[UNLOCKED] Episode 541 - Calling Out "The Compatible Left" (w/ Gabriel Rockhill)

Bad Faith

News, Comedy, Politics

4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2026

⏱️ 155 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Founding director of the Critical Theory Workshop and professor at Villanova University Gabriel Rockhill is out with a new book that calls out many of the intellectual fathers of the academic left as insufficiently imperialist and often funded by the CIA. How have we been mislead by the "compatible left" -- a cohort of leftists that support marxism only in theory while inveighing against actually existing socialism? Where do Slavoj Zizek & Noam Chomsky fall in this analysis? How do we identify the contemporary "compatible left" in our media and political environment, and if the deep state is so effective at coopting left movements, what can we possibly do to evade them and achieve revolutionary change? This is a sprawling, three-hour episode you wont want to miss.

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Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm
0:02.0	MOYOVUKUKUK
0:05.0	I'm
0:06.0	A
0:07.0	BORP
0:09.0	TAN I'm so excited to be. I'm so excited to have on Bad Faith podcast for the first time, Professor Gabriel Rockhill.
0:46.5	He is the author of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism and has raised this very provocative conversation about whether or not this idea of
0:57.5	cultural Marxism that has been the betton noir of conservative movements for the last
1:03.7	five, six years should also maybe be criticized by the left. So welcome to Bad Faith podcast. It's such a pleasure to talk to you.
1:16.9	Thanks for having me. All right. I should also mention that you're a professor at Villanova University. And you also
1:23.3	run an educational nonprofit called the Critical Theory Workshop. So I'm really happy to have you
1:28.3	with us working through some critical theory. Now, Professor Rockhill, you've made some waves
1:34.0	by saying things like the CIA ran the largest patronage system in the history of humanity.
1:40.6	And I think really provoking lots of us who are very skeptical, and I've done episodes about
1:46.0	this in the past, right, about the ways in which the CIA and other sort of deep state
1:50.6	institutions have had this influence in our art and our cultural products and a way to influence
1:55.2	our broader politics. You've really trained laser focus on the Frankfurt School, which is a source of a body of
2:02.9	Marxist knowledge that is often targeted by the right as the problem and the root of all
2:07.8	the leftism in the country. So why is it that we should potentially be as skeptical of the Frankfurt
2:13.2	school as, say, Christopher Rufo.
2:22.5	Well, the first thing that I'd say is that reference to the Central Intelligence Agency being the largest patron of arts and culture, arguably in the history of humanity,
2:26.8	comes from U. Wilford, who is one of the leading specialists on the Central Intelligence
	...

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