4

Cultural Marxism and

the Radical Right
Jérôme Jamin

Abstract: This essay examines the conspiratorial dynamics

of the term Cultural Marxism, which has been deployed
by a number of extreme right activists. Jamin parses this
discourse from its origins in the Free Congress Foundation,
to its uptake by the high-profile American politician
Pat Buchanan, to its eventual employment by Anders
Breivik. As well as in Anglophone settings such as Breivik’s
manifesto, analysis also highlights that the concept has
found a relevance within the British extreme right. Figures
including Nick Griffin have drawn on this terminology,
a discourse offering a useful crutch to support various
political arguments. Jamin’s conclusions highlight the
nebulous nature of this discourse, allowing a variety of
protagonists to use it to mobilize a range of passions.

Keywords: Anders Breivik; conspiracy theories; Cultural

Marxism; Free Congress Foundation; Pat Buchanan

Jackson, Paul and Anton Shekhovtsov. The Post-War

Anglo-American Far Right: A Special Relationship of Hate.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
doi: 10.1057/9781137396211.0009.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137396211.0009
P. Jackson et al. (eds.), The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right: A Special Relationship of Hate
© Paul Jackson and Anton Shekhovtsov 2014
 Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right 

Through his murderous attacks in July 2011 in Norway, Anders Breivik

has explicitly included himself in the works of authors who, for about the
past 20 years, or since about the fall of Communism, see the Frankfurt
School, and its proponents, as the source and the cause of ‘multicultural-
ism’ in the West. Though certainly in a more dramatic and spectacular
way than his predecessors, Breivik has simply added his name to a long
list of political and religious groups, each of which view their activities
as confronting what they see as Cultural Marxism. So, as Timothy James
McVeigh – the American Army veteran who blew up a truck rigged with
explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City (19 April 1995) – justified his actions by invoking the Turner Diaries
by Andrew MacDonald,1 Anders Breivik, in committing his crime, also
put the spotlight on a literature little known by the public at large.
This chapter analyses the place of the threat alleged by Cultural Marx-
ism in the discourse of the radical and extreme right, in the United States
as well as in continental Europe and, more briefly, the United Kingdom
too. The underlying aim of this chapter is to examine the determinant role
that this ‘threat’ plays in the Anglophone extreme right, in particular at
the intellectual, ideological and doctrinal levels, in comparison to other
countries. Certainly if the Netherlands, France or other countries have
parties or political groups which borrow the rhetoric of ‘fighting’ against
Cultural Marxism, or its more nebulous variant, ‘political correctness’,
it certainly finds its origins in the United States, and more broadly the
Anglo-Saxon world.
To achieve this, the chapter will begin by unpicking the meanings
behind the notion of Cultural Marxism, from its origins to its use in
Anders Breivik’s manifesto released shortly before the Oslo and Utøya
massacres. It will show that the term emerged from the literature of
American ultraconservatives following the fall of the Berlin Wall as a
consequence of the disappearance of the ‘red menace’ of Communism.
Secondly, it will focus on two important moments in the development
of the term. It will describe the phrase’s usage from the beginning of
the 2000s within the discourse of Pat Buchanan, a political commen-
tator and multiple US presidential candidate. Then it will illustrate the
re-emergence of the term some 10 years later, in the manifesto of Anders
Breivik and in the subsequent justification of his acts throughout his trial.
In both cases, we will see that Buchanan and Breivik emphasise the same
basic theme, Cultural Marxism, in their denouncement of what they see
as two different threats. Finally, from these explorations of the usage of

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 Jérôme Jamin

the term, the discussion will examine other current uses of the notion
of ‘Cultural Marxism’ in the Anglophone radical right. To conclude, it
will show how the ‘Cultural Marxism’ threats are used by a variety of
activists to argue for the defence of their political standpoints, setting
this in a language of preserving freedom and democracy, but ultimately
only within a framework designed to defend Judeo-Christian values.

The notion of Cultural Marxism

The goals of the fight against Cultural Marxism, and the means of
putting it into place, vary from one political group to the next.2 Before
getting into the details of the discourse and of the literature, it is helpful
to firstly summarise the ‘battle’ being undertaken in the following way.
For those ‘fighting’ against Cultural Marxism they see the idea revolving
around the assertion that yesterday’s Marxists would have a very diffi-
cult time today finding ‘the proletariat’ to support their revolutionary
cause/goals. As a solution to this, in order to regain public trust, Marxist
must now extend the defence of the ‘proletariat’ to the ‘new proletariat’,
who are now made up of women to be protected against ‘macho men’;
foreigners protected from ‘racist nationals’; homosexual people from
‘homophobes’; humanists from ‘Christians’; juvenile delinquents against
‘violent and aggressive police’ and so forth. Regarding strategy, the
theory states that Cultural Marxists must accuse their enemies of being
racists, anti-Semites, homophobes, fascists, Nazis and conservative,
which allows for the implementation of a ‘politically correct’ language,
and the banning of criticism of Cultural Marxism. As such, the ultimate
goal of Cultural Marxists, according to the theory, is to discredit institu-
tions such as the nation, the homeland, traditional hierarchies, authority,
family, Christianity, traditional morality in favour of the emergence of an
ultra-egalitarian and multicultural, rootless and soulless global nation.
Taking a variety of forms, Cultural Marxism has appeared in
conservative and radical American literature from the beginning of the
1990s, often developed in articles published in confidential journals,
some of which have either ceased to exist or are no longer published.
When consulting these numerous texts addressing Cultural Marxism,
one discovers that they all draw on the same set of core texts, judged to
be fundamental to giving shape to the critique. To give some examples
of these texts, it is worth mentioning Michael Minnicino’s article ‘The

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 Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right 

Frankfurt School and “Political Correctness” ’, published in the winter of

1992 in Fidelio magazine3; Gerald Atkinson’s article entitled ‘What is the
Frankfurt School (and its effect on America)?’, published in 1999 on the
informational site Western Voices World News4; William Lind’s article
‘The Origins of Political Correctness’, published in 2000 on the website of
the conservative institute, Accuracy in Academia, and taken from different
conferences held in 2000 by the same organisation5; John Fonte’s article
‘Why there is a culture war’, also published in 2000 in a ‘policy review’
by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University6; a multi-authored work
– which is, without a doubt, the most complete, most often cited and the
most commented on among these core texts – ‘Political Correctness’: A
Short History of an Ideology, published by the Free Congress Foundation
in November 2004 under the editorship of William Lind7; and finally a
shorter and more recent article by William Lind, ‘The roots of political
correctness’, published in 2009 on the website of The American Conserva-
tive magazine.8 Though these individual texts each have their own value,
it is Lind’s multi-authored work, ‘Political Correctness’: A Short History of
an Ideology, to which we must direct our attention, being unanimously
cited as the reference since 2004 and reworking many of the ideas devel-
oped before 2004.
In his chapter in this edited volume, entitled ‘What is “Political
Correctness”?’, William Lind – a military expert and intellectual
conservative – evokes the all-powerful nature of a new state ideology in
the United States. He called this ‘Political Correctness’, and immediately
associates it with Cultural Marxism, that is to say ‘Marxism translated
from economic into cultural terms’ (p. 5). This was a transfer initially
undertaken by the leaders of the Frankfurt School, who we will return
to below. Lind draws many parallels between classic (economically
based) Marxism and what he calls Cultural Marxism. Both, he explains,
aim to create a classless society and so both are totalitarian ideologies.
This point is crystallised in comments such as: ‘The totalitarian nature
of Political Correctness can be seen on campuses where “PC” has taken
over the college: freedom of speech, of the press, and even of thought are
all eliminated’ (p. 6). For Lind, the two ‘Marxisms’ rely on one founding
reason for explaining history: economic Marxism stresses that history is
determined by ‘ownership of the means of production’. Cultural Marx-
ism ‘says that history is wholly explained by which groups – defined by
sex, race and sexual normality or abnormality – have power over which
other groups’ (p. 6). Further, explains Lind, the two Marxisms ‘declare

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 Jérôme Jamin

certain groups virtuous and other evil a priori’. Classical Marxism ‘defines
workers and peasants as virtuous and the bourgeoisie (the middle class)
and other owners of capital as evil’. Political Correctness and Cultural
Marxism ‘defines blacks, Hispanics, Feminist women, homosexuals and
some additional minority groups as virtuous and white men as evil’
(p. 6). Finally, Lind considers that the two Marxisms are characterised by
their expropriation. Economic Marxism aims to expropriate the wealthy
and bourgeois; Cultural Marxism punishes, through heavy fines and by
unjust laws, anything that does not adhere to the new ideology. Lind
cites affirmative action (‘positive discrimination’) in the United States
as a means among numerous others to favour the so-called ‘virtuous’
minorities to the detriment of White men (p. 6). Lind concludes that if
economic Marxism is ‘dead’ and discredited, Cultural Marxism has taken
its place. And though the ‘medium’ has changed, the message remains
the same: the necessity of ‘a society of radical egalitarianism enforced by
the power of the state’ (p. 6).
In ‘What is the Frankfurt School (and its Effect on America)?’ – an
article which would later influence the presidential candidate Pat Bucha-
nan in his book The Death of the West – Atkinson goes on to say:
Didn’t America win the Cold War against the spread of communism? The
answer is a resounding ‘yes, BUT.’ We won the 55-year Cold War but, while
winning it abroad, we have failed to understand that an intellectual elite
has subtly but systematically and surely converted the economic theory of
Marx to culture in American society. And they did it while we were busy
winning the Cold War abroad. They introduced ‘cultural Marxism’ into the
mainstream of American life over a period of thirty years, while our attention
was diverted elsewhere.9

Meanwhile, in the chapter entitled ‘Political Correctness in higher educa-

tion’, Cribb (a former advisor to President Ronald Reagan) describes the
fear which has allegedly overrun university campuses under the name
of political correctness and the fight against homophobia, sexism and
racism. From discrimination in hiring or in enrolment in the name of
multiculturalism to conservative newspapers being stolen, destroyed or
burned by ‘activists’, and the imposition of language conventions so as to
avoid harming minorities, Cribb describes a universe wherein professors
judged to be too conservative or simply in favour of the army are refused
promotions, where male workers find themselves hounded by feminist
activists, and where, in the end, ultra-politicised academics indoctrinate

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 Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right 

their students in the name of the cult of egalitarianism, based on a

destructive relativism, fruit of the labour of the ideological influence of
the heirs of the Frankfurt School.
In some respects, as we will see in the multiple uses of the notion of
Cultural Marxism by numerous different actors following this initial
development of the term in the United States, everything is already said
here. With the fall of the Berlin Wall the Communist threat disappeared,
and yet only a few years later there emerged a literature claiming that the
fight was still not over, and in many ways, the threat had passed from
economic to the cultural arena. According to the analysis, the former
‘proletarians’ who needed saving from capitalism made way for the new
‘proletarians’: women, gays, sexual minorities, ethnic minorities and
immigrants. They must defend themselves against the ‘White man’ with
new weapons such as the fight against racism, sexism, male chauvinism,
the struggles which Lind regroups under ‘politically correct’, which is
nothing other than a thought control capable of suppressing everything
that is not thought or spoken ‘correctly’.
If the literature on Cultural Marxism appeared at the beginning of the
1990s, the various abovementioned authors place its birth during the
1930s. To this, Atkinson points out that Cultural Marxism and Critical
Theory were concepts developed by a group of German intellectuals who
in 1923 founded the Institute for Social Research, better known by the
label the Frankfurt School. Atkinson explains that, in 1933, when the
Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the School fled to
the United States where they joined major universities and influenced
approaches to teaching in these institutions.10 Despite differences in
style and tone employed by various authors who contributed to ‘Political
Correctness’: A Short History of an Ideology, the majority insisted that the
Nazis were not completely wrong to distrust these émigré Marxist intel-
lectuals, figures who were not restricted in developing their profound
influence on the values of young American university students, and who
showed neither respect nor consideration for the culture of their new
home country.
Among the Marxist intellectuals, the most regularly cited as reflecting
the membership of the School can be found in Raehn’s text, ‘The histori-
cal roots of “Political Correctness” ’. In particular, this chapter, again
taken from ‘Political Correctness’: A Short History of an Ideology, includes
short biographies of Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich,

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 Jérôme Jamin

Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkhe-

imer.
Following its emergence in the political discourse, two particular
moments characterise clearly the wider impact of the theme of Cultural
Marxism. Firstly, its appropriation since the early 2000s by Pat Buchanan;
the second, ten years later, was its tragic application by Anders Breivik,
who used the concept as a justification for his actions in his manifesto,
and during his trial. In both cases, the ‘threat’ of Cultural Marxism
allowed Buchanan and Breivik to frame their particular political analysis
in terms of defending freedom, democracy and Judeo-Christian values,
while also largely avoiding an openly racist or xenophobic discourse
associated with traditional fascist ideologies such as Nazism.

Pat Buchanan’s Cultural Marxism

Patrick Joseph Buchanan was born in Washington, DC, in 1938. As the

Anti-Defamation League highlights, as a ‘columnist, broadcaster and
influential staff member in the Nixon and Reagan Administrations,
Buchanan has been a long-time, consistent voice of the right’,11 and also
a candidate on multiple occasions for President of the United States, in
1992, 1996 and 2000. Considered by some as a traditional conservative,
by others as a conservative populist, he has also been described as one
of the leading figures of paleo-conservativism.12 Buchanan has also been
notable for presenting hard-line attitudes towards migrants, homosexual
people and secularists. This has led to him being seen by some as an
extremist (even far-right), while others have even viewed his positions
against globalisation as ones that mark him out as being on the left, at
times causing potential confusion.13
In his numerous speeches and in some of his other works,14 Buchanan
clearly denounces the ‘ravages’ of Cultural Marxism. The ideology, as it is
denounced by Buchanan, is a complex synthesis between Marxism and
materialism, secularism and atheism, individualism and egalitarianism,
as well as, in economic terms, capitalism and communism. We find these
disparate elements throughout Buchanan’s work and, in many ways, the
point of departure of the ideology that he denounces is the ‘cultural
revolution’, a revolution which finds its source in Max Horkheimer of the
Frankfurt School, first in Germany, and then later in the United States.
As he put it:

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 Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right 

At Horkheimer’s direction, the Frankfurt School began to retranslate Marx-

ism into cultural terms. The old battlefield manuals were thrown out, and
new manuals were written. To old Marxists, the enemy was capitalism; to new
Marxists, the enemy was Western culture. [ ... ] To new Marxists, the path to
power was nonviolent and would require decades of patient labor. Victory
would come only after Christian beliefs had died in the soul of Western Man.
And that would happen only after the institutions of culture and education
had been captured and conscripted by allies and agents of the revolution. [ ... ]
For old and new Marxists both, however, the definition of morality remained:
what advances the revolution is moral, what obstructs it is not.15

Citing authors including Gerald Atkinson, John Fonte and even Raymond
Raehn, Buchanan’s history situates the beginning of the conquest of the
minds somewhere between the Russian Revolution and the 1930s:
About this same time, music critic Theodor Adorno, psychologist Erich
Fromm, and sociologist Wilhelm Reich joined the Frankfurt School. But,
in 1933, history rudely intruded. Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Berlin,
and as the leading lights of the Frankfurt School were Jewish and Marxist,
they were not a good fit for the Third Reich. The Frankfurt School packed
its ideology and fled to America. Also departing, was a graduate student by
the name of Herbert Marcuse. With the assistance of Columbia University,
they set up their new Frankfurt School in New York City and redirected their
talents and energies to undermining the culture of the country that had given
them refuge.16

Following in the footsteps of the previously analysed authors, most

specifically the article by Kenneth Cribb entitled, ‘Political Correctness
in Higher Education’, Pat Buchanan considers that the attacks against
Christian America have been carried out via the public and private insti-
tutions which shape public opinion. In particular, he cites schools and
teaching: ‘But today, in too many of our schools our children are being
robbed to their innocence. Their minds are being poisoned against their
Judeo-Christian heritage, against America’s heroes and against American
history, against the values of faith and family and country.’17 Therefore,
education is the ideal place to spread the revolution’s new catechism:
Having captured America’s public schools and converted them into the parish
schools of secular humanism, the new religion that ‘dare not speak its name’
will not readily surrender these unrivaled pulpits for the propagation of the
faith. [ ... ] Allied with the secularist, the media, the academic community, the
state and federal education bureaucracies stand shoulder to shoulder, while
the federal courts shelter their monopoly control.18

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 Jérôme Jamin

If, above all, the American theoreticians of Cultural Marxism fear

relativism and the obliteration and replacement of Christian values by
a form of State atheism, we will see below that, with the reinterpreta-
tion of Cultural Marxism by Anders Breivik, another danger resides in
the replacement of ‘one religion with another’, of Christianity by Islam.
While Buchanan denounces the threat of Islam in Europe, he believes
that the war against Christian values and symbols is not aiming so much
to replace one religion with another in the United States, but instead is
placing the individual, the human being and his words, at the centre of
the system in place of God, the guarantor of the soul of America. As he
stresses: ‘And as we defend our country from threats from abroad, we
shall fight and win the cultural war for the soul of America. Because that
struggle is about who we are, what we believe, and the kind of people we
shall become.’19
Additionally, in certain respects, there is a proximity between the
concepts of ‘New World Order’,20 ‘Cultural Marxism’ and ‘Political
Correctness’ found in Buchanan’s language. The ‘New World Order’ is
the society as defined by Buchanan, ‘Cultural Marxism’ is the imposing
ideology on the minds of the masses allowing the way for this ‘New
World Order’. ‘Political Correctness’ is one of the weapons used by
cultural Marxists to prevent all verbal and written criticisms against the
‘New World Order’ project. As he states it in The Death of the West:
Why is this happening? Socialism, the beatific vision of European intellectuals
for generations, is one reason. ‘If everyone has the promise of a state pension,
children are no longer a vital insurance policy against want in old age,’ argues
Dr. John Wallace of Bologna’s Johns Hopkins University: ‘If women can earn
more than enough to be financially independent, a husband is no longer
essential. And if you can also have sex and not babies ( ...) why marry?’21

Anders Breivik’s Cultural Marxism

In the same way that Timothy McVeigh revealed to the public Andrew
Macdonald’s work, The Turner Diaries – from where he took his inspira-
tion – it is less the ‘thinking’ of Breivik that interests us than the particu-
lar literature that influenced his behaviour and his world view. This
section does not seek to treat and analyse Breivik’s manifesto, 2083: A
European Declaration of Independence,22 a compilation of texts lifted from
various websites,23 set alongside material authored by Breivik himself, on

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 Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right 

the same footing as the previous treatment and analysis of Buchanan’s

works and speeches. In fact, if Buchanan and Breivik have both played
the role of ‘political sounding board’ of Cultural Marxism, it was only
Buchanan who was reiterating the name Cultural Marxism in his many
speeches and his writings throughout his some 50-year career. Contrast-
ingly, for his part Breivik chose to strike a violent cord when battling
against Cultural Marxism. His action, one of extreme brutality – a
massacre – made his writings known thanks to his simultaneous sharing
of his manifesto with hundreds of like-minded people via new media
technology. If the manifesto, and its accompanying video, serves as an
illustration of his vision of the world, then it highlights that Breivik too
was driven by a perceived omnipresence of the threat of Cultural Marx-
ism. As such, drawing links between Breivik and the various writings
discussed already in this chapter, by others who have been concerned
with this theme, are worth examining.
To highlight its dominance within 2083: A European Declaration of Inde-
pendence, a simple word search shows that the term Cultural Marxism
appears some 100 times in Breivik’s manifesto. This is a figure that could
easily be multiplied several times if we include many of the concept’s
synonyms in the eyes of the author: ‘politically correct’, ‘cultural commu-
nism’, ‘multiculturalism’ and so forth. But, the most surprising aspect,
and certainly the most intriguing to analyse, resides in the manifesto’s
general construction as well as in its introduction.
From the start of his manuscript, Breivik explains that the manifesto
shows that ‘the fear of an Islamization of Europe is anything but an irra-
tional fear.’ Further, Breivik describes his reasoning here, when outlining
the manuscript’s general structure: the volume begins with a section
on the rise of Cultural Marxism/Multiculturalism in Europe and in the
West. This is followed by a section on the origins of Islamic colonisation
and the Islamisation of Europe and the West. This is then followed by
a section on the current state of anti-Marxist and anti-Jihad resistance
movements, a section on the struggle to follow in the decade to come, and
finally a collection of concrete recommendations on organising the battle
against Cultural Marxism on different political fronts. The chapter order
positions the danger of Cultural Marxism at the core of the manifesto,
focusing secondly on one consequence among others of this danger: the
rise of Islam and the disappearance of Judeo-Christian values.
If 2083: A European Declaration of Independence’s overall structure is
clear, the manifesto’s introduction and a now inactive internet link to

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 Jérôme Jamin

the website of the Free Congress Foundation24 leave no doubt as to the

literature consulted by Breivik during the writing of his text. Approxi-
mately twenty-seven pages of the overall manuscript reuse, often with-
out any cited reference, the different theses developed by William Lind’s
work, and published by the Free Congress Foundation.25 The manifesto,
it says, is a ‘compilation of works by many courageous individuals
throughout the world’, but also adds that none of these writers were
directly solicited for practical and for security reasons. Nevertheless, all
‘have decided to release their works freely to the public via the internet’.
This warning allows Breivik to plagiarise a core body of texts central to
the literature on Cultural Marxism, while protecting himself behind his
self-assigned mission of ‘releasing’ the words of others without revealing
their identities.
According to Chip Berlet,26 Breivik’s manifesto is part of the conspiracy
theory literature that is widespread within American Christian Right
circles. This theory affirms the link between Cultural Marxism and
political correctness, the link between Cultural Marxism and multicul-
turalism (which means also ‘Islam’ and ‘immigration’) and finally the
link between multiculturalism and the destruction of Judeo-Christian
nations. Further, according to Berlet, Breivik believes that ‘political
correctness’ ought to be denounced ‘as a conspiracy orchestrated by
Cultural Marxists in order to destroy the sovereign Christian nations’,
the Cultural Marxists (these ‘agents of the revolution’ to use the language
of Pat Buchanan) push the political leadership to authorise Muslim
immigration en masse towards Europe. As such, Chip Berlet links Brei-
vik’s study to that of conservative William Lind, and the now deceased
Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation.
The fear of Islam in Breivik’s manifesto is also illustrated in his adop-
tion of Bat Ye’or’s theme of ‘Eurabia’,27 a concern supported by movements
such as Jihad Watch, Stop the Islamization of America and its European
variant, Stop the Islamization of Europe.28

William Lind and associates, Pat Buchanan and

Anders Breivik
In revisiting the different authors presented, we can now distinguish
between at least three different ways of mobilising Cultural Marxism to
denounce a perceived threat. First, according to the terms originators,

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 Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right 

figures such as Michael Minnicino, Gerald Atkinson, William Lind,

Raymond Raehn, Kenneth Cribb and Jamie McDonald, the enemy is
called ‘political correctness’, and, in many ways, it is a requalification
in the 1990s of the Communist threat after the end of the Cold War.
Secondly, for Pat Buchanan, there is a difference. Buchanan shows a deep
fear for the future of Christian, White America due to the rise of ‘relativ-
isms’ that favour consumerism, individualism, atheism, egoism and lastly
nihilism, all caused by the influence of Cultural Marxism. Finally, in the
case of Anders Breivik, which also draws on the threat of Cultural Marx-
ism, here the fear is both the disappearance of the Judeo-Christian West
but perhaps, above all, the rising power of Islam. In other words, a single
theory has come to combine three discrete threats or three conspiracies:
communist, relativist and Islamist.
Yet despite Breivik’s fears being set within a much wider contem-
porary far-right discourse, few intellectuals from the radical right, or
representatives of populist or extreme right parties, have condoned or
minimised the massacre in Norway by Anders Breivik. This is with the
notable exception of Pat Buchanan who published an article WorldNet-
Daily with indicating a certain level of understanding vis-à-vis the killer’s
motivation (as did Jean-Marie Le Pen, former president and co-founder
of the French National Front, in France a few days later). In particular
here Buchanan put back-to-back, and on an equal footing, two issues:
the killing on the one hand, and the problem of immigration on the
other29:
Breivik is evil – a cold-blooded, calculating killer – though a deluded man of
some intelligence, who in his 1,500-page manifesto reveals a knowledge of the
history, culture and politics of Europe. [ ... ]. As for a climactic conflict between
a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and
advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this
one, Breivik may be right.30

Cultural Marxism in the discourse of the

Anglo-Saxon radical right
Though we can easily establish links between different authors since
the early 1990s who have developed the Cultural Marxism theme in
the United States, and show their influence on a well-known figure like
Anders Breivik, it is more difficult to measure the wider impact of this

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 Jérôme Jamin

discourse on the many radical groups that can be found in the United
States and in the United Kingdom. Moreover, with the exception of Brei-
vik, who compiled a manifesto but who is primarily a terrorist, the other
authors who are concerned with variants of Cultural Marxism discussed
in this chapter are figures who more clearly play the role of the intellec-
tual, or the political commentator. Nevertheless, links remain between
those who propose ideas and those who implement them.
Cultural Marxism does appear in the literature and websites related
to the radical right. For example, we find the appearance of Cultural
Marxism on some sites affiliated with the Tea Party movement in
the United States,31 though more regularly in the forums and blogs of
grassroots activists, and rarely in the official pages of the movement.
The Tea Party, however, is an ideal place to accommodate the ideas of
William Lind and Pat Buchanan, as it is fundamentally anti-communist
and anti-Marxist. Meanwhile, US Islamophobic groups like ‘Stop the
Islamization of America’, directed by Pamela Geller, and ‘Jihad Watch’,32
directed by Robert Spencer, figures who were often quoted by Breivik,33
are ideologues who have also, on occasion, been intermediaries dissemi-
nating the Cultural Marxist threat, a threat sometimes associated with,
or considered complementary to, the Islamist conspiracy theory of
Eurabia.34 Meanwhile, in the same way, according to Bill Berkowitz,35
Lind’s thesis on Cultural Marxism has been well received in the Holo-
caust denier community too, including being discussed in 2002, at a
conference organised by the anti-Semitic newspaper Barnes Review.36
Cultural Marxism has also been the subject of many discussions and
exchanges on forums such as Stormfront.org, a site more clearly associ-
ated with white racial nationalism, and espousing the platform ‘White
Pride World Wide’.37
If Cultural Marxism appears implicitly in different movements, it is
quite different from the more direct synonym found in the literature,
namely ‘political correctness’. Here, however, the term is so widely used
in radical circles that in some ways the opposite problem emerges: to
what extent do groups that speak of ‘political correctness’ do so because
they are supportive of the conservative American literature mentioned
earlier? Moreover, to understand the extent to which a common vision
of the world and of politics, setting out which enemies to fight, connects
the actors in the United States as well as those in the United Kingdom,
we must consider the concept of ‘political correctness’ as it relates to the
concept of freedom of expression. Indeed, ‘politically correct’ speech

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 Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right 

and antiracist legislation in the United States and the United Kingdom
are seen, on both sides of the Atlantic, as posing restrictions on freedom
of expression within radical and extreme right discourses.
Of particular interest here are articles posted on the website of the Brit-
ish National Party, as well as its manifesto of 2010. Indeed, it should be
noted that the party’s leader, Nick Griffin, had on many occasions taken
the opportunity to speak out on the Frankfurt School, and its influence
on Western Europe, as revealed in an interview entitled ‘Understanding
the Frankfurt School’ posted on the party website.38 Moreover, many
blog entries by party activists on the BNP’s website refer to the Frankfurt
School and its influence, such as an unsigned article published on 13
July 2012 titled ‘How to ruin a country? Part 2’. This webpage stated that
‘Multiculturalism is an alternative to the homogeneous national state
and seeks to replace it by overcoming and eventually destroying national
cultures by means of unlimited immigration, infiltration of its existing
institutions by Marxists using the Frankfurt school techniques, the
corruption of the media and most essentially the corruption of politics’. 39
Meanwhile, the BNP’s 2010 General Election manifesto proposes the
dismantling of what the party considers a legal arsenal imposing ‘politi-
cal correctness’. It stresses the BNP will abolish:

politically correct indoctrination of the police, teachers, and employees in

the public sector ... all departments, agencies or other agencies of government
whose sole and specific function is to attend to the interests of ethnic minori-
ties ... [and] ‘positive discrimination’ schemes that have made native Britons
second-class citizens.40

Also interesting here are all kinds of comments and analyses on freedom
of speech and political correctness from the United Kingdom Independ-
ence Party,41 and the English Defence League too.42 Among others, we
find at UKIP Daily, the blog of the movement, the idea of Marxists who
must now extend the defence of the ‘proletariat’ to the ‘new proletariat’:
‘The left have long agonised over common sense and came to the conclu-
sion that they needed to create a “new” common sense so that the aver-
age person could see Marxist Socialism for the paradise they believe it
to be. This is rooted in Cultural Marxism, and in particular the teaching
of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of Cultural Hegemony’.43 We also find
some mentions of ‘political correctness’ as ‘Government sex education’
which plans ‘to indoctrinate 5 year children’ in the UKIP website for
Liverpool’.44 On Facebook, some English Defence League posts have also

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 Jérôme Jamin

talked of ‘Cultural Marxism’ and its adepts as ‘enemies of free speech,

enemies of Freedom of opinion, enemies of Freedom of expression, and
enemies of Freedom of thought’.

Conclusion
What is the deep signification of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy
theory? First, it is important to underline its global approach, which
gives comforting answers to multiple questions on a very large scale,
which reach beyond national contexts. Secondly, it is also crucial to
stress the fact that this conspiracy theory is quite new. Finally, it is also
vital to mention that it gives to its users an easy way to criticise different
categories of the populations without using openly biological xeno-
phobic or racist rhetoric. Indeed, talking about Cultural Marxism lets
the proponents of a far-right conspiracy theory present themselves as
defenders of democratic values against ‘fake democrats’, ‘corrupted elites’
and even ‘parasites of all kinds’.
To take these points in turn, the global dimension of the theory is obvi-
ous. In the literature on the appeal of conspiracy theories, many authors
establish a difference between two kinds of conspiracies. According to
such analysts, history can indeed sometimes be driven via hidden plots
and conspiracies. Yet according to the advocates of conspiracy theories,
conspiracies are what give history its tempo, and explain all major devel-
opments. In this context, studying conspiracy theories does not mean
claiming there have never been hidden plots in history, rather it means
identifying as ‘conspiracy theories’ ideas that reduce complex historical
facts to the consequences of a systematic global plot. American historian
Richard Hofstadter was a pioneer on this point. Writing in 1968, he
stressed ‘there is a big difference between the localization of a plot at
a specific moment on a specific context, and considering the whole of
history is just a conspiracy’.45 More recently, Goldschläger and Lemaire
have shared this point of view, writing: ‘Plots exists, “the” plot doesn’t
exist’.46
With this in mind, clearly the conspiracy theory which justifies the
global struggle against Cultural Marxism also gives multiple answers
to frightening questions. Whatever version of Cultural Marxism one
analyses (the original ‘red menace’, Buchanan’s battle against relativism,
Breivik’s ‘Islamic plot’ and so on), the theory always seeks to comfort

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 Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right 

its believers by offering significations to a complex political and interna-

tional environment. With the idea that only a few people are organising
a vast, global conspiracy, according to Raoul Girardet, ‘all facts, whatever
are their causes, are gathered, in a hard-and-fast logic, in a unique causal-
ity, as much fundamental as all-powerful’. Girardet also stresses that
everything can be seen to happen as if ‘an interpretative platform was
established, in which could be inserted all events of the present, includ-
ing the most scary and the most disconcerting events’. This leads Girar-
det to conclude that ‘destiny will become understandable, and a certain
kind of rationality, at least some coherence, will tend to re-establish itself
within the disconcerting evolution of things’.47 In Conspiracy Nation, Peter
Knight makes a similar point:
Every conspiracy theory provides a narrative to legitimate its account of
contemporary society, offering a view of how things got to be as they are.
Conspiracy theory provides archaeology in narrative form, locating causes
and origins of the conspiracy, piecing together events, connecting random
occurrences to organize a chronology or sequence of sorts, and providing
revelations and denouements by detailing the conspiracy’s plans for the
future. Narrative provides a form of mapping for conspiracy theory, offering
not only an explanatory history but also a map of the future that is to come.48

Next to the global dimension of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy

theory, there is its innovative and original dimension, which lets its
authors avoid racist discourses and pretend to be defenders of democ-
racy. As such, Cultural Marxism is innovative in comparison with old
styled theories of a similar nature, such as those involving Freemasons,
Bavarian Illuminati, Jews or even Wall Street bankers. For Lind, Bucha-
nan and Breivik, the threat does not come from the migrant or the Jew
because he is a migrant or a Jew. For Lind, the threat comes from the
Communist ideology, which is considered as a danger for freedom and
democracy, and which is associated with different authoritarian politi-
cal regimes (Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc.). For Buchanan, the
threat comes from atheism, relativism and hard capitalism which, when
combined, transform people and nations into an uncontrolled mass
of alienated consumers. For Breivik, a self-indoctrinated lone-wolf,49
the danger comes from Islam, a religion seen as a totalitarian ideology
which threatens liberal democracies from Western Europe as much as
its Judeo-Christian heritage.50 In Lind, Buchanan and Breivik, overt
racism is studiously avoided. So, in an era when ideas can be banned

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 Jérôme Jamin

from mainstream media as far if they are labelled racist or sexist, the
interpretation of politics in the Cultural Marxism rhetoric offers a new
way to develop old ideas, but within a new framework.
To conclude, while Lind’s and Buchanan’s variants of Cultural Marx-
ism are concerned with a new form of Marxism threatening the United
States – a new kind of ‘red menace’ politics akin to the McCarthy era51 – the
re-interpretation of these themes by Breivik is perhaps the more worrying
development. His manifesto falls within a much larger European discourse,
one which also includes populist parties, far-right movements and secular
radical groups that are overtly Islamophobic, as well as many bloggers
decrying the ‘Islamisation of Europe’. In this context, while the ‘red menace’
theme might seem anachronistic, or simply eccentric, in Europe, the situ-
ation is very different when Cultural Marxism is reworked to include the
alleged ‘Islamic threat’. While more culturally acceptable, this threat also
appears credible for multiple groups, and therefore has a future on the
internet, in the blogosphere and in the social networks. So though the
Cultural Marxism theory was born within the esoteric circles of American
cultural conservatives in the 1990s (with articles and books from Lind and
Buchanan, among the most notable iterations here), it now owes its success
to an array of specialised websites and blogs on the internet concerned with
scapegoating,52 and demonising Islam.53 Such websites have powerfully
contributed to the adaption of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory for
20 years, a journey which reached a truly tragic point with appearance in
Breivik Manifesto in July 2011, a document made public just a few hours
before the explosion in Oslo, and the massacre on Utøya.

Notes
1 This 1978 work by the Extreme Right ideologue, William Pierce (under the
pseudonym of Andrew Macdonald), describes a coup d’état in the United
States led by White supremacists against the US government which has fallen
into the hands of ‘Blacks and Jews’ who have since ruled the country.
2 Jérôme Jamin, ‘Anders Breivik et le ‘marxisme culturel’ : Etats-Unis / Europe’,
Amnis : Revue de Civilisation Contemporaine Europes/Amériques, 12 (2013).
3 Fidelio is a publication by the Schiller Institute, an institute belonging to
the LaRouche network, the name of the American alarmist and politician
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche (1922). Article available online from www.
schillerinstitute.org (accessed 01 September 2013).
4 http://www.wvwnews.net (accessed 01 September 2013).

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 Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right 

5 Based in Washington, DC, Accuracy in Academia seeks to report

endoctrination of students on university campuses and the rhetoric of lies
associated with them. Lind’s text is available from http://www.academia.org
(accessed 01 September 2013).
6 The article is also available online from http://www.hoover.org/ (accessed 01
September 2013).
7 The work revisits some of the big names mentioned earlier. The multi-
authored volume is no longer accessible via the website Free Congress
Foundation; however, it is available from different outlets and conservative
magazines most notably LifeSiteNews, the source from which we are going to
analyse the below-mentioned document, and for which we will use the page
numbering, is from the site: http://www.lifesite.net
8 http://www.theamericanconservative.com (accessed 01 September 2013).
9 http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=8183 (accessed 01 September 2013).
10 The article is available from Western Voices World News at http://www.
wvwnews.net (accessed September 2013).
11 Anti-Defamation League (1991), Anger on the Right: Pat Buchanan’s Venomous
Crusade, p. 1. Report available from: http://archive.adl.org/special_reports/
pb_archive/pb_1991rpt.pdf (accessed 01 September 2013).
12 Mark Worrell, ‘The Veil of Piacular Subjectivity: Buchananism and the New
World Order’, Electronic Journal of Sociology, 4/3 (1999).
13 Edward Ashbee, ‘The Also-Rans: Nader, Buchanan and the 2000 US
Presidential Election’, The Political Quarterly, 72/2 (2001), 159–69.
14 See the author’s doctoral thesis devoted to, among others, the ideological
universe of Pat Buchanan: Jérôme Jamin, L’imaginaire du complot. Discours
d’extrême droite en France et aux Etats-Unis (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2009), 161–271.
15 Pat Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant
Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2002), 78–9.
16 Buchanan, The Death of the West,79–80.
17 ‘1996 Announcement Speech’, 20 March 1995.
18 Pat Buchanan, Right from the Beginning (Washington: Regnery Gateway,
1988), 352.
19 ‘1996 Announcement Speech’, 20 March 1995.
20 As a conspiracy theory explained by one of its main defenser, see Pat
Robertson, The New World Order (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991).
21 Buchanan, The Death of the West, 13.
22 Breivik’s manifesto is available from different places on the web. One single
version seems to still be circulating, available in pdf at beyond 1,515 pages
on some sites and 1,518 pages on others due to slight formatting differences.
Among the versions available, we suggest that found on the Public

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 Jérôme Jamin

Intelligence website http://publicintelligence.net/anders-behring-breiviks-

complete-manifesto-2083-a-european-declaration-of-independence/
(accessed 01 September 2013).
23 For an analysis of the writings of one of the key voices who influenced
Anders Breivik (Peder Jensen writing under the pen name Fjordman),
see Paul Jackson “The License to Hate: Peder Jensen’s Fascist Rhetoric in
Anders Breivik’s Manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence”,
Democracy and Security, 9/3 (2013), 247–69.
24 The link is http://www.freecongress.org/centers/cc/pcessay.aspx, now
inactive, we can deduce by the URL’s extension ‘CC’ that it reroutes
interested readers to a page dedicated to the Center for Cultural
Conservatism, the centre (also no longer active) at the heart of the Free
Congress Foundation which published online the multi-authored work
edited by Lind discussed earlier.
25 On this borrowing of text, see Øyvind Strømmen, ‘A propos d’UTØYA et de
la banalisation de l’extrême droite’, Recherches internationales, 92 (2011), 96.
26 Article is available from platform analysis on the Religious Right in the
Unites States: Talk to Action: http://www.talk2action.org (accessed 01
September 2013).
27 Eurabia refers to a conspiracy between Arab countries and European elites to
build a Muslim Europe in exchange for financial support and access to cheap
oil. Read the main author of this theory: Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab
Axis (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005).
28 Recommended readings include, among others, Liz Fekete, ‘The Muslim
conspiracy theory and the Oslo massacre’, Race and Class, 53/3 (2012), 31; Ryan
Lenz, ‘Christian Crusader’, Intelligence Report, 143 (2011). Available online on
the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center (December 2012): http://
www.splcenter.org (accessed 01 September 2013); and Øyvind Strømmen,
‘A propos d’UTØYA et de la banalisation de l’extrême droite’, Recherches
internationales, 92 (2011), 95–104.
29 On the commentary of Pat Buchanan regarding Breivik, also read Ryan Lenz
“Christian Crusader”, Intelligence Report, 143 (2011): http://www.splcenter.org
(accessed 01 September 2013).
30 This article was placed online on 25 July 2011 and is available from http://
www.wnd.com/ (accessed 01 September 2013).
31 The Tea Party movement is deliberately decentralized and consists of
autonomous entities, sections and Web sites. Among others, the following
platform refers to multiple sites specific to local Tea Party groups: http://
teaparty.org (accessed 01 September 2013).
32 http://www.jihadwatch.org/ (accessed 01 September 2013).
33 Strømmen, ‘A propos d’UTØYA’, 97.

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 Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right 

34 On the Islamic conspiracy, read Fekete, ‘The Muslim conspiracy theory and
the Oslo massacre’, 30-47.
35 Bill Berkowitz, ‘ “Cultural Marxism” Catching On’, Intelligence Report, 110
(2003: http://www.splcenter.org (accessed 01 September 2013).
36 http://www.barnesreview.org/ (accessed 01 September 2013).
37 http://www.stormfront.org/forum (accessed 01 September 2013).
38 http://www.bnp.org.uk/news/understanding-frankfurt-school (accessed 01
September 2013).
39 http://www.bnp.org.uk/news/national/how-ruin-country-part-2 ((accessed 01
September 2013).
40 The manifesto is available online at (pp. 21–2): http://communications.bnp.
org.uk/ge2010manifesto.pdf (accessed 01 September 2013), pp. 21–2.
41 See: www.ukip.org (accessed 01 June 2014).
42 See: www.englishdefenceleague.org (accessed 01 June 2014).
43 See the post of Chris Bond ‘Should the British left be defined as political
extremists?’, www.ukipdaily.com/british-left-defined-political-extremists/#.
U7KGZEBkyM6 (accessed 01 June 2014).
44 http://ukipliverpool.org/category/tags/political-correctness
45 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (London: Cape,
1966), 6.
46 A. Goldschläger and J. Lemaire, Le complot judéo-maçonnique (Bruxelles:
Labor/Espace de libertés, 2005), 7.
47 Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 54–5.
48 Fran Mason, “A Poor Person’s Cognitive Mapping” in Peter Knight,
Conspiracy Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 43–4.
49 Michael Wine, ‘Trans-European trends in Right-Wing Extremism’, in
Mapping the Far Right in Contemporary Europe Local, National, Comparative,
Transnational, ed. by Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin and Bryan
Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 2012), 329.
50 Marie Demker, ‘Scandinavian Right-Wing Parties. Diversity more than
convergence?’, in Mapping the Far Right, 242.
51 Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (New York:
Guilford Press, 2000), 156.
52 On the definition of the scapegoat within conspiracy theories, see our article
“Bouc émissaire” in Pierre-André Taguieff, Dictionnaire historique et critique
du racisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2013), 228–30.
53 Fekete, ‘The Muslim conspiracy theory and the Oslo massacre’.

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