Chapter Six - Discussing Cultural Marxism, Queer Theory, and Grievance Studies

By Alex Van Hamme

What is Cultural Marxism? During the time that Jordan Peterson was rising to fame, most online right-wing communities were frequently discussing “Cultural Marxism”. I remember seeing many clips of Andrew Breitbart, the now deceased founder of Breitbart, discussing Cultural Marxism being circulated on social media. Peterson himself spoke about it at length to Joe Rogan on Rogan’s podcast.

It is very common for people to deflect conversations of Cultural Marxism with the accusation that Cultural Marxism is just a “right wing conspiracy theory”. So what exactly is it, a right-wing conspiracy, nothing at all, or a legitimate concept?

Although it is true there are exaggerated right-wing conspiracies based around it, and it is frequently misrepresented or misunderstood online, it is an actual term that has been used in scholarship for decades to refer to a real school of thought.

It’s also real insofar as the ideas of the Frankfurt School, which is associated with Cultural Marxism, have formed the essential basis of current radical progressive ideology. In 2022 Peterson told a reporter for Sky News Australia “The notion that these ideas aren’t fundamentally Marxist in their derivation is only an idea that people who have no idea what these ideas mean, would claim. People like Jaques Derrida and Michelle Foucault, who are I suppose the intellectual leaders of the post modern radical types knew perfectly well that their form of thinking was a derivation of Marxism. Derrida in particular was interested in moving the marginalized to the Centre, which is an idea very similar to moving the proletariat to occupy the positions that the bourgeois held. It was just a Marxist slight of hand. And Michelle Foucault was just as interested in remediating what he regarded as marginalization as Derrida. So the notion that the post modernists and the Marxists aren’t aligned is absolutely foolish, and the idea that Marxism isn’t the strain of thought that the post modernists for example in the universities turned to is preposterous. It’s not a conspiracy theory and anyone who thinks it is just has no idea what the ideas mean.”

In my view, the term has become an umbrella term used to describe modern day progressivism that is rooted in something called Critical Theory, which was espoused by the thinkers of the Frankfurt school. When the term Critical Theory is capitalized, it refers specifically to the product of several generations of thinkers from the Frankfurt School, as opposed to a critical theory in general. The Frankfurt School theoreticians described Critical Theory as critical insofar as it seeks to “liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.” Feminism, social justice, and post-colonial studies all have their roots in the Frankfert school.

All one has to do is go online and look into the curriculum at any University for general programs in the humanities and social sciences, such as women’s studies, fat studies, etc and you can observe what the curriculum is made up of. When I first started FBM, I often joined the Facebook groups of many university courses at different schools in Ontario just to observe the kinds of posts professors would make for their students to read. In general I noticed a lot of rhetoric that I would use the word toxic to describe. You will see that these programs are often entirely focused around interpreting the world around them through Critical Theory and a heavy emphasis on post-modernism. The original Frankfert intellectuals were highly critical of capitalism but also acknowledged the failure of Marxism. What they then essentially did after migrating from Europe to the United States was refocus on critiquing the social inequalities in society rather than just the economic ones.

Some of the most influential intellectuals of the Frankfert school include people like Michelle Foucault, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Eric Fromm and Jaques Derrida.

Herbert Marcuse is relevant for writing a now famous essay called “Repressive Tolerance” which was an essay contained in the book “A critique of Pure Tolerance”. In this essay he argues that in a free society, genuine tolerance can only exist in a situation of intolerance to limits on real freedom. In other words, he believed that people in a free advanced industrial society need to be “intolerant to the intolerant” So for example, forms of Christianity that do not tolerate homosexuality should not be tolerated.

The typical low intellect antifa member usually cites this essay to me while they are justifying violence against whoever they have arbitrarily labeled a Nazi at the time.

Theodor Adorno is another member of the Frankfert school. He wrote a book titled “The Authoritarian Personality” in which he describes parenthood, pride in one’s family, Christianity, patriotism and traditional gender roles and sexual attitudes as pathological phenomenon. The fact that Adorno’s philosophy has essentially set the framework for today’s hyper sensitive politically correct authoritarian culture is interesting, especially in light of the research I discussed earlier from Jordan Peterson and his grad students on left wing authoritarianism.

Because the philosophies of Cultural Marxism focus on themes of inequality, they appeal specifically to the group of people that Peterson identified as PC egalitarians, who are also the same people that Johnathan Haidt identified as being high in trait openness and having a moral matrix focuses primarily around the axiom of equality. These are the people whose minds filter reality around them in such a way as to be completely drawn in and seduced by the ideology of Cultural Marxism.

The average 20 something progressive ideologue out on the street usually has a personal ideology composed of bits of things like Peggy McIntosh’s Invisible Backpack and BLM talking points (to justify racism towards whites) the fictional gender-wage gap promoted by feminists (to justify hating men) and Marcuse’s ‘Repressive Tolerance’ (to justify violence against those who don’t share their ideology). Those are about the only rhetorical talking points they really need when they dawn their black mask and sunglasses to go out and “bash the fash” while they assault some old woman with a walker (we’ll get to that later). I find it tragically ironic that a school of thought original put forward to “free one from ideology” formed the basis of today’s intolerant Politically Correct ideology.

Black Lives Matter, part of the modern day coalition of progressive movements, was founded by three “avowed Marxist” women according to founder Patrisse Cullors. She’s gone on record saying “The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers.” She was referring to BLM co-founder Alicia Garza. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk.” Cullors was the protégé of community organizer Eric Mann. According to Mann’s Wikipedia page, “Eric Mann was born December 4, 1942 in Brooklyn, New York, into a Jewish home rooted in “anti-fascist, working class, pro-union, pro-‘Negro’, internationalist, and socialist traditions. Both sides of his family were Jews who fled the Russian Empire during the anti-Semitic pogroms of the early 1900s”. In 1968, Mann was a coordinator for Students for a Democratic Society, from which a more radical wing known as the Weather Underground splintered off. Mann was eventually charged with assault and battery, disturbing the peace, damaging property, defacing a building and disturbing the public assembly, for which he spent 18 months behind bars.

In May 2021, Cullors resigned as executive director of Black Lives Matter, saying she wanted to focus on a book and tv deal. This resignation happed amid criticism, including anger over her decision to buy a 1.4 million dollar home in an affluent majority white neighborhood and her lavish lifestyle. Only 1.8% of the neighborhood’s population is black.

In October 2020 Cullors signed a deal with Warner Bros. to develop and produce original programming across all platforms, including broadcast, cable and streaming.

I think the most import aspect of Cultural Marxism/Critical Theory that the average citizen should know about is its connection to Queer Theory, and what Queer Theory actually says about issues of child sexuality and age of consent laws. Michel Foucault, known as the “Godfather of Queer Theory” and a member of the Frankfurt School as well as one of the most well-known and frequently cited left wing intellectuals today, was a masochist and a homosexual who advocated for the removal of age of consent laws right down to infants.

Judith Butler, the most famous Queer Theorist of today was heavily influenced by Foucault and also promoted pedophilia. She proposed the legitimacy of “intergenerational sex” which was her euphemism for adults having sex with children.

Gail Ruben wrote the founding document of Queer Theory. In it, she writes: “like communists and homosexuals of the 1950s, boy-lovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders of their civil liberties”. She has also compared pedophilia with a preference for spicy food.

Third wave feminist Patrick Califia, a bisexual trans-man and former lesbian, has written “any child old enough to decide whether or not she or he wants to eat spinach, play with trucks, or wear shoes is old enough to decide whether or not she wants to run around naked in the sun, masturbate, sit in someone’s lap, or engage in sexual activity” (by which she means with adults).

There don’t seem to be any proponents of Queer Theory who have taken a stand against pedophilia. Critics of Queer Theory have asserted that this is precisely because Queer Theory is about transgressing social norms by definition.

I find it very interesting that within a lot of libertarian subcultures one will find people arguing in favor of pedophilia and removal of age of consent laws. These type of libertarians want to remove government from being an impediment to their ability to engage in sexual acts with children, whereas many progressive want to use the state to normalize pedophilia and even help use that kind of ideology to groom potential victims.

While I don’t like to both myself in with any labels, temperamentally speaking I am probably closet to a libertarian. I’m high in trait openness and I highly value freedom. But perhaps the most socially conservative thing about my is that I am completely opposed to any form of sexualizing children. I think there is a crucial different between fully developed, mature adults and people who have not yet reached that point, and I don’t wish to see the age of consent laws lowered.

As a free speech advocate, this leads to a line of thinking that can be hard to navigate. Should it be illegal in society for one to possess and/or manufacture illustrations or art that depicts sexual acts between adults and children if the images or videos are completely fake? In this situation, there is no actual victim, no one is harmed. Libertarians and anarchists will argue that if there is no victim, there is no crime.

However, I don’t believe this type of material should be legal in our society, even if it is simulated. With the rate and stage of development of technology now, deep fakes are almost at the point where they are indistinguishable from reality. My concern is that by allowing the existence of such material, there is a realistic chance this will encourage the problem to escalate within those who consume it. Currently, my best proposal for dealing with the issue of pedophiles is to establish clinics that can allow individuals to seek treatment for any type of such urges with anonymity. Above all though, I believe pedophilia and the sexualization of minors should remain very taboo in our society, and not be normalized.

Another school of thought within academia that is closely related to and often blends with Queer Theory is feminism. Feminism is now another vague umbrella term that means different things to different generations of people. Modern feminism is a significantly more radical way of thinking than it was in the 1970’s, and the older generations of people tend to not realize what the word means today to a younger and more radical generation of people.

On October 29, 2019 I live streamed coverage of a massive protest outside of a local branch of the Toronto Public Library. A feminist writer and activist named Meghan Murphy had reserved a room at the library to host a dialogue on transgender women who are biologically male sharing intimate female only spaces like changerooms. Murphy considers herself a feminist but is critical of transgender ideology and anti-discrimination laws like Bill C-16. As a result, over 1000 members of the local LGBTQ+ showed up to protest the event and labeled her a “TERF” (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist).

I livestreamed the large crowd outside for over 15 minutes before I was spotted by a crowd of antifa members dressed in all black. They recognized me and began coming towards me through the crowd, and since I was essentially by myself I had to retreat.

Another example of the Left cannibalizing itself and turning on its own for not being radical enough is the controversy around Harry Potter author J.K Rowling. Rowling has essentially been cancelled and boycotted by the woke Left for claiming that only women can have periods.

She initially drew criticism when she tweeted “People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud” along with a link to an opinion piece with the headline “Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate.”

She was immediately denounced by the woke left on Twitter as a transphobe, causing her to double down and tweet “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.” This only escalated the situation and has harmed her reputation immensely.

These examples of controversy within modern feminism are a good example of the way in which older generations of feminists have completely lost touch with where feminism is today.

From a very young age, it has always seemed like common sense to me that, as Feminist scholar Christina Hoff Summers puts it “gender is a complicated mix of burdens and benefits depending on the circumstance.” When I am critical of feminist ideology, it is not because I am unsympathetic to the various challenges and problems that women face in society. I am critical of the ideology of feminism specifically when it espouses narratives I think are incorrect, or puts forth manipulations used for political gain, such as the notion of the “gender wage gap” for example. So while I’m not anti-women, or a misogynist, I think that the issues and burdens that face both males and females in our society need to be recognized properly and truthfully in order to think of pragmatic and fair ways to potentially improve society. Progressive ideology is focused solely on acknowledging and amplifying women’s problems while simultaneously denying the issues men face. It’s emotionally motivated and usually driven by resentment and a drive for power. In academia it’s not allowed to be properly challenged or scrutinized.

Let us consider that in our society, men make up the majority of the homeless, the majority of military casualties, the majority of prison inmates, the majority of the victims of violent crime. Let us further consider that men are a minority in academia, men have a lower life expectancy than women, family courts absolutely favor females in domestic disputes, and that men contribute more to the state in terms of taxes than they take out over their lifetimes, while women do not. If we are to go even deeper, let us acknowledge that we are a primate species and within our species, females have sexual selection privilege, ensuring more of them achieve their biological goal in life (of sex/reproduction) than men. Men are, from a sociobiological perspective, expendable and disposable. There a very real challenges and burdens to being a man, and they deserve to be acknowledged as much as the burdens and problems women face. In reality, it is necessary for ensuring both genders are properly valued and taken care of in society requires that we have to honestly acknowledge the benefits of burdens of being male and female in society. I feel it’s also worth pointing out that in my view, obviously equal rights mean equal responsibilities, but I personally wouldn’t advocate women be drafted for combat in times of war, so the roles of men and women are different in peace time than in times of conflict, and in many situations will never be exactly “equal”.

It's also very relevant to point out that, any discussion about civilization and society as they relate to human nature and “progress” have to address the issue of hypergamy among humans, simply for pragmatic reasons. It’s a controversial issue that many feminists deny outright or claim is only the product of male oppression, but I don’t share their view. I think it’s been well established within psychology that female humans are “choosy maters” (as opposed to other types of primates) which means they have evolved a drive to mate across or up a social hierarchy. This has been shown to be true cross culturally. Numerous studies of mate selection in many countries around the world have found men and women report prioritizing different traits when it comes to choosing a mate, which shouldn’t shock most people. Men tend to prefer women who are young and attractive and women tend to prefer men who are rich, well-educated, ambitious, and attractive. Evolutionary psychologists believe this is an inherent sex difference that arises out of sexual selection, with men driven to seek women who will give birth to healthy babies and women driven to seek men who will be able to produce the necessary resources for the family’s survival.

Feminists and Social leaning theorists tend to dismiss evolutionary explanations for this and often claim this difference in preferences is due to women’s own ability to earn is constrained by having a disadvantaged status in a male dominated society.

Gilles Saint-Paul is an academic that has argued, using mathematical models, that human female hypergamy occurs because women have greater lost mating opportunity costs from monogamous mating (given their slower reproductive rate and limited window of fertility), and thus must be compensated for this cost through marriage. Marriage reduces the overall genetic quality of her offspring by precluding the possibility of impregnation by a genetically higher quality male, albeit without his parental investment. However, this reduction may be compensated by greater levels of parental investment by her genetically lower quality husband.

What this means is, when women don’t have to be monogamous, they can share the minority of high quality men. When they are monogamous, many of them have to settle for subpar men, but this is compensated for by their money and their nurturing abilities.

In is often argued in right-wing circles that Europe evolved the civilization it did largely because of socially enforced monogamy. The thinking goes that men naturally spend most of their time thinking about and pursuing mates/sex. In cultures that do not socially enforce monogamy, most men spend their time and energy pursuing sex, but when monogamy is socially enforced, men can then redirect their sexual energy towards outward civilizational expansion having already secured a monogamous mate. Since many women would rather share a high-status mate than have a low status mate of their own, around 20% of the highest status men in a population end up sharing around 80% of the females, with the remaining males and females having no mate at all.

I only bring this up because it’s relevant to point out that in a society where the majority of females are above the majority of males in the social hierarchy, it’s going to result in a lot of males with no mates, and a lot of women struggling to find a partner. In a lot of fields, and a lot of environments, women are dominant now. They’re dominant in academia and they out earn men in a lot of industries. This obviously has drastic social impacts. We recently reached a point where for the first time in modern history, more women over the age of 30 are childless vs women who have children. For both men and women, rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness have skyrocketed lately, despite all the material wealth of Western society. Another consequence of women’s sexual liberation is that the mechanism of enforced social monogamy is no longer present, meaning the mechanism the West was historically built upon for expansion isn’t going to be in effect anymore. Perhaps society can avoid regression by adapting new social norms, but I don’t know.

I’m not a traditionalist or a social conservative, and I’m not even necessarily advocating we go back to socially enforcing monogamy. I’m simply saying that I believe in a free society, but a freer society doesn’t necessarily make people happier if they are still brainwashed or influenced into lifestyles that aren’t conducive to long term happiness psychologically, which is a trap I feel I’ve obsessed a lot of my female peers fall into. This has a lot to do with incorrect ideas regarding human nature and the lack of understanding of female hypergamy. A lot of politics in general is driven by resentful people. A lot of people are resentful because they can’t get a mate. A lot of people are also resentful and nihilistic because they were sexually abused.

The deep tragedy of our society now is that too many children are forced into sex they don’t want while so many adults are unable to acquire any consensually.

“The feminist concept of patriarchy is embellished from the anthropological observation that in many cultures men appear to hold more social, economic and political power and resources to dominate women because they hate them (misogyny). My research suggests patriarchy is vastly more complex than feminists have ever imagined and that women have just as much influence in its structure and maintenance as men.”

The reality is patriarchy exists because it is the mechanism by which women select mates, not because men hate women or seek to oppress them.

The best illustration of how the Culturally Marxist theories developed by the Frankfurt School have formed narratives within Academia that absolutely demonizes the concept of White Identity and is specifically maliciously toxic towards white males as The Grieve Studies Affairs controversy. The grievance studies affairs.

As Peter explains: Since approximately June of 2017, I along, with two other concerned academics, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose, have been writing intentionally broken academic papers and submitting them to highly respected journals in fields that study gender, race, sexuality and similar topics. We did this to expose a political corruption that has taken hold of the university. By this point several of these papers have been accepted in highly respected journals, and one claims that dog humping incidents can be taken as evidence of rape culture, has been officially honoured as excellent scholarship. I’m not going to lie to you, we have a lot of fun with this project. But don’t let that lead you to believe that we’re not addressing a serious problem. If you have a few minutes I’ll try to explain. To be clear up front, we think studying topics like gender, race and sexuality worthwhile, and getting it right is extremely important. The problem is how these topics are being studied right now. A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed, like those that make whiteness and masculinity problematic. The fields we’re concerned about put social grievances ahead of objective truth. So as a simple summary, we call the problem ‘grievance studies’. To test the depth of this problem, my collaborates and I dedicated ourselves to a one to two year secret project. Targeting top grievance studies journals with an agreement to publicly release our findings, no what the outcome. We started officially on August 16, 2017 and by Thanksgiving we were in trouble. We had begun ambitiously and mostly stupidly. Our first papers were really only suited to test the hypothesis that we could penetrate their leading journals with poorly researched hoax papers. That wasn’t the case, and we were wrong for thinking that we might be able to. So by late November it looked like all we had accomplished was ruining our reputations.

Jim: If this doesn’t achieve anything, it would actually frighten me.

Jim: The best tan tap into is there’s this kind of like religious architecture in their mind where privilege is sin. Privilege is evil. And then they’ve identified education as the place where it has to be fixed. So you can come up with these really nasty arguments, like let’s put white kids in chains on the floor at school as an educational opportunity. And if you frame it in terms of overcoming privilege, and you frame their resistance that they want this to happen to them, that they would complain about this. If you frame that in terms of “of they only complain about that because they’re privileged and they can’t handle it because their privilege made them weak”. Then it’s right in.”

Peter: So far what we’re learning is rather astonishing, but the data we’ve fathered requires more analysis to fully comprehend. What appears beyond dispute is that making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated at the highest levels of academic grievance studies.

Jim: We rewrote a section of Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism and this journal has accepted it. Social work.

Peter: This is deeply concerning because the work of grievance scholars goes on to be taught I classes, to design education curricula, to be taken up by activists, to influence how media is produced, and to misinform journalists and politicians about the true nature of our current cultural realities. No one tolerates this sort of corruption when the find out an industry is funding biased research to make itself look a certain way. The same scrutiny should apply to research when it pushes a political agenda and we have uncovered enough evidence to suggest that this corruption is pervasive among many disciplines, including women’s and gender studies, feminist studies, race studies, sexuality studies, fat studies, queer studies, cultural studies, and sociology. Truth will set us free. You may be thinking that the work done in these fields must be good, because it seems to continue the noble work of the civil rights movements. Well after having spent a year immerse in it, and becoming recognized as experts int it, we have to disagree. Grievance studies does not continue the work of the civil rights movements, it corrupts it. And it trades upon their good names to keep pushing a kind of social snake oil onto a public that keeps getting sicker. Progress is easier without grievance studies. My collaborators and I are left-wing academics who can now say with confidence these people don’t speak for us. This is now a plea to all the progressives and minority groups these people claim to speak for. We suggest you spend some time critically engaging with the ideas coming out of these fields and decide for yourself whether they speak for you.”

Speaking to Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Peter told Joe candidly that “I actually think that what we’re looking at with this woke movement, and you know we’ve kind of compared it to cults/ to religion, I actually think it’s evil, and reason is exactly what you just said. It plays on people’s best nature. It takes good people and twists them to its purpose. And that’s horrible. Like, the whole game is to try to make you a more nicer, more caring person. So it takes your care and turns it into something literally totalitarian. You’re not allowed to disagree with it. Anything you say you get branded with these horrible stigmas. They try to cancel people. It’s literally trying to use people’s best, fairest most just and caring instinct and trying to program them into this way of thinking.”

In Industrial Society and It's Future Ted Kaczynski also wrote “Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.”

After attempting many times to engage in rational and dialectic discussion with modern leftist ideologues, I can say I agree with that observation entirely. All I ever heard from them were rhetorical talking points that didn’t hold up to scrutiny. It was usually just a babbling mix of ignorance and/or narcissism. Nothing seems to have changed in the decades since Kaczynski wrote about these types decades ago.

#Tedkacynski #DerrickJensen