to end gradations of social rank or class, which Marx described as having simplified in his day into two antagonistic classes—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The Marxist revolution must thus begin with the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie. All this is consonant with today’s cultural Marxists. Cultural Marxism adapts Marx’s foundational concepts. Marx believed that revolutions would invariably result when “the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.” Cultural Marxists, abandoning economic determinism, substitute culture for economy and racial and sexual identities for the proletariat. They agree with Gramsci that “popular beliefs and similar ideas are themselves material forces.” And immutable traits, such as race, will now trump class. To the 21st-century communist Eric Mann, “the racialization of all aspects of political life operates as a material force in itself.” Cultural Marxism is thus a remodeled Marxism, a mutation; but it is Marxism nonetheless, something Americans in the 21st century need to understand. It is entirely distinct from other forms of garden-variety left liberalism, whose proponents are being displaced by cultural Marxists—in the Democratic Party, for example, socialist members of the so-called Squad, such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), and Corey Bush, (MO), receive levels of attention denied to their moderate colleagues, such as Representatives Henry Cuellar (TX) and Carolyn Bourdeaux (GA). The cultural Marxists’ goal is not to improve the system, but to overturn the existing social order entirely—which they consider to be an enforcer of “white supremacy.” Because of that absolutism, cultural Marxism cannot tolerate or co-exist with other worldviews. It demands censorship, which began as “political correctness” but has since veered into the far more insidious censorship, which leads inevitably to tyranny (as Marxism always has everywhere it has been tried). It punishes alternative views by attempting to drive those who express them from public life, a phenomenon dubbed “cancel culture.” As Klingenstein said in his September 2022 speech, “if the Woke Comms want to overthrow our system, we have to overthrow theirs.” The new Marxists play for keeps, just as the old ones did. Marx’s favorite phrase came from Goethe’s Mephisto (the devil): “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”35 Paul Kengor, The Devil and Karl Marx (Gastonia, NC: Tan Books, 2020), p. 36. Cultural Marxists took over the universities and transformed the class struggle into one over race, sex, and other immutable traits, and used these positions of power to reinterpret not just history but reality itself. Cultural Marxists also abandoned violent struggle in favor of indoctrination. Socialism evolved from preaching government ownership of the means of production to putting socialists in charge of “the means of meaning production.” The capture of the university has paid huge dividends, for it is from the university that so much of a nation’s culture emanates. But the takeover by Marxists has been far more totalizing. In fact, sex, sexual orientation, climate, and other issues have been used indiscriminately to advance revolutionary goals, something that Marxists themselves sometimes admit. The former Marxist David Horowitz, for example, quotes an SDS radical as having once written, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”36 David Horowitz, Hillsdale College, July 9, 2010, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSCGMrriZpo (accessed October 13, 2022). Horowitz explains, “In other words the cause—whether inner city blacks or women—is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.” Eric Mann, the communist and former Weatherman who trained Black Lives Matter (BLM) co-founder Patrisse Cullors for a decade on Marxism–Leninism and how to be an organizer—drove this point home when he told an interviewer in 2015 that whether the issue is race, sex, gender, or the environment, the goal is overthrowing the U.S. system, and the rest is just “a little division of labor.”37 Eric Mann, interview, The Laura Flanders Show, 2015, https://lauraflanders.nationbuilder.com/ericmann (accessed October 15, 2022). Even the drug culture falls under that division of labor. Horowitz says that SDS leader and progressive firebrand Tom Hayden once described the utility of the drug culture to him: “Once you get a middleclass person to break the law, he said (and he was thinking of students), they are on their way to becoming revolutionaries,” wrote Horowitz.38 David Horowitz, “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model,” 2009, https://userpages.monmouth.com/~dmajor/Mail/BHO-rules4rev.html (accessed October 15, 2022). A few examples of what this looks like in practice should suffice to demonstrate the impact the cultural Marxists have had. Cultural Marxism’s Infiltration of the Institutions Education. Universities today have almost completely succumbed to the ideology imposed by those who have followed the cultural Marxist pioneers of the 1980s. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression pointed out in its 2022–2023 College Free Speech Rankings report, 42 percent of conservative students “are most likely to feel they cannot express their opinions,” compared to 13 percent of liberal students saying the same.39 College Pulse and FIRE, “2022–2023 College Free Speech Rankings,” https://rankings.thefire.org/ (accessed September 15, 2022). The report, shockingly, has a list of 772 professors who have been fired, suspended, or sanctioned because of conservative speech, and another long list of speakers who have been disinvited to speak at American universities. Not surprisingly, political science professor Samuel Abrams found that “academic faculty report a six-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative professors.” College administrators are far worse, sporting a 12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative members. First-year students, meanwhile, reported a much smaller but still significant two-to-one ratio. “It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate—and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators,” concluded Abrams.40 Samuel J. Abrams, “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators,” The New York Times, October 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/opinion/liberal-college-administrators.html (accessed September 15, 2022). The university officials most involved with enforcing the cultural Marxist ideology generally fall under the heading of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). These are positive terms (who could be against diversity, equity, or inclusion?) but they have been distorted into meaning almost the exact opposite. James Lindsay, Bruce Gilley, and Peter Boghossian, three dissenting academics, have drafted a “Cheat Sheet for Policy Makers”41 The Oregon Association of Scholars is a chapter of the National Association of Scholars that describes itself as “a non-profit organization incorporated in the state of Oregon that promotes excellence, freedom, and merit in higher education in the state” that is composed of professors, graduate students, university administrators, trustees, and independent scholars in the Beaver State. See Oregon Association of Scholars, “About,” https://oregonscholars.org/about/ (accessed October 13, 2022). that provides a glossary of what they found working inside the American university system. The trio define today’s diversity as “[a]n identity-based approach to society; includes only those who agree with Social Justice, which is a violation of individual identity; enforced intellectual conformity, political quotas; an attack on merit and a form of soft bigotry.” Equity, they write, now means the new inequality that we have seen, and “equality of outcomes plus reparations, which is a violation of equality before the law, a dismantling of the foundations of a free society [and] state management of society by redistributing resources, opportunity, and access.” Inclusion, the three write, now means “restricted speech and justification for purges,” which is, “an attack on freedoms of association and speech [and] an enforced separation of people by race (‘neo-segregation’).”42 Bruce Gilley, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay, “Responding to Social Justice Rhetoric, A Cheat Sheet for Policy Makers,” Parents Defending Education, August 2021, https://defendinged.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Responding-to-Social-Justice-Rhetoric.pdf (accessed October 13, 2022). Nonetheless (or perhaps, unsurprisingly), a 2021 study of 65 of the largest universities by The Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene found that the average American university has 45 DEI personnel who act as political commissars enforcing the cultural Marxist ideology of DEI. (The University of Michigan alone has 163.) That means that universities have 40 percent more DEI staff than history professors.43 Jay P. Greene and James D. Paul, “Diversity University, DEI Bloat at the Academy,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 3642, July 27, 2021, https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/BG3641_0.pdf. That total number of DEI staff excludes Title IX and legal compliance staff and ethnic and gender study professors and related staff. Greene’s study examined campus climate survey results to see if the number of DEI staff made campuses more welcoming or inclusive, and unsurprisingly he found that the opposite was the case. In the 1980s, when the takeover of campuses by cultural Marxists started to become evident, a number of leading intellectuals published books that either directly or indirectly tried to alert the general public to what was happening in the universities, including Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987); John M. Ellis’s Against Deconstruction (1989); Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990); and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991). But those warnings had little effect. As John Ellis, a professor of German literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, reflected some 30 years later: Radical politics was a rising force on the campuses, and we were trying to draw attention to the dangers in what was happening while there was still some chance of arresting it. But it’s now clear that we failed to stop the slide, because the political radicals on campus never had any interest in what we had to say. Their purposes were not ours. We were interested in the quality of higher education, but what they cared about was getting control of the campuses so they could use them to promote their political ideology, one so unpopular with the general public that it could not have been advanced in any other way.44 John M. Ellis, The Breakdown of Higher Education (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), p. viii. In reflecting on what allowed the advance of radical politics on campuses and the failure of these and other warnings to slow those advances, Ellis blames “factors that are always present in human life: the complacency of those many people who are always prone to think alarms overwrought.”45 Ibid. Too many Americans are still willing to think the alarms overwrought. Parents are willing to overlook the far-left leaning of universities, and to pay large sums or incur debt for the privilege of having their children indoctrinated into the anti-American cult of modern academia. As Andrew Breitbart once famously said, “You send your kids off to college. They love you. You walk away with a Cornell mom T-shirt. You are walking away going this is great, and come Thanksgiving, your kid tells you that you are an imperialist and a racist and a homophobe.”46 QuotePark.com, Andrew Breitbart, https://quotepark.com/quotes/1811806-andrew-breitbart-you-send-your-kids-off-to-college-they-love-you/ (accessed October 13, 2022). Universities are, of course, not the only place where cultural Marxists indoctrinate students. The CRT spread in K–12 classrooms accelerated after the social upheaval of the BLM riots of 2020, giving rise to widespread opposition by parents starting in early 2021. CRT, as explained earlier, is a revolutionizing method that also focuses on outcomes as measured by race, and therefore in its practices violates the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution’s provision for “the equal protection of the law” when students are treated differently because of their race, sex, or national origin. “Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law,” acknowledges Delgado.47 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2017), p. 3. Despite this reality, President Joe Biden has made CRT part of the nation’s hegemonic narrative, directing his Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, to favor schools practicing CRT when distributing taxpayer dollars. Many studies by different scholars have concluded that the nation’s schools of education, where K–12 teachers are trained, have been turned into veritable cultural Marxist madrassas. One such study, by Jay Schalin of the James G. Martin Center, analyzed nearly 300 syllabi used at three prominent colleges of education. Schalin said the evidence was “unequivocal”: The “most influential thinkers in our education schools are radicals who adhere to a collectivist, utopian vision.”48 Jay Schalin, “The Politicization of University Schools of Education: The Long March through the Education Schools,” The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, February 19, 2019, https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/02/schools-of-education/ (accessed October 13, 2022). Critical pedagogy, a version of CRT, elevates group membership defined in terms of race, sex, or sexual orientation over the individual. Like CRT, critical pedagogy is based on the teachings of Gramsci, who sought to use education to advance socialism by imposing a “counter-narrative” that would produce students who were ready to install the socialist revolution. Sex and Gender. The sexual revolution, of which critical theorist Herbert Marcuse was also a guru, has been clearly part of the strategy, as are today the advances of gender theory and critical pedagogy. Gender theory—or gender ideology—derives from feminism, critical theory, and Marxist–Freudian thought. One of the intellectual forefathers of gender theory is Michel Foucault, the French poststructuralist who philosophized that gender, commonly understood in society, was a social construct imposed by oppressive forces. Operating from Marxist postmodern terminology of “autonomy” and “liberation,” Foucault believed that deconstructing the norms of gender would bring about “greater autonomy and creativity in human identity.”49 Scott Yenor, “Sex, Gender, and the Origin of the Culture Wars: An Intellectual History,” Heritage Foundation First Principles No. 63, June 30, 2017, https://www.heritage.org/gender/report/sex-gender-and-the-origin-the-culture-wars-intellectual-history. To Foucault, sex was not binary, and the “naturalness” of gender and sex was dubious. Foucault’s thought represents a cultural Marxism that also transcends class struggle—as seen with race—and bases the “oppressed vs. oppressor” dynamic on sex. It asserts that individuals need to be liberated from societal norms and commonly understood notions of gender and sex in order to achieve liberation. From Foucault and the French second-wave feminist Simone de Beauvoir, one can track the development of gendered pronouns and the transgender phenomenon that is being imposed on students in schools and universities across the country today. Kate Millett, whose Sexual Politics is an example of the distinction between sex and gender, was a Marxist feminist who argued for a reconstruction of academic disciplines in order to reflect the “structures of gender oppression that have subjugated women.”50 Ibid. Sexual Politics is replete with citations of Engels, Marx, and Stalin. Millett, dubbed the “Karl Marx of the women’s liberation movement,” or “The Mao Tse-Dong of women’s liberation” (the latter by The New York Times), personified this new form of Marxism that is triumphant in America today.51 Mike Gonzalez, The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), p. 99. Finally, there are academics, such as Dean Spade, a law professor at Seattle University who helped to found the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a nonprofit organization inspired by the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the activism of Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two transvestites who founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970. Spade is an academic and activist who supports a “Critical Trans Politics” that embraces many tenets of Marxist thought.52 Dean Spade, “What’s Wrong with Rights?” in Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, & the Limits of Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Spade has contributed to an anthology titled Towards an Ethics of Activism, in which BLM co-founder Alicia Garza is also featured.53 Frances S. Lee, ed., Anthology: Toward an Ethics of Activism, 2018, https://francesslee.medium.com/toward-an-ethics-of-activism-a-community-investigation-of-humility-grace-and-compassion-in-377948c84e7e (accessed October 13, 2022). This current generation of gender theorists, like Spade, Wendy Brown, and Judith Butler, urge the dismantling of the American status quo and criticize the emphasis that others place on equality. “Gender equality” as civil rights and law issues is not enough. Instead, they believe the entire system is corrupt and in need of liberation. In practice, this academic jargon has tragic consequences, such as minors undergoing the routine amputation of perfectly healthy body parts, and hormonal interventions that fill their young bodies with toxins. “These are deeply invasive and often irreversible procedures that destroy functioning and alter visible physical structures,” explained former Heritage Foundation analyst Ryan Anderson.54 Ryan Anderson, “Protect Good Medicine, Stop the Censorship of Good Counseling,” Heritage Foundation Commentary, October 26, 2020, https://www.heritage.org/gender/commentary/protect-good-medicine-stop-the-censorship-good-counseling. And here, again, the institutions in charge of the culture exercised their ruthless censorship over those who would dare question the new cultural Marxist regime. In February 2021, Amazon banned sales of Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.55 Virginia Allen, “Based on False Assumptions, Amazon Still Censoring Book on Transgenderism,” The Daily Signal, January 9, 2022, https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/01/09/based-on-false-assumption-amazon-still-censoring-book-on-transgenderism/. It is not by any means the first time that Marxists used sex and children to undermine the authority of parents, the church, and the state. One particularly disturbing example occurred in the early 20th century during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet state of 1919. Its education and culture commissar Georg Lukacs ordered schools to instruct young children on sexual perversions like those of today. According to his biographer, Special lectures were organized in schools and literature printed and distributed to “instruct” children about free love, about the nature of sexual intercourse, about the archaic nature of bourgeois family codes, about the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasure. Children [were] urged thus to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the church, and to ignore precepts of morality.56 Victor Zitta, Georg Lukács’ Marxism, Alienation, Dialectics, Revolution (Berlin: Springer, 2016), p. 106. Climate. America’s wars over climate are also a part of a Marxist strategy. No less a figure than Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore says he walked away from environmentalism in the late 1980s because it was taken over by Marxists. He said in a 1997 interview that composition of Greenpeace changed dramatically after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Communism’s demise behind the Iron Curtain brought with it the growth of anti-corporate extremism. According to Moore, suddenly, the international peace movement had a lot less to do. Pro-Soviet groups in the West were discredited. Many of their members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their eco-Marxism and pro-Sandinista sentiments. A lot of those in the peace movement were anti-American and, to an extent, pro-Soviet. By virtue of their anti-Americanism, they tended to sometimes favor the communist approach. A lot of those people, a lot of those social activists, moved into the environmental movement once the peace movement was no longer relevant.57 John Elvin, “A Green Activist Changes Colors—Greenpeace Founder Patrick Moore,” Insight on the News, October 20, 1997. Social activists, Moore told Insight on the News, “are now using the rhetoric of environmentalism to promote other collectivist agendas, such as class struggle—which I personally believe is a legitimate area, but I don’t believe it’s legitimate to mix it up with environmentalism.”58 Anderson, “Protect Good Medicine, Stop the Censorship of Good Counseling.” One can see why Van Jones, at one time President Barack Obama’s “green jobs czar,” found it so easy to go from being a self-described communist who in 1994 co-founded the collective Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), which trained young activists on Marx and Lenin, to joining the Apollo Alliance, which promoted environmental efforts, after STORM disintegrated in 2002.59 Eliza Strickland, “The New Face of Environmentalism,” East Bay Express, November 2, 2005, https://eastbayexpress.com/the-new-face-of-environmentalism-1/ (accessed May 20, 2022). Cultural Marxists have used the climate debate to take over the corporate world to advance their cause. They do this mainly through the use of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) rules. ESG is a nebulous and even benign-sounding term, and hence many people unwittingly sign on to it believing it to mean simply more conscientious behavior by corporations. In fact, ESG is the framework through which corporations adopt policies which are socialist and collectivist in nature and directly counter free-market principles. Under the guise of ESG, a public company must place the ends of environmentalism, diversity, and equity above the traditional ends of efficiency, innovation, and excellence, which are the normal drivers in the free market, and which are, ultimately, the factors that drive wealth creation—not just for corporate owners and employees, but for all investors—and that means many ordinary Americans whose retirement funds are invested in American corporations. Investment firms and proxy advisory service companies that provide advice to asset managers on how to vote on proxy proposals at shareholder meetings, will, for example, instruct companies to bend to their will. The point man for ESG is Larry Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, an asset company that has a $10 trillion global portfolio. “Fink leverages this immense power to compel companies that BlackRock invests in to comply with an aggressive climate change and diversity agenda in their operations,” writes Heritage Foundation fellow Richard Reinsch.60 Richard Reinsch, “Larry Fink of BlackRock and His Global Crusade to Advance Identity Politics,” Heritage Foundation Commentary, January 28, 2022, https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/larry-fink-blackrock-and-his-global-crusade-advance-identity-politics (accessed September 15, 2022). Fi