Usage in The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025[edit]

Yesterday an article released by Salon, and carried by Yahoo News, explicitly pointed out that the conspiracy theory "Cultural Marxism" is part of the thinking behind The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 (which is to be expected, considering Paul Weyrich's involvement with both the conspiracy theory, as well as Heritage's foundation).

I'm shopping for opinions on whether this information is pertinent to the article, and whether it might be included.

The Salon paragraphs that contain the phrase "Cultural Marxism" are as follows:

This is evident throughout Mandate for Leadership, the 920-page manifesto published earlier this year by the Heritage Foundation-led 2025 Presidential Transition Project (or Project 2025), which aims to recruit and vet up to 20,000 potential staffers for a future Republican administration after the anticipated purge. Writing in the book’s introduction, project director Paul Dans, who served in Trump’s Office of Personnel Management during his final year, breathlessly proclaims that the “long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass,” giving credence to a notorious conspiracy theory that has long floated around white supremacist circles. With the federal government ostensibly captured by "cultural Marxists” and “globalists,” Dans frantically proclaims that it has been "weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”

Republicans have been harboring fantasies about gutting the federal government since the Reagan era. But what distinguishes today’s right from the past is its greater willingness to employ explicitly authoritarian means to achieve their ends. Indeed, a growing number of conservatives now appear convinced that the next Republican president must be granted something close to dictatorial power if their movement is to stand a chance against the “cultural Marxists” who allegedly control the state.

With the now widespread acceptance among conservatives that the federal government and other major institutions have been captured by "cultural Marxists,” “globalists,” and “wokeists,” Republicans are now pre-programmed to accept more authoritarian leadership. This is especially the case among a younger coterie of Republicans who have come to prominence in the post-Trump era. Unlike some of their older Republican colleagues, these young Trumpians are more open to employing post-Constitutional or “extra-Constitutional” means to achieve their reactionary goals.

Interestingly enough, the Project 2025 policy document ("Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise") only appears to use the phrase cultural Marxism once, on the second page of its general introduction:

It’s not 1980. In 2023, the game has changed. The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. With the quickening approach of January 2025, we have two years and one chance to get it right.

After doing a search on google news, other articles noting the connection can be found from CounterPunch, (1), The Daily Beast. (2), Politico, (3), Truthout, (4), and Washington Monthly, (5). Please feel free to contribute further opinions, sources and discussion below. Some of the questions to consider are, is this worthy of inclusion? What section should the content be in, and what should be said about it given the sources available? Thank you for any opinions you have, or help you can offer. 194.223.39.240 (talk) 09:42, 21 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thank you very much for the sources. I was waiting such sources before mentionning Project 2025 here. Since the mention of Cultural Marxism in its manifesto is only one paragraph and since the media coverture is not yet massive (especially compared ot other endorsements of the Cultural Marxism already mentionned in the wikipedia article), i think that a short mention in the wikipedia article) would suffice, something like one sentence, with all sources of course. Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 20:55, 21 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I'd say leave it out. I suggest the Salon article at least isn't particularly reliable for analyzing whether Heritage is using the term conspiratorially; I don't think Lynch is like an expert in this subject or something, is he? Also it's considered progressive-leaning, so it could be considered biased when it comes to inferring Heritage's intent. In any case, it doesn't seem like a particularly noteworthy example of someone mentioning the term; we have plenty of other more notable examples in the article: WP:UNDUE. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 21:41, 26 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Notability for the antagonistic role of "cultural Marxism" in the "2025 Project" seems to only be increasing with time: Here's a (very recent) article in The Nation. Excerpt:

[...] In his forward, Roberts warns that the “very moral foundations of our society are in peril” from “the totalitarian cult known today as the “The Great Awokening.” This “woke Marxist” cult, Roberts charges, has infiltrated the military, the corporations, the universities, and the bureaucracy. Big Tech is “less a contributor to the US economy than it is a tool of China’s government.” Paul Dans, director of the 2025 project, writes in his introductory note,

The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. [...]

I would argue this, along with the other sources already mentioned here, warrants inclusion. TucanHolmes (talk) 08:43, 9 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
This source doesn't argue that 2025 is using it in a conspiratorial way, though, it is instead complaining more about 2025 being bad policy. "focus is a war on equity" i.e. it's using the term in the sense of "synonymous with the 'Critical Theory'" as our article puts it. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 19:37, 15 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Never said that it argues that, it instead merely documents that the conspiracy theory plays a prominent role in Project 2025. Excerpt:

This “woke Marxist” cult, Roberts charges, has infiltrated the military, the corporations, the universities, and the bureaucracy. [...]

See also the explicit mentioning of Cultural Marxism in the excerpt above. I think that this demonstrates both notability for the conspiracy's role in Project 2025 and gives us a further reliable source to cite, if we include it in the article. TucanHolmes (talk) 12:49, 19 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

2024-01 oppressors versus oppressed[edit]

WP:FORUM
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

You may already know that conspiracytheories are not grounded in reality so most of conspiracytheories have variants/flavors/flavours. During the last 6 month i have read in reddit many mentions of the «oppressors versus oppressed» variant of the Cultural Marxism narrative. It claim that Marxism is not about analyzing the 19th century economy and concluding that part of the workers work is stolen by factory owners (la plus value), but that Marxism is about viewing society as a fight between oppressors and oppressed persons, so «Cultural Marxism» is just an extension of this framework to other dichotomies such men-women, black-whites, heterosexual-homosexual. I was almost worried that this variant is very little mentioned in Wikipedia, in the wikipedia article about the Cultural Marxism narrative.

How fool i was!!!!

Today a conspiracytheoric (an adjective i coined this month) reddit user kindly opened my eyes by linking Oppressors–oppressed distinction, which at first look

  • was created in 2011
  • endorse the aforementioned variant the Cultural Marxism narrative, a far-right conspiracytheory with roots in nazi Germany
  • transgress Wikipedia:No original research

If the last 2 points are correct, then maybe maybe the page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppressors%E2%80%93oppressed_distinction should become a redirect to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory

By the ways, among the wikipedia articles linking Oppressors–oppressed distinction is Woke, which include a paragraph about the aforementioned variant (the woke narrative and the Cultural Marxism narrative are similar and related):

French philosopher Pierre-Henri Tavoillot characterizes "wokeism" as a corpus of theories revolving around "identity, gender and race", with the core principle of "revealing and condemning concealed forms of domination", positing that all aspects of society can be reduced to a "dynamic of oppressor and oppressed", with those oblivious to this notion deemed "complicit", while the "awakened (woke)" advocate for the "abolition (cancel) of anything perceived to sustain such oppression", resulting in practical implementations such as adopting inclusive language, reconfiguring education or deconstructing gender norms.

Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 20:55, 21 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I don't really follow most of what you're saying. I'd suggest that page is an unsourced neologism, or, perhaps an essay, and should be deleted. Certainly not redirected here? that would be strange. Why would we even need this redirect? (FWIW of course a lot of people talk about oppressors systematically oppressing the oppressed, the idea that people make this distinction is of course not a conspiracy.) ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 21:30, 26 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Looks like there's a deletion discussion going on for that page right now. 194.223.27.216 (talk) 03:47, 2 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Indeed. Thanks to @RecardedByzantian:. Thank you too for your comprehensive commennt in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Oppressors–oppressed distinction. Also please take a look at Wikipedia:Why create an account?. Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 10:32, 2 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I don't see the contradiction. Marx said, "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." He primarily wrote about the struggel between captialist and worker. Conspiracy theorists claim that cultural Marxists view the class struggle today as between white heterosexual Christian middle class men and everyone else. TFD (talk) 04:59, 2 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
«I don't see the contradiction.» => Maybe because i did not go into details.
First, this variant, like most of variants of the Cultural Marxism narrative, implicitly claim that the goal of Karl Marx and his followers was and is not to improve the life conditions of workers, but to take over the industrialised countries and become the new rulers.
Second, this variant claim that the Marxists and the Cultural Marxists view the «oppressors versus oppressed» as a manichaean dichotomy where capitalist owners are always evildoer while workers are always welldoer. Class traitors do not exist. In the current era, men and whites and heterosexuals are always evildoer while women and black and homosexuals are always welldoer, which has the consequences that
  • Taylor Swift is always evildoer because she is white and always welldoer because she is a woman
  • antisemite Kanye West is always evildoer because he is a man and always welldoer because he is black
And you do not need to be an expert in Intersectionality (an other bogeyman of the far-right which is ironically summoned by some proponents of this variant of the Cultural Marxism narrative as evidence) to see that this does not stand, that this ridiculously does not stand.
Third, not everything in a conspiracytheory is false/wrong/incorrect/misleading. For example, somedy claiming that US president John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963 by the CIA
  • is correct that John F. Kennedy was US president in (most of) 1963
  • is correct that John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963
Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 10:50, 2 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

“Antisemitic”[edit]

not doing this again, increasingly off topic Dronebogus (talk) 06:08, 16 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

This has to be removed from the lead, as clearly one can have a non antisemitic version of this conspiracy theory. For example, the president of Argentina talks about cultural Marxism all the time, and he’s about to convert to Judaism and loves all things Jewish and Israel. 82.36.70.45 (talk) 19:15, 15 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Inb4 someone argues that Jewish people can be antisemitic too.
I don't think there's really a non-anti-semitic conspiracy theory about "cultural marxism". The conspiracy theory is basically International Jewish conspiracy or similar, I think. The term is, as our article says, often used just to refer to "critical theory" or adjacent activism, Milei might be using it that way. However, I think Milei is actually talking more about Marxism per se? (I don't know, I haven't read a lot of his work.) ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 19:44, 15 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
The conspiracy theory under the title Cultural Marxism (the claim that The Frankfurt School plotted to destroy Western Tradition by infiltrating Woke politics into society) was debuted by it's creator William S. Lind at a Holocaust Denial Conference in 2002 (put on by his friend Willis Carto for the Holocaust Denial magazine, The Barnes Review... Lind was paid to attend. His employer at the time, Paul Weyrich of The Free Congress Foundation (a conservative think tank) later went on to make a documentary on the topic that featured an actual Nazi collaborator and convicted war criminal Laszlo Pazstor (External link to a screen shot of the "documentary").
Here are some examples of the theory being used in antisemitic media (warning some links are to antisemitic websites and authors): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
You can also find many antisemitic memes about it on it's know your meme page. This is in part because it spread from the Holocaust Denial community, onto StormFront, then to neo-nazi 4chan threads, to the alt-right (who made most of those memes)... and then into usage among Trump fans and conservative media (which Milei panders to).
On top of all this, there's all the news media and academic content describing it as an antisemitic conspiracy theory. It's also been a part of a myriad of political scandals which describe it as an antisemitic conspiracy theory (see the content about Suella Braverman's, and Ron Paul's scandals). In short, there's far far far more evidence that it is antisemitic, than that it isn't. 220.253.21.21 (talk) 03:28, 16 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Converting to Judaism means taking "keep the Sabbath" literally, and I don't think that a president of a large country can actually do that. That would mean he is president only six days per week. No lamp, no telephone, no radio, no TV, no internet, no travel by car on Sabbaths. tgeorgescu (talk) 05:40, 16 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
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