The Roots of the Issue

The current political divide is not Donald Trump’s fault; indeed, he only ran for president because of the dangers he saw it posed to our nation’s survival. In some ways, the roots of this issue actually go back to the Garden of Eden. But more recently, we can trace them to specific people and ideas. Below is a brief run down of what I have learned over the years. I’m sure there’s more and would welcome anyone who can add to our knowledge and wisdom on this (and any other) topic.

In the early 1990s, Michael Minnicino wrote an article entitled The Frankfurt School and “Political Correctness” (link below) in which he traced the roots of what he called “the new Dark Age.” He wrote that our current state was “consciously fostered and organized.” He posited that “either we create a Renaissance—a rebirth of the fundamental principles upon which civilization originated—or, our civilization dies.”

Minnicino identified the “single, most important organizational component of this conspiracy” as having been a Communist thinktank known as the Frankfurt School whose members were desperately disappointed that the glorious Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had not inspired the proletariat of other European countries to rise up and overthrow their own governments.

One of the members – Georg Lukacs (photo above) – wrote, “Who will save us from Western civilization?” A hundred years ago, Lukacs promoted sex education in the schools, easy access to contraception, and loose divorce laws. So did Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. So do the majority of the leaders and members of today’s Democratic Party.

Lukacs believed that what kept the West from embracing Communism was their Judeo-Christian belief in the uniqueness and sacredness of the individual and in the possibility of enjoying an unmediated relationship with the Divine. From Lukascz’ (and Satan’s) point of view, no society infused with such beliefs could ever “reach the state of hopelessness and alienation which Lukacs recognized as the necessary prerequisite for socialist revolution.”

Lukacs and the other denizens of the Frankfurt School sought to identify the means by which the Judaeo-Christian cultural matrix could be replaced with a demonic world view. They sought cultural forms that would alienate people from truth and goodness. In modern art, literature, and music, they promoted ugliness, pessimism, and discord. Brecht, for example attempted to write his plays so as to make the audience leave the theater demoralized and aimlessly angry.

The Frankfurt School saw the new technologies of radio, film, and recorded music as golden opportunities to exert control over society’s cultural matrix. They sought to do this, in part, by substituting art with entertainment. In 1937, the Rockefeller Foundation (a supporter of the Frankfurt School) began funding research into the social effects of new forms of mass media, particularly radio, basing its headquarters at Princeton University. The director of the “Radio Project” was a Marxist named Paul Lazersfeld.

Under Lazersfeld was Frank Stanton, who one day would become president of the CBS News Division, and ultimately president of CBS. Stanton also became Chairman of the Board of the RAND Corporation and a member of President Lyndon Johnson’s “kitchen cabinet.” Another member of the Rockefeller Foundations’ radio research was Herta Herzog, who married Lazersfeld and became the first director of research for the Voice of America, which functioned from 1942 until Trump shut them down in March of this year.

The efforts of the Radio Project conspirators to manipulate the population spawned the modern pseudoscience of public opinion polling. Another member of the Radio Project was Hazel Gaudet, who became one of the nation’s leading political pollsters. In 1966, Gaudet organized the first meetings of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Nevada in her own living room. In 1970, she was elected Nevada’s representative on ACLU’s national board.

The major pollsters of today—A.C. Neilsen, George Gallup, Elmo Roper—started in the mid-1930’s and, by 1936, had become sufficiently widespread to justify a trade association, the American Academy of Public Opinion Research, which was located at Princeton and headed by Paul Lazersfeld. In 1940, the Office of Radio Research was turned into the Bureau of Applied Social Research, a division of Columbia University, also headed by Paul Lazersfeld. In fact, the entire development of television and advertising in the 1950’s and 1960’s was pioneered by men and women who were trained in the Frankfurt School’s techniques of mass alienation. Their techniques would eventually control American political campaigning.

The Frankfurt School also made major inroads in American academia. In the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of baby boomers were exposed to the Frankfurt School’s poison, either directly or indirectly, when they attended college. It is no coincidence that this is also when student rebellions, widespread drug use, and the sexual revolution began.

By the 1990s, the ideas hatched at the Frankfurt School dominated the universities where students were taught to replace reason with political correctness. More recently, the cancel culture’s tolerance for all things left and intolerance for all things right have permeated our entire society. It is worth noting that Saul Alinsky and his protegé, Barack Obama, are both acolytes of the Frankfurt School.

Thirty-three years ago, Minnicino wrote that our only way out was “to discard the evil, and inhuman, and just plain stupid, and to go back, hundreds or thousands of years, to the ideas which allow humanity to grow in freedom and goodness.” I think it is clear that we are not embroiled in some new and different socio-political battle; rather, we are in the midst of what is likely the end of the ages old spiritual battle that began in the Garden of Eden. Obviously, the only way out is found in the Bible.

SOURCES:

• The Frankfurt School and “Political Correctness” By Michael Minnicino – 1992 @ http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html. Accessed August 4, 2025.
• Minnicino’s ideas are sneer at by Wikipedia as being a “far right conspiracy theory” @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Luk%C3%A1cs
• https://jacobin.com/2019/01/lukacs-hungary-marx-philosophy-consciousness
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Research_Project
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lazarsfeld
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Gaudet-Erskine
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America
• https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2012/03/14/how%20saul%20alinsky%20taught%20barack%20obama%20everything%20he%20knows%20about%20civic%20upheaval/