(Following are excerpts of chapter 10 written by historian William S.Lind for Dr. Ted Baehr's and Pat Boone's book "The Culture-wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Mass Media World")

 

Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture.

 

Just 50 years ago, in the 1950s, America was a great place.  It was safe. It was decent.  Children got good educations in the public schools.  Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes so moms could stay home with the kids.  Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.

 

Where did it all go?  How did that America become the sleazy, decadent place we live in today -- so different that those who grew up before the '60s feel like it's a foreign country?  Did it just "happen"? It didn't just "happen".  In fact, a deliberate agenda was followed to steal our culture and leave a new and very different one in its place. The story of how and why is one of the most important parts of our nation's history -- and it is a story almost no one knows.  The people behind it wanted it that way.

 

What happened, in short, is that America's traditional culture, which had grown up over generations from our Western European, Judeo-Christian roots, was swept aside by an ideology.  We know that ideology best as "political correctness" or "multi-culturalism".  It really is cultural Marxism. Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms goes back to World War I.  Cultural Marxism has become the ruling ideology of America's elites.  The No. 1 goal of that cultural Marxism, since its creation, has been the destruction of Western European culture and the Christian religion.

 

In 1917, a Communist revolution occurred in Russia.  But attempts to spread that revolution to other countries failed because the workers did not support it. Marxist theorists had to ask themselves the question: What went wrong?  As good Marxists, they could not admit Marxist theory had been incorrect.  Instead, they said that Western European culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true Marxist class interests that a Communist revolution was impossible in West Europe until both could be destroyed.  That objective, established as cultural Marxism's goal right at the beginning, has never changed. A new strategy was laid out for destroying Christianity and Western European culture, one that has proven all too successful.  Instead of calling for a Communist revolution up front, as in Russia, Marxists in West Europe should take political power last, after a "long march through the institutions" -- the schools, the media, even the churches, every institution that could influence the culture.  That "long march through the institutions" is what America has experienced, especially since the1960s. One of its main components was introducing sex education into schools.  Destroying the country's traditional sexual morals would be a giant step toward destroying traditional morals and Christian faith.

 

In 1923, the Marxists set up a new think tank at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany called The Frankfurt School.  Originally it was to be called the "Institute for Marxism", but the cultural Marxists realized they could be far more effective if they concealed their real nature and objectives by calling it a neutral-sounding name, the "Institute for Social Research". The Institute for Social Research would become the place where political correctness, as we now know it, was developed.  The basic answer to the question "Who stole our culture?" is the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School. The institute discarded conventional Marxist issues such as the labor movement and pioneered work on further developing cultural Marxism into a full-blown ideology. They broke with Marx's view that culture was merely part of society's "superstructure", which was determined by economic factors.  On the contrary, culture was an independent and very important factor in shaping a society. Frankfurt School members decided that the key to destroying Western European culture was to cross Marx with Freud.  They argued that just as workers were oppressed under capitalism, everyone lived in a constant state of psychological repression.  They realized that psychological conditioning offered them a far more powerful tool than just philosophy. Today, when Hollywood's cultural Marxists want to "normalize" something like homosexuality (thus "liberating" us from "repression"), they put on television show after television show where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual. 

 

Cultural Marxism makes powerful use of tools like radio, film and later television to psychologically condition the public.  It is no accident that the entertainment industry is now cultural Marxism's most powerful weapon. That is how psychological conditioning works; people absorb the lessons the cultural Marxists want them to learn without even knowing they are being taught.

 

The Frankfurt School was well on the way to creating political correctness.  Then suddenly, fate intervened.  In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany.  Since the Nazis hated Marxism, the Frankfurt School with its leading members decided to leave Germany and re-established in New York City with help from Columbia University in 1934.  Soon, its focus shifted from destroying traditional Western European culture in Germany to doing so in the United States.  It would prove all too successful. The Frankfurt School developed a powerful tool it called "Critical Theory".  The theory was to criticize every traditional institution, starting with family, to endless unremitting criticism to bring them down, being careful never to define what it was for, only what it was against (notice current political opposition).   Critical Theory is the basis for the"studies" departments that now inhabit American colleges and universities, the home turf of academic political correctness. They accuse traditional attitudes to be "prejudice".  They incorporated into their cultural Marxism the "transvaluation of all values".  What that means, in plain English, is that all the old sins become virtues, and all the old virtues become sins.  Homosexuality is a fine and good thing, but anyone who thinks men and women should have different social roles is an evil "fascist".  That is what political correctness now teaches children in public schools all across America.