How Theodor W. Adorno Destroyed America

I must say I never cease to be amazed at the creativity and stupidity epistemic closure of right-wing writers and pundits in the US.  This week's New Yorker magazine as a profile of the right-wing super-blogger and Tea Party evangelist Andrew Breitbart.  In the article, Breitbart explains his theory that Barack Obama is the fulfillment of a "Marxist plot" that was set in motion by Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School:

"Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the nineteen-thirties by émigré members of the Frankfurt School, to take over Hollywood, the media, the academy, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism. “He’s a Marxist,” Breitbart says of Obama. “His life work, his life experience, his life writings, and now his legislative legacy speak to his ideological point of view.”

Earlier this year Breitbart spoke about Adorno to a group of right-wing enthusiasts:

But how exactly die Adorno and his colleagues from Germany destroy America? A commenter on Breitbart's Web site explains:

"The Frankfurt school recommended (amongst other things):

1. the creation of racism offenses
2. continual change to create confusion
3. the teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
4. the undermining of schools and teachers' authority
5. huge immigration to destroy national identity
6. the promotion of excessive drinking
7. emptying the churches
8. an unreliable legal system with bias against the victim of crime
9. dependency on the state or state benefits
10. control and dumbing down of media
11. encouraging the breakdown of the family"

Well, I've read most of the works of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse and haven't found those recommendations.  Especially "the promotion of excessive drinking" is surprising, since Adorno was pretty much a teetotaler (although Marcuse's essay "Versuch über die Befreiung" did inspire me to smoke weed and have sex).

Comments

[Hattie]

For crying out loud! This must be a new category of person: the know-nothing intellectual! Only in America!
Uh: Frankfurt School. Commies. New School. Berkeley. New York Jews. Want to destroy our country. Yeah, that's it!
(Can't play the vid at this location but will look at it later.)