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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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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"

Well, you can follow the people who referred to their thought as "Cultural Marxism", see what they were writing later on, when "woke" became a thing, note the lack of differences between "woke", the current academic memplex "woke" is based on ("Critical Theory" as best as I can gather), and "Cultural Marxism" of the past.

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?).

This is exactly what we'd expect from a movement that was dismissed, on this very forum, as "just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses", until a few years ago.

is justified as a term, when the "woke" themselves see their lineage as a procession of mass movements (civil rights, LGBT etc.),

I have to stop you there, "woke" is not a term to describe mass movements. Civil rights, and LGBT are not "woke" / "Culturally Marxist" by virtue of being being civil rights / LGBT.

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.

It's not a separate question. The term "conspiracy theory" is deliberately used to slander anyone believing it, the implication being that the theory is false, and the person is a paranoid schizophrenic for thinking it might be true. In colloquial usage a "conspiracy theory" has to be false or else it's not a "conspiracy theory". We could it watch in real time when 2rafa posted about how believing in WEF conspiracy theories are an "embarrassment", and how they magically stopped being "conspiracy theories", according to several users here, when I wrote my longpost about the WEF, even though I explicitly endorsed the term.

If you want to apply the label "conspiracy theory" to "Cultural Marxist" I can endorse it on the condition it is done in a way like "Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory that turned out to be 100% true", or otherwise made it absolutely clear that the theory is not false.

If you want to insist that the pejorative connotations are a separate question, then we have to come back why you insist on not calling wokism "Cultural Marxism", here too the pejorative connotations should be a separate question.