QAA Podcast - The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy feat. A.J.A. Woods (E378)

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Travis and Annie are joined by intellectual historian A.J.A. Woods to discuss their new book The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. Woods traces how a group of German critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School were transformed in the right-wing imagination into the secret architects of everything reactionaries hate about modern life, including feminism, multiculturalism, LGBTQ rights, “political correctness,” Critical Race Theory, and “wokeness.” A.J. documents how paranoia about the Frankfurt School travelled from Lyndon LaRouche’s conspiracist ecosystem, through the Free Congress Foundation and the 1990s panic over political correctness, into the Tea Party, Gamergate, anti-woke politics, and contemporary right-wing movements in the US, UK, and Brazil. The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West https://www.versobooks.com/products/3239-the-cultural-marxism-conspiracy A.J.A. Woods https://x.com/adubwoods A*CR Brighton https://www.instagram.com/ACRBrighton/ Cursed Media: https://www.instagram.com/cursedmediadotnet/ https://www.cursedmedia.net/ Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/qaa Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm ). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com ) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

If you're hearing this, well done, you've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 378, the cultural Marxism conspiracy featuring AJA Woods. As always, we're your host, Travis View. And Danny Kelly. Father's Day was this past weekend, and that's why on Friday I traveled down to the city of Oceanside, California, to spend some time with my in-laws. When I was walking and driving around there, I was struck by how much it had changed since I was a teenager. It used to be this working class and military town that was the cheapest place in San Diego County to have a beach day.

Now there's a lot more upscale housing, fine dining restaurants, museums, and galleries, and maybe it's for the best. I really don't know enough to say, but that's not the point. The point is that it made me a little uncomfortable that my understanding of the city acquired from decades ago doesn't match what I was seeing in 2026. Now, I assume there are some complex, economic, and policy reasons for the changes. and, of course, things always change and remembering how things were different it's just a byproduct of living long enough. But during his time, I was also reading and thinking

about the new book, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, why the Wright blames the Frankfurt School for the decline of the West by AJA Woods. And that led me to consider another possibility. Perhaps the changes to the city were not caused by a combination of the priorities of the local residents and capitalist incentives. Perhaps Oceanside had changed

as part of a decades-long plot dreamed up by people who hated that I was once able to fill up on fish tacos for pocket change, easily find a free parking spot, and spend half a day catching small waves with a washed up boogie board. And so, corrupt city administrators, motivated by this poisonous ideology, made at their life's mission to change the area in ways to irritate me specifically. Consequently, if we want to return Oceanside to its past glory, meaning, of course, as a place where I'm younger and have fewer responsibilities, it's just

a matter of identifying this ideology and rooting it out. Now, maybe that won't work, but that is roughly how generations of some people on the right responded to cultural and political changes that they didn't like. As the cultural Marxism conspiracy explains, conservatives and far-right activists have placed a lot of blame on the Frankfurt School, which was founded by a group of mostly German-Jewish intellectuals who studied capitalism, culture, authoritarianism, and modernity, especially after the rise of fascism. The Frankfurt School served as a scapegoat for the cultural changes associated with the long 1960s. Feminism, anti-racist. LGBTQ visibility, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and student protest.

More recently, the specter of cultural Marxism has driven anxiety around what conservative media calls political correctness, wokeness, and gender ideology. Today, I am joined by Woods to discuss the genealogy of cultural Marxism and why is still such a popular and pervasive kind of concept today. AJ, thank you so much for joining us. Indeed, thank you very much for having me on. This is another instance of a sort of long-time listener, first-time caller. So I'm very glad that you've invited me to talk.

Yeah, I mean, like I was telling you before we're recording, it's like it's my favorite kind of book that explains where these ideas come from. Because like whenever there's an idea that sort of simultaneously pervasive and like popular and odd, I was like, I always want to know who came up with it. This didn't come out of the ether. And this certainly helps demystify the whole concept of. of cultural Marxism that's so embedded in a lot of right-wing ideology. What I specify in the book is that our idea of cultural Marxism that we're familiar with

the day comes from a whole bunch of places. I mean, the book itself is almost a kind of patchwork history of bringing together all of those different patches that we kind of know in our minds as the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. It comes a bit from sectarian battles in the American New Left in the 1960s. it comes through different ideas of what the American conservative movement should do in the 1980s and 1990s in the aftermath of Reaganism and the end of the Cold War. And it also, I mean, it also has to do with kind of the lingering presence of anti-Semitism in the far right in the United States

and how it kind of adapted itself to the age of the internet in the sort of late 90s, nearly 2000s. Yeah, when you first got in touch with me to tell me about the book, my first thought was that I was so glad that somebody was writing about the Frank Frankfurt School, but not the real Frankfurt School, if you know what I mean, but the Frankfurt School, as it exists in the imagination of the reactionary mind. Because I think that actually might have been where I first was introduced to it. I think I came across the Frankfurt School as a kind of reactionary online enemy before I actually read any Frankfurt School theorists. In fact, for a while, I think during, oh gosh, this is really dating me. I think during like Gamergate and all stuff like that,

And I think I even had in my bio, Frankfort School, janitor, which I don't think I even, yeah, I think maybe I'd read some Gramshy at that point, but I really hadn't much familiarity. But mainly just because I was fascinated with the way that it became such a trope in that, I guess, proto-alt-right sphere, that this, yeah, this school of theorists were responsible for why ladies in their video games weren't sexy anymore, essentially. Yeah, I mean, thinking back to game again, the first time I ever encountered any of these narratives around the Frankfurt School was immediately after Trump's 2016 election. And I was doing a bit of research on brightbought.com to figure out how they were portraying the left. And I would often scroll through the comments at the bottom of the articles.

And I kept seeing again and again this sort of pseudo document, as I would later find out, called the 11 Ames of the Frankfurt School. And it would attribute these proposals to Adorno and Hawkeheimer and Walter Benjamin of, you know, trying to encourage people to drink more or and not go to church or to sort of dumb down the media. And in some cases, when you're looking at the agenda that the right imputes to the Frankfurt School, it's almost the kind of opposite of what they wanted and almost rhymes in weird ways with their own critique about, you know, mass culture in a capitalist society and how it affects the way we think and affects the possibilities for, like, fulfilling lives. Yeah, these guys would have hated being held responsible for, like, popular Hollywood movies, do you know?

And they would have hated that idea that they were the ones behind it. Sometimes, like, they're a very strange, important component of a lot of conspiracist narratives is the idea of sort of a hyper-competent and a hyper-powerful villain. And I always thought it was kind of like a strange idea that they would focus in on a group of, like, intellectuals, yeah, that formed like the 20s and the 30s at a university. Like so much with American conservatism, it all goes back to the 60s, or at least the backlash to the 60s, and particularly with the figure of Herbe Marcousa. So Markusa was probably the most prominent Frankfurt school member in the United States

context. There was certainly a lot of reporting at the time after his book, One Dimensional Man, sold a lot of copies that he was this kind of guru or father of the new left or the American student movement at the time, who were protesting against the Vietnam War, criticizing the kind of the alienating nature of American consumer society at the time. And it aligned quite nicely with right-wing critiques of the student movement of saying, oh, these students aren't actually complaining about anything that's a real problem. They're being manipulated by some sort of master controller or some figure with sort of a large

nefarious goal. I think that that sort of specter of Marcusa ends up persisting through the decades when, you know, once people realize that he's part of a larger set of German intellectuals, that's when it sort of grows into this kind of Frankfurt school conspiracy that we're more used to now, largely through the act of kind of cherry-picking quotes and sometimes doing retrospective readings of their works to try and interpret elements of political correctness into their work. Because, I mean, admittedly, there's a lot in the Frankfurt School's theoretical approach that jails white quite well with progressive movements. And for sort of right-wing intellectuals, right-wing commentators, it's easy to say, oh, these movements wouldn't have existed without the work of the Frankfurt School. But really, when you look at the history properly, it's people who are already mobilizing.

or active in these movements, turn to the Frankfurt School to inform them, but not to necessarily inspire them or just sort of like to kind of be brainwashed by them, I would say. And discussing the sort of like how this, this concept of cultural Marxism became like such, I guess, a boogeyman and a sort of a way to explain all the, all the changes that the right doesn't like.

You really identify the LaRouche movement as key. There's a lot to explain, but it was a started as that kind of a Marxist left wing movement, itself, but shifted very hard to the right and very paranoid and conspiratorial and sort of offering a lot of all-encompassing ideology to college students. So explain how this idea really, I guess, like built up momentum in the LaRouche movement. Yeah, and it's really difficult to kind of summarize the history of the LaRouche movement because they kind of change from decades to decades. But the decades that I'm most interested in are from the late 60s to the early 90s. And as you

said, Travis, they did start off as a Marxist-Leninist sect in the American student movement, largely around New York. They got into a number of sort of factional struggles with other groups at the time, largely because they felt that they had the best agenda for creating a revolution in the United States. So, LaRouche himself around that time was, you know, in his 50s and became this kind of guru figure for a number of student militants in the area. He would give these very long and apparently quite fascinating lectures about revolutionary theory and history and you know, the role of psychology and politics and all these different things. It eventually did sort of gather together quite a tight gang of student radicals who were ready

to do essentially what ever he asked them to. And they sort of went on a campaign of trying to establish total hegemony on the American left. I mean, there was a period that's known as Operation Mopup where they would go to the meetings of other levels. left-wing groups and beat people up with numchucks and baseball bats. This was also around the time when Lerush developed sort of paranoid fantasies that the CIA and MI5 were sort of planning to assassinate him and brainwash some of his own followers to kill him and take over his own organization because he had this sort of grand-geo's conception of himself as the only person who had, like the vision for transforming the world for sort of overting

humanity from a global catastrophe and the incoming imposition of a sort of fascistic genocide of the whole human race. And as part of this kind of factional warfare of other groups, him and his followers were quite suspicious of other student radicals who had been influenced or sort of in conversation with Herbert Marcusa. Herbert Marcusa during the 60s

wrote quite a bit about how in American society the working class or the industrial proletariat was not in a position to perform its revolutionary role to transform society into a socialist state and that movements like the student movement or the black power movement or the

movement for women's liberation, represented kind of disintegrating forces of kind of the late capitalist administered society. And for LaRouche, the Lerushite saw this as a challenge their own position as kind of Leninist intellectuals who were able to sort of guide the working class to their new utopia. So they drew on a series of articles that had been put out not only by the Soviet newspaper Pravda, but also by another sort of Maoist group in the United States called the Progressive Labor Party, talking about how Marcoza had intelligent. links from his time when he was working in the State Department to combat the Nazis during

World War II and also perform intelligence work on the opportunities for denatification after Germany had been defeated. And they usually to suggest that Marcuse was still part of the CIA network and his role was to divert student radicals away from their actual revolutionary goals, which in the LaRouche-Rouche would be just to sort of follow LaRouche and pushing them towards helping to install fascism in the United States. And so over the following decades, they would then sort of take this idea and build on this idea as they shifted further to the right in the 1970s and 1980s, forming links with people in the Reagan administration, more sort of radical right groups like the neo-Nazi Liberty Lobby, to the point

in the sort of 1980s and 1990s where they would be arguing that the Frankfurt School had been, like, it was a intelligence operation set up by the Soviet Union to destroy Western civilization and bring political correctness in the United States to sort of drive Americans away from their Judeo-Christian values. It's such an interesting part of the book because I talked in my PhD thesis, which was about digital anti-feminist subcultures. I talked a little bit about the kind of recurrence at the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism, but basically every history up until them that I had read sort of starts at all with William Lind and the paleo-conservative. So I know you go into later and we'll cover them. But I think this was my first time reading about

the kind of origins of a conspiratorial view of the Frankfurt School as originating on the left. And I know, yeah, I know the Lerushites are actually pretty hard to plot politically because, as you say, they move. But they sort of start off with a critique, which is essentially, I guess, a leftist sounding one, which is that the Frankfurt School are not revolutionary enough, that they're actually counter-revolutionary. And it's so interesting how that changes over the decades to being like, no, they are actually completely subversed. and want to destroy Western civilization, even from the same, yeah, the same figurehead, the same organisation. Yeah, certainly.

I mean, although the trajectory from left to right is so striking in the LaRouche movement, what is also very striking is the consistency in, like, how their ideology operates. I mean, in the book, I say that what is always central to the LaRouche movement is a notion of elitism, even when they're sort of starting to talk about themselves as kind of platonists or as, in a classical sense, Republicans rather than Leninists, they still see themselves. as an elite that has a kind of plan to save humanity. And the Frankfurt School continues to be sort of portrayed as the kind of evil counter-elite, even if the sort of surface details of that change.

I mean, in the 1960s, it's because they're seen as sort of counter-revolutionary or as fascist. But in the 80s and 90s, it's because they're perceived as, you know, Soviet subversives. And also in a peculiar way that would take a long time to explain because of the weirdness of the LaRushite worldview, Aristotelians. But, yeah, I mean, in the 80s, the Lerushite saw all of world history as a contest between, you know, two secret factions of the Platonists and the Aristotelians. And that was their, you know, their framework for understanding all world events. Yeah, I was really interested in the role of Lind because he was, he was someone that seems to be in the sort of the narrative or the genealogy of your book of someone who acts as a bridge from sort of these fringe Lerushite figures into a little bit more mainstream conservatism. because Lind, he was associated with major conservative think tanks, and he was a war theorist.

And so he was published and written in respectable places. And so he was taken seriously. And he also took this idea of cultural Marxism and gave it a name and sort of held it up as a great ideological enemy. Yeah, you can quite easily contrast the Luritz and Lind based on how they present their work. The Ruchites were almost kind of like intellectual snobs who sort of wrote these very long, esoteric articles because they felt that they were sort of world historical geniuses. Whereas Lind is kind of more of a sort of cultural war mercenary. He's interested in like getting messages out there that's going to be very effective. It's going to shift public opinion and sort of win policy battles. In the book, I characterize Lind as a type that I call the new right think tank intellectual. that is the sort of political fighter that kind of grows out of the sort of modern conservative movement

in the 70s and 80s who are very opportunistic, sort of very media savvy, very, very intelligent in their own right, but sort of much more pragmatic about the way that they tell narratives, the way that they tell stories. And so, yeah, I mean, what you get with Lind is the kind of classic rhetorical setup of the cultural Marxism idea that we have today. I mean, the refrain that we're quite familiar with of, you know, the Frankfurt School shift. Marxism from economic to cultural terms, that is Lind. The kind of association of Gramsci and Lukash to the Frankfurt School, which doesn't necessarily make sense historically, that comes from Lind.

So a lot of the weird kind of rhetorically effective, but sort of factually inaccurate notions of the Frankfurt School that we live with today do come from this particular sort of new right think tanker. And it's partially because he was just really great at his job and knew how to sort of develop a story that could be sort of, more effective in the sort of American political landscape. It was interesting because, as you mentioned, he was someone who discussed what they call like fourth dimension warfare, an idea of like a warfare as a total cultural, like, you know,

environmental kind of like practice rather than something that's just fought with munitions and like, you know, I guess like conventional armies. But I mean, did he like apply this kind of like thinking to like his conception of cultural, cultural Marxism, where cultural Marxism was like a weapon of war that ought to be fought with similar ideological and media weapons. Yeah, it was peculiar when I was looking through Lynn's biography and saying in the 1980s that he shifts from sort of being a military theorist and also like someone who lobbies on Capitol Hill about, you know, defense spending, changing almost quite dramatically to being a person who

writes predominantly about culture. But when you sort of look into it a lot more, like for him there's a, there's a continuum there, because with fourth-generational warfare, he sees it as warfare no longer being the exclusive domain of the state to the point where it's a return to what he sees as war, what it was like before the sort of Treaty of Westphalia, to return to all warfare being wars between cultures. He's seeing this in particular in the 90s as a way to sort of explain Al-Qaeda Eda, and they explained the growth of sort of Islamist terrorist cells, as well as the Patriot movement in the United States of kind of a, what he would see as a sort of homegrown, sort of

libertarian reaction to the overextension of federal power in the United States. And for him, so cultural Marxism, or in his military writings in the 1990s, who would describe it as social and cultural Marxism or multiculturalism, he saw that as like the ruling ideology of, of the American state of the federal government, and that it was kind of an expression of sort of a desire for elite control of ways of speaking, ways of living. You know, this is the whole sort of political correctness complaint of, you know, they're controlling how you can speak. And so they're not letting us live, you know, our traditional lifestyles and, you know, where women are wives and, you know, sort of homemakers. And they're sort of imposing the sort of cultural Marxist ideology on it. And so for him, fourth generation of warfare, particularly coming from the right, is a way to liberate the sort of American people or, you know, when he's writing about Europe as well as that, you know, the people of the West from a kind of totalitarian cultural Marxism, cultural Marxism, cultural Marxist ideology of the state.

There's a really funny bit in your book where I had no idea that William Linden, I obviously knew about William Linden, coining kind of cultural Marxism and sort of popularizing it on the paleo-conservative right. but I had no idea that he wrote a novel and a novel called Victoria, a novel of Fourth Generation War. And the fact that this novel basically is a speculative fiction in which William Lind is proven right about everything.

And like not even in a subtle way. It's literally like the characters are like going to his website and like using him as a, as an authoritative source to understand the events that are unfolding around them. And I just found that so funny because it's not even the first time I've heard of a right wing think tank guy doing this, just going ahead and just like writing a, writing a little story

in which they are proven right about the world. And I don't know, I just find it so illustrative of how this, how this faction sees art, do you know, and how they kind of see culture just in general as this kind of like, just like purely political battleground. Yeah, did you, did you read the book? Yeah, I read it three times. Oh my God. Thank you for your service. Indeed. No, thank you. Yeah. It's also so fun because one of the main characters is so clearly modelled after him. Of course. It's a character that never does anything wrong, who is like totally badass all of the time.

And so that is quite amusing. But I mean, it's because they also see culture is quite didactic. Like culture is a way to model right ways of living, you know, that there are morals. And, you know, I mean, Victoria itself is almost a kind of instructional manual to become a fourth generational warfare told through a very thin veneer of fiction. He does refer to her very specifically, but it's almost exactly like reading an Anne Rand novel, because I mean, all the characters are very flat and they're largely there to work as mouthpieces for either Rand's own sort of philosophical work or what the kind of views that she attributes to her opponents. It's not necessarily a kind of a naturalistic approach to literary fiction. I mean, it is sort of very didactic.

You also talk about how these ideas got a lot more traction in some. sort of, I guess, widespread awareness through the Tea Party movement. This was a, you know, it was the sort of conservative populist movement that happened to coincided with Obama's administration starting around 2009 or so. But you have an interesting perspective because you seem to describe the Tea Party as a, as a kind of a real media-driven movement. As you discuss a lot of like documentaries in their blogs and Fox News and Breitbart, which is also central to momentarily. So like, why do you? Why do you? did cultural Marxism flourish in this, in this Tea Party media ecosystem? A lot of the kind of tea parties gripes revolved around the idea of a kind of conflict with

mainstream media, I suppose you'd say, particularly in the sense that they felt like CNN and the New York Times weren't kind of representing them in a truthful or impartial manner. There's plenty of work on this of how, you know, actually the New York Times and CNN were actually quite sympathetic in its reporting of the Tea Party. So the Tea Party's sense of it was not like accurate, but it felt quite true to them. They felt like they were in this sort of classic rhetorical term, like the forgotten majority,

or at least kind of like a maligned majority, and they weren't able to sort of express their views or advocate for their own interests because of a kind of pervasive political correctness. And of course, when you then you then look through what they're writing and, you know, what they're making documentaries about, then there's no surprise that they are receiving charges of being called, you know, sort of sexist or racist.

I mean, especially when you sort of look at the Tea Party rallies and their depictions of Barack Obama. I mean, it's quite blatant and explicit there. But the cultural Marxism narrative worked for them because in some ways it is a story of the media. It's a story that, you know, the Frankfurt School came here. You know, these German guys, Adorno and Hawkeme started to write all of the stuff about the culture industry.

And, you know, instead of, like, in the real world, you know, them actually critiquing the culture industry. Adorno and Hawkeheimer actually want to create a culture industry, a industry that sort of controls and people's minds and determines what they think and helps to create the fertile ground for a sort of socialist authoritarian state.

And so when you're looking at like films like a gender grinding America down or cultural Marxism, the corruption of America, the two films that I look at at the book, it's a story about how the Frankfurt School sort of took over American media to corrupt the

to corrupt the people. And in particular, it's almost sort of focused on an idea that there are subliminal messages in movies or mainstream news that are sort of there to seep into people's consciousness, almost in a way that it's kind of undetectable. But thanks to, you know, the activists who work so hard in the Tea Party movement, they are able to uncover this. Yeah, I just had a question, because I think one thing that I've always been struck by reading William Lenn, and kind of people who have been inspired by Williamland is their focus on the Frankfurt School and Hollywood being connected somehow.

I remember reading a Williamland essay where he said many of their key people move to Hollywood and being like, what? I don't think that's true. And I guess this is a good opportunity for us to bring this up because I'm not actually sure if we've even discussed it so far, the fact that cultural Marxism has a kind of anti-Semitic double meaning as well. Do you know that not necessarily everybody using it means Jews,

but some people using it do mean Jews. And I guess, yeah, I was kind of curious to get your take on this, whether William Lind is saying that because he kind of just means, well, there's lots of Jewish people in Hollywood, so they're probably, you know, so they probably have a similar worldview. Or if there is any actual connection there at all. Yeah, I always found it confusing, I guess.

Yeah, there is a degree of truth to it because, you know, people like Adorno and the Holkheimer did move to L.A. during exile. I think they also hung out with Charlie Chaplin at parties, I think, that Adorno would play the piano for Charlie Chaplin. Right. I think also Adorno, sort of while he was there, co-wrote a book about film music that no one ever reads, but does exist. I mean, there are these sorts of grains of truth,

but I mean, I think that you are right, that especially in the sort of circles that Lind moves around in and certainly some of the people who sort of promote the idea of cultural Marxism in the Tea Party, there is that anti-Semitic component to it, where the Frankfurt School is sort of genetically predisposed to produce or, like, inspire cultural artefacts that are designed to sort of corrupt the pure white European. I mean, you see it very particularly in the film,

sort of cultural Marxism and the Corruption of America by James Yeager. I mean, because he's very explicitly believes that, like, all of Hollywood is controlled by Jewish people that they are producing, sort of propaganda to kind of, corrupt ordinary Americans and also, you know, give woman the wrong ideas about, you know, their capacities for independence and, you know, freedom, all that sort of stuff. And so, I mean, it lines very well with all of those sort of very typical anti-Semitic tropes, but also, I mean, with like, the kind of the classic wish of sort of American conservatives,

sort of wishing that they could sort of be in charge of all media output. I mean, you are sort of seeing that in the United States at the moment with, you know, things like sort of Barry Weiss taking over, you know, the editorial roles and, you know, Trump wanting to be in charge of the Kennedy Center and put cats on forever because that's his favorite musical, which is the cutest fact about Trump. This is why, you know, especially of the last few decades, there has been a kind of moments of convergence between portions of the American conservative movement and the sort of more anti-Semitic far right, because in both cases it is a narrative of, you know, these others have taken, you know, the cultural institutions that should be ours away from us. us and we need to retake them, you know, sort of forcibly, either in some instances of, you know, resorting to actual violence about it when you're sort of looking at the cases of mass shooters or going through the legislative level. Yeah, I mean, there's something quite fundamental to the

narrative that struck me when I was reading this book about how it's also an anti-refugee narrative as well, one in which these people come claiming asylum, but they actually, you know, bring with them these like polluted ideology. Do you know these subversive ideas which were which they kind of like take advantage of the freedoms and liberties of their of their host country and then kind of use it against itself? And I guess reading this, I was like, oh, this feels a lot like how people will often talk about Muslim immigrants as well today. You know, there's a kind of parallel there. And this so-called ideologies are different between cultural Marxism and I don't know what they call Islamo-Leftism and things like that. But they rhyme, right?

I kind of wondered if you could see that as being, you know, as someone who's traced the genealogy of this, of this ideology, if you could see that as being a further permutation to come maybe or a next step. Yeah, and I'm always alert to how the notion of cultural Marxism gets taken up at particular inflection points. And the one that I've noticed most recently is immediately after the Henry Novak murder in the UK. So for those who don't know, Henry Novak was a guy in Southampton who were stabbed. And when he sort of told police officers who turned up to the scene that he had been stabbed, the police officers didn't believe him and didn't realize this until a few minutes after. And the reason this is becoming like a big, big story in the UK is that the person who stabbed Henry Novak was a Sikh man. And that they had initially reported to the police that Henry Novak had racially abused him.

The killer has now sort of been tried and I think sentenced as well, but the British right has basically exploited this case to sort of to bang on about what they call sort of two-tier policing, which is the idea that racial minorities are policed in a much more softly, softly fashion than white British people, which is completely untrue, but they like to use cases like this to demonstrate that as of white Britons are persecuted by the police forces and that they have sort of been taken over by the ideology of cultural Marxism and that it has sort of meant that they have been sort of pushed away from their so-called

sort of neutral mission of the sort of maintaining law and order while also ignoring that, you know, the police until quite recent, I mean, the police even now has sort of been declared to be for many years an institutionally sort of racist and sexist institution. And you could very much say that the same about the sort of UK migration system. But it is, to build on your point, Annie, another instance of how cultural Marxism is used to sort of fuel anti-refugee or anti-migrant sentiment by saying

you know, cultural Marxism is not just sort of the ideas that sort of foreign people have brought over here, but it's now kind of infected the system to prevent it from working quote unquote properly to actually sort of help us see sort of migrants or refugees as a threat. And underpinning all of this is the idea that there was once kind of a healthy system

that was entirely neutral. when that simply wasn't the case. I mean, if you look through not only the sort of British history, but American history in the way that kind of police, but also other kind of structures of state power and control have sort of helped to sort of further sort of instantiate sort of racism and sexism and sort of Islamophobia and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah, it's simply not the case that, you know, everything was fine and then, you know, some Frankfurt school ideas got into the immune system of the nation and fucked everything up. Yeah, I really want, I'm curious about the role of, Andrew Breitbart in his Brightbart publication because one of his big ideas that he talks a lot about is that politics is downstream from culture, which is, you know, it sounds, it sounds like a simplistic kind of inversion of like the sort of the kind of the kind of the Frankfurt school ideas about the interplay

between media and culture and power. So I'm curious. I mean, did he was this was this a was this like kind of deliberate kind of like hijacking of that concept and then and then sort of rallying call? What exactly was the function of that kind of idea? Yeah, I mean, in the book, I sort of suggests that Breitbart got his famous dictum from Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, because in a 1999 book that Rush Limbaugh wrote, he's writing about sort of how Clinton was able to win the presidency. And he starts sort of talking a lot about Gramsci and sort of saying how, you know, Clinton won because the Democrats and the left were all in charge of the couple of. institutions and what the right needs to do is to realize that we need to take the culture first

and then politics will follow. And so it seems to me that Breitbart's famous line is actually a limbarism. It is also kind of a sort of self-justificatory motto because Andrew Breitbart is sort of not a politician. He's a kind of media activist and he has the sense that, you know, what we need to do at this moment in the 2000s when, you know, certain social media platforms are picking up, There's the rise of things like YouTube and WordPress. There's no longer the traditional media gatekeepers are no longer able to maintain the role that they once did. The potential for political transformation is no longer

in the sort of more typical electoral process. It can actually be in this more kind of participatory media landscape. And so I do see that that's what sort of Breitbart is trying to suggest to his comrades on the American right, more so than, I guess, him saying, you know, what we need to do is we need to write more novels, we need to write more films, we need to do some ballets. It is more like get a digital recorder, get a, get a BlackBerry, start a blog, you know, do a YouTube

program, all of that sort of stuff, of actually take advantage of this sort of burgeoning infrastructure of more kind of participatory and easy to access media to sort of shift people's minds. I think we see the kind of the outcome of that now, where even people who are hired by right-wing think tanks now have to act online like they are like an influencer. They have to have a sort of certain kind of profile on Twitter or, you know, do the podcast circuit rather than sort of perform the kind of the kind of roles that they used to do. Yeah, I think most relevant to a podcast that talks about online reactionary movements, uh, you also discuss the role of Gamergate. Uh-huh. And, uh, well, first of all, it's like, they feel like there's a, there's a lot of, like,

there's a lineage going on here. It was like, what, what exactly was the, uh, the connection between Bright Bart and their philosophy and Gamergate. Yeah, my editor almost recommended that I didn't include this in the book because in the way it's kind of so hard to, the way of tracing one to the other is almost so windy windy. And it has a lot to do with an event that's now become almost like a point of obsession for a lot of people on the online right. And that is certain changes to the Wikipedia page on cultural Marxism.

So you'll often see on Twitter, that an image circulating of, you know, what a screen grab of the Cultural Marxism Wikipedia page from 2014 and what it looks like now, and people saying, ah, it used to just be sort of a page on cultural Marxism, but now it's a page on the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. This is an example of how the left took over Wikipedia. And with Game of Gate in 2014, what happened was Wikipedia editors decided to delete the cultural Marxism page because it was splitting in two different directions.

because originally the page was about the use of the term cultural Marxism as a scholarly idea. There have been a number of books that have used to use the term cultural Marxism in a relatively neutral way. But there was also that second use that was now becoming much more popular by in the mid-2010s that has this sort of right-wing anti-Semitic reactionary history. And the editor said, you know, the content's splitting in two ways. We can't have one page about this. We'll put some content here, some content there. But people on the Gamergate Reddit page are Kutaku in action, I think, was the name of it,

said, you know, this is just a plot to distract from or from the fact that Anita Sarkisian is like a feminist blogger who will sometimes talk about the Frankfurt School in her work. And so what they did was pester Jimmy Wales to reopen this page and stage a whole debate about it. And they tried to sway the debate about, you know, keeping it open and introducing all of these sort of Gamergate ideas. But they picked up this idea that the Frankfurt School was bad from Milo Yanniopoulos, who at the time was sort of a young Breitbart reporter, and sort of immersed in that kind of Brightbart worldview that had sort of been adopted from the Tea Party days, who saw a lot of kind of opportunity to further his own career in Gamergate coverage. And so would often pepper some of his reporting

on sort of the, with these kind of classic sort of cultural Marxism narratives. And so, what eventually happens is, you know, the cultural Marxism page is shut down, but you have almost an army of kind of Reddit Gamergate trolls who are now sort of very passionate about this idea that the Frankfurt School caused political correctness, later informing some of the subredits that would go on to sort of support sort of Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016, and also producing a number of memes to that effect as well. I thought it was really interesting. that whole episode about the Wikipedia edit war and generally the the trolling and sort of the participatory element of GamerGate in which they felt that they were fighting back against

it like an imposition of their, of their hobby through these vicious means that they thought were justified because they saw behind these efforts that they imagined was this kind of like cultural Marxist style ideology. And I thought, I thought that was an interesting, you know, just the connection between sort of like online participatory posting in politics, taken with such grave seriousness and sincerely believing that doing it enough can change the course of a nation in a way that even like mere voting or more conventional political participation cannot.

The way that, yeah, this belief in fighting cultural Marxism can sort of like make people think that they're these online digital soldiers. Yeah, and the history of culture of Marxism in itself is almost like a story of alternative media. I mean, with the LaRushites, they sort of saw the newspapers and the TV stations as, you know, infected by this kind of this global fascistic Frankfurt School ideology. And so they set up there in newspapers. They set up all of these different institutions to get their own ideas out there.

With Lind and his own think tank at Free Congress Foundation, they even set up their own satellite network TV station. And that then continues on with the Tea Party and Gamer Gate with the adoption of Reddit forums where it's not something that just sort of requires a big kind of financial investment or a large team of people to be working on it. You can sort of just log into your computer and then there you are, you are sort of involved in the media war against the kind of cultural Marxist edifice. Yeah, and I think one thing I really got the sense from reading your book is how cultural

Marxism often provide this kind of quite heroic identity for the person who's participating in this stuff. where you are David against Goliath, right? This has infected every single institution on the planet near enough. And therefore, you know, it is so powerful and so pervasive that almost no action that you take personally can be too much in response. I think, yeah, at one point you said something like, you know, I'm kind of paraphrasing someone where it's like your opponents don't bother with truth.

So why should you? And I thought that was like, a really nice way of articulating this kind of struggle that people who subscribe to this theory will end up seeing themselves as part of. And, you know, it's not exclusive to this. I think, you know, I think it's very common with lots of conspiracy theories similar to QAnon, as we discuss on here, people calling themselves digital soldiers. It's the same kind of idea, essentially, which is that you cannot be overly committed. You cannot be overly aggressive. Yeah, I sometimes say that my book reads like a comedy, but it's actually structured like a tragedy,

in the sense that all of the different episodes and characters that I discuss in the book, there's something a bit farcical about them. But in the end, their plight is a tragic one because there's nothing that they can do to really overcome the kind of cultural Marxist overlord that they see. And so it's almost always a sort of receding horizon. There's no point where they've actually won. Yeah, because the winning point is what? It's just like, I mean, yeah, will you?

Gimlin does actually outline it at one point, and it's just so ridiculous, right? You kind of mentioned this book. It's just women all just kind of, you know, give up, give up that silly feminist idea. Black people all kind of give up the silly civil rights idea. And they all kind of just, you know, go back to being happy, happy and subservient. And that's just, I mean, that's just not going to happen, really. That's not like a genie you can put back in the bottle, so to speak. So, yeah, it's an unrealizable kind of fantasy. Yeah, yeah. And it's never enough for some people. I mean, I think we see this a bit, in the UK, and there are parallels in the US too, with like the rivalry between reform and Restore.

Nigel Farage and a reform party can give the far right, you know, every policy that they want, but it's never going to be extreme enough. It's never going to be the fiery race war that they really desire. And eventually Restore, who are now sort of seen as that sort of natural, the natural representatives of the far right, soon they will no longer be enough. And it's just always sort of chasing that sort of scratching a nature that can never sort of actually be satisfied, I think. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the UK context, because that was actually one thing I wanted to ask you about. So in one of your chapters, you do a kind of separate case

studies of cultural Marxism, as it's discussed in American politics, in British politics, and Brazilian politics. And one thing I noticed was that with both Bolsonaro's administration and Trumps, that politicians can discuss cultural Marxism as a accepted, respectable term. But that's Not quite the case here yet. I mean, I think it's changing. I think there is a slow move towards respectability, but right now even, yeah, you know, right-wing politicians such as Suella Braidman, I think you also mention Miriam Kates. If they do bring up cultural Marxism, they do get a scolding, essentially, and not just from woke cultural Marxists like ourselves, but, you know, from figures of authority, saying, you know, that's an anti-Semitic term, that's a, that's

conspiracy theory, you shouldn't use it. It degrades public discourse. And as I say, I think this is changing. I think just in the, I think the, the yankification of our political culture does just continue apace. But I was curious as to why you think that is. Why, what is the cultural difference here? Oh, that's such a fascinating question. I think it has to do with, because, I mean, because British political culture revolves around the idea of decorum, right? There's also, like, in the journalist and political world a sense of superiority over America in a way.

I think that anything that maybe just seem to reminiscent of kind of American rabble-rousing is seen as maybe a bit too crass. But also I think that Britain itself just has a very thick sort of civil society in itself. And I think that also

we have way too many opinion columnists who are kind of desperate for desperate for stories. And so I think that you can whip something up into a frenzy immediately. And I think this was the case with Suella Braveman, right? And I wrote a whole like academic article about it called the Bravemen. And, you know, various British journalists were talking about it for three weeks because it like garnered attention. And so I think that partially why it also has to do with is the incentive to sort of keep the English journalist opinion generation machine going.

But I mean, I think that why it's sort of slowly becoming more acceptable in British conservative circles is because there is also a reward for kind of having the balls to say it. I think that, I mean, Rupert Lowe, for better or worse, is kind of leading the British right wherever it's going to go next. And his line is, you know, you call me racist. I just don't care anymore. I think that people will then start using phrases like cultural Marxism or, you know, sort of start banging on about George Soros, for instance, to show, look, you should really vote for me because I actually have the guts to sort of stand up to the establishment. That's my feeling of where it's going. And that's particularly where, like, Nigel Farage is going.

This is why he's done that big sort of shifts to the right recently to try and win back some people who moved over to restore to say, you know, I'm no longer doing the kind of the reactionary respectability politics. I'm no longer going to try and pretend just to be a Tory. I'm actually going to be the kind of racist you want to vote for. He also trace cultural Marxism to a more recent evolution, which is the sort of the opposition to like critical race theory or they call wokeness and these kinds of ideas. I mean, you explain that it's not really kind of like a direct lineage like you talk about.

It's kind of a complicated history, but it's more of sort of like a revision or like re-contextualization of these ideas for this particular moment, right? Yeah, I mean, as we were discussing it earlier, I mean, even William Lynn's version of cultural Marxism is a kind of strange piecing together of different tropes and, and I that he sometimes borrows from the LaRouche, sometimes borrow some other bits of the American right. And that is what you see in like the work of people like Christopher Rufo and James Linty of sort of pulling things together and seeing what works. And I think that Rufo is almost kind of the modern day William Lynde. I mean, he doesn't really care about sort of what the Frankfurt School actually

said or what critical race theorists actually said as long as, you know, it helps him raise his own profile and helps him actually gain their popular support for the laws that you want to put forward. And I think that this is also the result of the right-wing influencers sort of stage of the conservative movement. I kind of replicate how people sort of search for information now of sort of searching through sort of Google and sort of piecing together all these different bits of information to form something new. I was interesting the particular manner in which these kinds of labels like Wokeness are designed to help sort of delegitimize any kind of reform.

And even sort of like, sort of like mild ones. People sort of like put this label on it. And the subtext is like, well, this is the byproduct of some sort of poisonous ideology that's like illegitimate and astroturfed and not even real. And therefore, I don't even have to like discuss the substance of the policy itself. Because it's part of this, this poisonous ideological tradition, I reject it. And in fact, we need to exercise any resources we have available. to us to oppose it.

Yeah, I mean, Rufo and Lindsay are obsessed with the idea that they are uncovering some secret behind the surface. So, I mean, you see this, particularly with Lindsay's project of, I think, translating woke terms or, you know, translating wokeish into English of him saying, you know, equity is a term that is ultimately kind of like a Marxist smokescreen vote sort of wanting to send everyone to the gulags, right? And then that eventually leads to those kind of lists of terms. that you see sort of circulated around by Doge of saying, you know, if any sort of research project has the word woman in it, then, you know, we have to cut the funding for it.

And so the aim and also the outcome of the kind of anti-critical race theory or anti-wokeness crusade was to sort of build a project where people become kind of skeptical about sort of language itself and whether people are using words in an explanatory way or sort of in a way to kind deceive you and sort of trick you into supporting. agenda that you wouldn't otherwise support. And this also goes back to the way that Lynn describes what's useful about the term cultural Marxism. When Lind came up with the term cultural Marxism, he says, well, use this term to make people distrust anything that they see is political correctness to sort of suggest that, you know, affirmative action or speech codes aren't, you know, a way to sort of include people in society or sort of prevent us from causing offence to others. It's actually a step towards, you know, a sort of Marxist dystopia. Yeah, I really got the sense when I was reading your bit about James Lindsay, who I have to say I've never really read much of his work because it's always struck me as just like really, really incoherent.

But I guess it kind of almost emerged to me. I was like it kind of almost feels like there's two different types of cultural Marxism conspiracy theories here. And there's the first one which you talk about with William Lynn's TV show and then subsequent kind of tea party documentaries about cultural Marxism where it's kind of like the classic. conspiracy theorist crazy board, right, where you're like, Carl Marx starts Marxism. Then the Frankfurt School will start cultural Marxism. Then, you know, they come to the US and have all of these connections with US activists. Then those activists mentor modern democratic politicians. And through this, we can create this like this thorough line from Karl Marx to Barack Obama or someone similar. But then there's also this other kind, which I guess is like the, I mean, in

Q and non-terms, I would call it like the baking kind of cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. You're like, you know, I'm going to delve into the original texts and I'm going to find their secret meanings. Their secret subliminal messages, which they're hiding underneath all of this fancy academic language. And I guess that, yeah, I really got the sense. It's the first time I think I've like really understood what the whole James Lindsay thing is about reading your book. So I was like, oh, he's baking. He's just like baking critical theory, basically. There is that outstanding clip of the interview that he did with Jordan Peterson,

where Jordan Peterson is saying something about, I think, maybe A Paradise Lost and Lucifer, you know, sort of referring to him as the Morning Star. And Lindsay says, let me hold you there for a second. The Morning Star is what rises in the morning. And, you know, what do you do in the morning? You wake up. And then he says, woke. And so him trying to connect sort of, you know,

wokeness to the devil just sort of through word association games. And when you were reading any of his work, that's almost entirely his only kind argumentative strategy. And when people are, you know, baking in the Frankfurt School from a right-wing perspective, I don't know if that's the right way to use that, Pallant's four times. But when they're baking, that that's precisely what they're doing. They're sort of using a kind of a socialist if logic to sort of link sometimes in very arbitrary and vague ways what the Frankfurt School said to their sort of everyday gripes. And, you know, it also kind of reminds me of another clip from Andrew Breitbart where he's giving a speech to the Heritage Foundation.

And he says, you know, the Frankfurt School is why, you know, your daughter comes home from college at Thanksgiving and says, you know, why are we having Turkey. Don't you understand this is, you know, like a colonialist holiday? And then it goes on to say, you know, the Frankfurt School is why we have whole foods or arugula. And so, you know, the Frankfurt School becomes like this ultimate culprit for all the things that kind of American conservatives feel uneasy or, or, you know, or maybe. most totally objectionable. I guess it goes back to Travis, your little anecdote at the beginning of this episode of, you know, sometimes these people walk around the world and look what's going on and go, you know, the Frankfurt School must be behind this. Yeah, I mean, the accusation of something being, I guess, illegitimate or destructive because it is the byproduct of cultural

Marxism. I think it can introduce just a total all-pervasive paranoia in just everything you see, because it allows you to just be anxious that, like, even if it's not obvious that, for example, something might be descended or be the byproduct of this cultural Marxism, it might be in some sort of hidden way. And so it allows you, it gives you license to feel just, feel like everything that anyone you like does is the byproduct of a vast conspiracy of sort of a kind of info hazard that has infected the brains of even well-meaning people. This is precisely what Lind wanted to do when he coined the term. cultural Marxism too. He was interviewed in 2020 with Paul Godfrey about, you know, why he thought it was such an effective rhetorical tool. And he said, you know, it didn't really matter what

the Frankfurt School said or, you know, what communism really is, what Marxism really is, as long as you can sort of feed into people's fears, feed into people's anxieties about what's happening in the world and sort of then attribute it to Marxism, then, you know, we can win precisely. I mean, it is just for him a matter of winning the place. political war and cultural Marxism as a narrative is a means to do that. And it just could sort of be used to sort of be, you know, associated with anything. And I mean, what is almost kind of amusing in a kind of almost scary way in my book is just sort of how many things are associated with the Frankfurt School. I mean, you've got the film, the graduate. You've got the Beatles.

Plenty of examples. I mean, the Rolling Stones is in there. But everything that you sort of encounter in music, film, TV, in your newspapers, on your smartphones, even in your interactions with your kids, in your interactions with your co-workers, can then, through this lens, be seen as a consequence of, you know, a Marxist conspiracy. Yeah, just like all preservations. I'm thinking, I'm thinking about, you know, the constant sort of the, sort of the remnants of Gamergate still complaining about what they don't like in video games. In the recent James Bond, 007, first light game, it's like, this is still James Bond.

He's still a philanderer, and he's, he's childish, and he still does action stuff, and he fights, so he does explosions. It seems like everything they would like, but they were still complaining because they didn't find the digital women attractive enough. That was, was itself the byproduct of wokeness. It's absurd that you can, yeah,

you can find, like, traces of this you believe to be some sort of pervasive ideology that's ruining everything you don't like and just everything. This is maybe quite a mean point. But I sometimes think when I see on social media, you know, somebody presumably a grown adult complaining that a video game character isn't sexy enough for him or their boobs aren't big enough or stuff. I feel like secondhand embarrassment for them.

Do you know, where I kind of feel like, oh, you know, of all of the things, of all of the things to get really worked up about like this is, this is it. Like even from a reactionary point of view, surely this is quite trivial. And I guess maybe one thing that's really useful about cultural Marxism in that context is you're like, it's not trivial. Actually, it's destroying the West. It's not childish and juvenile that I care about, you know, how big Lara Cross boobs are in one game to another. It's not babyish. It's actually about the fall of Western civilization.

So therefore, it's actually very grown up that I care about this. Yeah, I think they say that, you know, they have this feeling that like, oh, this sort of like this cultural force of this ideology that's making these video games not attractive enough for me is part of the same ideology that wants to put me in gulags for being a straight white male. Yeah, exactly. And so they connect these two. And so, yeah, this thing that seems trivial is like because of this whole cultural Marxism idea, they're able to make these trivialities into these vast, very terrifying

political realities for them. You talk a lot about how it's like, well, you know, the cultural. Marxism is not conspiracy theory in sort of a more conventional sense. It's sort of a sort of narrative that could be sort of shown to be false or baseless or that kind of thing. And as a consequence, like debunking, which I have to admit, it's not very effective counter rhetorical strategy in normal times is even less effective in this particular sense. So fact checking and like debunking sort of like the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory isn't enough. It isn't effective. What do you imagine like would be a better way to kind of like fill the void of like or, to meet the kind of like the needs, the narrative or psychological means that the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is satisfying. This is my response to sort of Chris Rufo, who in one of his talk said that, you know, a lot of people who started to care a lot about critical race theory didn't do that because they had sort of read a critique of Kimberly Crenshaw in a conservative magazine.

But like they'd heard a story that sort of moved them emotionally. And a lot of the sort of responses in the kind of anti-CRT scare. had a lot to do with, you know, how the right was getting CRT wrong or, you know, how they weren't saying things that were factual about particular claims. And it didn't seem like that was effective because in a way, what that does is still maintain the kind of division between, I suppose, the 100% informed expert and the sort of quote unquote uninformed public. I think that what a real response to the right and its narratives of cultural Marxism should be is to kind of really transform the political and intellectual culture into something that's much more sort of open and

participatory and that actually has the kind of infrastructure to allow people to sort of come together and kind of create work or discuss ideas and actually sort of build community in a way. I think that this is something that could be done sort of in conversation with, you know, various sort of political and activist movements. But I think that if your only response to sort of cultural Marxism is that kind of more traditional debunking approach that kind of maintains the sort of hierarchy between so people who are quote unquote in the know and people who you know should be told what the facts are then i think that we're always going to kind of come back to that basic conflict of people feeling kind of alienated

or excluded from media from the political process from public culture i don't think that it's speaking in a a UK context specifically i don't think it's surprising that the rise in kind of narratives around cultural Marxism or wokeness coincides with, you know, the stripping away of a lot of our public and cultural infrastructure. I mean, over the past kind of 15 or so years, you're seeing, you know, hundreds of libraries closed down, you're seeing theaters closed down, you're seeing like youth centers closed down. Like all of these institutions that helped to sort of keep together kind of social or cultural life have now kind of been demolished or sort of been dismantled. I think that was sort of a left-wing response is to say, you know, if we are really cultural-Marxist, just like you say, we should actually try to do a bit of cultural Marxism.

We should try to actually try to create a culture that's sort of egalitarian and inclusive and not sort of reserved specifically for those who can afford it. I think that's really true. And I think just in the spirit of not getting into left doomerism, I think one thing that progressives are actually fairly good at is creating counter-narratives. In fact, I think in a weird way, I think the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is almost the rights, the right working through their jealousy of this ability of the fact that ideas like principles like egalitarianism, pluralism and democracy do actually have mass appeal.

They do spread. And so almost like you kind of then, in order to protect yourself from that psychologically damaging fact, if you oppose those things, you kind of have to turn this into the woke mind virus. Do you know, you kind of have to turn this into some kind of, it's not that this stuff actually appeals to people. it's that they've been brainwashed by evil, evil German Jewish intellectuals and things like that. So I think, I mean, don't get me wrong.

I'm obviously not saying that we're doing everything perfectly because obviously we're not. But it's one of those things where I do think sometimes I think we on the left can almost underestimate because we look at the right and we see how powerful they are and how, yeah, and how much ground they've gained. But we also can slightly miss the fact that they are envious of the left as well in lots of ways. And I think this is one of them. I think this book actually illustrates quite how envious they are in a certain regard. I agree with sort of a book that came out relatively recently by Anton Yeager called Hyperpolitics, where he sort of explains why sort of conservatives have continued to sort of have a bit more political success than the left in a sort of time where the kind of political institutions are sort of in decline.

And that's because the messages and narrative that they spread are incredibly compatible. with the way that we live. I mean, in a capitalist society, the incentives are there for you to have a sort of more individualistic life where you're sort of cut off from other people and not wanting to be engaged in sort of collective action to sort of transform the conditions of your lives and sort of work towards securing more equality for everyone.

And so as he puts it in the book, he quotes an old joke of a married couple of honeymooning in Ireland who sort of go over to a farmer there in the middle of the country, countryside and they say, what's the best way to Dublin? And the farmer says, well, I wouldn't start here. And I think that's the sort of the predicament that's facing left of sort of, you know, we know where we want to go, but where we're starting from can sometimes place a disadvantage. But I think that that kind of vision for actually pushing for a culture that's more kind of emancipatory and egalitarian and sort of brings people in and can actually sort of create the conditions for an alternative society is to cure for sort of the right sort of more. more facile talk about cultural Marxism. The book is The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for

the decline of the West by A.J.A. Woods. Speaking to A.J. today, I think it's super fascinating. It fills in sort of my gaps and sort of the understanding of how, you know, the mode of operations of a lot of these right-wing pundits operate from. And, yeah, we're going to put a link in the show notes. And, AJ, where can people go to follow more of your work? They can go to my Twitter page at A-W Woods on Twitter, but they can also follow my more political work on Instagram at ACR Brighton. That's the sort of Instagram for the Brighton branch of anti-capitalist resistance,

which is the activist group I work with down here. Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to the patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second premium episode for every. regular episode, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. We have a miniseries network called Cursed Media. We produce some great content, including Annie Kelly's Truly Tradley Deeply. And also, Julian has a solo podcast. Check it out. A lot of great people involved with that, too. That's superstructure. And for everything else, we have a website. That's QAApodcast.com.

Listener, until next week. May the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences. They call it political correctness. Came from the Frankfurt School from 1928, where Marxists didn't know understand why Marxism wasn't taking over. So they said, what if we went from an economic system and turned it into a social system? What if it's no longer the owners of the wealth and those who work for them?

What if we turned them into identity groups? What have we said that let's now not. make it the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. What if we make it the blacks against the whites and the women against the men and the homosexuals against the straight? What if we turn each other against each other because a house divided always falls?