“Cultural Marxism” – the alleged conspiracy of alleged secret Marxists allegedly trying to destroy Western Civilization through Political Correctness and feminism and racial equality – is a favorite boogeyman of the far right.
That includes, of course, large sections of the “Red Pill” world. Roosh V’s Return of Kings site publishes reactionary diatribes with titles like Cultural Marxism Produces Matriarchy and Tactics For The War Against Cultural Marxism In 2015; Heartiste rails against the alleged evils of “cultural Marxism, feminism, equalism, and … racial self-annihilationism.”
Though Cultural Marxism does not, you know, exist, the far-right obsession with it has made inroads amongst Men’s Rights Activists and #GamerGaters as well.
The Spearhead wrote about “the Menace of Cultural Marxism” as far back as 2009; more recently, British MRA Angry Harry has blamed it for what he sees as a cultural assault on “white heterosexual men.” A Voice for Men’s “Resident Historian” Robert St. Estephe, meanwhile, warns that “Cultural Marxism (“Feminism”) is About Destruction,” and that its insidious strategy “absolutely requires the destruction of the family and the emergence of authoritarian indoctrination of children.” And the MRA-adjacent right-wing videoblogger Bernard Chapin can’t shut up about it.
Among #GamerGaters the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory is if anything even more prevalent. The bumbling would-be documentarian duo behind The Sarkeesian Effect are making Anita S’s alleged Cultural Marxism a big part of their story. (It’s a longtime obsession of the Anton LaVey-looking Davis Aurini; his shaggy collaborator Jordan Owen is still reading up on it.)
And on Twitter, #GamerGate footsoldiers warn anyone who will listen about the (cultural) red menace.
https://twitter.com/GibberAUS/status/559114680204275713
https://twitter.com/RearAdmiralGate/status/557926692636086272
@RearAdmiralGate Cult Marxists are driving policy & helping to write legislation,enshiring Cultural Marxism into law #GamerGate
— EscapeVelocity (@EscapeVelo) January 20, 2015
@crecenteb All of them. I don't care to play video games or read reviews that seek to indoctrinate me using Cultural Marxism.
— GamerGate TRUTH (@GamerGate_TRUTH) January 20, 2015
I should probably mention that the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory is virulently anti-Semitic, with side orders of misogyny, white supremacy, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia and assorted other more specialized bigotries. For many of those on the far right, including numerous Manospherians, these are features, not bugs; they’re always happy for more excuses to rail against the Jews.
But not all #GamerGaters and Men’s Rights Activists are literally Nazis; indeed, many of them, including some who have embraced the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory, like to think of themselves as liberals or even leftists. Some even profess great love for people of color, gay and trans folk, and many of the other groups that the far right loves to vilify – #NotYourShield and all.
If you know one of these people, you might want to point them in the direction of Bill Berkowitz’ still-relevant 2003 history of the CM conspiracy theory in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, making clear how thoroughly anti-Semitic it’s been from the start.
But there’s an even easier way to reveal just how horrible most of those obsessed with the alleged dangers of cultural commies destroying the world really are: do a Google image search for “cultural marxism.”
Your results will be filled with some of the most vile propaganda this side of posters actually put out by the Nazis during their time in power. You will also see posters actually put out by the Nazis during their time in power, posted online by people who think that the Nazis had some pretty good ideas, if you think about it.
But don’t take my word for it. Here are some of the pics that came up in my results. I didn’t have to sift through pages of results to find examples this bad; these images are actually rather typical, and I’ve left out some of the worst. (You may recognize the “Happy Merchant,” #GamerGate’s favorite anti-Semitic caricature, in several of the pics below.)
#GamerGaters and MRAs: when you embrace the CM conspiracy theory, you’re getting into bed with the people who made these pictures.
[CONTENT WARNING: Every kind of bigotry you can think of.]
One thing you forgot to mention. The Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory originated in, I shit you not, Nazi Germany. They called it Kulturbolschewismus, and it was a blanket term for art they wanted to censor.
Meanwhile, how many people prattling on about “Cultural Marxism” have actually READ Marx…ANY Marx?
@Bina
Why do you ask questions that you already know the answers to?
I mean, reading Marx gives much for insightful reasons for rejecting (his) communism than “Booooooo evil,” which is about as much thought as a dark-enlightment mind seems to be able to muster.
Things like the inevitability of social progress through violent revolution are just laughable. Or his charge that history has been a steady approach towards greater equality. Or that the proletariat is, by it’s nature, capable of ideal self governance.
I don’t know, I think most GGers would wholeheartedly agree with those images.
“Cultural Marxism” had its Wikipedia article merged into a Frankfurt School Conspiracy Theory page. I don’t really care if it has its own page so long as its clearly describing a conspiracy theory (like the Homosexual Agenda page).
But what is adorable is how much the people advocating for its own page take it seriously. Jimmy Wales originally encouraged the consensus but now says he didn’t know anything about the topic and thinks its a shame the page got merged and the info is so one-sided.
Look at this stuff. These are not two equal sides, just a bizarre hate-based conspiracy.
See I actually read Marx because I went to university and did economics as well as some government subjects (dropped those eventually). We covered marxist economics and marxist criticism is considered in almost every liberal arts subject, though few students were ever fond of the perspective.
It’s considered because a class based perspective is often novel and of merit given the dominant perspective of individualism in western countries. Marxist economics is largely dead in the water, having few coherent unique policy agendas and being intractably stuck up it’s own butt with pointless issues (a fault it shares with the Chicago/Microfoundations/RBC crowd).
I never knew what was meant by “Cultural Marxism” until recently, it was just a thing batty people said. Now I know it’s even more batty than I thought.
Orion, how can taking a couple out of context statements by long-dead communists and extrapolating that into a world-wide conspiracy that just so happens to include everyone you disagree with, with the unstated sole intent of undermining civilization be “batty.”
Sheesh, you feminists and your leaps of logic.
Given how much the far right likes to call Obama a Marxist, the word has lost any meaning.
All I see is a giant toddler screaming, “WAAAAAAAH! I should be able to do and say whatever I want to people without having to hear about how it affects them! They’re being mean to me by being offended by my perfectly logical and not at all prejudicial view on how they’re not people deserving of a base level of respect! Why don’t they just shut up and let me abuse them?”
Grrgrlefrummagretz….
Sorry, seriously, that’s about as coherent a response as I can make to… whatever the hell I just spent a few minutes looking at.
“I’ve fallen to the Communists”
“Well they do have some strong arguments”
[Might be only English readers get that]
Every time I read the words “Cultural Marxism”, the rest of the rant morphs into a picture of a huge turd.
These people really don’t have anything going for them, so they have to make their WASPishness the most important and valuable thing about themselves. It would be almost pitiable if it weren’t so toxic and disgusting.
My Dad’s hobby is to bait neo-Nazis on Youtube by explaining genetics to them, but after a while he just mocks them for being boring and repetitive, because they really are like a broken record and they don’t like evidence-based reasoning at all.
I just can’t even with this. I mean, I should feel a sense of horror, but it’s so clumsy and blatantly hateful, it’s hard to imagine anyone taking this shit seriously.
I want to believe that the vast majority of those who adopt the term “Cultural Marxism” are oblivious to its dog-whistle “I am a literal Nazi” meaning and usage, and just want to rail against the straw-Leftie SJW bogeypersons, without having the self-awareness to associate “social justice” with “…is a good thing”.
Otherwise, the world is even more depressing than I thought.
What the hell do Jewish people, gay people, black people, women etc have to do with any sort of communism anyway?
Whoo, rhetorical questions.
It’s times like these I love being mixed race because I like knowing that my very existence upsets these people. I don’t want to be liked by such unpleasant people!
AltoFronto: I reckon most of the people who toss around “Cultural Marxism” are using it because, like “SJW”, it’s the latest version of ” political correctness gone mad”. It’s a vaguely scary-sounding way to mask their own discomfort at seeing people from other backgrounds apart from white cishet male represented in media, and validates said discomfort by manufacturing a threat.
Are they even still pretending this angry white man circle jerk is about ethics in gaming journalism?
Yup. Even the smallest, most legitimate and well-reasoned pushback has to be blown up into a global threat, a conspiracy for Total World Domination™! It has nothing to do with Marx or Marxism in the slightest. It’s just the old antisemitism/Jim Crow/Jack D. Ripper scenario, ever so slightly remixed for the RedPillock generation.
Cultural Marxism: A catch – all term of abuse thrown about by the far right in the general direction of anyone they disapprove of. It used to be epithets like ‘commie’ or ‘pinko’ though the latter might now be subject to a change in meaning lol.
“Cultural Marxism” is just codeword for “does not benefit trad cis white men”.
PoC having power and influence. Not being second in line to white people?
Women having equal legal and social rights, and NOT being soulless waifus?
Being cis, white and christian NOT giving you privilege?
The world NOT revolving around you as a straight, white dude?
CULTURAL MARXISM! WHITE GENOCIDE! MISANDRIST MATRIARCHY!
“Divide and concur”
@ Orion – I know what you mean about it being “stuck up its own butt”. My uni had quite a few Leftie political societies on campus, including the student branch of the Socialist Worker Party. I went to a meeting once where they were talking about the working class rising up against The Bourgeoisie… And I had questions.
“Who are The Bourgeoisie?”
“They’re the wealthy middle cla-”
“-Yeah, I know the definition of ‘Bourgeoisie’, but who counts? Who are you targeting in particular? How is this revolution going to come about? Are you guys advocating a violent revolution? Like, would you actually be looking to guillotine people, or what?”
“Well, there’s going to be a revolution…”
“Will it be violent?”
“If needs be”
“No, but are you actually setting out to do violence? You’re either planning to use it or you’re not. Who’s even leading this uprising?”
“The Workers!”
“What, all of them? Have you ever tried to organise a group of people??”
They couldn’t describe anything except in the vaguest terms, because they were just waiting for it to unfold, it seems.
It strikes me as silly to wait for some kind of spontaneous and specific awakening of the masses to overthrow the elites and install a Communist Utopia of one’s specifically preferred flavour without actually doing anything meaningful (they turn up at other people’s events and claim credit for them more than they do any grassroots activism of their own).
I mean, there’s a definite movement towards the Left in UK politics at the moment, but if the campus Trotsky-ites want to see any change, they’ll have to campaign for a less rigid definition of How Things Should Be Done.
Besides which, the SWP has a massive internal problem with rape apologism and white-hetero-cis-normativity that it refuses to acknowledge, anyway.
(A friend and I once confronted an SWP street-activist about this, explaining politely that we couldn’t support them until the party addressed those issues, and he got defensive, started shouting us down with more rape apologism and we had to just walk away).
So their reputation has taken a dive, their student groups are getting barred from campuses with safe-space policies for harassing people, and some activism events have been cancelled because they turned up to piggy-back on them and the organising group refused to share a platform with them.
It’s interesting that Marxists and Fascists alike buy into the myth that Marxists can’t have really problematic institutionalised prejudices of their own.
…Duck Soup?
Also, in the last pic, “divide and concur”?
RE: the “if white genocide isn’t happening, why do leftists say we deserve it” thing.
Umm… who says that? Pretty sure “hey, remember that slavery thing that still has ramifications today” was never used as an argument for things like interracial marriage (which these asswipes think is white genocide). How is this supposed to be a clever exposure of hypocrisy when the only people who will even understand what its talking about are fellow white supremacists?
RE: “Racial Suicide”
It took me forever to figure out this one. Who couldn’t look at the image and see a picture of cute kids? Then I realized it was a white girl and a black boy, and I started to feel ill. Somebody out there looks at this picture of children and is horrified. That’s messed up.
RE: The stairway to necrophilia:
This is just kinda boring to me; the far Right-wing religious types spout it all the time. I’m just wondering why they put pedophilia, the thing that hurts living human children, below bestiality and necrophilia, if each stair is getting progressively worse and worse.
RE: The bizarre laughing demon dude one
“I want my children to look like me and share my normal values.”
Children aren’t born with values, you know. Non-white folks aren’t some alien race with genetic memory. Although I’ve just realized that that’s probably what these douche-nozzles actually think… That non-white children are like cuckoo birds that just so happen to share some genetics with the white parent, but will run off and be all not-white when they grow up.
RE: Anime girls fishing and for some reason against cultural marxism
If you google the supposed author, you get a whole mess of anime images with random anti-left text attached. You also get links to the website on the image, with multiple versions of a “bio.” Apparently it’s all just a meme with a made-up person and made-up quotes.
I know it’s a really minor, minor point in all of those… bizarre images, but… what’s going on with the lesbian couple on the stairs? Why are they standing in that really odd half-squatting position?
Also, it’s not “political correctness gone mad”, it’s “POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD”.
We’re all so terrible for wanting people to be happy, safe and comfortable, and be able to make choices. Who knows where it might end up, because everyone knows that extreme right-wing policies have never led to acts of evil, only pure and good things. Grrr. Idiots.