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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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But if we map the arguments we've heard here, and in the other thread, to your analogy, we'd be getting things like "the Church of Mormon is a myth!" or "I'm a Christian, and if there was such a thing as Mormonism, I think I would have heard about it". It sounds like blanket denial, even as the other side is pointing at church buildings and the missionaries standing on the street corner.

I can think two better mappings. The crux that makes it different from most of other is that "cultural marxism" is a descriptive term that was never widely used as ingroup denominator, though it makes sense as theoretical construction.

During the George W. Bush years, many leftists here in not-the-US drank all the US leftist messaging about then-political enemy of American Evangelical Christians without much critique. Some people honestly think the US teeming with sex-crazy corrupt religious religious cultists called "Evangelicals", lead by nightmarish ministers who look something that crawled from 1st season of True Detective and Witchfynder General, who are generally corrupt and fully intend to subjugate women and instill visions from Handmaid's Tale.

If I thought it would matter, I could say things like "I have met Evangelicals, they are different from us bu not like the media portrays" or "if there was a conspiracy to turn Handmaid's Tale into reality, I would have heard about it" (and be not believed).

Another example: Patriarchy, as defined by feminism. Yes, there have been social and cultural organization models where men had more rights than women. Yet also the strong forms of "patriarchy" as an all-encompassing cultural force that must fought everywhere, all the time, that both needs to eliminated in our minds to remove hurtful notions and social expectations and also in the social world to remove privileges and old boys networks by setting up quotas ... yeah, we do get arguments lke "patriarchy is a myth" and "I am a man and if there was such a thing as patriarchy that supports me with my career, I think I would have heard about it".

If I thought it would matter, I could say things like "I have met Evangelicals, they are different from us bu not like the media portrays" or "if there was a conspiracy to turn Handmaid's Tale into reality, I would have heard about it" (and be not believed).

That doesn't work. If we map that back to the debate on Cultural Marxism, it would end up looking like "I've met Cultural Marxists, they're not saying what you're accusing them of". No one here is saying that.

yeah, we do get arguments lke "patriarchy is a myth" and "I am a man and if there was such a thing as patriarchy that supports me with my career, I think I would have heard about it".

Ok, but that's just a direct denial of Cultural Marxism having existed, and I'm quite prepared to argue the other side of the position (see here), and that just means the "core facts" from MadMozer's post are actually under dispute.