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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Well, this is (almost) a motte I'm happy to concede - the only part that I find doubtful is how by "resulted" suggests that the lineage of "woke" is entirely, or mostly, within the movement that referred to itself as "Cultural Marxism". I have seen evidence of existence of communities that used that term for themselves, but the volume of evidence is really too small for there to ever have been more than a fairly small number (on the order of a few academic groups and attached activist groupies? Perhaps 100-1000 people?). If you want to claim that those groups, however small they are, begot the "woke" that we see today to a sufficient degree that "resulted" is justified as a term, when the "woke" themselves see their lineage as a procession of mass movements (civil rights, LGBT etc.), this is pretty close to the textbook definition of a conspiracy (events are secretly steered by a small group). Then the moniker "conspiracy theory" would be appropriate on the surface. Whether one should abstain from using it because of the pejorative connotations, or push back against the pejorative connotations on account of those being obvious enemy action by conspiracies, is a separate question.