Internet conspiracy theories are great fun, to be sure: An endless pageant of highly entertaining clowns and village idiots for your enjoyment, entirely free of charge, with only a handful of stray homicidal maniacs thrown into the mix.
I love browsing ATS and other nutty sites as much as the next guy, but that slimy underbelly of hate and violence really gets to me sometimes.
EDIT:
Frankfurt school begins, 1923: Rather disappointed that the majority of the world had not undergone a marxist revolution, marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs tried to explain why. Their answer was that culture and religion blunted the proletariat’s desire to revolt, and the solution was that Marxists should carry out a “long march through the institutions” – universities and schools, government bureaucracies and the media – so that cultural values could be progressively changed from above. Adapting this, later thinkers of the Frankfurt School decided that the key to destroying capitalism was to mix up Marx with a bit of Freud, since workers were not only economically oppressed, but made orderly by sexual repression and other social conventions. The problem was not only capitalism as an economic system, but the family, gender hierarchies, normal sexuality – in short, the whole suite of traditional western values. They fled Europe during the rise of Nazism and eventually established themselves in America through New York, gaining a favourable reception amongst American and English academia. Their influence can be felt way into the modern age, where anyone studying a liberal arts course will find marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism as being the three standard 'alternative viewpoints,' modern progressive media rings and anything crazy anyone from tumblr says.
How is that supposed to be a legit conspiracy, as opposed to a shoddy wingnut bogeyman? If 20th-century Marxist criticism had any effect on anything whatsoever, it was limited to an ever-so-slight decrease in the quality of scholarship in liberal arts faculties, as this guy points out:
In my grad programme, the three words every paper needed to get an A are hegemony, discourse, and power.
I can certainly testify to the awesome power that "Marxist" codewords have on essay grading, but apart from that, it's just inconsequential academic hogwash for addled folk like meself.