1933 – The Institute for Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt was comprised of a group of German scholars, mostly Jewish, who developed highly provocative and original perspectives on contemporary society and culture, drawing on Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber. They were forced out of Germany by the political rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party and went to Geneva, Switzerland. It then moved to NYC in 1934, where it became affiliated with Columbia University and branched out to Princeton, Brandeis, and California at Berkeley.
Its journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was accordingly renamed Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. It was at that moment that much of its important work began to emerge, having gained a favorable reception within American and English academia. The Frankfurt School is the name usually used to refer to this group of scholars who have been associated at 1 point or another over several decades with the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt. Many of its scholars studied Marxism from a cultural perspective as the deciding factor in oppression, rather than the economic factors that Karl Marx emphasized. Basically, the Frankfurt School believed that as long as an individual had the belief — or even the hope of belief — that his divine gift of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation that they considered necessary to provoke a socialist revolution.
The roots of their thinking go back to classical Marxism, which aimed to incite working class rebellion. The workers refused to rebel, however, and sided with their national governments during World War I. After the war, a number of Marxists decided to revise their dogma. Prominent among them was a group living in Frankfurt, Germany, known as the Frankfurt School, who believed that class struggle was not enough to bring about revolution. What was necessary was cultural Marxism that would attack the key pillars of Western Civilization: religion, patriotism, and family life. They called this attack on Western identity and culture “critical theory,” and members of the Frankfurt School brought this theory to the U.S.
Cultural Marxism refers to a school or offshoot of Marxism that analyses culture as the deciding factor in posited oppression, rather than the economic factors that Karl Marx emphasized. An outgrowth of Western Marxism (especially Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School) and finding popularity in the 1960s as cultural studies, Cultural Marxism argues that oppressive power structures exist within traditional cultural artifacts of Western society like capitalism, nationalism, the nuclear family, gender, race, or cultural identity; and that the goal of Cultural Marxism is to use Marx's methods (e.g., dialectic materialism) within academia to expose and challenge such "capitalist hegemony".
To further the advance of their “quiet” cultural revolution, the Frankfurt School made the following 12 recommendations — all of them calculated to undermine the foundations of society and create the dystopia we now see all around us:
The creation of racism offences and hate speech laws.
Continual change to create confusion (e,g., in school curricula).
Masturbation propaganda in schools, combined with the homosexualization of children and their corruption by exposing them to child porn in the classroom.
The systematic undermining of parental and teachers’ authority.
Huge immigration to destroy national identity and foment future race wars.
The systematic promotion of excessive drinking and recreational drugs.
The systematic promotion of sexual deviance in society.
An unreliable legal system with bias against the victims of crime.
Dependency on state benefits.
Control and dumbing down of media.
Encouraging the breakdown of the family.
All all-out attack on Christianity and the emptying of churches.
Common Core Roots Lie in Ties Between Barack Obama, Bill Ayers
In an article published on 12/02/2013 that advocates for Common Core standards, the Associated Press presents what amounts to the typical talking points for supporters when faced with criticism that Common Core is a federal takeover of education.
The standards were created by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to improve academic achievement and increase accountability. President Barack Obama and his administration embraced them.
Actually, Barack Obama did not simply “embrace” a concept that others developed; instead, the very roots of Common Core are in the early ideas generated by him and his fellow radical community organizer, Bill Ayers. Just prior to the presidential election of 2008, Dr. Stanley Kurtz, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal in which he observed that then-Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s “most important executive experience” was heading up the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), an education foundation that was the invention of Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s.
Obama led the CAC from 1995 to 1999 and remained on the board until 2001. The foundation funneled more than $100 million into community organizations and radical education activists. The CAC’s stated purpose was to improve Chicago’s public schools using funding from an education initiative by Walter Annenberg. As chairman, Obama handled fiscal matters while Ayers co-chaired the CAC’s other key entity, the “Collaborative,” which influenced education policy. Archives from the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago showed that Obama and Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
In his op-ed, Kurtz explained that the Obama campaign at the time said that Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s “recruitment” to CAC’s board. However, as Kurtz discovered, the Daley archives showed that: …
…along with [Deborah] Leff and [Patricia Albjerg] Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
Kurtz continued that the CAC’s agenda channeled Ayers’ educational philosophy “which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.” Ayers wrote that teachers should act as community organizers whose focus is provoking resistance to American racism and oppression.
“I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s Sixties Radicals. …
good grief.