Featured Image: Herbert Marcuse in Newtown, Massachusetts, 1955.  © Marcuse Family.

In his First Inaugural Address Thomas Jefferson said of dissenters, “let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” Today dissenters and monuments alike are regularly toppled. Saying transgender women are not female, noticing racial discrepancies in IQ scores, supporting the First Amendment and the right to free speech –  all sorts of wrongthink can get you “no-platformed” nowadays. And most of these attacks are inspired directly or indirectly by Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 essay, “Repressive Tolerance.”  Those who believe “Cultural Marxism” is just an anti-Semitic canard would do well to read this seminal text from one of the Frankfurt School’s intellectual leaders.

Stalin, and later the Hungary and Czechoslovakia invasions, put paid to the dream of a Communist Worker’s Paradise…