 Today I'm going to tell you about cultural Marxism. Our enemy is cultural Marxism. Political correctness is cultural Marxism. We won the Cold War with political and economic communism. We've lost the cultural war with cultural Marxism. You're referring to the cultural Marxists and I really do think that they are so much that the heart of what has led to the crumbling of the West right now, the decline of the West. The thing is, it doesn't exist. At least not outside the fever dreams of far-right extremists and right-wing pandits and politicians. In short, here's the conspiracy theory. After the 1920s a group of Marxist academics set out to destroy Western modernity from within. But unlike classical Marxism which locates the working class as the agent of change and economics as the spirit of struggle, cultural Marxists sought to change social values and norms, gnawing away at the foundations of the West's very self-confidence. Are we the baddies? At the same time they encouraged mass migration, multiculturalism and even things like homosexuality to try out where the Mongols, Mores and Ottomans failed. Namely to bring about the demise of European civilization. Why are we constantly browbeaten into being ashamed of the West? We shouldn't be ashamed to defend Western civilization. Around this nebulous term you see the collapse of a distinction between the politics, the mainstream and the far-right, between seemingly respectable people who appear on television and those who actually commit terrorist attacks. Take question time's favourite Nigel Farage. He claimed that the BBC was responsible for a cultural Marxist revolution or Conservative Party MP Suehle Brevenman, the Attorney General. Last year she claimed the Conservative Party was engaged in a battle against a cultural Marxism. And then there's Anders Brevik who killed 77 people, primarily members of the Youth Wing of Norway's Labour Party in 2011. In a 15-page manifesto he mentions cultural Marxism 107 times using it interchangeably with terms like multiculturalism and political correctness. Then there's Brenton Tarran who killed 51 people across two mosques in the Christchurch massacre of 2019. He wrote The Western Society had long since fallen to the Long March through the institutions committed by the Marxists. Then there was the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter who murdered 11 people and blamed Jews for, among other things, communism. And yes, cultural Marxism. And in Britain, well, check out this video from the BMP's Youth Wing in 2014. The heartless scientist whose interests are foreign interests. The cultural Marxists who infest our teaching establishment. We will not give in and we will not back down. We will protect our own identities and secure our own futures. We are BMP youth. This guy is Jack Renshaw who, alongside targeting militant homosexuals, blames cultural Marxism for Britain's problems. He's currently serving a lifetime prison sentence for plotting to murder Labour MP Rosie Cooper. Despite this term being used so frequently by far-right terrorists, it has slipped unnoticed it seems into the right-wing mainstream, whether it's Fraser Nelson and the Spectator, Conservative members of Parliament, Nigel Farage or best-selling author Douglas Murray. A lot of people on the right are very happy to say they believe in something called cultural Marxism. But the comfort of recent decades has become the comfort of espousing and following a basically culturally Marxist view of the world. So how did this happen? How, over the last decade, has cultural Marxism become a relatively mainstream talking point for both politicians and pundits on the right? While it's easy to see a resemblance between contemporary claims around cultural Marxism and what the Nazis once referred to as culture bolshevismus, cultural bolshevism, it goes beyond just that. One important parallel between the two, however, is their flexibility and thus their political efficacy. When the Nazis used the term, it was applied mainly to the arts. But like cultural Marxism today, it was also deployed for a range of things they simply found disagreeable. One journalist, Carl Osiecki, wrote, cultural bolshevism is when a painter sweeps a colour into a sunset not seen in lower Pomerania, when one favours birth control, when one builds a house with a flat roof, when a caesarean birth is shown on the screen. In short, it was anything reactionaries wanted it to be. Today, cultural Marxism serves a similar purpose, ranging from antipathy towards gender-neutral pronouns to a secret conspiracy allying homosexuals, Muslims and leftists to destroy Western civilization. However, it wasn't until decades after the fall of the Third Reich that cultural Marxism as a recognisable conspiracy theory began to emerge. Arguably its godfather in this respect was Lyndon LaRouche, a conspiracy theorist often accused of racism hailing from a very, very strange part of the left. In 1974, LaRouche mentioned the Frankfurt School for the first time, as part of a broader smear campaign against left-wing opponents. According to a special report in his Executive Intelligence Review, LaRouche claimed Angela Davis was a CIA agent whose purpose was to infiltrate the American Communist Party and split the organisation. He further alleged Davis was prepared for such a role while studying under Frankfurt School intellectuals and, according to him, CIA agents Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Rodano. LaRouche claimed that when Davis was their student, Marcuse Rodano subjected her to a CIA zombie brainwash program, in essence, transforming Davis into a Manchurian radical, which is to say somebody who could infiltrate the very highest levels of the American left. The theme of the Frankfurt School as a secret brainwashing operation continued in a 1977 Counterintelligence Report, where LaRouche claimed those movements, which emerged in the aftermath of the late 1960s around gender race and sexual rights, had degenerated into violent fascism, even alleging British intelligence actually established the Frankfurt School themselves in the 1920s to assemble leading British agent intellectuals. But how did the idea of cultural Marxism go mainstream? After all, while culture Bolshevismus and LaRouche's conspiracy theories had been around for a while, the likes of Farage and Breivik didn't hear about them after reading interwar histories of Germany or the esoteric disjector of LaRouche. No, the transmission mechanism was 1990s paleo-conservativism in the United States, with conservative thinkers like William Lind, Papua Canaan and Paul Verich pushing the term into the mainstream. While a small sea conservative was meant to want to keep things the same and only believes in incremental change, a paleo-conservativist fundamentally a reactionary, somebody who wants to go back to a mythical Halcyon time before things went wrong. The mythology to many of these people, which gives forms to their otherwise incoherent rejection of the modern world, is cultural Marxism. Care about climate change? Cultural Marxism Think equal pay is important? Cultural Marxism Are you a vegetarian happy to be called they or them or pro-choice and abortion? Cultural Marxism 101 It was also during the early 1990s it became increasingly common to hear the term political correctness, another nebulous bugbearer of the right, whose use lay precisely in meaning both everything and nothing. It's content essentially a matter of opinion for those mainstreaming cultural Marxists and the terms were broadly interchangeable, with William Lind defining it as a brand of Western Marxism, commonly known as multiculturalism or less formally political correctness, though how either of those as Marxist remains unclear. He claimed the presence of LGBT people on television proved cultural Marxists control the media and that Herbert Marcuse considered a coalition of blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals a vanguard for the cultural revolution. But I thought he was the CIA or was it MI6? Anyway, by now the idea of political correctness was far from marginal and increasingly amplified by the likes of the Sun newspaper in Britain and Fox News in the US, both owned by this guy. Indeed it was even highlighted in a 1991 speech by President Bush. We find free speech under assault throughout the United States. By the end of 1992 feature stories on this crisis had appeared across the US print media from Newsweek to the New York Review of Books. That's right, we've been having the exact same moral panic around freedom of speech for at least 30 years. Why? Because if the conversation moves to class, living standards and economic justice, these people don't have a leg to stand on. For Pat Buchanan, godfather of the 1990s cultural wars in the US, the importance of this struggle was not to be understated but the culture war, a religious war and in many ways no less important than the Cold War. It is an anti-Christian, anti-god, anti-traditionalist revolution. The sexual resolution has a lot to do with it and so we are two countries now. In his 2002 book The Death of the West Buchanan described cultural marks as a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatise social heresy just as the inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance. Now where have I heard that before? The goal of the education system is to indoctrinate children from kindergarten into radical, post-modern, leftist, communitarian, equity-oriented ethos. It's Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News and close friend of former Trump guru Steve Bannon, similarly viewed to fight against cultural Marxism as essentially a continuation of the Cold War. This country will be destroyed by people like you who think you are doing good while you divide, you divide into separate different categories when we hit against each other. These people are incredibly dangerous. In 2014 William Lind under the pseudonym Thomas Hobbes published Victoria, a novel of fourth generation war in which a group of Christian marines lead a bloody insurrection against cultural Marxism as the federal government collapses. At the book's climax, knights wearing crusader crosses and singing Christian hymns murder politically correct staff at Dartmouth College, the main characters and Mr. Lind's alma mater. Such words wouldn't be out of place in the manifesto or diary of a far-right terrorist, yet they were written by a man who wears a suit and tie and has worked inside Washington DC. The very point of using the term cultural Marxism is to collapse any boundary between a significant part of the population who don't view themselves as extremists and the far-right people like William Lind. Most importantly, it tells that some of the most dangerous fanatics of the 21st century speak with polished accents, went to excellent universities and, most troubling of all, are actively promoted by the media. One thing is for sure, any politician or pundit who utters the words cultural Marxism has got nothing to say when it comes to the biggest issues of our day, which people actually care about and affect their everyday lives from healthcare to climate change, economic inequality and the housing crisis. Some conspiracy theories are relatively harmless. Cultural Marxism isn't. That's partly because it relies on bigotry and xenophobia and partly because it's designed to distract us from the big existential challenges of the 21st century and there are plenty of those.