The Great Reset, Part 2: Critical Theory

The destruction of our civilization is not an accident

In the first part of this series I introduced the Great Reset, a long-planned reorganization of our society according to Marxist ideals. Before I examine specifics such as DEI, CRT, and SEL, I need to explain the origins of Critical Theory, which is the foundation for everything else.

Karl Marx

Critical Theory is inextricably tied to Karl Marx. As you surely know, Marx was a 19th century German philosopher who developed the concept of communism, a supposedly ideal ordering of society where everyone is equal, and where property is shared rather than some having more than others. He divided society into two groups of people: the oppressed and the oppressors. Marxism calls the oppressed the proletariat, the factory workers, toiling in harsh conditions with no hope of escape, while the oppressors were the bourgeoisie, the factory owners, who enjoyed the profits of another man’s labor.

This model proved attractive to the lower classes in Russia. Vladimir Lenin was able to overthrow the government and institute a communist state that would eventually kill tens of millions of people in its quest to perfect mankind. However, communist revolutions failed to take hold in Western Europe. A group of professors at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany wanted to figure out why. They concluded that prosperous capitalist economies of Western Europe and the United States made the lower classes too materially comfortable to revolt. The philosophers of the Frankfurt School decided to apply Marx’s binary worldview to all of society, and the result was Critical Theory.

Critical Theory, or Cultural Marxism, divides social system in the world between oppressor and oppressed. What made this theory critical was that it contains an explicit demand to do something. Critical theorists believe that it is not enough to understand how societies work, they must also work to dismantle those societies so that something better can be built instead. That is the essence of Cultural Marxism; a demand to tear down every structure of Western Civilization so that a new universalist utopia can be built in its stead.

In the century since the Frankfurt School, critical theorists such as György Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, and Antonio Gramsci have applied that worldview to everything. For example, Critical Race Theory puts white people as the oppressors and minorities as the oppressed and decries every social structure in the West as white supremacist. Modern feminism casts men as the oppressors and women as the oppressed, and decries society as irredeemably sexist. Queer theory casts so-called cisheteronormative people as the oppressors and LGBTQ+ people as the oppressed.

Kimberlé Crenshaw (Source: theguardian.com)

In the 1980s, college professor Kimberlé Crenshaw developed an idea called intersectionality. This concept combines all the oppressor/oppressed lines of Critical Theory into one paradigm. Intersectionality creates a sort of pecking order for the oppressed: a black man is oppressed compared to a white man, but a black woman is even more oppressed. However, a disabled, non-binary, black woman is oppressed along four different axes and therefore has more clout. Most people find these distinctions ridiculous, but the people now running our country take them quite seriously.

An outgrowth of Critical Theory and intersectionality is something called standpoint epistemology, which is a growing problem in our culture and in our churches in particular. Standpoint epistimology says that people have special knowledge depending on where they stand in the intersectional hierarchy. The disabled non-binary black woman in the example above is alleged to have certain knowledge that others do not. Once you see this concept, you cannot forget it. How many op-eds or social media posts begin with phrases like as a woman, as a gay man, or as a person of color? Remember future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing that a wise Latina had a superior perspective to white men?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor (Source: foxnews.com)

This newsletter is only scratching the surface of Critical Theory. Marxist philosophers, professors, and activists have been refining these ideas for nearly a century as they work to fundamentally transform our society. If you want to do a deep dive into the subject I recommend Dr. James Lindsay’s website New Discourses, starting here.

Critical Theory demands that we destroy every structure of Western society so as to transform it into something new. This means physical structures such as monuments to our Founding Fathers (white cisheteronormative racist slave-owners, of course) as well as metaphorical structures like the rule of law, equality under that law, and the rights and liberties guaranteed by our Constitution. The Democratic Party is now wholly consumed with this goal and there is no corner of our culture that they will leave undisturbed. The Great Reset is the culmination of this systematic destruction of our culture. Building back better was the Marxist plan from the beginning.

The Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC

Our weakness as conservatives is that we often fail to see the forest for the trees. We constantly feel the urge to compromise, to meet the left in good faith. We fail to see that each issue is just one more step in dismantling of society that they have been working on for nearly a century. Eliminating the right to self-defense, erasing the barriers between men and women, adults and children, and annihilating the legacy of our ancestors are all steps toward the great reset of our civilization. If you believe in the ideals of our Founding Fathers, if you want to preserve our God-given natural rights, then the line must be drawn here.

Stay tuned for the rest of this series as I explain the tactics that the Marxist left is using to tear down our society and culture.