Thanks to Joe Rogan interviewing an up-and-coming conspiracy theorist, Ian Carroll, evangelical social media has been inundated in recent days with Christian influencers denouncing anti-Jewish “conspiracy theories” as being of the devil. On a scale from one to finger-wagging, the scolding has been a solid eight or nine. The Daily Wire’s Jeremy Boreing (who is Jewish) catastrophized the loudest, tweeting something about it being a dark day in the West (or something like that), and the predictable voices in evangelicalism chimed in behind him to form an Interfaith Choir of Scolding.
The only thing this tweet is missing is a gif of a pocket-watch swinging in a hypnotic fashion.
Joel Berry of the Babylon Bee also took up the scold-tweeting, warning young men of their Christian duty to not notice certain things, or have certain beliefs, or say certain words or phrases, if it’s directed at the Europeans who re-settled Palestine in 1948. And making their catastrophizing admonitions even stranger, the only so-called “conspiracy theory” concerning Jews that Carroll gave Rogan during the hours-long podcast was a statement of material fact; Epstein had very close relations with Israeli intelligence (this is beyond dispute).
One would think that conservatives like Jeremy Boreing, Owen Strachan, and Joel Berry would take a break from blasting shame-tweets like a scatter gun toward the people who are on their ever-growing list of deplorable antisemites, if it meant shedding some light on Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring. But no, they couldn’t even take a breather for the sake of exposing those behind the largest human trafficking ring (yet discovered) in modern history.
As I explained in my three-part series on The Scofield Conspiracy (available in the archives), the rise of Darby’s novel Dispensationalism convinced Christians - for the first time ever - in the late 19th and 20th Century, that Christians are obligated to show favoritism to the Jewish people. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why Strachan - who is not a Dispensationalist - consistently tweets like one. Or for that matter, Douglas Wilson over the last six months.
Collins’ remarks to Rogan simply laid out facts we already know are true. These include that many (in fact, most) of the central figures in both Epstein’s business and leisure circles were heavily associated with Mossad and Israeli Intelligence. The only conspiratorial aspect of his claim was Collins’ assumption that we would never have the full Epstein files released because it would implicate the Israeli government. That claim is something between a guess and conjecture, but those familiar with the interlinking partnership between American and Israeli intelligence wouldn’t think that’s a far fetched bet.
Epstein aside, what truly concerns me is when these evangelical influencers make such wild, broad and absolute claims denouncing any speculation that could put Jews (or the Israeli state) into a negative light, are wild-eyed conspiracy theories, it only amplifies the theory that Jews control the world. After all, the logic goes, if Jews control the evangelical influencers (as they obviously do), then the Jews must control everything (which they obviously do not).
But, it’s this tweet from Joel Berry that I want to discuss in today’s article:
Here, Berry is keeping up the attempt by Dan Crenshaw and the NeoCon leftwing of the GOP to paint dissident conservatives as “exactly like the woke left, but only the opposite.” If that sounds crazy, that “those on the right are exactly like the woke left, but only the opposite,” that’s because it is indeed nonsense. Obviously, if something is the opposite of something else, it’s not just like whatever it is that it’s opposite of.
What Berry is doing here, in keeping up this facade of a supposed “woke right,” is characterize those unwilling to denounce certain historic facts as somehow left-leaning. Not only is it our Christian duty to favor the Jewish people, Berry would have us believe, it’s our Christian duty to overlook objective reality, if that objective reality doesn’t make the state of Israel look good. For Berry, Strachan, and others like him, it’s not even enough to show favoritism to the Jewish people; they would have us believe that God Almighty requires us to show blinding loyalty to a foreign nation, a political formation, that would have us overlook any potential Israeli governmental misdeeds in the name of Christian duty.
WHAT IS WOKENESS?
The term "wokeness" has its roots in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), where "woke" originally meant being alert to social injustices, particularly racial inequality. Its modern usage can be traced back to the early 20th century, but it gained significant traction in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement. Activists used "stay woke" as a call to remain vigilant about systemic oppression and discrimination, a phrase notably popularized by Black musicians and writers like Lead Belly, who referenced it in his 1938 song "Scottsboro Boys" about a racially charged legal case. Over time, "woke" evolved from a niche term within Black communities to a broader cultural phenomenon, symbolizing awareness of societal power structures.
The ideology associated with "wokeness" as we know it today began to take shape in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, influenced by academic frameworks like critical race theory, intersectionality, and postcolonial studies. These theories, emerging from scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, emphasized how overlapping identities—race, gender, class—compound oppression, urging a deeper examination of privilege and systemic bias. The rise of social media in the 2010s, particularly platforms like Twitter, accelerated the spread of "woke" ideology, transforming it into a mainstream progressive stance. Movements like Black Lives Matter, sparked by the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, brought "wokeness" into public discourse, linking it to activism against police brutality, inequality, and cultural insensitivity.
By the mid-2010s, "wokeness" had expanded beyond its racial origins to encompass a wide array of social justice issues, including gender identity, environmental justice, and economic disparity.
WOKENESS AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL OF CULTURAL MARXISM
Cultural Marxism, as a term, originates from the Frankfurt School, a group of 20th-century. These thinkers shifted traditional Marxism’s focus from economic class struggle to cultural institutions—such as education, media, and family—arguing that these perpetuate capitalist oppression by shaping societal norms and values. Their critique aimed to expose how ideology maintains power, a concept that resonates with "woke" ideology’s emphasis on systemic inequalities embedded in culture, like racism, sexism, and heteronormativity.
"Woke" ideology shares some conceptual DNA with Cultural Marxism, particularly in its focus on deconstructing power structures and challenging dominant narratives. For instance, the "woke" lens often mirrors Marcuse’s idea of "repressive tolerance," where seemingly neutral societal norms are seen as tools of oppression that need dismantling. Intersectionality, a cornerstone of modern "woke" thought, echoes the Frankfurt School’s holistic approach to oppression, expanding beyond class to include race, gender, and other identity markers. Wokeness is nothing but a rebranded Cultural Marxism infiltrating Western institutions to undermine traditional values.
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL ORIGINS
The Frankfurt School refers to a group of scholars associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. This intellectual movement, primarily active during the mid-20th century, is best known for developing Critical Theory, a framework that critiques society, culture, and power structures with an eye toward emancipation and social change. The key figures of the Frankfurt School include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and later Jürgen Habermas, among others. Emerging in the context of Weimar Germany and the rise of fascism, their work blended Marxist theory, Freudian psychoanalysis, and cultural analysis to examine how modern capitalist societies perpetuate domination and alienation.
The Frankfurt School’s central contribution, Critical Theory, departs from traditional Marxist focus on economic determinism by emphasizing the role of culture, ideology, and mass media in maintaining social control.
While their ideas were initially marginal, they gained significant traction in the 1960s, influencing the New Left, student movements, and contemporary fields like cultural studies and sociology.
JEWISH INFLUENCE AT THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
The Frankfurt School owes much of its intellectual genesis and enduring character to the Jewish origins of its key figures, whose lives and works were indelibly marked by their Jewish identities in a Europe increasingly hostile to them.
The Institute itself was made possible by Felix Weil, a young Jewish scholar born in Argentina to a wealthy German-Jewish grain merchant, Hermann Weil. Felix, radicalized by Marxist ideas during his studies, used his inherited fortune to establish a center dedicated to social critique, appointing Carl Grünberg, a Jewish Austro-Marxist historian, as its first director. This financial and ideological foundation set the stage for a remarkable cohort of Jewish thinkers whose personal experiences as Jews navigating assimilation, exclusion, and ultimately persecution under Nazism profoundly shaped the School’s development of Critical Theory. Their Jewish heritage was not a mere footnote but a lens through which they interpreted the failures of modernity, the fragility of reason, and the mechanisms of societal domination.
The Jewish context of the Frankfurt School’s members must be understood against the backdrop of early 20th-century Germany, particularly the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), a period of both unprecedented opportunity and mounting peril for German Jews. Many of these thinkers came from assimilated or partially assimilated Jewish families who had risen to prominence in Germany’s cultural, academic, and economic spheres following Jewish emancipation in the 19th century.
This Jewish experience of living between acceptance and rejection in German society deeply informed the Frankfurt School’s critique of ideology and power. The Weimar era, with its cultural vibrancy and political instability, exposed the limits of Enlightenment promises—liberty, equality, and reason—that had once seemed to pave the way for Jewish emancipation.
As Jewish hate surged, culminating in the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, these thinkers witnessed firsthand how rationality could be twisted into tools of exclusion and genocide.
Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most explicitly Jewish in his intellectual style, brought a mystical and messianic dimension to the School’s work, rooted in Jewish theological traditions. Born in 1892 to a wealthy Berlin Jewish family, Benjamin’s writings—like his Arcades Project and Theses on the Philosophy of History—blend Marxist materialism with a Jewish sense of history as a site of potential redemption amid catastrophe. His tragic death in 1940, committing suicide at the French-Spanish border while fleeing the Nazis, underscores the personal stakes of his ideas. Similarly, Erich Fromm’s psychoanalytic explorations of authoritarianism, as in Escape from Freedom (1941), draw on a Jewish ethical imperative to resist conformity and uphold human dignity, reflecting his early immersion in Talmudic study. Herbert Marcuse, whose One-Dimensional Man (1964) critiqued the flattening of dissent in industrial societies, carried forward this legacy in the U.S., where he influenced the 1960s counterculture while never shedding his outsider’s perspective as a Jewish émigré.
The forced exile of these thinkers—most to the United States after the Institute relocated to Columbia University in New York in 1934—amplified the Jewish dimension of their contributions. Living as refugees, they grappled with displacement while adapting their critiques to American capitalism and its consumerist excesses. This experience of marginality, a hallmark of the Jewish diaspora, sharpened their sensitivity to how power operates through culture rather than just economics, distinguishing their Marxism from more orthodox strains. Their ideas later resonated with the New Left and academic fields like cultural studies, sociology, and philosophy, cementing their global influence.
WAS THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL A JEWISH PLOT?
This is the question that seems to matter most to those intent, whether through some kind of historic shaming or perhaps Dispensational priorities, are trying so hard to condemn those who recognize historic facts as historic facts.
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