“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.]
WS – Right?
I had let’s rally no idea that anti-Semitism existed outside of the Europe in the Middle Ages-Rennaisance and Nazi Germany until I was a young teen and caught School Ties as broadcast TV matinee.
Anytime I hear virulent anti-Semitism in modern life, I’m still like, “Really? Jews? That’s who you choose to hate? They’re like 3% of the world’s population. Branch out or something.”
(Sadly, my childhood firmly prepared me for the existence of racism and other forms of bigotry.)
Ha!
A quick search turned up that Jewish people make up 0.2% of the world’s population, 1.7% of the Population of Europe, and 1.4% of the population of the US.
Spread the hate around, haters!
Divide and concur, huh? That’s a clever approach.
@kirbywarp&proxieme–
I. I-ii. Uh. Gruuuuuh. Yard sard!
In other words, just what the actual holy living fuck.
In college, I took a topics class that focused on Jewish women in literature (one of those horrible Interdiciplinary classes these jerkfaces fear) and there was one man in the class. He was a holocaust denier and an unconfirmed MRA (he spouted all the talking points, but this was before I knew MRA/MRM was a thing).
I was baffled on so many levels.
I continue to be baffled by all of that. My grandfather and his brothers helped treat people who were liberated from camps. That shit happened.
What asshats, these jerks. I can’t.
Scarlettathena (Great nym BTW!):
I guess she’s there to illustrate white people (who dress in white!) because the author’s website seems to focus on promoting white people.
I guess if you’re a white supremacist, it’s really true that no POC share your values.
I got irritated yesterday at a few people on Tumblr because they took the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz as an opportunity to grind their axes at John Green.
Dude answered a question about Anne Frank and the Anne Frank House and talked about her death without restating the context of her death, and these Tumblr folks were all screaming holocaust denier! at him.
Yeah, neighbors. Man failed to mention she was killed by the Nazis, who neglected her to death. And this conversation can’t possibly wait a day, right?
I think the John Green beef originated due the parallel drawn between Anne Frank and, uh, Hazel (I think that is his MC’s name?).
I haven’t read the book, so I can’t speak to the actual context of the comparison, but I remember it coming up in some YA-centric convo I had at some point.
Here’s the interview that they pointed to.
Simplest explanation has got to be that he’s a neo-Nazi, right?
Over at Gawker I just got compared to a Nazi (Goebbels specifically) for defending women being wary of strange men and not always wanting to talk to them in bars and clubs. It was hilarious.
Yikes, an I nervous to touch this one.
No, the quoted text does not point to being a neo-Nazi. It does read as a drastic oversimplification of what happened, and also like a pretty cheap plot device.
Again, I have not read the book. I really don’t want to get into a fight over this.
Are there really weirdos out there who think people will be scared of two kids hugging? Unless they’re older versions of those hyper realistic baby dolls they advertise in Take 5.
I was really confused by the Abbot one till I realised they weren’t talking about Tony Abbot. Shame, I was hoping three ghosts had visited him last month.
“I want my children to look like me and share my normal, white, totally normative white values of whiteness and normality.”
I love how she’s focusing hard and repeating the mantra over and over and over again, trying to repel the temptations of the fork-tongued miscegenation demon. If she stops for even one second, Halo Joe Jonas will vanish and his unreplicated DNA will haunt her conscience forever.
That last tweet would have made as much sense if it said “I don’t care to play video games or read reviews that seek to indoctrinate me using voodoo mysticism.”
I’m sorry, WatermelonSugar, I wasn’t looking to pick a fight. I was venting my spleen over here, which probably wasn’t fair.
Yeah, probably he should have thought about it some more. I haven’t read his book, either.
Peace?
@WWTH: That is hilarious.
Falconer, it’s cool. Pinky promise. I’m just a little escalation-shy around here lately, honestly, so I own that part.
Total peace.
@canuck_with_pluck
I know, right? Who doesn’t like bagels and pastrami and Mel Brooks movies? I’d be honestly interested in some sociologist or psychologist examining the origins of modern antisemitism.
I’d guess that it’s different now than it was in countries with a visible jewish minorirty; most antisemites (in, say, rural Montana*) don’t have any real contact with jews, they’re just sort of a boogeyman now, like the Illuminati or something. It’s less “I keep running into those guys and they’re not like us screw them and their difference” and more just a sort of group that people can blame for all their problems based on a long tradition of hate. (Maybe? I’m just speculating.)
Also, as a philosophy grad student, it’s really hilarious to hear that people think the Frankfurt School was some sort of Illuminati world domination group. Oh no! That sinister Max Horkheimer! They’re not even all that influential in academic philosophy. They’re mostly ignored by analytic philosophers (which are most of the ones in Britain and America) and they’re only one among many schools of continental philosophy–we only have one guy in the department that works on them and that’s not even his primary area. (Not that they’re not important, just that if they were trying to take over the world by taking over academia, they didn’t do such a good job.)
*Rural Montana is awesome and you should go there. People are actually really nice.
Check out this amazing diagram that proves that the whole Cultural Marxism thing is totally real and was obviously created by a combination of Weimar intellectuals and the KGB as a means for corporations to push “progressivism” which obviously means higher profits for corporations?
http://t.co/J5bRWGsEgd
I’ve heard people who say that they’re notracistbut will only date people of their same race being called racist. Perhaps the devil one is a response to that?
That chart looks like it was copied from a wall covered in magazine clippings and photos with big circles drawn on them and little pins with string connecting the various groups. Totally not a conspiracy theory.
He’s a Marxist, so probably not.
Fun story:
I got labeled a Pinko Commie Leftist PC Warrior at one of my family Christmas Fiascos because I mentioned I had been reading Ginsberg. My ex-hippie uncle was all “I KNOW WHAT THAT IS ITS COMMIE READINGS WHAT R U A COMMIE?!?!??!!!112”
But I got a really cool old chapbook copy of Howl out of it (the aforementioned uncle had one left over from his hippie days and was more than happy to get such communist propaganda out of his house), so I am not complaining.
Nobody could associate any of these memes with Marxism if they’d actually met any Marxists. Marxists are fantastic people to hang around, really interesting and fun.
Even the term ‘cultural marxism’ is a total fucking oxymoron. Marxism, at its simplest, states that social and cultural norms and identities are dictated by underlying economic realities. therefore any attempt to change the ‘culture’ of a society, while not doing anything about the economic class relations upon which the culture is predicated,isn’t fucking Marxism.
Simply put, it’s a paranoid fantasy these fucknuggets dreamt up to put in place of ‘liberal society’ in their addled minds, so they can spout conspiracy theories and lay the blame for their loss of absolute dominance elsewhere.
A lot of it has to do with nationalism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this idea that there was something distinctly French about people in France, English about people in England, etc began to gain significant traction. But Jews, it was felt, didn’t work. They didn’t have their own country, but they clearly weren’t Us, with their non-Christian ways and funny food and garments. Jews were seen as a nation, just as the French and English were nations, but a nation that lived among Us and were probably trying to subvert Us with their non-French/English/German/etc ways.
Since nationalism and scientific racism go hand-in-hand together, people started to try to develop scientific explanations for why the Jews weren’t Us. and since over 1500 years of religious anti-semitism gave them a fertile field to harvest from, there were a lot of explanations.
Although religious anti-semitism and scientific racism have mostly retreated to the fringes, nationalism is still going strong throughout the world, and we probably won’t see the demise of anti-semitism until after the demise of nationalism.
I’m reminded of the priceless “quote” in the classic “Measured Response to The Sarkeesian Effect” YouTube video: