The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West
Rev Left Radio
Breht O'Shea
4.8 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 June 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Breht is joined by A.J.A. Woods, author of The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. In this conversation, they explore the genealogy of the "Cultural Marxism" myth, the reactionary forces that shaped it, and the way it continues to animate right-wing attacks on liberation movements, critical thought, and social progress. Moving from the upheavals of the long 1960s through Lyndon LaRouche, the New Right, the Tea Party, and today's panics over "wokeness," CRT, and gender, Woods shows how "Cultural Marxism" functions less as a coherent theory than as a flexible ideological weapon: one that explains away popular struggles for equality and emancipation as elite manipulation, cultural subversion, and civilizational decay. The result is a rich historical and political analysis of one of the contemporary right's most influential myths, and of the broader culture-war terrain on which reaction, neoliberalism, and authoritarianism increasingly converge.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. |
| 0:08.5 | On today's episode, we have on the author A.J.A. Woods, who put out the book recently through |
| 0:13.7 | Verso, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the |
| 0:20.0 | decline of the West. |
| 0:21.3 | All of us have heard the term cultural Marxism. |
| 0:24.0 | Some of us might just dismiss it as some sort of neo outgrowth of Judeo-Bulshivism, |
| 0:29.5 | which, you know, there's some truth there. |
| 0:31.0 | But this Gromshian historical analysis of the superstructural usage of cultural Marxism, how it arose historically, |
| 0:39.6 | interestingly, through an ostensibly left-wing formation of Lyndon LaRouche and his little |
| 0:45.1 | sort of authoritarian, sectarian, cultish group at first. It arises in that context, then gets |
| 0:51.6 | handed over to the right, taken by the new right, and developed. |
| 0:55.8 | And now we still hear it to this day. We hear, you know, Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay, |
| 1:00.2 | making a big part of their political rhetoric centered around this idea of cultural Marxism. |
| 1:07.0 | And we hear, you know, the right wing all the time talking about how, like, neoliberal |
| 1:13.3 | Democrats are communist or Marxist. |
| 1:15.9 | I watched this really sad video recently of this young father in his 30s or something, |
| 1:20.5 | just kind of talking about the economic hardship. |
| 1:23.0 | Life's getting so expensive. |
| 1:24.2 | It's hard. |
| 1:24.7 | He can't, you know, he has to work two jobs to provide for his kids. |
| 1:29.0 | He's struggling. He can no longer take him on vacation. He remember growing up and his dad |
| 1:32.7 | used to take him on vacation. He can't afford that. He's just getting by paycheck to paycheck. |
... |
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