0:00
The Democratic party, in my view, has been taken over by the political left.
7:19
And the Democratic party today is driven, and of course it's a big party, and these are generalizations that I've made, and I understand that there are very decent people in the democratic party. But the ideology of the democratic party today is called identity politics. And if you are a leftist you actually understand or you describe this as cultural Marxism. And what does that mean? Well Marx had this false idea that the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed. And he had the idea that capitalist democracies were also oppressors and oppressed.
8:36
It's that model. It was wrong when he said it, a hundred million people have been killed in its name. It's still wrong. And what the left has done is to extend this model of the oppressor and the oporessed to race, class, gender, sexual orientation. Everywhere they look they see oppression.
9:28
[Do you] see a big exodous from this country of black people? No. On the contrary. You see Haitians risking their lives to get here. Why? To be oppressed? No. ... Despite the fact ... there are bigots around, as [there are] always going to be bigots. But ... remember that Haiti [has been] a free country run by black people for over 200 years. But a Haitian in America has more rights, more privileges, and more opportunities, than any Haitian in Haiti.
More about cultural Marxism:
Karl Marx thought all of history could be explained by conflicts between people who were oppressed and their oppressors. Cultural Marxism is when that type of analysis is applied to contemporary culture and everybody is assigned to a group of either oppressed or oppressors. It is the same as identity politics. It is used to divide society into self-concerned groups and set them against each other so they can be more easily manipulated with appeals to victimhood and by demonization of their "oppressors". Another result is that many people are either programmed to fail because they are told they are oppressed or afraid to succeed and become an oppressor. This increases poverty, dependence on government, and support for leftist political parties. Cultural Marxism is related to "political correctness" because any attempts to heal the political polarization and other corrosive effects on society by opposing identity politics is said to identify individuals as oppressors and in that way silence political opposition.
Cultural Marxism is not just a construct used by conservatives. Jonathan Haidt who is a liberal sociologist describes it in this video at 1:03:
So there was a kind of a culture, we can talk about it in a moment but it's organized around victims of oppression its a vertical metaphor of privileged and oppressor people and victims.
Cultural Marxism involves cognitive distortions that can cause mental illness.
Cultural Marxism teaches people the distorted ways of thinking that are characteristic of mental illness. Cognitive therapy is one of the most effective forms of psychological treatment. It teaches people to recognize and eliminate distorted thinking that can cause depression and anxiety. Cultural Marxism is the opposite of cognitive therapy. It teaches people the distorted ways of thinking that cognitive therapy is designed to cure. Jonathan Haidt discusses this in an article he is a coauthor of on theltlantic.com:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
Below is a list of fifteen common cognitive distortions from psychcentral.com
1. Filtering. We take the negative details and magnify them while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation.
2. Polarized Thinking (or “Black and White” Thinking). In polarized thinking, things are either “black-or-white.”
3. Overgeneralization. In this cognitive distortion, we come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or a single piece of evidence.
4. Jumping to Conclusions. Without individuals saying so, we know what they are feeling and why they act the way they do.
5. Catastrophizing. We expect disaster to strike, no matter what.
6. Personalization. Personalization is a distortion where a person believes that everything others do or say is some kind of direct, personal reaction to the person.
7. Control Fallacies. If we feel externally controlled, we see ourselves as helpless a victim of fate.
8. Fallacy of Fairness. We feel resentful because we think we know what is fair, but other people won’t agree with us.
9. Blaming. We hold other people responsible for our pain, or take the other track and blame ourselves for every problem.
10. Shoulds. We have a list of ironclad rules about how others and we should behave.
11. Emotional Reasoning. We believe that what we feel must be true automatically.
12. Fallacy of Change. We expect that other people will change to suit us if we just pressure or cajole them enough.
13. Global Labeling. We generalize one or two qualities into a negative global judgment.
14. Always Being Right. We are continually on trial to prove that our opinions and actions are correct.
15. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy. We expect our sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if someone is keeping score.
Belief that all people are either oppressed or oppressors involves many cognitive distortions including: filtering, polarized thinking, overgeneralization, jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing, personalization, control fallacies, blaming, shoulds, fallacies of change, global labeling, always being right.
In his book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, a liberal, explains how progressive students have been intellectually damaged by identity politics:
(Excerpt by Ed Driscoll)
https://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2017/09/15/lilla-after-identity-politics-review/)
As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they are engaged in politics as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness. And they are less and less comfortable with debate.Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any questions that come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.
Cultural Marxism destroys its victim's ability to reason. Progressives can't explain how their beliefs are supported logically by facts. Instead of understanding whether their beliefs are valid, they chant slogans they have learned from someone else.
Adam MacLeod wrote in Undoing the Dis-Education of Millennials
http://newbostonpost.com/2017/11/09/undoing-the-dis-education-of-millennials/
I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.
KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov explained it this way:
http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/brainwashing/2007/bezmenov.htm
As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. ...he will refuse to believe it
The overreaction to the 2016 election provides ample evidence that cultural Marxism causes mental illness:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/post-election-stress-disorder-sweeps-nation/
...
My university is holding support groups for people terrified bc of the election results. Tell me again how every election is just like this?
...
“I think students everywhere are really afraid and need inspiration from current stakeholders,” said Larissa Szilagyi, the founder of the Women’s Political Caucus at Pace. “A lot of colleges are doing programming to help alleviate this anxiety — not because of their allegiance toward a conservative or liberal agenda, but because communities need to inhabit safe spaces. These programs help show students that we can overcome and we shall overcome oppression.”
...
“Because of the climate of this campus after the election and the number of students who would rather stay at home than go to class, I think keeping the campus active and loving and supportive is the best way to help students feel safer on campus,” she said.
A good way to understand what cultural Marxism is, is to consider how it has affected feminism.
Feminists used to be people who believed that women should be given the same opportunities in society that men have. The movement told women they were as good as men and could be successful at the same jobs as men.
Since cultural Marxism has taken over the movement, feminism has become about how men are the enemy and about how women need to be protected from them. Women are no longer equal, no longer able to fend for themselves, they need special protection because they are oppressed.
This is why cultural Marxism is subversive and culturally destructive. It does not encourage people to strive to excel, it convinces people they are being prevented from reaching their potential. Cultural Marxism also discourages people from taking on roles that lead to success in life for fear of becoming an "oppressor". Instead of uniting people as equals, cultural Marxism divides them setting them up as enemies fighting each other and it justifies and creates an expectation of failure.
According to Camilla Turner writing in telegraph.co.uk: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/21/victimhood-narrative-taught-schools-fuels-anxiety-young-women/
"Dr Joanna Williams, a lecturer in higher education at Kent University ...... said that if girls are instilled with a mindset of victimhood at a young age, it can set them back later in life. “When women go out into the world of work and experience obstacles, rather than persevering they think ‘oh these are the insurmountable barriers I was told about'."
...
Dr Williams said that the narrative continues at university where students are told that there is a "rape culture" or some kind of "epidemic" of sexual assault on campus....
“It is very difficult for women to present themselves as powerful, strong and capable if they think they need to be wary and anxious," she said.
A similar phenomenon occurred in other minority rights movements with equally harmful consequences.
But as David Horowitz says in the video above, people born in the United States don't know what oppression really is. No one is oppressed here. That's why oppressed people from all over the world want to come here to live.
Unfortunately, the leaders of political and social movements find it easier to gain power by preaching oppression not empowerment because it is easier to set yourself up as a "rebel leader" than as a role model for success.
The following video discussion between Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers illustrates how cultural Marxism has debased feminism and all other minority rights movements by changing their focus from the belief that we are all equal to the belief that some people are oppressed.
4:25
Camille Paglia: “It’s really started at the level of public school education. I’ve been teaching now for 46 years as a classroom teacher, and I have felt the slow devolution of the quality of public school education in the classroom.”...
“What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of the destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on – and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization. They now have been taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!”
~2:04
Camille Paglia: My generation of the 1960's, when I arrived in college in 1964 there were parietal rules in place so that the women in my dorm had to sign in at 11:00 at night. The men could run free. It was my generation that rose up and said that we wanted to be treated equally and we want freedom. And the colleges said the world is a dangerous place. You could be attacked you could be raped. We said, "Give us the freedom to risk rape. Freedom is much more important than protection and safety. And that's what young people have given up today.~5:59
Christina Hoff Sommers: And right now the fashion is the identity politics, intersectionality, this is all the rage, and its the premise of this theory it's the idea that all the oppressions intersect with one another and form this matrix of oppression. And so young people in a typical gender studies class now learn that they inhabit a society that is this matrix of oppression and depending on your identity you might be advantaged so you have unearned privilege or you might be burdened because of your race or maybe your disability or your gender or preference and on and on. But underneath it all is this assumption that the United States is a white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchal oppressive society. And in order to liberate ourselves we have to, I don't even know what they want to do - because it's all - maybe blame one another and form - have little feuds, on social media and on campus.
Growing Evidence That Russia Using ‘The Resistance’ To Stoke Division by PETER HASSON 11/02/2017
http://dailycaller.com/2017/11/02/growing-evidence-that-russia-using-the-resistance-to-stoke-division/
Recent reporting has shown that Russia’s attempts to inflame America’s political divisions included a concerted effort to promote identity politics, which currently dominates the American left wing.Several Russian accounts posed as a racial activist groups similar to Black Lives Matter. One of those pages, Black Matters, organized the massive anti-Trump protest in New York City on Nov. 12, four days after Trump won the election.
Another page, Blacktivist, had a bigger Facebook reach than the official Black Lives Matter Facebook account by the time it was shut down.
...
Yet another Russian account promoted a militant form of feminism, similar to the kind pushed by Women’s March organizers. The Russian operatives behind the account even fooled Women’s March organizers into sharing their content on Facebook.
Jonathan Haidt on Socialism and Human Nature
Related Articles
Jordan Peterson on the connection between progressivism and radical Islam explains why cultural Marxists and radical Islamists are allies because both groups desire the destruction of Western civilization.
https://higginswar.blogspot.com/2017/10/jordan-peterson-on-connection-between.html
KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov reveals Russian Subversion Tactics
http://higginswar.blogspot.com/2017/08/fascinating-kgb-defector-yuri-bezmenov.html
Cultural Marxism (Political correctness) can be addicting, it "teaches you to be a powerless victim", and "makes you unhappy by fomenting unrealistic expectations of utopia, and inciting resentment and jealousy,” it’s “terrible for mental health":
Former prof recounts her 'escape' from political correctness Toni Airaksinen Feb 16, 2018
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10530
Dr. Loretta Breuning, who was a professor of Management for over 20 years at California State before she left academia to launch her own think-tank, The Inner Mammalian Institute....
Breuning’s “ah-ha” moment came in the 1990s, when she realized she was lying to her students for “fear of sounding right-wing.” She writes that she “didn’t want to subordinate my life to ideological despotism,” but she ultimately felt she had no choice.
...
“I saw facts that conflicted with the prevailing belief system, but I questioned myself because I saw that people who question progressive assertions are ridiculed, shunned, and attacked,” said Bruening, who is also a member of Heterodox Academy.
“When I saw how the politically correct world view was affecting my kids, I found the courage to take off the goggles and see life without it,” she explained. “It took time, but I learned to meet my own needs instead of relying on political correctness to meet them for me. I want to help others take off the progressive goggles.”
...
While political correctness “offers a fast, easy way to pull yourself up by putting others down,” Breuning’s book offers strategies that can be used to hack your brain, so that you can trigger “feel good” chemicals without needing to engage in political correctness.
This can be hard, since some people are “addicted” to political correctness, Breuning says, noting that “if political correctness brought you rewards in youth, you got wired to seek good feelings from political correctness, and fear the loss of it.”
“You are effectively addicted to political correctness,” she declares. “It's better than substance addiction, but the two often go together. New neural pathways are hard to build, but it’s possible with repetition.”
Breuning argues that escaping political correctness isn’t about making a political statement. Instead, she argues that it can make well-intentioned people very unhappy in the long-run, since it “teaches you to be a powerless victim.”
“It wants you to be unhappy because that’s regarded as the engine of revolution. Political correctness makes you unhappy by fomenting unrealistic expectations of utopia, and inciting resentment and jealousy,” she says, adding that it’s “terrible for mental health.”
Source: Joe Rogan Experience #1006 - Jordan Peterson & Bret Weinstein https://youtu.be/6G59zsjM2UI?t=1h30m29s
Marxists criticize capitalism because under that system a few people have most of the money. The flaw in that criticism is that it is true of every economic system not just capitalism. The principle is true in every form of human endeavor. For example the most widely read books are written by a few authors. This principle is called the Pareto principle named an Italian economist. It is more commonly known as the 80/20 rule.
Pareto principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
