Ever since people began warning about the threat from Cultural Marxism, the Marxists’ main line of defense has been to deny everything. They claim that their critics are hallucinating and fighting with shadows.
The Marxists in control of universities insist that academic freedom is alive and well. No one has been excluded from the academy for being a conservative. No teachers are indoctrinating their students—they merely teach them true history.
In that light, it is perhaps understandable that the Trump administration framed their attack on Cultural Marxism as a concern with “true history.” The Executive Order (EO) titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” depicted the dismantling of Western civilization as a revisionist history project. Do not worry, fair citizens, your president will now ensure that history is not inaccurately revised, he promised.
The weakness of this strategy is obvious. There is nothing wrong with revising history, per se. History is not writ in stone. Historians regularly question the dominant interpretations, revising them where necessary. The problem is not that universities are revising history, but that they are indoctrinating students in the poisonous tenets of Cultural Marxism. The problem identified by the EO is not merely historical revisionism, much as the Trump administration was at pains to depict it as such. As the EO explained,
…the prior [Biden] administration sponsored training by an organization that advocates dismantling “Western foundations” and “interrogating institutional racism” and pressured National Historical Park rangers that their racial identity should dictate how they convey history to visiting Americans because America is purportedly racist.
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…the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.
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The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” are aspects of “White culture.” The forthcoming Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports. These are just a few examples.
Denouncing white Americans as racists is not “revisionist history.” It is an ideologically-driven attack masquerading as history. Defending your country is not a history project. It is intrinsic to the right to self-defense. There is no duty to sit and watch as your communities are destroyed under the guise of accurate history. It would have been more accurate to call the EO “Rejecting Cultural Marxism.”
Cultural Marxism is a poisonous and destructive ideology. Antony Mueller explains,
Another name for the neo-Marxism of increasing popularity in the United States is “cultural Marxism.”… Marxist theory flourishes today in cultural institutions, in the academic world, and in the mass media.
Given the terrible reputation of Marxism, the only people who stand to gain by depicting Cultural Marxism as “historical revisionism” are the Marxists. They know that their idol, Karl Marx, is a purveyor of death and destruction. They would sure love to give him a makeover as a mere history revisionist. David Gordon explains:
Marx is often portrayed as motivated by love of the working class, if not all of humanity. Actually, starting from the time he was a university student, he displayed contempt and hatred for the masses he deemed beneath him. As McMeekin writes, “Rather than appreciating the good fortune that allowed him to live this agreeable life of leisure [made possible by an allowance from his father], Marx wrote poetry that was angry and misanthropic. In Savage Saga, published in January 1841, a twenty-two-year-old Marx lambasted that humans were tired, empty, frightened, the ‘apes of a cold God,’ a God who warned his apes, ‘I shall hurl gigantic curses at mankind.’” In this connection, McMeekin might also have mentioned Reverend Richard Wurmbrand’s Marx and Satan (Crossway, 1986). Marx’s adoption of a Luciferian persona was, in fact, a frequent motif in nineteenth-century Romanticism, analyzed in the famous book of Marion Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford, 1930).
Marxists would prefer to shift the focus onto slavery debates. Forget Marx being a Luciferian, how about we discuss the fact that George Washington and William Penn owned slaves? No other history of slavery interests them—only the part that can be mined to dismantle Western civilization.
Depicting Cultural Marxism as a “history debate” is, therefore, a public relations coup for the Marxists. They insist that their schemes are not ideological. They claim that the slavery exhibits targeted by the EO are merely “information signs,” giving “educational materials on the history of slavery.”
If this was indeed a debate about history—as the EO unwisely concedes—then the activists would be right to insist that we must not expect politicians to settle historical debates by executive decree. We certainly should not erase historical exhibits just because politicians do not like a particular historical interpretation.
“Debate history, don’t erase it!” cry the woke historians when their Marxist exhibits are dismantled. But their true motives are exposed by their stated desire to “avenge their ancestors” for the evils of slavery.
The Avenging The Ancestors Coalition, an organization of African American historians, activists and more, was among the leaders of the effort to get the slavery exhibit signage restored.
They claim that the EO is an attempt by the Trump administration to “rewrite and whitewash history.” On that basis, they secured court orders that the plaques must be restored. The jubilant Philadelphia Mayor said, “Today we celebrate the return of our history at this important site.” One activist was overcome with emotion to see the return of her “history.”
“Well, it’s important. It’s important,” Cardillino said. “It happened. It happened, and it’s part of our history. You can’t deny it. This is not just about 6th and Market. It’s not just about Philadelphia. It’s not just about Pennsylvania. This was the right thing to do for our country.”
These are, of course, the very same activists who destroyed numerous historic monuments across the South. They shocked the world by destroying Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. They splashed pink paint on the memorial of Jefferson Davis, tied a noose around his neck, and tore it down. They took an axe to the statue of Stonewall Jackson and transformed it into what the New York Times admiringly described as “a kind of melted mutant grotesque.” The artist herself described her grotesque art as “a sort of haint.”
They rampaged through cemeteries tearing down tombstones. The statue of Robert E. Lee that stood in Charlottesville, Virginia, was hurled into a furnace.
“Today the statue comes down and we are one small step closer to a more perfect union,” said then-mayor Nikuyah Walker.
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They use a torch to score the head of the statue, in the pattern of a death mask. Lee’s face falls to floor with a loud clank.
The assertion by neo-Marxists that they are only interested in historical accuracy is falsified by their own destructionism. The historian Clyde Wilson is, therefore, right to warn that this is not a debate about history—“we are not in an argument over the interpretation of the past.” Wilson observes,
They are not interested in a balanced weighing of the evidence of history. For them history is an abstraction and a weapon of power over others.
The attacks on the South, in particular, are the opposite of preserving history. Their goal is, as Wilson observed, that, “Columbia, South Carolina, must become indistinguishable from Columbus, Ohio, which is only a small and early step on the road to the New World Order.” The Cultural Marxists hope that where “workers of the world unite” failed, the slogan that we are all citizens of One World may succeed.
But wait, say the Marxists. There you go again, fighting with shadows. Isn’t the New World Order just a conspiracy theory? The purveyors of Cultural Marxism know that mockery is a powerful political weapon, so they mock their critics as conspiracy theorists—but they are the first to protest against their own woke schemes being mocked. “Stop mocking us!” they cry.
The problem is the tone of hostility, of mocking.… It’d be one thing if it were incisive criticism. Bring it on. But the mocking, vicious hostility, it really bothers me.
They are bothered when they get mocked, yet they mock conservatives for being afraid of a non-existent “secretive globalist authority.” There is surely no secretive globalist authority, as the goals of the Neo-Marxists are far from secretive. They are openly published. Writing in 2018, Brian Balfour pointed out that,
Take, for instance, the 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, written by socialist theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Indeed, the ideas that inspired the book were captured in an article by Laclau and Mouffe published with the more telling title “Socialist Strategy, Where Next?” in the January 1981, issue of Marxism Today.
They deny that the identity politics movement and their “critical theories”—which they insist do not even exist—have anything to do with Marxism. “Do you even know what Marxism is?” they mock. Yet their Marxist roots are clear:
Marx and Marxism comes [sic] up often in the writings that formed the movement. Gramsci, meanwhile, is quoted approvingly by several authors in the 1995 anthology of essays that serves as the bible of CRT, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement [1995]—which CRT adherents, in another reference to Mao, refer to as the “Big Red Book.” And, lest anyone forget, Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research, which originated from the German antecedent of CRT, critical theory, was founded by members of different communist parties in 1922 to help to promote Marxism in the West.
Wilson is, therefore, justified in warning that “the relentless barrage of lies against our heritage is more than a series of petty skirmishes about historical interpretation.” They purport to be interested in reinterpreting history while they are driven by vengeance and destructionism.
As Wilson puts it, these are “not folks we can win over by presenting historical evidence.” The truth is that “we are not in a fight over historical interpretation; we are in a war against our culture.”
