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1. In honor of Lyndon LaRouche's passing, I want to recommend this excellent podcast on the history of the concept of "cultural marxism." Why LaRouche? Cause it was a LaRouche-ite who wrote the 1992 article that launched the right wing obsession with CM. http://theoryofeverythingpodcast.com/2019/02/cultural-marxism-industry/
2. It was this article in a fringe, LaRouche-sponsored magazine that launched the right wing obsession with so-called "cultural marxism." https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html
3. Martin Jay, one of the leading scholars of the Frankfurt School, was moved to inquire as to how such a distorted picture of Adorno's work had found its way into right wing discourse. That's when he stumbled upon that LaRouche-ite article. http://canisa.org/blog/dialectic-of-counter-enlightenment-the-frankfurt-school-as-scapegoat-of-the-lunatic-fringe
4. What caught my attention was the contemporaneous emergence of the "cultural marxism" narrative and the anti-PC discourse in the first years of the 1990s. CM was the more fringey cousin, closely related, of the anti-PC hysteria. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1069339867727818752?s=20
5. It strikes me that conservative political discourse took a significant turn in the early 90s, with the anti-PC and "cultural marxism" talk being related manifestations of the same, anti-intellectual (or at least anti-academic) tendency. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1069340609574395905?s=20
6. Shorter version. What contemporary conservatives call "Cultural Marxism" is a load of bullsh*t that bears zero resemblance to anything the Frankfurt School actually said, or anything most academic humanists or social scientists believe.
7. Anyone who uses the phrase "cultural marxism" with a straight face should be taken as seriously as Lyndon LaRouche and his acolytes, the people who invented the concept in the first place. RIP Lyndon.
8. Here's another great explainer as to how the term "cultural marxism" has become a buzzword on the right. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/1/23/1828527/-How-the-cultural-Marxism-hoax-began-and-why-it-s-spreading-into-the-mainstream
