Marxist Wokism | TruthXchange by Dr. Peter Jones

I finished my last essay on American Marxism with the following paragraph:

Marxism via Stalin and Mao killed millions of human beings during the twentieth century, and Marxist Pol Pot in Cambodia systematically murdered about three million of his own people (a quarter of all Cambodians) from 1976 to 1978. Anyone considered an intellectual was targeted for special treatment. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, and clergy were put to death. Pol Pot’s regime of terror even murdered people wearing glasses! One might think that a system so unthinkable would never enter the American system. For the moment, America’s Marxism conceals itself and is generally accepted in its subtle form: Wokism, which I will discuss in my next essay.

As I shuffled around in my endless collection of dossiers, I found a text that dealt with wokism that I had already published, entitled “Wokism: The New Pagan Morality.”[1]

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A Post-Christian Culture

We now live in an increasingly post-Christian society. In his book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything,[3] the brilliant young cultural analyst Christopher Rufo traces the origins of CRT/Wokism, showing how America has been quietly taken over by the ideological heirs of 1960s radical neo-Marxists.[4] In his groundbreaking research of contemporary Western culture, Rufo discovered a “hideous face of revolution” that is “a rot spreading through American life. The country’s foundations are starting to shake loose.” If this is true, we all need to know about it.

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America is easily seduced by false notions of reality. One recent study found that the median number of people in a Christian congregation in America in 2023 is 60—less than half of what it was twenty years ago, when the number was 137. This steep decline has been called the “Great De-churching” of America.[5] Any respect for or worship of the Creator-Redeemer God is virtually absent.[6]

People cannot live without morals, since God created an ethical universe. Those who reject God’s moral order are now busy normalizing LGBTQ ideology, eliminating the nuclear family, and living according to the moral norms of neo-Marxist wokism. Marxism is thoroughly anti-Christian, denying the being of God and seeing matter as ultimate. It worships the creature rather than the Creator (Rom. 1:25).

Marx had a close friendship with the radical New Testament scholar Bruno Bauer, who claimed that the Christian Gospels were forgeries. Marx himself believed it was necessary to “recognize as the highest divinity the human self-consciousness itself,”[7] thereby dismissing God. Today’s Critical Race Theory is a modern form of atheism derived from Marxism, as we shall show. CRT embraces postmodern “truth,” which does not come from God but is instead an expression of human power.

Many—even Christians[8]—are abandoning their personal faith in the God of Scripture and seeking a new source of morality. Wokism’s false morality plays skillfully on the sensitive conscience of young Americans.

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The Marxist Framework of Oppression

White supremacy theory argues, in classic Marxist fashion, that society is always divided into oppressors and the oppressed. In today’s framework, whites are cast as oppressors, and minorities—particularly Blacks, women, illegal aliens, and LGBTQ groups—are cast as the oppressed. Biblical morality is therefore viewed as oppressive, especially its standards of sexual behavior.

As noted in my previous article, Stanley Ridgley has done excellent research on the semi-religious movement of wokism in his book Brutal Minds (2023).[9] The subtitle describes his findings well: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities. Ridgley documents a deliberate effort by university administrators not only to undermine classical academic thinking, but also to instill a profound sense of ideological—and quasi-religious—guilt.

I have often wondered why the history of the West, and of America in particular, is no longer taught in American universities. Jesse Jackson’s 1987 rallying cry at Stanford University comes to mind: “Hey ho, what d’ya know, Western civ has got to go.” We now see that, indeed, it did.

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Wokism as Cultural Control

Wokism is a progressive political program that has infiltrated American culture—government administrations, corporations, and educational institutions—where DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) officers are empowered to “cancel” anyone who does not comply with the new rules. This “hideous system,” to use Rufo’s term, is dangerous precisely because it presents itself as virtuous, claiming to seek social justice and oppose racism.

Cultural analysts trace its roots to the Sixties Cultural Revolution. Rufo explains that when violent revolutionary movements such as the Black Panthers failed, radical intellectuals turned instead to ideological transformation. They abandoned street violence in favor of “a long march through the institutions,” making cultural revolution a philosophical project developed within universities and bureaucracies.

This strategy originated with the Frankfurt School—German Jewish Marxists who fled Hitler’s Germany and relocated to Columbia University. One of them, Herbert Marcuse, later moved to the West Coast and became highly influential among radical students. Marcuse and Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke (who coined the phrase “the long march through the institutions”) were collaborating as early as 1966. In 1971, Marcuse wrote approvingly to Dutschke:

“Let me tell you this: that I regard your notion of the ‘long march through the institutions’ as the only effective way.”[10]

Marcuse predicted that if Western society could be liberated from capitalist repression, its moral and religious foundations would collapse. Rather than a dictatorship of the proletariat, he proposed “a dictatorship of the intellectuals.” This neo-Marxism is the intellectual foundation of Critical Race Theory.

Marcuse also provided the theoretical basis for modern “cancel culture.” Long before the term existed, he defended “repressive tolerance”—the suppression of dissenting ideas in favor of progressive ones. Liberalism, once rooted in free speech, has lost its footing. As one observer noted, by the 2020s it had become “a marginal belief held by a few college professors at odds with society.”[11]

Marcuse reframed the Marxist revolution around race rather than class, thus transforming racism into a revolutionary ideology. As Rufo documents, this movement has reshaped language, law, and historical interpretation, gaining control of institutions and redefining public orthodoxy.

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Race as a Marxist Weapon

Almost by accident, I came across a little-known fact crucial to understanding the modern attacks on white supremacy, white privilege, and white anger.[12] The accusation of racism as a political weapon is not new.

Its origin was documented by African-American eyewitness Manning Johnson in Color, Communism and Common Sense (1958).[13] Johnson described a deliberate effort by Soviet and American communists in the 1930s to undermine American institutions by portraying the nation as irredeemably racist. The goal was to create “a common front against the white oppressors.”

Johnson revealed that Stalin himself devised the strategy in 1928 to use “Negroes as the spearhead” for revolutionary agitation. American communist leaders cynically promoted racial conflict as a “cold-blooded struggle for power.”[14] The objective was simple: make “the white man’s system” responsible for everything.[15]

“Smear is a cardinal technique,” Johnson wrote. “Black rebellion was what Moscow wanted. Bloody racial conflict would split America.”[16]

Ironically, Marxists themselves showed little regard for Black people. Walter Williams noted that Marx dismissed Blacks as closer to the animal kingdom.[17] Robert Robinson, a Black American who lived forty-four years in the Soviet Union, testified that Soviet anti-racism was one of the greatest propaganda myths ever created.[18]

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Neo-Marxism Today

Marcuse argued that racial conflict was the new axis of revolution. He rejected free speech and free assembly as dangers to revolutionary justice and promoted “liberating tolerance”—intolerance toward the political Right. Today’s revolution is no longer based on class and economics but on identity and race. Whiteness is portrayed as inherently guilty, while minority identities are defined primarily by oppression.

According to Marti Gurri, “nothing like the woke DEI ideology has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.” Nearly every major American institution—government,[19] universities, corporations, media, and the military—has adopted DEI ideology. Employees can be fired for challenging its definitions. We see the early formation of a soft fascism uniting state, media, and corporate power.

The failed Disinformation Governance Board demonstrated how close we came to institutionalized speech control. Though premature, such efforts may return.

Angela Davis praised Marcuse as the intellectual leader of the New Left and declared: “We cannot combat racism until we have destroyed the whole system.” This explicitly ties wokist racism to Marxism.

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Objective Christian Reality

Political control of speech and behavior marks a critical stage in the advance of cultural Marxism. Though Rufo does not directly address theology, he warns that abandoning Christian morality and constitutional liberalism risks a Weimar-like collapse.[20] To sum up, wokism is the invention of Sixties Western neo-Marxists to undermine American history, especially its Christian elements, by dismissing them as “racist.”

Human beings cannot survive without God’s law. Christians are therefore called to proclaim God as both Creator and Redeemer, as Paul declares in 2 Corinthians 4:6:

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Though the future may appear bleak, God’s creation still testifies to His glory. Those drawn to the Creator may yet be drawn to the Redeemer, who welcomes all who place their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

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Footnotes

[1] Jones, Peter, Wokism: The New Pagan Morality, https://truthxchange.com/?s=Wokism
[2] Bond, Paul, Newsweek, “Has Hamas Hastened the Demise of ‘Woke’” (Nov 6, 2023).
[3] Rufo, Christopher, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023).
[4] Page references in brackets refer to Rufo’s book.
[5] Henrickson, Charles, “Christ Will Build His Church” (Sermon, Oct 29, 2023).
[6] Doyle, Rob, UnHerd, Aug 2023.
[7] Skousen, W. Cleon, The Naked Communist (2017), 40.
[8] Miles, Lucas, Woke Jesus (2023); Robles, A.D., Social Justice Pharisees (2022).
[9] Ridgley, Stanley, Brutal Minds (2023), x.
[10] Marcuse, Herbert, Collected Papers, vol. 6, 336.
[11] FrontPageMag, “The University States of America.”
[12] Collins & Jun, White Out (2017), 72–73.
[13] Johnson, Manning, Color, Communism and Common Sense (1958).
[14] Johnson, ibid., 37.
[15] Johnson, ibid., 44–54.
[16] Hippolito, Joseph, FrontPageMag, Sep 24, 2020.
[17] News-Herald, Aug 16, 2020.
[18] FrontPageMag, Feb 2021.
[19] RealClearInvestigations, Feb 14, 2023.
[20] Rufo, Christopher, Substack (Oct 21, 2023).

Source: Marxist Wokism

Jesse Kelly on “The Criminal Enterprise That is the Democrat Party” – (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit

Jesse Kelly on “The Criminal Enterprise That is the Democrat Party” – (VIDEO)

Jesse Kelly of “The First” talked earlier this week about how the Democrat Party has become basically a criminal organization. He explained that they don’t exist as a viable party anymore, but survive through criminal actions, including election fraud, mass importing of illegals, and financial fraud.

Kelly also explained the structure of their operations. The elite communists who have wealth and positions of power use their influence to recruit, train and essentially brainwash people to go into the streets to riot for their revolution. He went on to explain that they find people who are already troubled and feed them with propaganda and give them the tools necessary to go out and become agitators.

“ICE has been surging into Minnesota right now. Minneapolis, other parts of Minnesota. Why? Well, the Somali fraud ring has been exposed. Minnesota is one of these sanctuary, communist run states where foreign barbarians go there and pillage the American taxpayer,” Kelly said.

“They are going to go into these sanctuary places, and they are going to grab people who should not be in this country. They are going to arrest them, and they are going to send them away, as every country should,” Kelly said.

“The Democrat Party in this country, ceases to exist as a viable, political party without taxpayer money. They find a way to swindle it. Without the mass importation of foreign barbarians, and without election fraud,” Kelly said.

“When you understand that, you understand why they fight so hard to keep foreign barbarians here. It could be confusing for normal people,” Kelly continued.

“Why would they organize these protests and these riots. You don’t understand. Their entire existence disappears without the mass importation of foreign barbarians who will be given taxpayer money in various ways and then will vote for Democrats in various ways,” Kelly warned.

“So, ICE surges into Minneapolis, surges into Minnesota. They start scarfing up foreigners. What happens? Here’s what happens,” Kelly said.

“They want to cause disruptions. They want to cause all kinds of disorder out there, but they are of course not going to get their manicured fingers dirty. That’s the elite communists,” Kelly said.

“The street communists. It’s their job to get their fingers dirty. Street communists are generally the true believers almost always broken, miserable, pill addicted criminals,” Kelly said.

“They give them training. They give them equipment. They break their minds with relentless propaganda, and then they send them out like an army to fight for the revolution,” Kelly explained.

Kelly responded to those who send him death threats and explained to them that the people who send them out to fight for the revolution do not care about them.

“You should understand that they don’t care about you. That woman who was just sent out to die today. She died. That revolutionary. You know they will send you tomorrow. And then your daughter the next day, and your son the next day after that, and the people who are breaking your mind and your soul as you consume it on social media and you read New York Times and none of those people will lose a minute of sleep when you die for their cause,” Kelly explained.

Watch:

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Bill Maher Shares Brief History Lesson on Socialism (Video) | The Gateway Pundit

Bill Maher Shares Brief History Lesson on Socialism (Video)

Screencap of Twitter/X video.

Bill Maher recently shared his less-than-optimistic view about the future of the Democrat party, especially following the win of radical socialist Zohran Mamdani as Mayor-elect in New York City. Maher likened the Democrat brand to Kodak, Polaroid, Radio Shack, GE, Atari, RCA, and other brands that have slipped into obscurity or have disappeared altogether.

NYC voters, especially young, white women, voted in droves for Mamdani, many fully embracing his socialist plans for the Big Apple.  Maher warns, however, that socialism isn’t quite the utopian fantasy spoiled middle-class hipsters think it is.

During a recent episode of his show, Maher shared a brief history lesson on the realities of socialism.

“Democrats must recognize that Zoran Mamdani is the future of the party.”

“Unfortunately, it’s the Republican Party.”

“We’ve run this experiment many times, and the results are always obvious.”

“Here’s capitalist South Korea at night from space.”

South Korea at night./Video screenshot/Bill Maher Show

“Here’s socialist North Korea.”

North Korea at night/Video screenshot/Bill Maher Show

“Yeah.”

“In 1990, Venezuela was wealthier than Poland. But then Poland, finally free of Soviet-style economics, went all in on capitalism. and now their economy is as big as Japan. And people there have high wages, low inflation, cars, vacations, homes.”

“Meanwhile, Venezuela traded capitalism for Hugo Chávez’s Socialism for the 21st Century, which turned out to be like socialism in the last century or any century, a fu**ing mess.”

“It turned one of Latin America’s richest countries into one of its poorest. Low wages, high inflation, shortages, outages, and 8 million people fleeing.”

“If you think New York can somehow reinvent this wheel, you’re in for a rude awokening.

Watch:

The post Bill Maher Shares Brief History Lesson on Socialism (Video) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Oh, What a Tangled Web of Communists and Islamists Lies Behind Zohran Mamdani | The Gateway Pundit

Oh, What a Tangled Web of Communists and Islamists Lies Behind Zohran Mamdani

A screenshot from Nov. 6, 2025, of Iranian newspaper Quds.

Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral campaign benefited from an extensive activist network connecting Marxist and Islamist movements, several of which are under congressional scrutiny for foreign and extremist ties.

This article provides an overview of the key organizations, individuals, and funding channels involved.

Subsequent articles will explore these connections in greater depth, one focusing on the communist affiliations tied to Chinese Communist Party, aligned networks, and another examining extremist groups linked to Hamas.

A central pillar of Mamdani’s political base is the immigrant-rights organization Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) and its political arm, DRUM Beats, which organized a large-scale South Asian voter mobilization for his campaign.

Both groups are linked to the far-left People’s Forum, a socialist organization funded through the CCP-aligned network of billionaire Neville Roy Singham, a U.S. citizen residing in Shanghai.

The People’s Forum works closely with the ANSWER Coalition, a front for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party (WWP) and its offshoot, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).

Mamdani’s personal ties to this broader ideological network trace back to his student years. While attending Bowdoin College, he co-founded the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which he credits as the start of his political activism.

SJP, founded by Hatem Bazian, operates under the umbrella of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), which publicly praised Hamas following the October 7 attacks on Israel.

SJP’s leadership includes individuals previously involved with Hamas-linked organizations such as the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and the Holy Land Foundation, both shut down or sanctioned for financing or coordinating with Hamas.

Multiple investigations have identified AMP as a key conduit for U.S.-based pro-Hamas activism.

Through SJP, Mamdani is connected to what congressional reports describe as the “Hamas-linked” side of this activist network.

That bloc converges with the CCP-funded and Marxist-Leninist coalition through joint campaigns such as Shut It Down for Palestine, co-organized by SJP, the ANSWER Coalition, and The People’s Forum.

The “Shut It Down for Palestine” (SID4P) campaign brings together multiple activist groups, some alleged to have affiliations with Chinese Communist Party–aligned organizations and others with Hamas-linked entities.

This alliance reflects a fusion of Islamist extremism and communist internationalism united under shared anti-Israel and anti-American objectives.

Pakistan’s Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP), a socialist party, part of this same international far-left ecosystem, deepens the overlap.

Founded by Cambridge-educated historian Ammar Ali Jan and socialist politician Farooq Tariq, HKP advocates merging nationalist and socialist revolutionary movements.

The group maintains close ties with The People’s Forum and DRUM, extending the CCP-linked network into Mamdani’s campaign support structure.

On the ground in New York, DRUM’s director of organizing, Kazi Fouzia, a Bangladeshi immigrant who received asylum after entering the U.S. as an illegal alien, led neighborhood-level mobilization efforts crucial to Mamdani’s primary victory.

“We’re like a gang,” she said, describing the group’s influence. “When we go to any shop, people just move aside and say, ‘Oh my God. The DRUM leaders are here.’”

Taken together, Mamdani’s origins in SJP, his campaign’s backing from DRUM and The People’s Forum, and the shared activities of CCP-funded and Hamas-linked groups expose a unified network, an unusual convergence of communist, Islamist, and foreign-funded entities operating collectively within the same American political space.

Among the potential legal issues surrounding Zohran Mamdani’s campaign network are possible violations of federal nonprofit law and foreign-agent statutes.

The significant overlap between Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) and its political arm, DRUM Beats, raises 501(c)(3) compliance concerns since organizations with that tax-exempt status are prohibited from direct political campaigning.

Despite her open involvement in Mamdani’s campaign, Kazi Fouzia is still listed as DRUM’s director of organizing on her own LinkedIn profile, further blurring organizational boundaries.

Campaign-finance records also reveal that Mamdani’s campaign collected roughly $13,000 from donors listing foreign addresses; by October 14, 91 of those donations had been refunded, totaling $5,723.50.

The Coolidge-Reagan Foundation filed criminal referrals alleging illegal foreign contributions, and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith has demanded records citing evidence that the same network acted as an unregistered foreign agent of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while maintaining U.S. tax-exempt status.

Activities involving foreign-linked funding and coordination with overseas political entities may fall under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Senator Marco Rubio formally requested that Attorney General Merrick Garland investigate whether Neville Roy Singham and the organizations he funds are violating FARA provisions.

According to the Network Contagion Institute, the “Shut It Down for Palestine” coalition, of which several campaign-affiliated groups are members, has received financial and logistical backing from CCP-aligned entities whose messaging mirrors Beijing’s propaganda strategy of presenting China as a defender of global justice while undermining U.S. influence.

Further illustrating the ideological overlap, the International ANSWER Coalition, a major partner in this network, is operated by the Workers World Party (WWP), a Marxist-Leninist communist organization founded in 1959 by Sam Marcy.

WWP has a long record of defending authoritarian regimes, including North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and even praised the Chinese government’s violent suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

The FBI once described WWP as a “hard-line communist organization dedicated to world revolution.” The party has spawned several front groups, including the International Action Center and ANSWER, which have served as vehicles for its political agenda.

In 2022, DRUM executive director Fahd Ahmed publicly praised his “opportunity to engage with Mohiba Ahmed, Raza Gillani, and Ammar Ali Jan from Haqooq-e-Khalq Party,” a radical Pakistani socialist movement.

Meanwhile, The People’s Forum—another group within this same orbit—is under congressional investigation for possible CCP ties and foreign funding.

Senator Chuck Grassley has cited evidence that The People’s Forum was financed through Neville Roy Singham’s China-linked network and may have operated as an undeclared foreign agent under FARA.

The Program on Extremism at George Washington University likewise lists The People’s Forum within a broader Singham-funded network of U.S. activist groups engaged in pro-Palestinian organizing that carries CCP-influenced narratives.

The post Oh, What a Tangled Web of Communists and Islamists Lies Behind Zohran Mamdani appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

How Communists Are Taking Over the Democrat Party | IFA

The following is an excerpt from our new special report, The Communist Takeover of the Democratic Party.

For years, unbeknownst to most Americans, the Communist Party has been purposely and diligently chipping away to gain a foothold into our nation. In 1982, the newly formed Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) emerged as the latest vehicle for their Marxist ideologies, packaged for new times. It’s not your father’s communist party! Green. Hip. And with new mouthpieces now carrying water for their repackaged red ideologies.

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Has this soft-peddled, mainstream-embraced socialist movement now found their foothold? As an article in CanaryOnline shared, it’s not unlike the methods of the cuckoo bird, who lays its eggs among other birds’ nests, sat on and fed by the attentive host mother birds, When the cuckoos hatch, they destroy the original hatchlings, evicting them from their own nest, now using the host’s nest and broody mother to advance their own cuckoo domination. It’s called “brood parasitism” and it is happening within the Democrat Party.

With the high-profile election of an unapologetic and self-defined Muslim Socialist, Zohran Mamdani, it appears the “eggs” are in process of being pushed out of the Democrat nest. The DSA may now be in control of the Democrat Party.

How did we get here?

When Bernie Sanders 2016 Presidential bid put DSA on the map with everyday Americans, membership surged from 6,000 members to nearly 100,000 in just a few short years. It made Democratic Socialist a palatable handle for the actual socialism behind it.

The DSA began quickly muscling its policies and candidates through the Democrat Party, and has helped elect over 250 officials nationwide with help from socialist darlings such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) who also fronts the movement.

The momentum and growing influence of the DSA in the Democrat Party also has been likened to a hostile takeover. In fact, leaked documents revealed that DSA leaders view the Democrat Party as just a “vehicle” for socialism with some DSA officials stating clearly “we hate the Democratic Party” and navigating “toward insurrection.”

What is the DSA’s long term goal, and how will the party ensure that socialism becomes the law of the land? Learn more about their strategy and how you can pray by downloading our new special report, available here.

IFA President/CEO David Kubal also discussed the DSA on yesterday’s First Friday webcast. You can view that webcast in the embedded player below:

 

How are you praying about the Democratic Socialists of America? Share your prayers in the comments.

(Photo Credit: Moises Gonzalez on Unsplash)

Source: How Communists Are Taking Over the Democrat Party

Disruption and Despair: The Dark Logic of Critical Marxism | Public Discourse

Disruption and Despair: The Dark Logic of Critical Marxism 

After a slow march through our society’s schools, businesses, and courtrooms, critical Marxists are in retreat, facing political backlash for movements like transgenderism and critical race theory that they inspired. 

But political fortune runs in cycles, and Marxist critical theory has sunk roots deep in our institutions; its return may only be an election away. Rather than complacently trust heavy-handed politicians to undo it, conservatives need to continue the hard work of understanding why it has won over so many people, and of answering it. 

An excellent place to start is Carl Trueman’s recent book To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse. Trueman explains not only the logic of this movement that rejects the very notion of truth, but its appeal to the darker emotions of the heart. 

From Traditional Marxism . . . 

Trueman begins explaining critical Marxism by reviewing the original, “traditional” Marxism of Karl Marx. 

Marx learned from philosopher G. W. F. Hegel that “[h]istory was a story of becoming, not being”: there are no unchanging, transcendent truths that all human beings know; rather, “the way people think about the world” develops directly from “the underlying social conditions” in which they live. The aspiration for universal freedom never occurred in pre-twentieth-century China, because China’s people lived in servitude to the emperor; political freedom first developed in the West, where Christianity and economic changes had eroded aristocracy.  

Hegel also taught Marx that changes in society, and therefore in ideas, issue from a back-and-forth process of conflict or “dialectic”: a social status quo arises, it ossifies, it calls forth an opposing reaction, and a new status quo emerges from the two, out of which new ways of thinking come to be. One man sets himself up as king, his rule becomes rigid and tyrannical, an aristocracy rises up to overthrow him, and the aristocrats conceive more expansive notions of freedom. Over time the aristocracy itself becomes tyrannical, and the process repeats. With each cycle, history gets a little better until, Hegel hopes, society achieves perfect liberation. 

Marx added to Hegel’s thought a revolutionary insight: the historical process of change could be accelerated. Men who transcended their circumstances (although it’s not clear how that could be in Marx’s deterministic universe) might imagine a more liberated society of the future and move people to overthrow the status quo now. Indeed, without revolutionary leaders, change could hardly happen in a world where (allegedly) people’s thinking conforms slavishly to their existing social situation: someone has to “think outside the box” for them so they can break the box down.  

Marx also drew out the pessimism of Hegel’s historicism: if thought depends radically on social circumstances, it reinforces those circumstances and helps constitute the status quo. If a society’s current situation is oppressive (as it may have been for many factory workers in nineteenth-century Europe), then the moral norms of that society are themselves oppressive, as though designed to keep people in servitude to their masters. Those norms are not truth but “ideology: . . . a set of ideas that hides what is really going on in the material circumstances of the world by a process of what Marx calls ‘mystification.’” Ordinary people are told they should follow civil laws because God commands them to do so; but “God” is just a projection of society’s status quo into a “mystical” concept, as though it were transcendent and deserved complete obedience. To take an instance that might support Marx’s view, in the slave economy of the pre–Civil War American South, “assumptions of racial hierarchies, of the ‘natural’ fact of slavery, even perhaps notions that slavery is good for the slaves” both “reflect[ed] the economic structure, [and] also reinforce[d] and perpetuate[d] it.” 

Ideologies are “as though” designed to oppress, because thought, being the product of circumstance, is not “intentional” in Marx’s theoretical universe; it is therefore not the act of an unchanging, transcendent reality like the soul (just the sort of mystical concept that could justify an oppressive theory of unchanging human nature). All people in society, whether oppressors or oppressed, labor under “alienation”—estrangement from their real selves and desires, under the deception or “false consciousness” wrought in them by the ideology of their society. They do not belong to themselves. To escape alienation, and to liberate their minds from ideology, men must be liberated from their circumstances—not guided to “truth,” which is, again, just a tool to reinforce social circumstances. Hence Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers [up to Hegel] have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Until politics change, there will be no new, freer ideas, only reformulations of the ideology of the status quo.  

. . . To Critical Marxism 

Marx may have looked gloomily on society, but he hoped that at least it would inevitably evolve in the right direction, even if it needed to be helped along. Actual events, however, shattered that hope.  

Marx never saw the liberated, communist utopia in his lifetime: revolutions happened, but when the dust settled, capitalism was still in place, though softened by more humane labor laws, unions, and social welfare programs. More damningly for classical Marxism, the actual progress of history defied the socialist economic theories that Marx had endorsed in the latter part of his life. According to socialism, Marx’s home country, Germany, with its advanced economy and democratic, bourgeois society, should have been the most ripe for a proletarian revolution as the next step in the dialectical historical process. But the first successful communist revolution occurred in a place of the opposite sort—agrarian, despotic Russia—and it produced a totalitarian dystopia. Still more surprisingly, the regime to which nineteenth-century Germany did give rise was violently opposed to Marxism: the National Socialist Third Reich.  

The failures of traditional Marxist theory sent Marxists back to the drawing board. They concluded that Marx had not gone far enough—false consciousness ran far deeper than he supposed. Marx himself remained captured by bourgeois society’s ideology, by his adherence to socialism, with its commitment to a theory of timeless (i.e. transcendent) economic laws. If even he was deceived, one must need to unmask ideology by more thorough psychologizing. This was the project of Critical Marxism. 

Critical theorist Karl Korsch, for instance, noted that factory workers resisted Marx’s call to revolution because they wanted to work in the factories, to support their families, and to fight in the state’s armies to serve their country. Mobilizing people for revolution therefore required not just breaking down oppressive economic and legal structures, but showing people the necessary connection of those structures to cultural norms (like family life and patriotism), so that people would shed the norms as well.  

But to do that does not mean to “disprove” those norms; that would be to appeal to unchanging truths of human nature and logic—to replace one set of norms with another, setting up a new oppressive status quo. The solution is rather to disrupt the status quo, and keep on disrupting, so that no false consciousness has the chance to harden. Life must become continual revolution in all respects, not just in economics and politics, but in culture, the family, and today in human nature, as contemporary Marxists seek to disrupt the very reality of being male or female.  

Critical theorists even aim to disrupt the way people think by writing “disorienting” texts—so difficult to understand that no “dominant idea” could come from them to create a new false consciousness. “Orthodox Marxism,” according to critical theorist George Lukács, is not a set of beliefs, but a “method.” The goal is not to understand but to change, until utopia arrives. 

Grains of Truth . . . 

As deeply pessimistic and disruptive as Marxism is, Trueman says, its criticisms often contain grains of truth.  

Nineteenth-century Marxists helped draw public attention to objectively oppressive economic situations—child labor, unfairly low wages, etc. George Lukács pointed out how laissez-faire capitalists can “reify” “the economy,” treating it as though it existed independently, as an end in itself; they forget that economies are fundamentally relations between people that serve people, not wealth for its own sake. More recently, Marxists have helped raise awareness of the subtle ways in which racial stereotypes can inform people’s thinking. 

Critical theory acknowledges the fact that the world is not as it should be. People suffer; sometimes they suffer a great deal, even at each other’s hands. Often their suffering goes unnoticed, even deliberately ignored. As Trueman points out, the founders of critical theory—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and many others—suffered as Jews living in Germany under the anti-Semitic Third Reich. The development of their theories, Trueman suggests, cannot be dismissed as mere derangement—it was their (very flawed) attempt to grapple with their people’s terrifying experience.  

Many contemporary academics who espouse critical theory have perhaps also suffered a great deal. For others, however, adopting critical theory is simply “a rather useful career move,” or perhaps a rationalization of their darker, selfish desires. In any case, Trueman’s cultural analysis of the original critical theorists shows how complex Marxists’ motives can be. He reminds us that those who (rightly) reject Marxists’ approach should not dismiss Marxists, or those they mislead, as beyond hope. Part of them, buried deep inside, is trying to find truth and peace.  

Christians cannot ignore critical theory; it is a mysterious cry for help, from human hearts wounded by evil and searching for answers in the wrong places.

. . . In a Philosophy without Hope 

But whatever the inscrutable motives of its adherents might be, critical theory is, objectively, deeply misguided. It is not simply healthy pessimism about the human condition. Despite its apparent hope for a future utopia (which it scarcely defines, perhaps for fear of creating a new ideology), Marxism is a philosophy of despair. By denying agency to the person, and viewing oppression as the default mode of society, Marxism destroys hope: hope in the possibility of being free interiorly even amid exterior oppression; hope that, despite others’ flaws (and our own), there is good in people, and they can repent and be forgiven; hope that evil can be overcome through the power of love; hope that, whatever its past sins may be, the human soul is made for truth. This hopelessness has, tragically, ended up producing violence, like that of the Third Reich, that would have horrified the founders of critical theory—even mutilating children to “liberate” them from the “alienating” constraints of their bodies that contradict their “gender identity.”

Occasionally To Change All Worlds, I think, adopts too much of the critical theorists’ way of thinking. For instance, speaking to Christian readers, Trueman applies critical theory’s term “alienation” to fallen humanity outside the Church. True, sin deeply estranges man from himself and others, but I should think that such estrangement is not complete, as the Marxist meaning of “alienation” would suggest. As long as he lives, man continues to bear the image of God in himself and can experience the goodness of life in communion with others, albeit overshadowed by sin. Notwithstanding this and similar lapses, Trueman recognizes the risks of borrowing terms from Marxism and clearly warns readers against it. The theory is so tightly constructed that, as Joseph Ratzinger once said, to accept one part is to accept the whole.  

In any case, Christians would do well to heed Trueman’s warning to take seriously the way their infidelities to God and the Law of Love “damage the church’s plausibility, even if they do not disprove the gospel.” This warning goes especially for those Christians who today openly use Marxists’ own Machiavellian tactics of “disruption” against them, doing evil that good might come about. Such Christians have become, as it were, Marxists of the right, driven not by hope in truth and charity, but by rage born of despair. They only perpetuate the pagan cycle of vengeance that Marxism has brought back to life in the West, and they risk calling forth a severe backlash of the Marxist left in the future.   

Christians cannot ignore critical theory; it is a mysterious cry for help, from human hearts wounded by evil and searching for answers in the wrong places. We must try to understand it, refute it—by proclaiming the truth in love, even if it means suffering at the hands of those who misunderstand us —and bring to the broken souls of our times the peace that no worldly liberation can give. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.

Previous Generations Were Right To Warn About The Trajectory Of Society | Harbingers Daily »

It’s a question that eventually rings forth from every generation. “What’s the world coming to?” More specifically, they ask, “What’s wrong with these kids today?” Many deride all such concerns because they are common to all generations. But is that a reason to dismiss such worries? Look at the history of the world and of humanity. You see an almost continuous story of war, subjugation, and pain. Maybe each generation of elders had good reason for concern.

The “last days” generation will be a mess. Here are a few of the many descriptions found in 2 Timothy 3:2-3. They will be selfish, materialistic, pretentious, and proud. They will speak evil of sacred things. They will not appreciate the gifts they have received. Lacking self-control, they will be brutal. They will embrace evil and despise good.

According to the Bible, all generations sin. But that does not mean all generations are the same. Things can get better, and they can get worse. The morals of individuals and of societies can improve or deteriorate. Choices have meaning and consequences.

We may be seeing the 2 Timothy 3 generation right now. That makes it ironic when older people of our time question the validity of their own concerns. They think it may mean little or nothing, like their memories of adults worrying about Elvis, the Beatles, and other early rock stars. “We turned out okay,” they say. “Maybe our concerns are an overreaction.”

They push aside apprehensions about obscene and destructive song lyrics because they eventually learned that “Puff the Magic Dragon” was not about marijuana. They give all musicians a pass because Elvis’s swiveling hips did not bring down the nation. In fact, he turned out to be a nice person. Rock music has not destroyed America. The flag still waves, the crops grow, and the Washington Monument shows no cracks.

Still, all is not as it should be. Cracks in monuments can be repaired, but the restoration of broken moral foundations can be difficult, especially when moral blindness keeps them from being seen. I’m not criticizing Elvis Presley. I was a fan, too. But his critics were not fools. Maybe they were wrong about Elvis as a person, but they saw a sexual revolution coming — one that would cause terrible pain for millions. And they were right. The sexual morals of the nation fell apart in the years that followed. And, as his defenders point out, what Elvis did was mild compared to what was coming.

In another example, Americans 70 years ago were deeply concerned about communist ideology infiltrating government, institutions of higher learning, and the media. In the decades that followed, their worries became the butt of thousands of jokes. But today, communist ideology has gone beyond secretly infiltrating government. It is openly espoused in various forms by high-ranking politicians and other officials. It has taken over the thinking in institutions of higher learning. And it lives openly in the media. They may not always call it communism, but that’s what it is. And it’s here now. Our elders’ concerns were valid.

Communism has always followed certain patterns. And those patterns fit the biblical end-time scenario of central control of human lives. But now that control can happen at a level that was unimaginable until the advent of artificial intelligence. Communist revolutions also fit with the end-times pattern of scaring people in ways that will make them malleable, then providing what will seem to be the only way to peace and safety.

We live in dangerous times, but Jesus is still “the good Shepherd.” Stay close to Him. And have confidence in what you know to be true. Speak out in love.

---

Tom Gilbreath is an author and a contributor to the Hal Lindsey Report.

Source: Previous Generations Were Right To Warn About The Trajectory Of Society

Os Guinness on the Sexual Revolution | CultureWatch

https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/08/19/os-guinness-on-the-sexual-revolution/

The sexual revolutionaries’ real endgame:

I have already discussed the new book by Os Guinness: Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (Kildare, 2024). This important volume by the Christian intellectual and social commentator is quite significant indeed. In it he argues that Western civilisation is clearly a crossroads. Early on he defines what this entails:

A civilizational moment is a critical transition phase in the rise, course, and decline of a civilization when a civilization loses its decisive connection with the dynamic that inspired it. Such a moment must then issue in one of three broad options: a renewal of the dynamic that inspired the civilization in the first place, a successful replacement of the original dynamic by another, or the decline of the civilization and perhaps the birth of a new and different civilization later in time and elsewhere in the world. In sum, the issue for a civilization in a civilizational moment is its vision of ultimate reality: Is the civilization in living touch with the ideas, ideals, and inspiration that created it in the first place and chat it needs no to continue to flourish? Or, with its roots severed, is it destined to decline and die? (p. 30)

He offers four key flashpoints where this is occurring:

The Red Wave: Radical Marxism
The Rainbow Wave: The Sexual Revolution
The Black Wave: Radical Islamism
The Gold Wave: Corrupt Elitism

I have previously penned pieces on his chapters about Islam and Marxism:

https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/08/10/os-guinness-on-israel-the-west-and-islamism/

https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/08/14/os-guinness-on-the-threat-of-radical-marxism/

Chapter 5 on the sexual revolution is worth looking at more closely and quoting from as well. He begins by saying this:

The Rainbow Wave is the broad combination of trends that make up the sexual revolution, and the different elements that presently comprise the ever-expanding and increasingly self-contradictory “LGBTQ+” movement. Many people think that the sexual revolution is recent, and simply about the long overdue liberation from the supposedly uptight sexual and moral traditions of the past. They see it as the result of the sexual “Big Bang” of the 1960s, and therefore the child of Hugh Hefner, Playboy magazine, the Pill, and permissive sex. It certainly includes all of that, but in fact, the roots of the sexual revolution lie much deeper in the ferment of the French Revolution. The roots are ideological rather than technological, and their endgame is far more radical. In essence, the sexual revolution presents a vision of human life and society that is nothing less than the ancient and impossible dream of complete human autonomy, the total liberation of human desire, and a celebration of sexual freedom in all its forms and with no limits. Thus, the sexual revolution represents the deliberate subversion of 3000 years of civilization and its constraints. (p. 109)

As to the overall theme of the book, Guinness writes: “In terms of our civilizational moment, the sexual revolution is an open assault on the Bible’s view of sexuality, which replaced the pagan view that had been dominant before the rise of the West.” (p. 111)

He looks in some detail at those warring against biblical anthropology and sexuality, and discusses how so many intellectuals and influential leaders ran with the mantra that sexual libertinism was somehow the royal road to freedom. He assesses some of the leading figures here, such as Wilhelm Reich, Alfred Kinsey, Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault.

They all wanted a world without limits, especially when it comes to all things sexual. Ethical, legal and natural limits were spurned, and the push was on for open slather with any and all forms of sexuality. Pursuing pleasure at all costs was the rallying cry, and forget about personal responsibility and self-control.

As Guinness explains:

The notion of social construction and deconstruction rules out creation and means the elimination of all God-given distinctions, demarcations and limits. For Jews and Christians, creation-based distinctions mean limits, limits mean both the fulfilment within the limits and the possibility of transgression through flouting the limits, and transgression means freedom in the short-term, but chaos and loss of freedom in the long term. For the sexual revolution, in open contrast, there are no created distinctions, as all is constructed and not created. So, there are no inherent limits, there is no transgression where there are no limits to be transgressed, in the short-term result is undreamed of freedom of all kinds. As Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, if God is dead, everything is permitted. You can be as free as you desire to be. The only limits are the limits of your own thinking. (p. 118)

That is the stuff of dreamland. Hedonism and sexual anarchy might sound neat, but they can never go far in the real world. Things always get messy. That is why unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, countless abortions, broken families, and fractured societies are now the norm throughout the West.

Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds by Guinness, Os (Author)

And the boundaries – at least the few of them that are still left – keep being challenged:

Inevitably, the outcome of these liberation movements grows increasingly illiberal, both in terms of the movements themselves and in terms of the ever-greater aggression towards any who disagree with them. The dissent starts slowly but gathers speed. At first, all that each movement asks for is toleration and acceptance, but then a forced celebration of its new lifestyle, and in the end, legal penalties for those whose faith and conscience see things differently from them. This old strategy is now being harnessed to promote pedophilia. Few people notice when the opening cry is for “children’s liberation” and then for a crusade for “international children’s rights.” Isn’t everything a matter of liberation and rights today, so why not children too? But somehow, the proposed liberation includes the right to certain “sexual freedoms,” and then to the lowering of the age of consent across the world. (pp. 120-121)

He explains this sad regression in terms of these five downward steps:

First, legal admissibility…
Second, moral acceptance…
Third, social aggression…
Fourth, global affirmation
Finally, and fatefully, global authoritarianism… (p. 121-123)

He carefully looks at each step, and then goes on to say:

When the lone individual is the primary concern, the goal of revolutionary liberation is the elimination of all limiting ties that restrict the newly autonomous individual – whether ties of religion, tradition, family, associations, social expectations, and prohibition such as limits on abortion. All limits must go. All mediating institutions can be dispensed with. The autonomous individual must be liberated and left unhampered. (p. 131)

Yes, and the endgame of all this is the total eradication of the Judeo-Christian worldview, replaced by autonomous, decadent and utterly unrestrained mankind:

Yet this smashing of the categories is not the ultimate goal of the sexual revolution. Its spiritual elite have a higher goal in mind: to strive towards ultimate human harmony beyond all categories. In aiming for this state, the elite revolutionaries are attempting to return both paganism and sexual androgyny to their primitive pedestal and to license every possible type of sexuality as an expression of freedom – with polyamory now half in the door and pedophilia and zoophilia (or bestiality) well on the way. Starting by elevating androgyny and unisex, and by erasing all differences between the male and female as socially constructed, and then all other inherited distinctions, the revolutionaries released sexual options to be as free, fluid, and infinitely variable as individuals might choose, so Freud’s “polymorphous perversity” with a vengeance, and homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, polyamory, transgenderism, trans-speciesism, cross-dressing, drag queen culture, puppy play, and the like. This is how, Reich said, the sexual revolutionaries were out to subvert thousands of years of “patriarchal” societies (including the four thousand years of both the Jewish roots and the Christian flowering). (p. 133)

He continues:

At its deepest, this vision is religious and not secular, as many gurus have made clear. It looks far beyond immediate sexual freedom. Its supreme goal is to erase all distinction and fuse all opposites, especially between male and female, in order to attain the primordial cosmic wholeness and unity that has long been sought by pagan priests and shamans. Sexual androgyny is the key to this quest for both the religious and the secular….

The revolutionaries knew, of course, that to win, they would have to win by overcoming all who prized the differences between male and female—above all, three major enemies: the patriarchal family and the Jewish and Christian faiths—and therefore enforced the rigid straightjacket of sexual stereotypes (“gender fundamentalism”). The revolutionaries would sideline parents, for instance, by introducing sex education, drag queen shows, a general sexualization of women, and sexual grooming of children at the earliest age, making an end run around parents and parental responsibilities. “We’re coming for your children,” as the drag queen shows now boast. And in more and more areas, the idea grew that the state, not parents, should be the authority over children, with schools now hiding critical information from parents. (pp. 133-134)

The full-on sexualisation of children, the assault on marriage, the radical homosexual and trans agendas, the ready access to porn in all its forms, and the reductionism that says we are all really just animals, are all working together to destroy Judaism and Christianity. And in the end, it will mean the destruction of what it means to be human – and of the West itself.

The sexual revolutionaries have a lot to answer for. And we can be grateful for voices like that of Guinness for sounding the alarm.

[1586 words]

The post Os Guinness on the Sexual Revolution appeared first on CultureWatch.

Os Guinness On the Threat of Radical Marxism | CultureWatch

We must not be complacent about communist and woke ideology:

Marxism and related ideologies are still very much with us. The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall may have come crashing down some 35 years ago, but the pernicious threat that is Communism and godless Socialism remain. They are found throughout Western institutions, be it the media, academia, or the political and cultural arenas.

In a recent piece I examined a new book by the important Christian thinker Os Guinness: Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (Kildare, 2024). In it he argues that there are four major harmful waves that are crashing over the West:

The Red Wave: Radical Marxism
The Rainbow Wave: The Sexual Revolution
The Black Wave: Radical Islamism
The Gold Wave: Corrupt Elitism

I already examined his thoughts on Islam and its war against the West: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/08/10/os-guinness-on-israel-the-west-and-islamism/

Here I want to look at the Red Wave which he discusses in Chapter 4. He explains it this way:

The Red Wave is the combination of radical and revolutionary political movements that have flowed down from the French Revolution in 1789. Along with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution is a watershed event in the breakdown of Western Civilization, and its ever-evolving influence is now global and spreading. With deadly accuracy, the great revolution and the revolutions it has spawned, all aim at the heart of the evils and weaknesses of the West, and the West has never recovered from the forces of its eruption. In the shape of its current formulations, the French Revolution is now undermining even the American Revolution and calling the ideas and ideals of the American republic into question. (p. 89)

Guinness looks at the traditional revolutionary movements and the earlier emphasis on economics, and then notes how the cultural has become the new form of Marxism:

Below the major shifts from economic to cultural Marxism, the underlying revolutionary algorithm applied to all of life, is the same. The power differential between “oppressor and oppressed” is not only political; it can be found everywhere – in families, in schools, in businesses, in relationships of every kind; in fact, everywhere, with no exception (including, of course, themselves). This means, logically, that there is not a single relationship and no human situation absolutely anywhere that is not vulnerable to revolutionary accusations. The shifts from classical to cultural Marxism are therefore significant, but the foundational analyses of the two types of Marxism both proceed in broadly the same way: the radicals’ task is to analyse the difference between the “majority” and the “marginal minority,” the “normal” and the “abnormal” or “queer,” the “powerful” and the “powerless,” and above all, to discover the “oppressors” and the “victims.” (p. 96)

He goes on the say this:

One major problem arises from the fact that the Marxist tactic of elevating and exploiting “victims” and “victimhood” is emotionally explosive, as it appeals directly to resentment. The revolution stirs up relational emotions that are personal, and then inflates and blends them with justice that should be objective and impersonal. The resentment stirred against “the haves” by “the have-nots” is bad enough, but the endless, indulgent probing of victimhood from every other possible angle of “intersectionality” serves to stoke feelings of hurt, resentment, bitterness, revenge, and hate that prove impossible to be assuaged. The politics of cultural Marxism is essentially destructive because it focuses on the subjective, personal emotions at the expense of objective, impersonal justice for all. That is why, traditionally, Lady Justice is blindfolded with scales tipped by neither fear nor favor. The radicals fixate on victimhood as a matter of the past rather than the present, and on hurts rather than healing, so the result is a perpetual stirring of rage and hate rather than any striving towards justice. (p. 97)

Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds by Guinness, Os (Author)

He examines cultural Marxism and the ‘long march through the institutions’ in more detail, discussing figures like Lukacs, Gramsci and Marcuse. He notes how successful it has been in taking over the universities, the media, politics, and even business. The woke takeover of society involves everything from woke education to woke finance.

Guinness says this about what it all entails:

It is a serious mistake to think that “wokeism” is a purely political problem that can be solved by purely political solutions. At its core, wokeism is cultural, and a cultural revolution, but it is also a cultural and educational revolution with openly religious overtones. The term “New Faith” is apt, for wokeism is a pseudo-religion like so many of the avowedly secularist ideologies that flowed from the French Revolution. Far more than progressive against conservative, let alone Democrat against Republican, the new faith is cosmic and apocalyptic – a total war of the oppressed against the oppressors, with all of humanity on one side or the other, in a fight to the death over reality, truth, words, authorities, and boundaries. (p. 104)

Looking further at the scene in the West, and especially in America, Guinness rounds off the chapter with these ominous words:

At the end of the line, the worst-case scenario for America would be a merger between two movements: cultural Marxism (or wokeism), the revolutionary ideology at the radical left; and progressivism, the ideology of the ruling elites of the managerial regime. As each party seeks to co-opt the other for its own purposes, they would together create an almost irresistible trend towards oligarchic one-party politics and a centralized and administrative state that could grow into a woke Leviathan. . . . The result would be a one-party state and a perfect match for Benito Mussolini’s infamous formulation of his own fascist government: “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. His fascist regime is said to have been the first to declare itself totalitarian.

 

Were this dread specter of a society totally engineered by the state to materialize further, a newly radicalized America would take its place next to a long-radicalized China, and together, these two autocracies, one soft and one hard, would tower over humanity and the world as a two-headed superpower despotism, the likes of which the world has not seen in the modern era – as if Stalin and Hitler had won at the same time and formed a lasting alliance of dictators.

 

God forbid. But long before such a dire result, the impact of cultural Marxism in the form of variance such as Critical Race Theory, represents a disaster for the American republic. In the words of James Lindsay’s searing book Race Marxism, cultural Marxism, in the form of the Red Wave overall, is a “one-hundred-year-long spear that is being thrust into the side of Western civilization.” (pp. 106-107)

Worrying times indeed. But Guinness does not just leave us with bleak prospects for the future. In a forthcoming piece I will look at his closing words in the book and what he says we can do about resisting these menaces and help turn things around.

[1155 words]

The post Os Guinness On the Threat of Radical Marxism appeared first on CultureWatch.

Source: Os Guinness On the Threat of Radical Marxism

America’s Armchair Revolutionaries: How The Left Is Rediscovering Marxism As The Ultimate Virtue Signal | ZeroHedge

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

During the Cold War, Soviet communists reportedly referred to American liberals as “useful idiots.”

Although the origin of the quote has been challenged (and attributed to both Lenin and Stalin), it captured many of the adherents of communism after World War II. From higher education to Hollywood, dilettantes on the left embraced Marxism with little real understanding of the philosophy or its implications.

We are now seeing the rise of a new generation of armchair revolutionaries who are calling for everything from the overthrow of the U.S. government to the seizure of factories and homes.

Democratic New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani personifies this new movement of young people lacking any memory of the failure of socialist and communist systems in the 20th Century.

Mamdani is perfect for this rising movement of Latte Leninists and trust-fund baby Trotskyites. The privileged son of a radical Columbia professor and a Hollywood producer, Mamdani went to the elite Bowdoin College, which charges over $70,000 annually in tuition. He is part of the “radical chic” of American higher education, where extreme views are fully mainstream.

Mamdani shows the appeal of mouthing Marxist manifestos as manifest truths. It is Marxism-lite — promises of everything from rent control to making “Halal eight bucks again.”

In one speech before the Young Democratic Socialists of America conference, Mamdani even stated matter-of-factly how one of the goals is to “seize the means of production” in America.

“Right now, if we’re talking about the cancellation of student debt, if we’re talking about Medicare for all, you know, these are issues which have the groundswell of popular support across this country,” he said.

“But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s [boycott-divestment-sanctions against Israel] or whether it is the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.”

Mamdani offers few details of what it would mean to seize all industry in this country or how such a system would work in the United States after failing in literally every nation where it has been attempted.

He has also called for the seizure of unoccupied luxury condos in New York to turn over to the homeless.

With pledges of state-run grocery stores and other proposals, many are thrilled by the prospect of Marxism coming to America.

Polls show increasing support among young people for socialism and even communism. That is reflected in the New York primary, where Mamdani received significant support from wealthy and young college-educated voters.

Like Mamdani, these young voters have no inkling of what life was like under socialist and communist governments. They were not alive when radical shifts to socialism in Great Britain and France destroyed their economies and had to be reversed. They did not see the collapse of the Soviet Union or the move toward capitalism by China to avoid economic meltdowns.

Yet, as Mamdani stated, the radical left has to wait to seize such powers until it has “the same level of support at this very moment.” Unfortunately, socialist programs can produce the very dire conditions that lead to even greater consolidation of state controls and power.

Notably, most of Mamdani’s proposals would violate the Constitution or bankrupt the city. For example, efforts to seize multimillion-dollar luxury condos would constitute unconstitutional takings unless he was prepared to buy the units at their market value — a virtually impossible proposition.

Such considerations are rarely raised, let alone resolved, in radical conferences.

Earlier this month, University of Minnesota liberal arts professor Melanie Yazzie joined others for a “teach-in” in which she delighted the audience with calls for the overthrow of the country by “people who come from nations who are under occupation by the United States government.”

She added, “it’s our responsibility as people who are within the United States to go as hard as possible to decolonize this place because that will reverberate all across the world. Because the U.S. is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed.”

That includes forcing “[the] U.S. out of everywhere,” including “Turtle Island” (the Native American name used to describe North America). Yazzie insisted that “the goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States for the freedom and the future of all life on this planet. It very much depends on that.”

Yazzie is an example of how most faculties in this country now run from the left to the far left. Applicants who espouse center-right viewpoints are often rejected as lacking “intellectual rigor” or depth. However, you cannot be too far left to secure a position in many departments that do not have a single Republican or conservative.

Take University of Chicago Assistant Professor Eman Abdelhadi, who used her recent appearance at the Socialism 2025 conference to denounce the University of Chicago as an “evil” and “colonialist” institution. Nevertheless, she insisted that she wanted to remain at the evil institution — not for its intellectual community, but to “organize” and “leverage” to build a political coalition.

Keep in mind that the faculty not only decided that Abdelhadi was worthy of a faculty position in the university’s Department of Comparative Human Development, but then also made her the Director of Graduate Studies.

For some, the calls of professors like Yazzie to “dismantle” the U.S. constitute the ultimate virtue signal. Like demands to seize factories and homes, the willingness to burn down the system is a cheap and easy way to establish your bona fides as one of the enlightened — something to brag about with your other 20-something fellow travelers as you order your $7 latte on the way to your Hyrox workout.

Lenin once mocked many in the West as idiots who would “transform themselves into men who are deaf, dumb and blind [and] toil to prepare their own suicide.”  What he never imagined was how some would still be transforming themselves decades after the revolution failed.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the best-selling author of “The Indispensable Right.”

Source: America’s Armchair Revolutionaries: How The Left Is Rediscovering Marxism As The Ultimate Virtue Signal

How Communism Is Quietly Reshaping the Modern West | The Daily Declaration

How Communism Is Quietly Reshaping the Modern West

Despite the Cold War’s end, the ideology of Communism persists — reshaping politics, governance, and freedoms across the globe today.

The ominous final line of an important new history of Communism says this: “Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.”

I refer to the 530-page book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism by American historian Sean McMeekin (Basic Books, 2024).

There are, of course, entire libraries filled with books about socialism, Marxism, the Soviet Union, and related topics. In my own library I have several hundred volumes on these subjects. But this one — To Overthrow the World — stands out as both one of the newest and most compelling. It offers a sweeping yet carefully detailed history of Communism covering the past 175 years or so.

To demonstrate the relevance of this book, let me begin by noting two recent events that have taken place in America. Zohran Mamdani just became the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City. A hard-core socialist, Mamdani is right up there with Bernie Sanders and AOC in radical progressivism. President Trump has rightly branded him a “Communist Lunatic.”

In contrast, the Texas government just passed a Bill — 89(R) SB 24 — that requires the school curriculum to teach about the history and horrors of Communism, contrasting this godless ideology with the vision of the American Founding Fathers.

That’s a commendable move, and a volume like Sean McMeekin’s would fit well within such a curriculum. It covers all the major themes, with detailed, well-documented chapters on the early socialist utopians, Karl Marx, the Bolshevik coup, the terror reigns of Lenin, Stalin, and others, the Red Guards, the Khmer Rouge, and so much more.

Communism Back From the Dead

I’ll return to this important volume in future articles, but here I want to focus on the Preface and Epilogue, where McMeekin highlights the central theme reflected in the title: the issue of control in Communist societies. In the opening paragraphs of the Preface, he explains:

It is now more than three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of the USSR prompted Francis Fukuyama to proclaim the “End of History.” Like most Americans who lived through those heady and exciting times, I felt a surge of pride as one Eastern Bloc country after another discarded single-party Communist rule for pluralism and political freedom — even Russia itself, which for a time seemed just as eager to embrace the West. For the first time, Soviet archives were thrown open to Western researchers such as myself, who happily descended on them to probe the secrets of Soviet and global Communism. Confident postmortems of Communism then filled the airwaves, with a sense of relief and “goodbye to all that.” At the height of American triumphalism in 2001, the historian Richard Pipes described his short Communism: A History as not only “an introduction to Communism” but also “at the same time, its obituary.”

Twenty years later, things look rather different. Russia may no longer be Communist, but it is ruled by Vladimir Putin, a proud and unrepentant former KGB officer. Joseph Stalin is more admired in Russia today than at any other time since his death in 1953, his manifold crimes against the peoples of the Soviet Union now either forgiven or forgotten. Since the Ukraine crisis of 2019 and the Russia-Ukraine war that broke out in February 2022, relations between Russia and the West have been thrown into the deep freeze, frostier by some measures than at the height of the Cold War, with nearly all trade and travel cut off. Meanwhile, thrown off its perch by the 9/11 attacks, ineffectual “forever war” military interventions, deindustrialisation, and debts eroding the value of the dollar, the United States has bled prestige in uncanny parallel with the return of Russian military power to the world stage and the rise of Communist China in economic power and global influence. With the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020-2022, the China model spread globally, as once inviolable rights, from freedom of speech and dissent to freedom of movement and travel, were temporarily abandoned in the West. For many young westerners, Communism is no longer a cause banished from mainstream discourse for its association with totalitarian regimes, for they have no living memory of them. Liberal democratic capitalism seems bereft of energy, if not moribund, while Chinese Communism rapidly assimilates much of the world. How did this happen, and why did no one see it coming?

What follows is an attempt to grapple with this question, and to approach it with a greater sense of humility than I might have done in those heady early years of the post-Communist era. Owing to several decades of historical research in partly open Chinese, mostly open Eastern Bloc, and until recently relatively open Soviet archives, we also know far more today than in the past about how Communism worked in practice, and about why, and exactly how, so many Communist regimes fell — while others endured — between 1989 and 1991. There was nothing fated about the collapse of Soviet power that allowed the Eastern Bloc Communist satellites and the three Baltic Republics to spin free from Moscow’s orbit in 1989, and that prompted the collapse of the USSR itself two years later — the cause of Fukuyama’s premature gloating — nor in the violent reassertion of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control in Tiananmen Square earlier in 1989, which should have rendered his thesis null on arrival. Much as we like to imagine that Communism failed because of a cascading groundswell of heroic popular opposition from below, it was actually the disappearance of coercion from above that counted. More than any other system of government known to man, Communist rule required the strong hand of the military and heavily armed security services, all under strict party control. Once the regime’s sword was lifted, Communist parties crumbled quickly; if the sword remained, the party did too.

Communism and the COVID-19 Connection

In the Epilogue, McMeekin looks at the “Strange Non-Death of Communism”. There, he reminds us of how recent developments in Communist China along with the West’s response to Covid proves that the ugly allure of Communism is alive and well. He shows how closely connected the two in fact are. His book is again worth quoting from at length:

With the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020-2022, the China model of Communist statist surveillance crashed into Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as once inviolable Western freedoms — of movement, travel, and association, of speech and robust debate over controversial public policies — were abandoned one by one. Even “social distancing,” the now much-mocked craze of 2020 — which, by making it illegal for humans to sit or congregate closer than six feet (in the United States) or one metre (most of Europe), shut down public schools and all but destroyed social industries, from cinemas, concert halls, and theatres to churches, gyms, restaurants and nightclubs — was a CCP import… [It] was a Chinese Communist policy imposed in 2002-2003 in response to outbreaks of avian flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). It was quietly, owing to CCP influence, incorporated into pandemic guidelines by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the American Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2004, reversing decades of progressively more humane — and scientifically sound — policies on mitigating disease outbreaks. “Lockdown” had absolutely no basis in the Western tradition, not even in the more credulous times of the Black Death, when sick people might have been quarantined against their will, but never the entire healthy population.

Social distancing lockdown, however, was a logical outgrowth of the statist population controls embraced by twentieth-century Communist regimes, such as the one in China where it first emerged…

Further Examples of Communism’s Modern Allure

McMeekin continues:

After heady moments in 1989 and 1991 when it appeared that the fall of Communism would usher in an era of greater civil liberties and freedoms worldwide, most of the Western world is now converging instead on a hybrid Chinese Communist model of statist governance and social life. Private (or semi-private) social media and other tech companies are harnessed by the state to track, monitor, censor, and control private communications, speech, and political activity, mostly behind the scenes, although with periodic high-profile crackdowns to scare would-be dissidents into compliance. The CCP’s social credit system, which sees those who fall afoul of the government or social media consensus denied access to schooling, travel, banking, or credit, has already been applied en masse to the “COVID unvaccinated” across the Western world, along with other dissidents. Such restrictions have now begun to extend into the banking system in the West. Funds raised to feed Canadian truckers participating in an outdoor winter protest against COVID vaccine mandates in early 2022, for example, were frozen by Canadian authorities in early 2022. When former Brexit Party chairman and European Parliament member Nigel Farage faced closure of his bank accounts, or “debanking,” in the summer of 2023, he believed it was because of his political views. Similar crackdowns affected British and American journalists critical of the West’s Ukraine policy in 2023.

It is not hard to imagine “debanking” or other types of persecution being applied in the near future to people whose views dissent from the approved consensus of Western social and governing elites on a wider range of topics, such as “climate change,” immigration, race, sexual orientation, or gender identification. It might once have sufficed for intellectual orthodoxy-enforcers that dissenters had trouble finding employment in government, in academe, or at white shoe corporate and law firms, but social access can now be restricted to many other areas of public life: not only the closure of bank accounts or refusal of service, but also social media bans, the seizure of funds collected via online platforms such as GoFundMe, the denial of passport or travel rights, or even, in some cases, interrogation and arrest. Americans have thus far been spared the cruder Communist injustice of “expropriation” of their assets, and the horrors of Stalin- or Mao-style Gulag camps and state-induced famines. In the social and intellectual sphere, however, the echoes of Cultural Revolution-style Communist totalitarianism have become too powerful — and painful — to ignore. Because modern-day thought commissars often work in the private sector (or for companies aligned with state intelligence), these new Western forms of social control may be more insidious than the cruder methods of physical intimidation and violence deployed by the NKVD, the Stasi, and Mao’s Red Guards: many victims deprived of their jobs, funds, reputations, or basic civil rights may not even know who their accusers are. Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.

If McMeekin is correct, then the eternal vigilance required to ensure the continuation of freedom is needed now as much as ever. And a book like this is part of what we need to make sure we remain free.

___

Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Image courtesy of Unsplash.

The post How Communism Is Quietly Reshaping the Modern West appeared first on The Daily Declaration.

Communism, Control, and Our Future | CultureWatch

Communism, Control, and Our Future

The desire to control others has always been with us – and it is getting worse:

The ominous final line of an important new history of Communism says this: “Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.” I refer to the 530-page book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism by American historian Sean McMeekin (Basic Books, 2024).

There are of course entire libraries filled with books about socialism, Marxism, the Soviet Union, and so on. In my own personal library I have several hundred volumes on these topics. But this volume is one of the newest and best volumes available so far. It offers a sweeping yet detailed history of Communism covering the past 175 years or so.

To demonstrate the relevance of this book, let me begin by noting two recent events that have taken place in America. Zohran Mamdani just became the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City. The hard-core socialist is right up there with Bernie Sanders and AOC in radical progressivism. President Trump rightly branded him a “Communist Lunatic.” https://www.foxnews.com/politics/zohran-mamdani-secures-victory-most-total-votes-nyc-mayoral-primary-history

But in contrast, the Texas Senate just passed a Bill – 89(R) SB 24 – that requires the school curriculum to teach about the history and horrors of Communism, contrasting this godless ideology with the vision of the American Founding Fathers. https://victimsofcommunism.org/texas-passes-law-mandating-education-on-communism/

That is a great move, and a volume such as this one would fit in nicely there. The book covers all the major topics, with detailed and well-documented chapters on the early socialist utopians, Karl Marx, the Bolshevik coup, the terror reigns of Lenin, Stalin and others, the Red Guards, the Khmer Rouge and so much more.

I will speak more to this very important volume in future articles, but here I want to focus on the book’s Preface and Epilogue where he highlights what I mention in my title: the issue of control in Communist societies. The opening paragraphs of the Preface say this:

It is now more than three decades since the fall of the Berlin all and subsequent collapse of the USSR prompted Francis Fukuyama to proclaim the “End of History.” Like most Americans who lived through those heady and exciting times, I felt a surge of pride as one Eastern Bloc country after another discarded single-party Communist rule for pluralism and political freedom —even Russia itself, which for a time seemed just as eager to embrace the West. For the first time, Soviet archives were thrown open to Western researchers such as myself, who happily descended on them to probe the secrets of Soviet and global Communism. Confident postmortems of Communism then filled the airwaves, with a sense of relief and “goodbye to all that.” At the height of American triumphalism in 2001, the historian Richard Pipes described his short Communism: A History as not only “an introduction to Communism” but also “at the same time, its obituary.”

Twenty years later, things look rather different. Russia may no longer be Communist, but it is ruled by Vladimir Putin, a proud and unrepentant former KGB officer. Joseph Stalin is more admired in Russia today than at any other time since his death in 1953, his manifold crimes against the peoples of the Soviet Union now either forgiven or forgotten. Since the Ukraine crisis of 2019 and the Russia-Ukraine war that broke out in February 2022, relations between Russia and the West have been thrown into the deep freeze, frostier by some measures than at the height of the Cold War, with nearly all trade and travel cut off. Meanwhile, thrown off its perch by the 9/11 attacks, ineffectual “forever war” military interventions, deindustrialization, and debts eroding the value of the dollar, the United States has bled prestige in uncanny parallel with the return of Russian military power to the world stage and the rise of Communist China in economic power and global influence. With the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020-2022, the China model spread globally, as once inviolable rights, from freedom of speech and dissent to freedom of movement and travel, were temporarily abandoned in the West. For many young westerners, Communism is no longer a cause banished from mainstream discourse for its association with totalitarian regimes, for they have no living memory of them. Liberal democratic capitalism seems bereft of energy, if not moribund, while Chinese Communism rapidly assimilates much of the world. How did this happen, and why did no one see it coming?

What follows is an attempt to grapple with this question, and to approach it with a greater sense of humility than I might have done in those heady early years of the post-Communist era. Owing to several decades of historical research in partly open Chinese, mostly open Eastern Bloc, and until recently relatively open Soviet archives, we also know far more today than in the past about how Communism worked in practice, and about why, and exactly how, so many Communist regimes fell—while others endured—between 1989 and 1991. There was nothing fated about the collapse of Soviet power that allowed the Eastern Bloc Communist satellites and the three Baltic Republics to spin free from Moscow’s orbit in 1989, and that prompted the collapse of the USSR itself two years later—the cause of Fukuyama’s premature gloating—nor in the violent reassertion of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control in Tiananmen Square earlier in 1989, which should have rendered his thesis null on arrival. Much as we like to imagine that Communism failed because of a cascading groundswell of heroic popular opposition from below, it was actually the disappearance of coercion from above that counted. More than any other system of government known to man, Communist rule required the strong hand of the military and heavily armed security services, all under strict party control. Once the regime’s sword was lifted, Communist parties crumbled quickly; if the sword remained, the party did too.

To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism by McMeekin, Sean (Author)

And in the Epilogue, McMeekin looks at the “Strange Non-Death of Communism”. In it he reminds us of how recent developments in Communist China along with the West’s response to Covid proves that the ugly allure of Communism is alive and well. He shows how closely connected the two in fact are. He is again worth quoting from at length:

With the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020-2022, the China model of Communist statist surveillance crashed into Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as once inviolable Western freedoms – of movement, travel, and association, of speech and robust debate over controversial public policies – were abandoned one by one. Even “social distancing,” the now much-mocked craze of 2020 – which, by making it illegal for humans to sit or congregate closer than six feet (in the United States) or one meter (most of Europe), shut down public schools and all but destroyed social industries, from cinemas, concert halls, and theatres to churches, gyms, restaurants and nightclubs – was a CCP import. . . . [It] was a Chinese Communist policy imposed in 2002-2003 in response to outbreaks of avian flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). It was quietly, owing to CCP influence, incorporated into pandemic guidelines by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2004, reversing decades of progressively more humane – and scientifically sound – policies on mitigating disease outbreaks. “Lockdown” had absolutely no basis in the Western tradition, not even in the more credulous times of the Black Death, when sick people might have been quarantined against their will, but never the entire healthy population.

Social distancing lockdown, however, was a logical outgrowth of the statist population controls embraced by twentieth-century Communist regimes, such as the one in China were at first emerged….

He continues:

After heady moments in 1989 and 1991 when it appeared that the fall of Communism would usher in an era of greater civil liberties and freedoms worldwide, most of the Western world is now converging instead on a hybrid Chinese Communist model of statist governance and social life. Private (or semi-private) social media and other tech companies are harnessed by the state to track, monitor, censor, and control private communications, speech, and political activity, mostly behind the scenes, although with periodic high-profile crackdowns to scare would-be dissidents into compliance. The CCP’s social credit system, which sees those who fall afoul of the government or social media consensus denied access to schooling, travel, banking, or credit, has already been applied en masse to the “COVID unvaccinated” across the Western world, along with other dissidents. Such restrictions have now begun to extend into the banking system in the West. Funds raised to feed Canadian truckers participating in an outdoor winter protest against COVID vaccine mandates in early 2022, for example, were frozen by Canadian authorities in early 2022. When former Brexit Party chairman and European Parliament member Nigel Farage faced closure of his bank accounts, or “debanking,” in the summer of 2023, he believed it was because of his political views. Similar crackdowns affected British and American journalists critical of the West’s Ukraine policy in 2023.

It is not hard to imagine “debanking” or other types of persecution being applied in the near future to people whose views dissent from the approved consensus of Western social and governing elites on a wider range of topics, such as “climate change,” immigration, race, sexual orientation, or gender identification. It might once have sufficed for intellectual orthodoxy-enforcers that dissenters had trouble finding employment in government, in academe, or at white shoe corporate and law firms, but social access can now be restricted to many other areas of public life: not only the closure of bank accounts or refusal of service, but also social media bans, the seizure of funds collected via online platforms such as GoFundMe, the denial of passport or travel rights, or even, in some cases, interrogation and arrest. Americans have thus far been spared the cruder Communist injustice of “expropriation” of their assets, and the horrors of Stalin- or Mao-style Gulag camps and state-induced famines. In the social and intellectual sphere, however, the echoes of Cultural Revolution-style Communist totalitarianism have become too powerful—and painful—to ignore. Because modern-day thought commissars often work in the private sector (or for companies aligned with state intelligence), these new Western forms of social control may be more insidious than the cruder methods of physical intimidation and violence deployed by the NKVD, the Stasi, and Mao’s Red Guards: many victims deprived of their jobs, funds, reputations, or basic civil rights may not even know who their accusers are. Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.

And if that is so, then the eternal vigilance required to ensure the continuation of freedom is needed now as much as ever. And a book like this is part of what we need to make sure we remain free.

[1808 words]

The post Communism, Control, and Our Future appeared first on CultureWatch.

Second-Edition Copy Of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ Currently Leads NYC Mayor Race | Babylon Bee

NEW YORK, NY — All eyes have turned toward the New York mayoral primaries, as a new poll indicated that a second edition copy of The Communist Manifesto now holds a sizeable lead over other Democratic Party candidates.

Though incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and former Governor Andrew Cuomo have maintained their share of support, the second edition of The Communist Manifesto surged in popularity due to how closely it matches the values and ideals held by a vast majority of Democratic Party voters.

“It says all the right things,” said one Democratic voter after casting her ballot for the manifesto. “We have always leaned toward the more progressive candidates, but nothing comes close to how far this manifesto is willing to go. The more I read what it says, the more I want this document to be the leader of New York City. Let’s stop beating around the bush with these other candidates and go straight to the source of our party’s platform.”

A spokesperson for The Communist Manifesto welcomed the growing support. “This is the candidate that best represents New York Democrats,” said the campaign’s press secretary. “The second edition of The Communist Manifesto has been standing up and promoting the thoughts and views of Democrats for years, so it’s only right for it to take its rightful place as mayor of New York City.”

At publishing time, analysts were projecting the second edition of The Communist Manifesto to secure the party’s nomination for the general election and coast to an easy victory in the general election before furthering the city’s descent into third-world ruin.

---

These British police officers are keeping the streets safe from dangerous weapons.

https://babylonbee.com/news/a-second-edition-of-the-communist-manifesto-currently-leads-in-the-nyc-mayor-race/

The Marxist Origin of Wokism | The Log College

The Marxist Origin of Wokism

by Peter Jones

The Hideous Face of Revolution

I am picking up a subject about which I have already written in an article entitled “Wokism: The New Pagan Morality.”^[1] We now live in an increasingly post-Christian society. Interestingly, 56% of American voters deemed the term “woke” to be positive, associated with being informed and educated, while just 39% deemed it negative, likening it to censorship and being overly politically correct.^[2] In his book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything,^[3] Christopher Rufo traces the origins of CRT/Wokism, showing how America has been quietly taken over by the ideological heirs of 1960s radical neo-Marxists.^[4] In his ground-breaking research of contemporary Western culture, he discovered a “hideous face of revolution” that is “a rot spreading through American life. The country’s foundations are starting to shake loose”. If this is true, we all need to know about it. 

We now live in an increasingly post-Christian society, easily seduced by false notions of reality. One recent study found that the median number of people in a Christian congregation in America in 2023 is 60. That’s less than half of what it was 20 years ago, when the number was 137. This steep decline has been called the “Great De-churching” of America.^[5] Any respect for or worship of the Creator/Redeemer God is virtually absent. ^[6] People cannot live without morals, since God created an ethical universe. Those who do not want to respect God’s morals are busy normalizing the LGBTQ philosophy, eliminating the nuclear family and living according to the moral norms of neo-Marxist Wokism. Marxism is thoroughly anti-Christian, denying the being of God and seeing matter as ultimate. It worships the creature (matter) rather than the Creator (Rom 1:25). Marx had a close friendship with the radical New Testament scholar, Bruno Bauer, who claimed that the Christian gospels were forgeries. Marx himself believed that it was necessary to “recognize as the highest divinity the human self-consciousness itself,”^[7] thereby dismissing God. Today’s Critical Race Theory is a modern form of atheism that derives from Marxism, as we shall show. CRT believes in the Postmodern “truth,” which does not come from God but is rather an expression of human power. Many, even Christians,^[8] are abandoning their personal faith in the God of Scripture and seeking a new source of morality. Wokism’s false morality plays on the sensitive conscience of young Americans.

White supremacy argues, in Marxist fashion, that society is always divided into oppressors (owners) and the oppressed (workers). In today’s context, whites are the oppressors and minorities are the oppressed (particularly Blacks, women, illegal aliens, and LGBTQ). Biblical morality is seen as oppressive because of its standards of sexual behavior. 

As noted in my previous article, Stanley Ridgley has done an excellent job researching the semi-religious movement of Wokism in his book, Brutal Minds (2023).^[9] His subtitle describes what he has seen: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities. He saw the decided intention of university administrators not only to undermine a student’s ability to engage in classical academic thinking but to give them a serious case of “religious” guilt. I have often wondered why the history of the West and of America in particular are not taught in American universities. Jesse Jackson’s 1987 rallying cry at Stanford University springs to mind: “Hey ho, what d’ya know, Western civ has got to go.” We see now that, indeed, it got up and went!

Wokism is a progressive political program that has infiltrated our American culture in its government administrations, its companies and its educational facilities, where “diversity officers” of DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) will “cancel” anyone who does not follow the new rules. This “hideous system,” to use Rufo’s term, is dangerous because it proposes itself as good, seeking social justice and opposing racism. 

Authors who seek to understand present-day culture find its roots in the Sixties Cultural Revolution. Rufo points out that in the Sixties, some radical intellectuals turned away from the violent actions of racial groups like the Black Panthers and attempted to change the culture ideologically. They abandoned racist violence in the streets in favor of “a long march through the institutions,” that would make cultural revolution an attractive philosophical novelty, to be developed in the universities and bureaucracies. This was the original work of the Frankfurt School of German Jewish Marxists, who, seeking to escape Hitler’s Germany, moved to Columbia University, where they pursued their study of contemporary neo-Marxism. One of them, Herbert Marcuse, moved to the West Coast, and exercised great influence on the radical students of the Sixties. Marcuse and Marxist radical Rudi Dutschke (who invented that phrase— “the long march through the institutions”) worked together as early as 1966. Marcuse wrote to Dutschke in 1971 agreeing with this strategy: “Let me tell you this: that I regard your notion of the ‘long march through the institutions’ as the only effective way.”^[10]

The modern Left is currently fulfilling Marcuse’s prophesy that if Western society could be liberated from capitalist repression, the “oppressive” moral and religious foundations of the West would collapse and the populace would discover true freedom. Rather than proposing a dictatorship of the proletariat (in the old Marxist style), he proposed “a dictatorship of the intellectuals”. This neo-Marxism is the origin of Critical Race Theory.

Herbert Marcuse is also the source of contemporary “cancel culture,” the denial of free speech. Before that term was invented, he defended the notion of “repressive tolerance,” that is, the notion that the free expression of ideas ought to be repressed. Only tolerance for progressive (Marxist) ideas should be allowed—which is classic one-sided expression of Marxism. Liberalism, which respects free speech, has lost its way. It was challenged in the Sixties by “Boomer radicals…. By the eighties it was meaningless, by the ‘noughts’ (2000s) no one believed it, and by twenty-twenties, it’s a marginal belief held by a few college professors at odds with society.”^[11] The Marxist Marcuse decided that the new proletariat should use race rather than class to overturn society”. Thus racism as a revolutionary ideology was born and has moved from the margins to the center. As Rufo shows, they have sought to change the language, the law and the historical discourse. They have succeeded in controlling the institutions and redefining public orthodoxy.

Almost by accident, I came across a little known fact that is crucial for understanding the attacks on white supremacy, white privilege and white anger.^[12] It shows that CRT is a Marxist plot, and the accusation of racism is a classic Marxist idea. Read on!

The origin of white racism was described, not by Rufo, but by an African-American first-hand eye witness, Manning Johnson, in his book Color, Communism and Common Sense (1958). He describes a broad and deliberate attempt by Soviet and American communists in 1934–35 to undermine faith in American institutions through a massive program that would expose America as deeply racist. The goal was to create “a common front against the white oppressors.”^[13] Johnson documents that the plot to use “Negroes as the [expendable] spearhead” to undermine America was created by Stalin in 1928, ten years after the creation of the Comintern (the World Organization of Communism), whose goal was to wipe out Western civilization. This tactic was employed also by “the top white US communist leaders” hypocritically promoting the idea of racial conflict in “a cold- blooded struggle for power” to “advance the cause of Communism” in America.^[14]

The goal was “to make the white man’s system, the white man’s government, responsible for everything.” He noted: “Smear is a cardinal technique,” seeking to “divide America” that can only be called “a propaganda hoax.”^[15] “Black rebellion was what Moscow wanted. Bloody racial conflict would split America. During the confusion, demoralization and panic would set in.”^[16] At the same time, apparently, the anti-racists had little time for black people. According to the recently deceased Walter Williams, Marx dismissed the black race as much closer to the animal kingdom.^[17] Robert Robinson, Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union, observed: “I can say as an expert that one of the greatest myths ever launched by the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus is that Soviet society is free from racism.”^[18]

The New Marxists

It is little wonder that the Marxist Marcuse “suggested a new axis for revolution: ‘racial conflict.’” He believed class conflict and cultural revolution could be produced by such racial conflict. “He saw the black militant movement as a viable means of breaking the Establishment’s stranglehold on language and culture”. He saw the liberal democratic notion of tolerance as an illusion (see above), and proposed a new regime of liberating tolerance” (intolerance against movements of the Right). Free speech and free assembly were “a clear and present danger”. The revolution for justice today is not based on social class and economic values (as in the old Marxism) but on human identity and racial justice. This is the “neo” side of Marxism. Wokists define white identity as soaked in guilt due to its oppression, thus setting an antithesis to black identity, which is deeply oppressed. Neo-Marxism insists that whiteness is a malevolent invisible force that produces cultural sickness.

In 1972, Marcuse argued that the only path to liberation was a socialist regime, the end of which was traditional Marxism. According to Marti Gurri, a former CIA analyst who studies media and politics, “nothing like the woke DEI ideology has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.” Nearly every major American institution—including federal, state, and local governments,^[19] universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies and major retail brands—has accepted the DEI social justice, which pedals a false morality based on hatred and revenge. The driving ideology claims that such an infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper health and function. Most leading companies and the universities have bought into the ideology that claims moral power by rejecting white racism while supporting minority groups such as LGBTQ movements and women’s reproductive rights (abortion). From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy. So have sanitation departments, police departments, the military, and government departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education and energy. Employees can be instantly fired if they dare to challenge the DEI definition of equity. We see the beginning of fascism that joins state, media and business. Last year, a proposal was made to put in place a Disinformation Governance Board that would have the power to “cancel” the speech of ill-informed citizens. The Board failed miserably since the person in charge of judging speech, Nina Jankowicz, came under relentless attack for her partisan and biased opinions. The political attempt to control speech came too early—but, if things continue as they now are, we may see such a board return in the future to “cancel” free speech.

“Everything we have seen in the Soviet Union will inspire us in our own struggle…”, said the radical racist, Angela Davis. She hailed Marcuse as “the intellectual leader of the new Left’s revolution and stated: ‘We cannot combat racism until we have destroyed the whole system’”. What we need is a “total and complete change in the structures of society” —thus tying wokist racism to Marxism.

Political control of behavior and speech (the goal of CRT/Wokism) is a significant stage in the arrival of full-blown cultural Marxism. Though Rufo does not consider religious issues in his book, he states on his substack page that the future of America concerns the rejection of both religion (Christian morals) and of political liberalism (that is, constitutional law): “The problem I see is that abandoning a Christian moral framework and a liberal political framework means abandoning the United States as a whole….[it]would mean that we are in a Weimar scenario, with radical movements across the political spectrum vying for the regime”^[20]. In Germany, the Weimar Republic led to the Hitler regime.

To survive in God’s world, human beings need at least a knowledge of God’s law, so it is the responsibility of Christian believers to make God known both as Creator and Redeemer, to preach the Gospel, yes, but also the law, as the Apostle Paul says so eloquently in 2 Cor. 4:6:

For God (the Creator), who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (the Redeemer).

We may feel extremely discouraged as we see the direction of our country, and we are not promised peace and tranquility. Yet the stunning intricacy of God’s creation still makes thoughtful people sit up and take notice. Those who are ready to acknowledge the Creator may well be drawn to the beauty, power, and love of God the Redeemer, who receives anyone who puts faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

---

^[1] Jones, Peter, Wokism: The New Pagan Morality, (https://truthxchange.com/?s=Wokism).

^[2] Bond, Paul, Newsweek, “Has Hamas Hastened the Demise of ‘Woke’” (Nov 6, 2023).

^[3] Rufo, Christopher, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023).

^[4] My page references in brackets all refer to Rufo’s book.

^[5] Henrickson, Charles, “Christ Will Build His Church” (Sermon for Reformation Day, on Matthew 16:13-20) stmatthewbt.org, October 29, 2023.

^[6] Doyle, Rob, https://unherd.com/2023/08/pagan-gods-rule-the-digital-age/?tl_inbound=1. Rob Doyle is an Irish novelist, short-story writer and essayist. His most recent book is Autobibliography.

^[7] Skousen, W.Cleon, The Naked Communist: Exposing Communism and Restoring Freedom (Izzard Ink, 2017), 40.

^[8] Miles, Lucas, Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity (Humanix Books, 2023) and Robles, A. D., Social Justice Pharisees (MJ Nashville, 2022).

^[9] Ridgley, Stanley, Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities (Humanix Books, 2023), x.

^[10] Marcuse, Herbert, Marxism, Revolution and Utopia: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol 6, (Routledge, 2014), 336.

^[11] https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-university-states-of-america

^[12] See Christopher Collins and Alexander Jun, White Out (Peter Lang, 2017), 72-73.

^[13] Manning Johnson, Color, Communism and Common Sense (Martino Fine Books, 1958), 7, 15.

^[14] Johnson, ibid., 37.

^[15] Johnson, ibid., 44, 52 and 54.

^[16] Hippolito, Joseph, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3887162/posts. BLM, Antifa and the Communist Strategy to Destroy the United States, Frontpagemagazine, Sep 24, 2020.

^[17] https://www.newsherald.com/story/opinion/2020/08/16/many-marxists-dont-realize-their-hero-racist-and-anti-semite/3369024001/

^[18] https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/make-black-history-month-inclusive-lloyd-billingsley/

^[19]https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/02/14/the_sudden_dominance_of_the_diversity_industrial_complex_880202.html

^[20] Rufo, Christopher, substack, (Oct 21, 2023).

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You Can’t Fix Stupid – or Evil | The Stream

Decades ago, when I began my serious study of the Marxist-Leninist historical worldview of scientific socialism, tutored by some of the foremost experts at the time, I recall being somewhat intimidated.

The formative writings of the 1800s were dense and plodding, hardly seeming to be the ideas that would rearrange the human landscape – or tear the world apart by reframing post-World War II realities. Reading Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s works was like eating broken glass: painful and dangerous on the first bite. Far from intimidated by the time I finished, I remember thinking, “This stuff is gibberish.”

Following the convoluted arc of Marxist-Leninist thought through the early 20th century was like trekking along a dry arroyo. Most of the time, it, too, contained lifeless and parched expositions of “scientific socialism” and “dialectical materialism” disconnected from the general revelations of life in the real world.

Then, infrequently, these theories were punctuated with historical thunderstorms and raging waters of terrifying violence and viciousness. Stupidity turned into evil.

What brings this to mind is the meltdown of the corrupt, obsequious national media complex and what remains of the Democrat Party after Donald J. Trump escaped their well-laid plans to either murder or imprison him.

Modern History

No description of the plight of the now completely radicalized Democrats could be more revealing of their true character than the “outrage” over Elon Musk and the violence that has broken out against privately owned Tesla vehicles and dealerships. Wild-eyed, radicalized lunatics attacking the property of someone they don’t even know, as though that might change the course of politics in Washington, also reflects the transformation of stupidity to evil. The fact that the party leaders refuse to denounce it for what it is suggests the rot runs deep.

Of course, the George Floyd riots of the summer of 2020 – an actual insurrection – caused billions of dollars in damage to countless private businesses and government buildings and resulted in the deaths of at least 19 people; meanwhile hundreds of police officers across 68 cities and counties were injured as Antifa, BLM, and other assorted Marxist-communist groups rampaged against innocents. Leftist district attorneys funded by globalist George Soros refused to bring charges against the perpetrators; state-compliant media on the scene dismissed the burning buildings behind them as the result of “mostly peaceful demonstrations,” and Democrats high in the federal government urged their minions to continue doing what they were doing.

How did we get here? And how did the Democrat Party collapse entirely into a radical socialist paradigm of glorifying death and destruction while rejecting human freedom? Look no further than the punctuated history of violence and its infatuation with compulsion and death that attends these ideologies.

European History

In Germany and Italy, especially, communist theorists sprouted like spring gardens after the 1917 Russian Revolution led by Vladimir Lenin, who put meat on the bones of Marx’s arcane theories. The revolution’s monstrous violence spilled over into competing communist groups in the West, and soon enough, they were even killing each other.

A little more than a decade later, the Spanish Civil War became a “cause” for Western intellectuals, as the Communist International Brigades supplied money and fighters from dozens of countries in a civil war that took perhaps half a million lives, including mass executions.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the National Socialist Party of Adolf Hitler was busy killing or locking up communist party activists or driving them out of public life – not so much because their ultimate demonic goals were much different, but because the “will to power” was so strong. There, we find the infamous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, a group aiming to develop a Marxist interdisciplinary social theory for the world. As Hitler’s grip became tighter, many of the Frankfurt scholars fled Germany in fear for their lives – and regrettably, some landed at Columbia University in the US, picking up right where they had left off.

The key principle of developing the “new theory,” or critical theory as it has come to be known, marries Marxist theory to the entire inventory of human social sciences and interactions to establish the intellectual foundation for a “scientific” government and society. In other words, this isn’t just about capitalism: It’s now about total control of the rhythm of life.

Critical Theory in the West

Since the late 1960s and 1970s, Marxist critical theory has been a significant and growing force in the study of law, literature, history, journalism, and the social sciences. It was, and remains, a complex and multifaceted mix of disparate purposes and ideas that divides even the minds of Marxist-Leninists. And, like Marx’s writing, its voluminous written reasoning and rationales, even by some of its most acclaimed luminaries, are ponderous and lumbering — sometimes unintelligible — explanations, descriptions, and prescriptions that amount to words without a destination.

The only connecting tissue in the Marxist worldview is that Christianity and its foundational moral ethos must be destroyed, and the sovereignty of the individual and classical reason must yield to scientific socialism — and its core theory that the institutions of Western culture psychologically oppress everyone. No longer is communism only for the “workers of the world.” Now, everyone is a victim (unless they are white, male, or Christian).

The Fathers of Cultural Marxism

Two crucial voices (among many) from the early twentieth century were instrumental in shaping what we now know as “cultural Marxism” and “critical theory” and the horrendous violence and social destruction loosed on Western civilization. They were heralds to what we are seeing now.

One was Gyorgy Lukacs (also known as Georg), a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, politician, literary historian, and author who championed “cultural terrorism” (some credit him with the phrase).

“I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions,” he would write. He identified Christianity as the “primary obstacle to revolution and the primary oppressor in the master-slave regime.” Also, while serving as an official in the Hungarian government, he introduced the early sexualization of children in schools, which he wrote would “crumble the pillars of society.” (He was forced to leave Hungary and fled to Germany, where he met Felix Weil, who became a wealthy patron helping to found the Frankfurt School.)

The other important link in “new Marxism” was Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist whose abiding contribution was that the “revolution” of communism would never succeed in Western societies as it had in Russia. Instead, the institutions of Western culture – especially religion and education – must be suborned from within (an echo of Lenin’s “vanguard” of revolutionaries within societies), giving the communists a “position of power” (a process that would become known as the long march through the institutions).

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After all these decades, I remain a student. However, my judgment hasn’t changed. Marxism, at its foundation, is anti-intellectual, not intellectual. The old saying “You can’t fix stupid” fits here. Undoubtedly, intelligent and educated men and women conjured up Marxist critical theory and still attend to its upkeep.

But being clever doesn’t mean you aren’t stupid or willfully ignorant. Or evil.

Two critical constants emerge when examining the long view of Marxist theory across its various iterations over the past 150 years, culminating in its current pervasive influence on Western governments, academia, education, and the behavioral sciences. One is that regardless of the packaging, the radical left is at war with God. The other constant is that by rejecting logic, reason, and the universal moral order, the radicals continually leave the door open for evil to prevail over stupidity.

In the meantime, garage your Tesla.

 

Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.

The post You Can’t Fix Stupid – or Evil appeared first on The Stream.

Source: You Can’t Fix Stupid – or Evil