The Cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School believed economic Marxism would fail because of the resistance of the working classes. They believed Marxism could only ever be achieved by undermining the institutions, all of them. They began what they called the long march through the institutions. Who would have thought even a few years ago that the Boy Scouts would go gay? The Frankfurt School would have.

I had thought Jennifer Roback Morse was getting to the heart of the matter when she pivoted to a focus on the victims of the Sexual Revolution. Her undoubtedly correct view is that gay so-called “marriage” did not start with the gays; rather, the Sexual Revolution prepared the ground beginning in the 1960s.

In The Devil’s Pleasure Palace (Encounter Books), Michael Walsh explains there is something even more fundamental at the heart of the matter, and the Sexual Revolution is only part of it. What lay at the heart of the matter are Cultural Marxism, Critical Theory and the institute that spawned them, the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the Frankfurt School.

You know these better than you think. In fact, their ideas are coursing not only through all of society, but through your own veins whether you know it or not.

Consider first psychiatrist William Reich, the man who, in 1936, coined the term “sexual revolution” in a book of the same name. Reich was a crackpot of the first order. Eventually even his Freudian colleagues avoided him like the plague. All his books had to be privately published. Quite simply, Reich was sex-mad and very likely insane. Even his photograph in Wikipedia makes him look like an inveterate masturbator. He massaged his nude patients and in 1920s Catholic Vienna advocated contraceptives, abortion, and divorce.

Reich wanted to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism and believed that economic Marxism would fail because of the repressed sexuality of the proletariat.

Reich was a paid up member of the Frankfurt School who eventually made his way to the United States, where he invented an orgasm machine later mocked as the “orgasmitron” by sex-mad Woody Allen in his movie Sleeper. He later died in prison after conning people into buying his hilarious machine. The Food and Drug Administration actually burned several tons of his books.

According to Michael Walsh, Reich was one of the most influential members of the Frankfurt School. How influential? During the student riots of 1968 in Paris and Berlin, students threw copies of his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism at the cops. They scrawled his name on walls. But, more than that, the Sexual Revolution he theorized is now the common currency, the lingua franca of our age.

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