It all began with a Marxist philosophy called “Critical Theory” in 1930’s Germany that eventually led to Cultural Marxism, Political Correctness, Critical Legal Theory, and now Critical Race Theory.
“The most dangerous thing you can do with a driven leftist intellectual clique is to ignore it.“
(Andrew Breitbart in Righteous Indignation, April 2011)
The ‘driven leftist intellectual clique’ photographed above were noticed and revered by higher education institutions in mid-twentieth century United States, and later by radicals in the 1960’s, but they were largely ignored by the rest of us.
And so here we are, almost a century later, trying to make sense of what the heck is happening to our country today.
What is Critical Theory?
Critical Theory is a philosophy that came from the deranged beliefs and teachings of Marxist sociologist Max Horkheimer, who served as the first director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany in the 1930’s. Horkheimer’s sociological Critical Theory, entrenched in Marxist political philosophy, became a trendy and heady movement among social science scholars that flocked to the Institute.
Many of the Institute for Social Research with Jewish origins defected to the United States from Germany (fleeing Hitler) in the mid to late 1930’s.
Most ended up at Ivy League Universities (Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Oxford) and quickly became recognized intellectuals in their field. Some of the more well-known of these scholars include: Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979); Eric Fromm (1900–1980); and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969).
(July 12 Update)
- According to Discover the Networks, Herbert Marcuse, who became a U.S. citizen in 1940, and served in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and later the CIA, as well as the State Department is especially known for “inspiring American student revolutionaries in the 1960s” and as “the mentor of Communist icon Angela Davis.”
- From Erich Fromm‘s biography at TheFamousPeople.com: “He found value in the absence of individual freedom and responsibilities of the medieval society. In 1955, the psychoanalyst published ‘The Sane Society’ in which he argued in favor of democratic socialism… Fromm rejected both Soviet communism and western capitalism as he believed them to be dehumanizing. Eventually, he became one of the initiators of socialist humanism… In the early 1960s, he published two books titled ‘Beyond the Chains of Illusion’ and ‘Marx’s Concept of Man’… For a time being, Fromm was actively involved in US politics. He worked in the Socialist Party of America during the mid-1950s and gave them an alternative viewpoint to McCarthyist trends…
- From Theodor Adorno‘s biographical sketch at Stanford: “…During the Nazi era he resided in Oxford, New York City, and southern California. There he wrote several books for which he later became famous, including Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer), Philosophy of New Music, The Authoritarian Personality (a collaborative project), and Minima Moralia. From these years come his provocative critiques of mass culture and the culture industry. Returning to Frankfurt in 1949 to take up a position in the philosophy department, Adorno quickly established himself as a leading German intellectual and a central figure in the Institute of Social Research. Founded as a free-standing center for Marxist scholarship in 1923…
Critical Theory, according to Andrew Breitbart, “It was, quite literally, a theory of criticizing everyone and everything everywhere. It was an attempt to tear down the social fabric by using all the social sciences … it was an infinite and unending criticism of the status quo, adolescent rebellion against all established rules and norms. … Critical theory does not create, it only destroys.” (Righteous Indignation, April 2011)
(July 12 Update) Mike Gonzalez & Lindsey M. Burke at National review tell us:
“Simply put, Critical Theory amounts to an unremitting attack on all of America’s norms and traditions. The goal is to replace them with a “counter-narrative” that will introduce a more leftist model of governing. Critical Theory is the main philosophical school in the identity politics of today…
Traditional theory, Horkheimer claimed, fetishized knowledge and objectivity. Critical theory, its opposite, held that there were no universal truths and man could not be objective. Instead of truths, there were competing narratives, and it was the job of the Left to impose its own. This relativism in itself was nothing less than an assault on Western civilization.” (To Tackle Critical Theory in the K–12 Classroom, Start with Colleges of Education, Oct 5, 2020)
What is Critical Race Theory?
According to Joel B. Pollak, a writer at Breitbart website, “Critical Theory spawned various offshoots. One of them was Critical Legal Theory, which said that the Constitution, our judicial system, and our laws could never be neutral or objective because they existed to protect those who created them.
A scholar at Harvard Law School named Derrick Bell applied that reasoning to race, and came up with Critical Race Theory: Critical Race Theory holds that the United States is racist by design, because its Constitution and all of its other institutions emerged in a context where slavery was legal. According to the theory, the very institution of private property in the U.S. is corrupt because it was enshrined in a system that saw black people as chattels.
To Bell, the civil rights movement was regrettable, in the sense that it misled black Americans into believing that equality before the law was sufficient. The real problem, he believed, was that the legal system itself was fundamentally racist.
Bell saw only one road to salvation: if the U.S. amended the Constitution to include socioeconomic rights — such as health care, housing, education, and the like — it could undo the original sin of slavery by enshrining the redistribution of wealth. Such a constitutional revolution could liberate poor people of every race while also restoring the humanity of black people…
(For more on Derrick Bell see Did Obama Hug a Radical? at Slate.com, Mar 9 2012)
Below we share a few videos that give insights into Critical Theory. Not only will you recognize the roots of Critical Race Theory, you will also recognize the roots of many of the outrageous cultural Marxist/Maoist/Communist transformations plaguing our country today.
1) Below is a video titled The Architects of Western Decline, whose narration is taken verbatim from Chapter 6: Breakthrough in Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation. We have been unable to find any information on the entity VertigoPolitix that produced this. Be forewarned, some of the imagery in this is disturbing – it is the audio that we are wanting to share.
2) Below are two 1969 videos of Max Horkheimer (translated) attempting to explain the lunacy of his Critical Theory.
Part 1:
Part 2:
