"Our son's actions were informed by people we do not know, and ideas we do not hold,â they wrote. âLike our other five children, he was raised in a family, a faith, and a community that all rejected hate and taught that love must be the motive for everything we do. How our son was attracted to such darkness is a terrifying mystery to us ..."
Itâs a terrifying mystery for America as well â but it shouldnât be. As David Neiwert wrote at Daily Kos, under the title, âThe new age of chain terrorismâ:
The pattern is becoming frighteningly familiar: A white man, radicalized online at alt-right media websites and through social media into hateful white nationalist beliefs built around the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about âcultural Marxism,â walks into a mass gathering of his selected targets (which can be any of the perceived participants in the conspiracy, including liberals, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, any nonwhite person, LGBTQÂ folk, even moviegoers) and opens fire.
It wasnât generic anti-Semitism that motivated the shooter, as a wave of right-wing blame-shifting. Even at the vigil for the victim, the Daily Beast reported that one participant âseemed to believe that anti-Semitism does not come from the right wing, but from the left,â claiming that âFascism and socialism are the same sides of a different coin.â
Generic claims like that ignore hard facts. As Neiwert writes, a specific anti-Semitic narrative about âcultural Marxismâ (meaning âMarxism translated from economic into cultural termsâ by a cabal of Jewish intellectual ĂŠmigrĂŠs from Nazi Germany, known as the Frankfurt School)Â is motivating these massacres, whose victims have included Muslims in New Zealand as well as Jews in America.
This is a narrative Donald Trump has long echoed, especially with his attacks on âpolitical correctness.â For potential terrorists, itâs also embedded in a very specific, dynamically evolving matrix of right-wing political activity and institutions that marks out a wide range of other targets for retribution, up to and including mass murder.
Anyone whoâs traditionally of lower status â women, minorities, non-Christians, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, etc. â is a potential target, since (in this worldview) they are âunnaturallyâ being elevated to equal status, thus threatening the ânatural,â âGod-givenâ order of things, as part of the cultural Marxistsâ nefarious plot.
âI revisit this every few months, when a new act of foreign or domestic terrorism happens and the perpetrator cites "cultural Marxism" as a reason,â researcher Bruce Wilson tweeted, linking to a 2016 piece in which he cited multiple examples.
ââCultural Marxismâ is now the grand unifying narrative for the hard, fascist & neo-Nazi right. It does the same work as did the âProtocols of the Elders of Zionâ forgery did, a century ago, to inspire Hitler & his Nazis,â he continued.
Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, used the terms âcultural Marxismâ or âcultural Marxistâ more than 600 times in his 1,500-plus-page manifesto. The Poway shooter only mentioned it briefly, but its themes echo throughout his far more modest six-page document. More importantly, the whole environment in which he was radicalized has clearly been influenced by the narrative, and partly even created by it.
Not quite so far removed as all that
Despite the Poway shooter's familyâs claims, their religious tradition â a fundamentalist sect called the Orthodox Presbyterian Church â has troubling "dangerous, violent and undemocratic threads," as explained by religious studies professor Julie Ingersoll, author of âBuilding Godâs Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstructionâ (Salon interview here):
No doubt the dark web, 4chan and the anons provide fertile ground for these young white men who become our homegrown terrorists, but as a scholar of religion whoâs studied these groups for decades, I can tell you this version of Christianity isnât entirely off the hook.You wonât find slavery apologists in the OPC anymore but the denomination has remained a home for far-right versions of Christianity.
Ingersoll referred to the Southern Presbyterian tradition of Robert Lewis Dabney, a pastor and theologian who served as a Confederate Army chaplain, and is still a hero to many in the fundamentalist world. He "was decidedly and explicitly opposed to notions of social equality of all kinds as unbiblical," she said.
That same anti-egalitarian worldview was found in the thought of William Lind, the paleoconservative activist who coined the term âcultural Marxismâ and did more than anyone else to shape the narrative, promote its spread and argue for its centrality. Lind was a colleague and collaborator of Paul Weyrich, an important figure in the history of the American right who co-founded the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Moral Majority, the Council for National Policy and the Free Congress Foundation, which he headed until his death in 2008. Lind headed a subsidiary of FCF called the Center for Cultural Conservatism, and successfully spread his ideas through multiple communication channels.
In 2003, Bill Berkowitz described the spread of the "cultural Marxism: concept in a paper for the Southern Poverty Law Center. it came from books like Pat Buchananâs âThe Death of the West,â white supremacist groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens, intellectual hucksters like David Horowitz (at one time a Salon columnist), and Weyrichâs own considerable influence, most notably âa widely circulated âletter to the conservative movementâ [in 1999] in which he lamented the widespread popularity of the âideology of political correctnessâ and âthe cultural disintegration that is gripping society.ââ
Since then one could add  Andrew Breitbart, Michael Savage and David Brooks (in faux highbrow style), along with torrents of repetitions on YouTube, Reddit, 4chan, 8chan and so on. In todayâs right-wing universe, it would have been have been hard for the Poway shooter not to be exposed to this notion.
Launching a myth
But letâs go back to how it started. In the late 1980s, Weyrich and Lind started promoting cultural conservatism as increasingly central to the right-wing project. Then, in 1989, Lind co-authored the first of two significant papers in the Marine Corps Gazette on âfourth generation warfare,â as described and analyzed here by former intelligence analyst James Scaminaci. This helped pave the way for development of the âcultural Marxismâ narrative, which was originally the product of a left-wing sectarian cult with a weirdly similar obsession that Lind was able to co-opt, as weâll see in a moment. But first, we need to understand Lindâs approach through the lens of âfourth generation warfare.â
The idea was that successive generations of modern warfare were increasingly decentralized, with a high degree of boundary blurring appearing in the most recent incarnation. The first paper was primarily focused on traditional military concepts, such as âan enemy attacking the strategic rear of an opponent rather than the front and turning the enemyâs strength into a weakness â such as taking advantage of porous borders to enter the rear and the legal system affording the invaders protection.â
Notice the boundary-blurring there, as the legal system becomes defined as a military target. But there was more, Scaminaci noted: âAnother aspect was âa direct attack on a nationâs culture,â an example of which was drug trafficking and the âfifth columnâ of drug buyers.â
If the cultural concerns that lead to Lindâs embrace of âcultural Marxismâ were present in his first paper, they became predominant in the second one, published in 1994:
[Lind and his co-author[ argued that Yugoslavia-style wars were coming to America because âcultural radicalsâ (liberalism and Marxism, in other words) in the universities were creating a new ideology of âmulticulturalismâ or âpolitical correctness.â One of the three key ideas of fourth generation warfare as it related to the United States was that multiculturalism represented abandonment of Judeo-Christian, Western culture and values here at home.The other two ideas were the stateâs loss of monopoly on war and the clash of civilizations, or as they put, âa world of cultures in conflict.â Though describing it as the clash between Christianity and Islam, it also represented the clash between liberalism and conservative traditional values. Multiculturalism would dissolve the bonds of national identity.
What happened between the two papers was Lindâs encounter with the raw material of the âcultural Marxismâ myth, which originated in the left-wing cult around Lyndon LaRouche, most prominently in a lengthy 1991 article called "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and Political Correctness" by Michael Minnicino. How Lind came across this obscure work remains unclear, but he made it his own. Apparently the Frankfurt School had played an important role in the LaRouche organization's paranoid fantasies, as a recent article by Andrew Wood describes:
The Frankfurt School â along with a revolving cast of co-conspirators like Queen Elizabeth II and Henry Kissinger â popped up repeatedly in LaRoucheâs conspiracy theories over the decades. Even as LaRouche veered from left-wing sectarianism to right-wing Messianism, Marcuse and Adorno [two of the leading Frankfurt theorists] continued to haunt his demented and delusional worldview.
Although the theory mutated over time, LaRouche was obsessed with European oligarchs and British intelligence. Minnicinoâs article dumps all that in favor of a more conventional international Communist background, which made it easier for Lind to pick up.
But "cultural Marxism" was not yet a narrative ready for battle, which was Lind's great accomplishment, as both Scaminaci and Wilson told me.
âI definitely believe that Lind was the vector,â Scaminaci said, picking up on what LaRoucheâs cult had started. âLind, for one thing, is only kind of an original thinker,â he said. Nor was he alone on the right in seeking inspiration from the left.
âHoward Phillips [a close ally of Weyrichâs] mined left-wing writings for his ideas and organizing concepts,â Scaminaci pointed out. âSeriously, the Christian Right is a bunch of Marxist-Leninists in religious-capitalist capes and cloaks. They have been slowly transforming the GOP into a âcombat partyâ while delegitimizing every opposing thought system.â
Wilson gives Lind a bit more credit. âWithin two years of the article's publication, Lind was already at work not only rebranding it for popular consumption,â he said, âbut considerably simplifying the narrative by stripping much of its overly abstruse qualities and repackaging it for individuals who, if not necessarily academically trained, were certainly intellectually inclined.â
More broadly, Wilson argued that "for all practical purposes, Lind can be considered the true architect of the 'cultural Marxism' conspiracy theory," and compares it to the way the secret police in czarist Russia adapted an 1864 French political satire to produce the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which was then repackaged for viral spread.
Wilson also underscores a point made above about the close relationship between his two overlapping projects. âConsider Lind's repackaging in context of his previous, 1989 articulation of the principles of fourth-generation warfare,â Wilson told me. âIn light of that, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Lind created âcultural Marxismâ expressly as an ideological weapon intended to instigate fourth-generation Warfare attacks against the enemies he had designated in his 1994 Marine Corps Gazette article.â
The grand confusion
To fully appreciate what happened here, one must turn to the notion of projection â if not to Melanie Kleinâs more subtle concept of projective identification. The evil machinations Lind saw in his fantasy version of the Frankfurt School were more than anything else just reflections of his own disowned contradictions and failings.
On the one hand, the Cold War ended, and suddenly there was no Communist enemy to fight. To continue fighting, a new enemy would have to be invented â and fighting, at some level, was all that Lind understood. Lind and Weyrich had already been arguing, even against other conservatives, for the primacy of culture, so the âcultural Marxismâ myth satisfied multiple needs psychological, financial, organizational, and so on. All that had to be done was to project their motivations, their deviousness, closed-mindedness and lust for domination onto the Frankfurt School, rendering this coterie of renegade Jewish intellectuals as the authors of a sinister world-encompassing con game.
A second aspect of this projection is where it all leads. Lind is quite clear about this: âCultural Marxismâ aims to destroy society, to pit every different group against each other, and thus bring down the whole noble edifice of America â and beyond it, the Christian West. (He even warns his Marine readers, âWe could end up with two, three, many Marine Corps: white Marine Corps, black Marine Corps, Christian Marine Corps, possibly even a gay Marine Corps.â)
Yet Lindâs own vision is virtually identical: the destruction of America and its fragmentation into smaller cultural enclaves. That was the âhappy endingâ Lind laid `out very clearly in a Washington Post op-ed (titled "Militant Musings: From Nightmare 1995 to My Utopian 2050â) that ran shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, and then in the 2014 novel, âVictoria,â that was derived from it.
In short, everything Lind says about those he rails against should be read primarily as a reflection of his own profoundly disturbed thinking. That is the core truth about the âcultural Marxismâ myth.
A wider view
But itâs hardly the only thing that needs saying. Lind didnât invent anything that was fundamentally new, he mostly fashioned new forms, as did the czar's secret police in Wilson's analogy. Lind's novel âVictoriaâ builds on the âcultural Marxismâ myth, but at bottom itâs just another white race-war fantasy like âThe Turner Diaries," with more literary pretension.
One might also argue that Lind's plans for fanning a violent race war have contributed to 21st-century political violence. But there's no reason to believe they made much difference, compared to the underlying driving forces that have brought repeated waves of political instability, violence, state breakdown and civil war to different societies over the last two millennia and more, as described in the work of Peter Turchin, such as âSecular Cyclesâ and âAges of Discordâ (Salon review here).
Mass unrest, even violence, has little chance of threatening political stability as long as elites are relatively unified, according to Turchin's "structural demographic theory." The crucial difference comes with the process of "elite fragmentation," which can lead to sustained conflict for extended periods of time.
This â rather than Lindâs narrative invention â is the primary difference between 2019 and 1978, when âThe Turner Diariesâ was published, or the early 1980s, when Ku Klux Klan member Louis Beam first popularized the idea of âleaderless resistance.â Weâre now in a period of heightened elite fragmentation, which is typified by, but certainly not limited to, the ascension of Donald Trump.
Leaderless resistance strategy, Scaminaci said, "posits that the federal government or an occupational government is the threat,â while âautonomous, anonymous cells form and magically â at the right time â carry out uncoordinated attacks.â But magic is not a strategic plan, so Lind and his mentor, John Boyd, had a fix in mind.
âThe strategic situation today is completely the opposite," Scaminaci observed. "The federal government is controlled by a president ideologically closest to the Patriot militias and the white nationalists. Trump has been dismantling the intelligence elements that would monitor the white nationalists. He has demonstrated his complete willingness to delegitimize the FBI, CIA and to a lesser extent DHS." In Scaminaci's view, we are not seeing "leaderless resistance" but something considerably more dangerous: "scripted violence," dictated from above with just enough plausible deniability.
âThe mass killers now are taking cues from Trump, from Fox News and from their own message boards," Scaminaci said. "If they are relying upon previous manifestos and memes, how deeply do we think they have thought this through?â
In short, Lindâs âcultural Marxismâ narrative may well help fuel the increase white nationalist terror, but heâs no more a conspiratorial mastermind than were the Frankfurt School thinkers on whom he projected his fantasies. Paranoia about "cultural Marxism" is a significant factor in the pattern of rising violence weâre experiencing, but itâs much more a reflection of deeper forces. These attacks, Scaminaci noted, âare not effective in causing a civil war. They are useful to Trump,â
âCultural Marxism,â in other words, is an important piece of the puzzle behind right-wing terrorism, but not the whole thing. Understanding what this term means and where it came from illustrates what form anti-Semitism has taken in our time, and how it no longer threatens only Jews, but all of democracy.
