‘Cultural Marxism’ is a conspiracy theory. Just ask Wikipedia.

Search “cultural Marxism” on Wikipedia, and you’ll be redirected to a page titled “Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory.”

This answer of "five" to Winston Smith’s two plus two prompt is a contradictory work of propaganda that reflects the culmination of roughly four years of leftists trying to get their denials straight.

The page smears as delusional and anti-Semitic those with the audacity to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough — including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Jordan Peterson, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, British Home Secretary Suella Braverman, the late Andrew Breitbart, and former communist David Horowitz.

Furthermore, it bears out Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger’s 2021 sense that the platform now deals primarily in “propaganda” and exists only to “give an establishment point of view.”

One of the first substantial versions of the page, around September 2020, revealed the authors’ early ambitions to build a case around the claim that cultural Marxism is a “far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory.”

According to the Wikipedians, cultural Marxism is allegedly “far-right” — a label perhaps now deserving of its own conspiracy theory page — because various people to the right of Josef Stalin had used the term over the decades.

Cultural Marxists have had an incredible impact on secular and religious institutions alike. They’ve marched through the halls of the academy, the legislature, and corporate America.

It was apparently “anti-Semitic” because there were some Jews among the cultural Marxists criticized over their political project, and, according to the Wikipedians, cultural Marxism’s notable Jewish critics were exceptional. The page now quotes leftist academic Martin Jay, who has been textually romancing the Frankfurt School since the 1970s. He calls Jewish criticism of cultural Marxism “puzzling and uncomfortable.”

The reasons provided on the page for why cultural Marxism is a “conspiracy theory” have varied over time.

In an older version of the page, Wikipedians figured Frankfurt School critical theory scholar Joan Braune’s statement, “Cultural Marxism does not exist,” amounted to some kind of proof, notwithstanding her unmistakable bias.

Another reason given was that leftist academics with Marxist leanings and hopes of cultural transformation don’t necessarily identify with a single school of thought called “cultural Marxism.” They are instead inclined to call themselves “postmodernists,” “post-colonial scholars,” “senators,” etc.

On Wikipedia’s current cultural Marxism page, which sports a quote from critical theorist Rachel Busbridge calling cultural Marxism “a distinct philosophical approach associated with some strands of the Frankfurt School,” Wikipedians maintain the whole thing is a conspiracy theory because the efficacy and influence of intellectuals identified as exponents of the movement have been exaggerated. Take it on faith from ink spilled in a pinko magazine.

Wikipedians appear to have characterized “cultural Marxism” this way because the term signals an actionable understanding of an all-too-real socio-political project, which, once identified, can be thwarted. Contrary to the Wikis’ assertions and Braune’s conclusion, cultural Marxism is a well-defined and well-chronicled offshoot of Marxism.

Stated simply, cultural Marxism is a mutated form of Marxism in which identity is tactically substituted for class and the revolution no longer comes from without or below but from within and above.

Cultural Marxism effectively took off running just before World War II with the suggestion from Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci that rather than a “war of maneuver,” leftists should adopt a “war of position.” The Frankfurt School in Germany was incubating similar notions, which would later be exported to America with Herbert Marcuse, the “father of the new left,” who later conceded that “today’s cultural revolution … involves a transformation of values which strikes at the entirety of the established culture, material as well as intellectual.”

Cultural Marxism, as we know it today, became an unmarked life raft for fellow travelers whose revolutionary ambitions began to sink midway through the 20th century. After all, Marxist socialism had repeatedly been shown in practice and in theory to be both economically unworkable and morally bankrupt — especially after Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech in 1956.

Seeing the writing on the wall and cognizant that the almost daily leftist terror attacks in the West were getting the Reds nowhere fast, shrewd leftists — Marcuse in particular — picked up the baton from Gramsci and carried it forward, contemplating a disguised alternative to the bloody and class-focused revolutionary Marxism then failing everywhere.

Marxists found that those previously expected to throw off their chains had been unwilling to do so. They were self-enslaved by an acceptance of their so-called oppressors’ institutions. Cultural Marxism offered a possible remedy: Have the unshackled take over these institutions and gradually liberate those otherwise stuck in their ways — to execute what Rudi Dutschke later characterized as a “long march through the institutions.”

Like Saul Alinsky’s ideal revolutionary organizer, the cultural Marxist would find a way to “shake up the prevailing patterns of [men's] lives — agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate.”

Cultural Marxists have had an incredible impact on secular and religious institutions alike. They’ve marched through the halls of the academy, the legislature, and corporate America.

Despite their mileage, we’re now supposed to trust — on the basis of a cherry-picked collection of leftist works and denials — that the march was only theoretical, that the grand marshals’ impact has been exaggerated, and that the observation otherwise itself is rooted in anti-Semitism.

We’re told to dismiss as fantasy the idea there is “an ongoing and intentional academic and intellectual effort to subvert Western society via a planned culture war that undermines the Christian values of traditionalist conservatism and seeks to replace them with culturally liberal values.”

Not a chance.

The real conspiracy at work here is the concerted effort by nameless leftists to gaslight the American people into discounting cultural Marxism both as a threat and as a reality.

(H/T: End Wokeness)