I finished this piece prior to the assassination attempt on President Trump, and I had no idea how timely it would be: July 13, 2024, another day that will live in infamy. I added his name to the title because he is the quintessential example of the obsession. God clearly saved Trump’s life, even as another young man, Corey Comperatore, gave his life to protect his family. This is what you get when you call someone Hitler for nine years. To the left, Trump is an existential threat to Our Democracy^TM, an authoritarian tyrant that must be stopped, and one could go on. You can hear these three alone every ten minutes on MSNBC. I don’t want to believe this was intentional, but is there really another explanation? The only other option is complete and total incompetence, and I’ll be waiting for evidence and mea culpas, max mea culpas if that turns out to be the truth.

None of this should surprise us because the left has been obsessed with Fascism and Nazi’s for a very long time? Everyone who opposes them are Fascists and Nazi’s, even as the tactics they use against their enemies are fascistic and worthy of Nazis. They are skillful and shameless in their use of projection (accusing others of doing what they do) and hypocrisy, having turned it into an art form. This piece I saw the other day from some leftist is a perfect example: “Why Aren’t We Talking About Trump’s Fascism?” And the dude is serious! I’m convinced now they really believe it. There was, of course, zero evidence of fascism from Trump in his four years in office, but so what. He’s a Fascist! And if they can they are going to put him in prison on trumped up charges, as they’ve done to his followers, just like actual Fascists. That is projection. We’ll see where the lawfare goes after they almost killed him.

Have you ever noticed that this obsession is reflected in the products that come out of Hollywood? There are a zillion, give or take a few, movies and TV shows either about Nazi’s or where Nazi’s are the bad guys. If it’s not the actual World War II Nazi’s, it’s Neo-Nazi’s, who are of course the personification of ultimate evil, White Nationalists. Oh the horror! By contrast, the world champions of butchery and genocide, the communists, are rare in Hollywood productions. Why this obsession and contrast? We have two German scholars and their reaction to World War II to thank for this, Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979).

Anyone interested or engaged in the 21^st century culture wars needs to know about the Frankfurt School. In 1923, a group of Marxists established the Institute for Social Research as what we call today a “think tank” associated with the University of Frankfurt in Germany. In due course it came to be referred to as the Frankfurt School, out of which the world was given what we now call cultural Marxism. We can thank Adolf Hitler for bringing the cultural Marxism wrecking ball to America. If the Institute for Social Research had remained in Germany, cultural Marxism may have stayed isolated in Europe. However, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 with many in the school being Jewish, it relocated to New York City in 1935 and set up shop at Columbia University. It shouldn’t surprise us that Marxists would find a welcoming home at an American university in 1935—secular academia always welcomes subversive ideas first.

The primary insight of the cultural Marxists wasn’t that class-based economic oppression didn’t bring the fruit of revolution Marx promised, but that the revolutionary consciousness required would clearly not arise spontaneously; it must be assiduously cultivated via culture. They recognized Western societies produced cultures that were almost completely resistant to revolution. Marxist revolutionary consciousness had to find its way into the worldview of the average prosperous Westerner, and that could only happen through the transformation of the culture.

What the economic and cultural Marxists had in common, though, was their antipathy to Christianity because it stood in their way. Christianity and its cultural influence must be taken down, specifically through the eradication of traditional norms and institutions. The purpose of the Institute would be to unmask all the institutions and organs of culture that promoted and maintained the shared value systems responsible for the public support of those institutions and culture, most especially the family and religion. Paul Kengor in The Devil and Karl Marx identifies the strategy to accomplish this:

Rather than organize the workers and the factories, the peasants and the fields and the farms, they would organize the intellectuals and the academy, the artists and the media and the film industry. These would be the conveyor belts to deliver the fundamental transformation.

The film industry was captured by the cultural Marxists, and thus we get Nazi’s everywhere.

The process of transformation would be helped tremendously by someone who came between Marx and the Frankfurt school who had a profound influence on the continuing secularization of Western culture, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Marx didn’t have the discipline of psychology which developed later in the nineteenth century, nor Freudian teaching on sexuality, but the cultural Marxists did. Kengor calls what the Frankfurt school developed a kind of Freudian-Marxism, the worst of the ideas of the nineteenth century wedded with some of the worst of the twentieth. Both the older and newer Marxists believed religion, i.e., Christianity, and the family had to be “abolished,” as Marx put it, but the old way just didn’t work. The Soviets did everything they could to snuff out both, including murdering tens of millions of their own people—religion and the family, however, just wouldn’t go away. Bishop Fulton Sheen said communists failed to convince the world there is no God. Rather, they succeeded only in convincing the world there is a devil. 

Repressive Tolerance, Adorno and Anti-Fascism
After the war most of the faculty went back to Germany to re-establish the school, but Marcuse decided to stay in America. Adorno returned to Germany as well but returned to America in the early 50s for a time in order to not lose his American citizenship. Although he returned to Germany after a time, he had a significant impact on the culture wars in America. Marcuse though was the most significant figure to come out of the Frankfurt school. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1940, and is most famously known as the father of the “New Left” and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, he was influential in the growth of political correctness and the wokeness of our time. The “Old Left” were those who embraced the old orthodox forms of Marxism, and especially that as practiced in the Soviet Union. Young Marxist radicals by contrast were disaffected with Soviet Communism and looking for new ways to bring down the capitalist West, and the cultural approach of Frankfurt would come to dominate American Marxism through the pen of Marcuse. 

His essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” is the inspiration for what we now call “cancel culture.” Only certain accepted speech can be tolerated because actual tolerance is “repressive.” Written as part of a book called A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Marcuse argues that “tolerance today is in many of its most effective manifestations serving as a cause of oppression.” From the perspective of a cultural Marxist, of course it is. The perverse logic of Marcuse as a cultural Marxist has to be read to be believed. In this upside down, inside out world, tolerance “actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination.” Free speech and the First Amendment are considered dangerous; a common trope on the left is “speech is violence.” If that is true, of course it must not be tolerated, and we’ll see why from Marcuse’s perspective.

Part of his argument will serve to introduce us to Theodor Adorno. What Adorno did in 1950 allowed Marcuse to develop “the Nazi argument.” It was a diabolically genius move paying cultural dividends to this day. First Marcuse lays his cards on the table:

Liberating tolerance . . . would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the left.

How convenient, but we’ll see why he says this when we get to Adorno. Then he gives us the punch line:

In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.

It’s a short trip from this to “speech is violence,” and by definition it can only be speech from the right. This led to a common phrase the New Left used in their protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, “No free speech for Fascists.” Thus what we know as cancel culture is a necessity to keep the right from doing what Fascists and Nazi’s always do. Not cancelling people on the right and their speech would be a dereliction of duty, the First Amendment be damned. Of course, all the political violence is on the left, but that is justified violence because it’s used against the Fascist right. A group using violence today can be called Antifa, for anti-fascists, with a straight face. You can’t make this stuff up!

Adorno was the one who made this connection in his 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality. Dinesh D’Souza in his book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left has a section titled, “The Deceitful Origin of ‘Anti-Fascism.’” He writes that after World War II, “Nazism became the very measure of evil. So Marcuse and Adorno knew that anything associated with Nazism or fascism would automatically be tainted. They set about putting this obvious fact to political use on behalf of the political Left.” Fascism in this distortion of reality would now be associated with capitalism and moral traditionalism, which as we’ve seen must be “abolished.” 

D’Souza argues persuasively that Marxism and fascism are ideologies of the left, but because of Adorno they came to be associated with two different ends of the ideological and political spectrum. In his book Adorno introduced the F-Scale, in D’Souza’s words:

The basic argument was that fascism is a form of authoritarianism and that the worst manifestation of authoritarianism is self-imposed repression. Fascism develops early and we can locate it in young people’s attachments to religious superstition and conventual middle-class values about family, sex, and society.

So a la Marx, religion and the family must be “abolished.” The book and ideas were swallowed hook, line, and sinker by an already liberal academia and media, becoming the accepted perspective that fascism was a phenomenon of the right. It’s a complete lie, but that’s what Marxists do. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, Hollywood was blatantly patriotic, but when the New Left exploded on the scene brining its cultural Marxism with them, it was only a matter of time until the Nazi’s were frequent guests on the big and small screen. Keep in mind, from the perspective of the woke leftists who make movies and TV shows, all references to Fascism and Nazi’s are a reflection on conservative, religious, traditional, patriotic, dare I say, MAGA Americans. That is how they see you, and me, as threats to Our Democracy^TM.

Wokeness Takes Over American Culture and the Solution
In a well-known exchange in The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’” Gradually and suddenly perfectly describes the apparent suddenness of woke ideology completely taking over American culture the last handful of years. Like most people I was surprised but I shouldn’t have been. Not only had the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism come to America in the 1930s, but as it took root with the leftist radicals in the ‘60s and ‘70s, those people went into academia and brought their cultural Marxism with them. From there many went into education and programmed a generation of children who are now adults into the woke Marxist worldview. This process has been going on for decades and it was only a matter of time before we experienced the cultural and governing effects we now have.

The modern-day cultural Marxists, the wokesters, have been programmed, or more accurately brainwashed, into Marx’s dialectical worldview of critique and crisis—or conflict theory. In a nutshell according to Marx, those with wealth and power try to hold on to it by any means possible, mainly by suppressing the poor and powerless. A basic premise of conflict theory is that individuals and groups within society will always work to maximize their own wealth and power. It’s an ugly view of reality which creates ugly people. All relationships are power struggles. Vladimir Lenin argued that the oppressed cannot of their own accord sufficiently understand the depths of their oppression and, therefore, need an intellectual class continually reminding them to be angry and feel hated.  Leftists push this emotional narrative of outrage which becomes axiomatic and unchallengeable—those who do must be silenced.

Wealth and economic power are no longer part of the oppression equation because the left, the cultural Marxists, are incredibly wealthy and have all the cultural and political power. So the “poor and powerless” of Marx are transferred to the culturally oppressed which has nothing to do with economics. There are many in the parade of victims we’re familiar with, including “people of color” which makes white people, especially males, the oppressors. Religious minorities are oppressed as well, which makes Christians (in the West) the oppressors. The most popular of the oppressed are the sexual minorities like lesbians, homosexuals, transgendered, etc. which makes heterosexuals the oppressors. There is even something comically evil called intersectionality which creates a hierarchy of oppression. At the top of the oppression scale would be white heterosexual Christian males, the worst of the worst, especially those married with families. Next in line would be heterosexual women again married with families. Single women regardless of their sexuality are always lower on the scale (meaning they are more easily oppressed) than married women. Any person of color regardless of sexual preference, marital status, or religious conviction is always lower on the scale, and so on. In addition, in the woke narrative any form of inequality is equivalent to oppression, and the full oppression matrix is the means to the end of total societal transformation into a Marxist Utopia, or whatever. In practice there is no such thing, so perpetual revolution via perpetual criticism is the result—misery forever. 

How do we counter wokeness and the cultural Marxists? It has to happen on three levels simultaneously: the political, the legal, and the cultural. If Christians really want this to change, it is going to take more than complaining, which we are all really good at. It is going to take work, involvement, and as the great Steve Bannon always says, action, action, action! Thankfully, since Trump and the Great Awakening we’ve been experiencing, conservatives and Christians are getting this like never in modern times, and it is extremely encouraging. We must remember, however, this secular, Marxists takeover of Western culture has been several hundred years in the making, and we are not going to change the direction of this massive societal ocean liner overnight.

Unfortunately, Pietism has had a pernicious influence on too many Christians who think engaging in politics and cultural pursuits is not “spiritual.” Too many Christians think supporting one particular political party perverts the gospel, when what really perverts the gospel is thinking it only applies to our personal, religious lives. Too many Christians think engaging in the “culture wars” is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (I heard a pastor at a church we attended once say exactly that!), a diversion from saving souls and doing the true, spiritual work of the kingdom. This is the same kind of pernicious piety that truncates the gospel and Christianity as if it applied to only a narrow slice of life. It was the great Dutch theologian and statements, Abraham Kuyper, who rebuked such narrow-minded Christian thinking, famously saying:

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!

Cultural Marxism and wokeness lead to misery and societal decay, as we see all around us, while Christianity and God’s law leads to blessing and societal flourishing. If we want America to flourish again and God to bless our land, we will take Christ out of our churches into every square inch of existence, including all that is political, legal, and cultural.