The biggest revelation of 2023

By Michael Brown, Op-ed Contributor Wednesday, January 03, 2024

On December 29, on Facebook and X, I asked this question: “What do you personally believe was the biggest revelation in American society in the last year — in other words, the cultural or political or spiritual phenomenon that suddenly became crystal clear?”

Naturally, I received a wide range of responses, but more than anything, I saw responses like this: “The blatant Antisemitism that is allowed, and apparently encouraged in this country without consequence.”

Yes, many Americans, including many left-leaning American Jews, were shocked to see just how pervasive Jew-hatred was in our country. And for these left-leaning Jews, the big revelation was how much Jew-hatred there was on the left.

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For years, American Jews have feared rightwing antisemitism. Now, they realized with horror, it was just as deeply entrenched — if not even more deeply entrenched — on the left.

For me, though, this was not a revelation at all, as I had been tracking antisemitism in America for more than 30 years, including on college campuses, almost all of which leaned left. I knew how pervasive it was, and it was just a matter of time before it came to the surface.

The big revelation for me was just how deeply Marxism has impacted our country — and this, in fact, ties in directly with the open manifestation of Jew-hatred and Israel-bashing as well.

To be sure, I was quite aware of Marxist influences in movements like BLM and in different aspects of our campus curricula. And I understood how concepts like intersectionality and CRT and DEI tied in with Marxist ideologies. I was also aware of the concept of the “long march” through our institutions of higher learning in which the radical activists of the 60s and 70s became our university mentors and teachers.

It's just that I’m reluctant to call everything “Marxist” and to view everything through a conspiratorial lens. But when the evidence is so widespread and pervasive, the conclusions are unavoidable.

What else can you say when elementary school children are seated in different groups depending on skin color and ethnicity, based on which they are identified as being in the oppressor or the oppressed class? (I heard this firsthand from a mother, but the phenomenon is well-reported.)

What else can you say when young people side with Hamas more than Israel, in large part because these young people have bought into the colonizer-colonized mentality?

Again, I’ve been aware of what was happening on our campuses for some time now — especially in our “elite” universities — with authors like Douglas Murray recounting in detail some of the most shocking and revealing campus scenes. (He did this in his 2019 book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, Identity.)

But it was other books published in 2023, most notably Christopher Rufo’s America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, that made the overt Marxist connection all the more clear. Senator Ted Cruz’s 2023 book Unwoke is actually subtitled, “How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America,” with chapter titles such as, “Mr. Marx Goes to Washington.”

Another key publication was James Lindsay’s The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire's Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education, released in December 2022, which I purchased in 2023. And while Rufo’s volume focused on higher education, Lindsay’s took us more deeply into children’s education. The fingerprints of Marxism are everywhere.

And if the search engine is right on the Kindle version of my good friend John Cooper’s just released book, Wimpy, Weak, and Woke: How Truth Can Save America from Utopian Destruction, the name Marx occurs almost 500 times.

In his book, Rufo cited the radical, 1970 publication titled Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism: Political Statement of the Weather Underground.

I recently purchased a copy of the book, which certainly breathes the spirit of the counterculture revolution, and as Rufo noted, contains many of the key talking points of today. (Of special interest at present was the connection between “Imperialism” and “Genocide” in light of the tidal wave of charges of “genocide” against Israel today.)

Not surprisingly, Prairie Fire begins with “The Banner of Che: Why Is Revolution Necessary?”

But that revolution did not come about by holding massive protest marches and defying the status quo. It came through infiltrating the status quo until a new order was set in motion.

I had already seen this on a moral level almost 25 years ago, but with no connection to Marxism.

Writing in the year 2000 in my 5,000 word mini-book The Jesus Manifesto: A Call to Revolution, I stated, “The last generation’s counterculture of rebellion has become this generation’s establishment of revulsion, and what was unthinkable thirty years ago — daytime talk shows celebrating adultery and incest; homosexual love scenes on major network TV; eleven year-old multiple murderers; massacres in our schools and houses of worship — is a matter of course today. We need a revolution!”

Looking back at this today, it seems almost routine and commonplace. No big deal at all!

That’s how far we have fallen since 2000, and so, none of this was new to me.

But the events of 2023, highlighted by the response to Israel’s war with Hamas, helped bring to the surface the degree to which Marxist ideology has transformed American thinking, especially in the younger generation.

Once again, however, the bad news is the good news since: 1. Marxism is doomed to fail because it simply does not work; and 2. the more it is brought into the light, the more it withers.

Let the light shine!