Good ten tactics from the book, NextGen Marxism, for countering cultural Marxism:
- Expose (ie, read STARRS website monitoring and exposing the CRT/DEI agenda in the military, share articles)
- Network (ie, sign up to be a STARRS Volunteer in your state and meet others of like-mind; sign up for the STARRS mailing list to keep informed)
- Follow the money (STARRS is working with Congress to defund DEI in the military; in govt programs, money is everything)
- Live within the truth (Always speak up and stand against this radical anti-American agenda)
- Vote with your wallet (are you supporting military-related organizations and associations that have gone woke (or too afraid to speak up) and no longer align with your values?)
- Engage (work with other STARRS volunteers in your state to get out the word about what’s happening in the military)
- Show up (get active, participate)
- Play the long game (the CRT/DEI agenda in the military won’t be eliminated overnight or with an election; keep on keeping on fighting/exposing/educating/standing against this miserable ideology)
- Focus internationally, nationally, and locally (focus on our lane–the military)
- Reclaim the culture (reclaim our founding principles as laid out in the Constitution)
“We’re in a BATTLE right now not just between Republicans and Democrats, but between two competing visions, two competing worldviews, for who we are as Americans and how we’re going to preserve this great republic.”—Rep. Mike Johnson
By Kathy Athearn | The Washington Stand
Some may wonder why conservatives talk so much about “the Left.” Are we overgeneralizing, or is there really an organized movement to tear down and reshape America into a completely different country?
The answer is: there is a highly influential movement within the Left that actually is an organized, international, and well-funded Marxist movement that has been on the rise for years.
It started to become mainstream in American universities in 1989 and now runs rampant in our culture through the implementation of critical race theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies.
Authors Mike Gonzalez and Katharine Gorka thoroughly researched and exposed the history and organization of the Left in their new, eye-opening book, “NextGen Marxism.”
Thankfully, not only do Gonzalez and Gorka reveal how organized, international, and powerful the Left is, but they also show how powerful and effective passionate citizens — especially parents — have been at stopping it in recent years. They provide straightforward action steps for those of us who love America and its freedoms and want to continue fighting for them on behalf of freedom-loving people around the world.
What Is NextGen Marxism?
NextGen Marxism (or cultural Marxism) is a philosophy implemented by “social justice” warriors (led by Black Lives Matter) through DEI policies that — over the last four years especially — companies and schools are expected to implement. If they don’t, they are labeled as heteronormative, sexist, white supremacist oppressors, and likely to be canceled.
Gonzalez and Gorka explain:
“This book makes the case that the social upheaval we are experiencing in the United States today is the result of a zero-sum view of the world, a world of irreconcilable antagonisms, one in which the open exchange of ideas is replaced by a rigid orthodoxy, in which there is no room for dissent, in which people are reduced to their skin color or sexual orientation. It is a worldview that sees the United States as fundamentally flawed and for which the sole antidote is its destruction and rebuilding.
“The [Black Lives Matter] leaders who shared this view well before they founded BLM made use of [George] Floyd’s tragedy to try to deliver a knockout blow against the US constitutional order in 2020 and were able to convince the managers and leaders of all our top institutions to buy in to the idea that the United States is systematically racist and oppressive, and thus in need of total transformation. It is this phenomenon that accounts for what has happened to American society.”
In The Heritage Foundation’s online forum, “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It,” Gonzalez and Gorka discuss how they discovered that in 1989 (when the Berlin Wall came down and many thought that Marxism and communism were dying), in reality Marxism became mainstream in American universities’ humanities and law departments, CRT was created, and Eric Mann formed his Marxist Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. (Several years later, Mann recruited Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter.)
Who Are “The Oppressors” and “The Oppressed,” according to Next Gen Marxists?
Today “the oppressors” are the “privileged”: whites, Americans, Israelis, Christians, Jews, heterosexuals, and males, according to NextGen Marxists. “The oppressed” is everyone else: those in the minority based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and those who were once colonized. They claim that Americans cannot work together to solve the supposed fundamental/systemic problems in our country, so they have to fight. They want to bring down the oppressors because they’re the “victimizers.”
From Economic Marxism to Cultural Marxism: “Abolish the Family”
Marxists believe that humankind can be perfected and that utopia can be attained here on earth (whereas Christians know that humans have been sinful since the fall and only will experience paradise in the new heaven and new earth). In order for Marxists to attain utopia, they believe they must tear down norms and traditions, the “trinity of the most monstrous evils”: private property, religion, and marriage. Gonzalez and Gorka write:
“One can draw a straight line from the anti-family, anti-morality position of [Robert] Owen and other utopians and socialists of the 1800s to BLM in 2020, which posted on its website (and subsequently removed following heavy criticism) the goal of destroying the nuclear family: “[W]e disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family-structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.”
In a video that he released in 2023, filmmaker and Florida educator Chris Rufo explained:
“In the late 1980s, a group of writers, including Judith Butler, Gail Rubin, Sandy Stone, and Susan Stryker established the disciplines of queer theory and transgender studies. They argued that gender was a social construct, used to oppress racial and sexual minorities. They denounced the categories of man and woman as false binary that upholds a system of hetero-normativity, the white male heterosexual power structure. These writers made the case that these systems must be ruthlessly deconstructed and turned to dust, and the most visceral, dramatic way to achieve this is transgenderism. If a man can become a woman, if a woman can become a man, they believed the entire structure of creation could be toppled.”
These views espoused by the leftist elite influence America’s schools and culture. The nonprofit Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) writes in its guidelines on comprehensive sex education for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Sex education has the power to spark large-scale social change. SIECUS is not a single-issue organization because sex ed, as SIECUS envisions it, connects and addresses a variety of social issues. Sex ed sits at the nexus of many social justice movements — from LGBTQ rights and reproductive justice to the #MeToo movement and urgent conversations around consent and healthy relationships.”
They add, “Controlling the formation of sexual identities through racialized stereotypes and the reproduction of racial and ethnic minority groups is central to effective population controls.”
Over the last 10 years, the Marxist Left has been successful at influencing schools, businesses, and the entertainment industry by making catchphrases such as “racial reckoning,” “marginalized groups,” and “heteronormative” a part of America’s everyday vocabulary.
The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens described this as the “great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs — regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome — became, more and more, not just passe, but taboo.”
Americans Are Successfully Pushing Back against Marxism
FRC’s Senior Fellow for Education Studies, Meg Kilganon, told The Washington Stand:
“When the vast majority of universities in America, including Christian and Catholic universities, have adopted ideas and concepts of Marxism that are antithetical to Judeo-Christian western civilization, the teachers, doctors, lawyers, bankers they produce will have been influenced by or will have accepted revolutionary ideals. This will make it very difficult for us to build and maintain organizations and institutions that are not vulnerable to take over. But that is exactly why we must fight to protect what we build and reclaim what has been stolen. The future depends on our devotion to God and his people.”
“Ten Tactics for Patriots”
Gonzalez and Gorka are encouraged by the successes that motivated Americans, including the impact that Family Research Council, Parents Defending Education, and Moms for Liberty have had at fighting back against NextGen Marxists. The Marxists’ “ideas must be exposed for the lies they are, their utopia as nothing more than a formula for tyranny and suffering.” They offer “Ten Tactics for Patriots”:
- Expose
- Network
- Follow the money
- Live within the truth
- Vote with your wallet
- Engage
- Show up
- Play the long game
- Focus internationally, nationally, and locally
- Reclaim the culture
If We Believe That All Humans Are Created in the Image of God, We Should Fight Marxism
Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement, Joseph Backholm, told TWS:
“From a biblical perspective, NextGen Marxism as with old Marxism, is born out of a rejection of the idea that we are created in the image of God. If the fact that we are all created in the image of God is the most important thing about us, it’s something we share in common with every other person we ever encounter. That idea is inherently equalizing and unifying.
“But if we reject that as the basis of our identity, we root our identity in superficial things like our class, race, sexual proclivities, sex, intelligence, or capacity. Once we do that, the most important thing about me is something that puts me at odds with many of the people around me. After all, if we are not created equal, then we are not equal. Just look around, we are significantly different, and human pride tempts us to use those differences to consider ourselves better than others. Marxism correctly identifies the fact that people are different and those differences lead to exploitation and abuse, but the gospel provides the only solution because it provides a basis for equality.”
Thankfully, we have leaders in the highest levels of the federal government that recognize the severe threat that NextGen Marxism poses to our country. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) recently told “Fox & Friends” cohost, Brian Kilmeade:
“I do have a great reverence for this country and for our great experiment in self-governance. And you know, we’re only going to be 248 years old on July 4th. We don’t know how long a constitutional republic like ours can last. The Founders didn’t know, but they gave us their advice on how to preserve it. And what we have to do every day here is defend those founding principles so that we can preserve them, so that we can pass along liberty, opportunity, and security for the next generation.”
He went on to say:
“There are a rising number of people who don’t appreciate the founding principles of the country and many of them want to trade it in for something else. I mean, we have elected members of Congress who would prefer that we be some sort of European-style socialist utopia or something that’s Marxism that leads to all sorts of evil ends, and so we’re in a battle right now not just between Republicans and Democrats Brian, but between two competing visions, two competing worldviews, for who we are as Americans and how we’re going to preserve this great republic.”
Thanks to the work of Gonzalez and Gorka and many others, more and more Americans are waking up to NextGen Marxism, fighting against it, and are working to protect the democratic republic that America’s founders established.
As President Abraham Lincoln said, the Founders “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
First published on The Washington Stand
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