The Authoritarian Harvest of the Frankfurt School

On September 10, 2025, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. The 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA was engaged in his characteristic campus debates. As the debate turned to the topic of mass shootings a sniper's bullet struck him in the neck. The image is seared into my mind as social media platforms were slow to prevent the proliferation of the zoomed in clips of the moment.

Tyler James Robinson, 22, surrendered the next day and now faces murder charges with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. According to law enforcement, when Robinson's parents asked why he committed this crime, he allegedly replied: "there is too much evil and the guy [Charlie Kirk] spreads too much hate."

The word "hate" is crucial to understanding not just this tragedy, but a decades-long intellectual project that has transformed American discourse. Robinson's justification echoes a framework that has become pervasive: certain speech is not merely wrong or offensive, but a form of violence that must be stopped by any means necessary.

Just months before Kirk's murder, the Southern Poverty Law Center had added Turning Point USA to its "hate map" placing it alongside actual Ku Klux Klan chapters and neo-Nazi organizations. The SPLC condemned Kirk's assassination, but notably has not removed Turning Point USA from the "hate map." As FBI Director Kash Patel noted when severing all FBI ties with the SPLC: "Their so-called hate map has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence." More on that down below.

To understand how we arrived at a moment where a young man could believe killing a political activist was an act of righteousness, we must trace an intellectual lineage back nearly a century to a group of scholars who sought to reimagine tolerance itself as a tool of oppression.

The Frankfurt School and the Birth of Critical Theory

In the aftermath of World War I, a group of neo-Marxist thinkers gathered at the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and their colleagues faced a puzzle: Why hadn't the working-class revolutions predicted by Karl Marx materialized in wealthy Western nations? Why did workers in America, Britain, and Germany seem content with capitalism?

Their answer fundamentally reframed Marxist analysis. The West, they argued, had developed a sophisticated "culture industry". This culture which encompassed media, entertainment, education, and art served to pacify the masses. This cultural apparatus didn't suppress workers through force, but rather integrated them into the system, making them complicit in their own oppression. A factory worker who spent his evenings watching Hollywood films and listening to popular music wasn't an exploited proletarian waiting to revolt; he was a satisfied consumer who had bought into capitalist values.

From this insight emerged Critical Theory, a distinct intellectual project. Unlike traditional theory, which seeks to understand or explain the world, Critical Theory explicitly aims to critique and transform society. Its method is to unmask the "hidden" power structures and forms of domination embedded in seemingly neutral institutions from family structures to grammar rules, from artistic canons to scientific methodologies.

This represented a profound shift. In the Critical Theory framework, there are no innocent traditions, no neutral standards, no objective truths that stand outside relations of power. Every cultural product, every social norm, every claim to knowledge becomes suspect and a potential tool of domination that must be deconstructed and interrogated.

The Frankfurt School's critique contained genuine insights. They correctly identified how mass media could manipulate public opinion, how propaganda worked, and how cultural institutions could reinforce unjust hierarchies. But their framework also created an intellectual foundation where all societal norms became suspect, and where all human interactions were, at their root, struggles for power.

Marcuse's Blueprint for "Liberating" Tolerance

Herbert Marcuse took these ideas and weaponized them against one of liberalism's core principles. In his 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance," he made an argument that seemed paradoxical but proved enormously influential: In a society with existing power imbalances, traditional tolerance is not liberating, it's oppressive.

Here's how the argument worked: If society already tilts heavily in favor of the powerful, then giving everyone equal freedom to speak doesn't level the playing field. The wealthy can buy media outlets, corporations can fund think tanks, and establishment voices drown out marginalized perspectives. Traditional tolerance, Marcuse argued, creates the illusion of fairness while actually preserving and legitimating the status quo. It's a sophisticated form of repression disguised as freedom.

What did Marcuse propose instead? A new kind of tolerance that he called "liberating": "intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left."

Read that again. This wasn't a call for more speech, better speech, or louder speech from marginalized voices. It was a call for the active suppression of certain viewpoints from "groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion."

The crucial question, of course, is: Who decides what counts as "aggressive," "chauvinistic," or "discriminatory"? Marcuse's answer was clear: The "oppressed" classes (which he identified as students, intellectuals, and racial minorities) would serve as the arbiters. Their targets would be the "oppressors" (business interests, the military establishment, and conservative political movements).

Marcuse was remarkably candid about the authoritarian implications of his project. He acknowledged it was "apparently undemocratic" to deny certain groups the right to organize or speak. But he justified this by claiming that a truly liberated society required these illiberal means. The end (his version of a just society) justified the means of suppression.

This framework became the intellectual ancestor of the crude oppressor-versus-oppressed binary that now dominates so much political discourse. It established a principle that would echo through the decades: Some ideas are so dangerous, some voices so tainted by privilege or power, that they forfeit the right to be heard.

Tyler Robinson, consciously or not, was operating within this framework when he pulled the trigger.

The Postmodern Turn: From Skepticism to Dogma

These ideas didn't develop in isolation. They were part of a broader intellectual earthquake: postmodernism. To understand this shift, consider three broad eras of Western thought:

Premodern: Truth is revealed through faith, tradition, and authority. The church or the king determines what is real and right.

Modern: Truth is discovered through reason, evidence, and the scientific method. The Enlightenment promised that human beings could use rational inquiry to understand reality and improve society.

Postmodern: Truth claims are "metanarratives" (grand stories that societies tell themselves) and these narratives are always exercises of power. What we call "truth" is really just the beliefs of whoever currently holds power.

The Frankfurt School's critical theories helped drive this postmodern turn. By challenging the validity of objective truth claims and emphasizing power dynamics over principles, they created an intellectual climate where certainty became suspect and skepticism became sophisticated.

French philosopher Jacques Derrida provided the methodology for this new approach. His technique of "deconstruction" became the primary weapon for applying critical theory to any text, institution, or idea. Derrida focused on "binary oppositions" which paired concepts like reason/emotion, man/woman, civilized/savage, or objective/subjective. He argued that these aren't neutral categorizations. Instead, the "privileged" term (like 'reason' or 'civilized') only gains its status by actively suppressing and defining itself against the "inferior" term ('emotion' or 'savage').

This insight had radical implications. If these categories aren't natural or neutral but rather products of power relations, then "objective reasoning" isn't a universal tool for discovering truth, rather it's a weapon that dominant groups use to silence other "ways of knowing." If "civilized" means "not savage," then Western claims to civilization are really just sophisticated forms of racism. If "rational" is defined against "emotional," then reason itself becomes a gendered tool of patriarchal oppression.

But how did these French philosophical concepts make the leap from Left Bank seminars to American college campuses and, eventually, to a Utah courtyard of the most high profile political assassination in a generation?

Academic Migration: Many Frankfurt School scholars, fleeing Nazi Germany, found positions at American universities. Marcuse himself taught at Columbia, Harvard, and UC San Diego, where his ideas directly influenced the New Left student movements of the 1960s and 70s.

Humanities Departments: Through the 1980s and 90s, postmodern critical theory became dominant in literature, cultural studies, and eventually across the humanities. Scholars like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Judith Butler translated these abstract philosophical concepts into analyses of colonialism, gender, and identity.

Activist Organizations: Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which began as a legitimate civil rights law firm, gradually adopted this framework. By the 2010s, the SPLC had expanded its mission from combating actual hate groups like the KKK to labeling mainstream conservative organizations as "extremist." Their infamous "hate map" now places conservative advocacy and outreach groups the same category as violent white supremacists.

Popular Translation: By the 2010s, these academic ideas had filtered into popular discourse through social media, activist journalism, and corporate diversity training. Concepts that originated in dense philosophical texts became simplified into slogans and frameworks accessible to anyone with a smartphone.

This evolution produced what we might call applied postmodernism or, in contemporary parlance, "woke" ideology. This represents a curious transformation: What began as radical skepticism about all truth claims hardened into a new orthodoxy with its own rigid dogmas.

In this worldview, society is fundamentally a hierarchy of groups competing for dominance. But unlike classical Marxism's focus on economic class, this new framework emphasizes race, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories. Marginalized groups are seen as having epistemic privilege by nature of having a less distorted perspective on reality because of their oppression. This gives them unique authority to define truth in their domains of experience, while dominant groups' perspectives are dismissed as inevitably biased by privilege.

The Woke Right: Illiberalism's Unexpected Convergence

Here's where the story takes an ironic turn. This postmodern disregard for objective truth in favor of raw power is no longer a left-wing monopoly.

As writer and scholar Jonathan Rauch observes , we're witnessing a troubling convergence of illiberalism. What we might call the "Woke Right" exemplified by elements of the MAGA movement and the New Right has adopted many of the same postmodern tactics it claims to oppose.

Consider the parallels:

Both sides treat political disagreement as a zero-sum war for dominance rather than a good-faith contest of ideas.

Both deploy identity politics - the left through racial and gender categories, the right through Christian nationalism and ethnic solidarity.

Both show willingness to deconstruct any institutional standard (electoral, legal, or scientific) that interferes with their power.

And crucially, both have embraced a postmodern relationship with truth, where facts matter less than narrative and claims of victimhood justify breaking norms.

Conservative writer James Lindsay memorably tested this overlap. He took passages from the Communist Manifesto , lightly reworded them to replace "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat" with nationalist and populist rhetoric, and submitted the text to the American Reformer, a Christian nationalist publication. They published it enthusiastically . The exercise revealed that radical leftist ideas could find a receptive audience among conservatives as long as the vocabulary changed. The underlying logic remained the same: History is a story of oppressor groups exploiting victim groups, neutrality is impossible, and winning requires seizing power by any means necessary.

When Tucker Carlson rails against "cosmopolitan elites" using language borrowed from mid-century European fascism, when conservative activists organize boycotts using the same tactics they decried as "cancel culture," when Republican politicians declare that elections they lose are automatically fraudulent we're seeing postmodernism in action, just with different heroes and villains.

This shouldn't surprise us. Postmodernism's core insight that claims of objectivity mask exercises of power is politically neutral. It can be deployed by anyone against any target. Once you've established that truth is just a power move, you've given everyone permission to abandon truth in favor of power.

From Theory to Violence: The Radicalization Pipeline

This philosophy has not remained confined to seminar rooms and Twitter threads. Over decades, it has transformed institutions, particularly universities, from centers of open inquiry into engines of ideological activism.

Walk onto many college campuses today and you'll encounter a worldview that would have shocked academics from just two generations ago. Students are taught that free speech is a "tool of white supremacy" used to protect racist expression. They learn that objective academic standards (standardized tests, merit-based admissions, mathematical proofs) are themselves forms of racism designed to exclude marginalized students. They're told that Israel's existence is nothing more than "settler colonialism," putting it in the same moral category as apartheid South Africa.

This isn't hyperbole. Consider these real examples from recent years:

At Stanford, the law school's dean had to apologize after students shouted down a federal judge , with an administrator telling him his speech caused "harm." At MIT, a professor was investigated for defending merit-based admissions . At Yale, students surrounded and harassed a professor for suggesting that Halloween costume guidelines were patronizing . At dozens of campuses, Israeli speakers have been disinvited or disrupted, with protesters arguing that "Zionist" perspectives constitute violence.

The Marcusean framework has become institutional policy. Many universities now have "bias response teams" that investigate speech deemed harmful to marginalized groups. They maintain expanding lists of microaggressions which are ordinary phrases supposedly laden with hidden bigotry. They've created separate orientation programs, graduation ceremonies, and housing options based on identity categories, abandoning integration in favor of what one critic called "self-segregation with a social justice gloss."

This institutional logic provides the moral architecture for a radicalization pipeline. It systematically teaches students three core premises:

Political disagreement is a form of violence.

Certain ideas are too dangerous to be heard.

Opponents are not merely wrong but complicit in oppression.

When this is the lesson, we should not be surprised when some conclude that actual violence is a justified, even necessary, form of "resistance."

We've seen this pattern play out tragically. In 2012, a domestic terrorist used the SPLC's "hate map" to target the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian think tank in Washington, D.C. He planned to kill everyone in the building. A building manager largely foiled the attack, but suffered lifelong injuries.

The man who opened fire at the 2017 Congressional Baseball practice, nearly killing then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise , followed the SPLC on Facebook.

After October 7, 2023, multiple student groups at elite universities justified Hamas's terrorist attacks as legitimate anti-colonial resistance. Professors across the country faced threats for criticizing these statements or defending Israel's right to exist. Jewish students reported being harassed, with some universities effectively endorsing or excusing this behavior as "political expression."

Political violence data from organizations like the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and analysts like Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh reveal concerning trends. To be clear, political violence remains extraordinarily rare in the United States, and historically right-wing extremism has accounted for more incidents. But the trajectory matters. When both sides embrace the logic that some ideas forfeit the right to exist, we're building toward a dangerous escalation.

This is the natural endpoint of teaching that tolerance itself is oppressive. Once you've established that certain voices are so illegitimate they don't deserve to be heard and that their very existence constitutes violence someone will eventually act on that logic.

The Incoherence at the Heart

Perhaps the deepest problem with critical theory and its postmodern descendants isn't that they're wrong, but that they're structured to be immune to rational critique.

Consider the paradoxes:

The metanarrative paradox: Postmodernism denounces all grand narratives as tools of oppression except its own grand narrative about oppression, which it treats as objective truth.

The authority paradox: It claims to speak for the marginalized and challenge power while rigidly enforcing conformity to its own hierarchy of approved thought and viciously attacking dissenters, especially those from the very marginalized groups it claims to represent.

The epistemology paradox: It asserts that objective knowledge is impossible because all claims are tainted by the knower's position in power hierarchies except for the knowledge claims of postmodernists themselves, which are somehow exempt from this critique.

The tolerance paradox: It argues we must be intolerant of intolerance but defines "intolerance" as any disagreement with its own positions, making the principle circular and self-serving.

Any attempt to critique these ideas using logic or evidence can be dismissed as an exercise of power. Push back against claims that math is racist? You're weaponizing "white rationality." Question whether all Western philosophy is merely colonialism? You're centering privileged perspectives. Ask for evidence? You're demanding that marginalized people perform emotional labor to justify their existence.

This is what philosophers call an "unfalsifiable" belief system constructed so that no evidence could possibly disprove it. Like a conspiracy theory that interprets all counter-evidence as proof of how deep the conspiracy goes, critical theory treats all criticism as confirmation of how pervasive oppression is.

This intellectual structure makes dialogue impossible. You cannot reason with someone who believes that reason itself is a tool of oppression. You cannot present evidence to someone who rejects the possibility of objective evidence. You cannot find common ground with someone who sees your very existence in a "privileged" category as an exercise of violence.

When the SPLC labels Turning Point USA a "hate group" alongside the KKK, they're not making a factual claim that can be debated. They're exercising the power to define reality itself. And when someone acts on that definition with lethal force, the internal logic is complete: They weren't committing murder; they were stopping hate.

What We've Lost

The doctrine of "repressive tolerance" now animates illiberal movements across our political spectrum. It's the logic behind:

Organizations like the SPLC that wield enormous influence over law enforcement, tech platforms, and public discourse while operating with minimal accountability

The "cancel culture" that destroys careers for decade-old tweets or unpopular opinions

Expanding "hate speech" codes that criminalize expression in Europe and blur the line between speech and action in America

Social media purges of content deemed "misinformation" based on shifting and politically convenient standards

Attacks on academic freedom where professors face investigation for teaching controversial material

The belief that some political candidates are such threats to democracy that democracy itself must be suspended to stop them

A climate where nearly 300 teachers in Texas are under investigation for speech criticizing Kirk after his death

The pattern is tragically predictable: Critical theory divides the world into rigid hierarchies of oppressor and oppressed groups. It teaches that dismantling these hierarchies justifies otherwise unacceptable means. Campus culture normalizes this worldview, eroding classical liberal norms of open debate and mutual respect. Activist organizations codify it into "hate maps" and policy recommendations. Eventually, ideas become actions. And those actions become the justification for counter-actions by the other side.

This can only lead to an endless cycle where today's oppressed become tomorrow's oppressors, wielding the same tools they once condemned. The only winner in this game is authoritarianism itself.

The Way Forward: Rebuilding Liberal Culture

The answer is not to fight illiberalism with more illiberalism. That is the trap into which both extremes have fallen. Meeting intolerance with intolerance, even in the name of defending tolerance, simply validates the logic we need to reject.

The solution requires returning to first principles:

Recommit to objective truth. Good and evil are real categories, not functions of group identity. Facts exist independent of who speaks them. The scientific method, logical reasoning, and evidence-based inquiry are not tools of oppression and they're humanity's best hope for distinguishing truth from falsehood.

Restore individual moral agency. People must be judged by their choices and actions, not their demographic categories. Charlie Kirk was not guilty of "hate" because of his political views, just as Tyler Robinson is not absolved of murder because of his grievances. Collective guilt is unjust whether applied to "white people," "men," "elites," "conservatives," "progressives," or any other group.

Defend genuine tolerance. True tolerance isn't neutrality about truth, it's the conviction that the path to truth requires protecting all viewpoints. As John Stuart Mill argued, silencing any opinion robs humanity. If the opinion is right, we're deprived of truth. If it's wrong, we lose the "clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

Rebuild institutional integrity. Universities must return to their mission of pursuing truth rather than advancing ideology. Organizations like the SPLC must be held accountable for their designation systems, or marginalized from influence entirely. Newsrooms must distinguish between journalism and activism. Scientific institutions must resist political pressure from all directions.

Accept productive discomfort. A free society will always contain ideas we find offensive, stupid, or dangerous. The answer is better ideas, not censorship. As Justice Brandeis wrote, the remedy for bad speech is "more speech, not enforced silence."

Acknowledge real injustices without accepting bad solutions. The Frankfurt School was right that power structures can perpetuate injustice. But the solution isn't to replace one orthodoxy with another, it's to create genuinely neutral principles and institutions that protect everyone's rights.

This isn't naive optimism about human nature. It's hard-won wisdom purchased with centuries of religious wars, authoritarian regimes, and ideological violence. Liberal democracy, with all its flaws and frustrations, remains humanity's best answer to the eternal question of how people with different values can live together peacefully.

Conclusion: The Uncontested Absurdity

As Ayn Rand warned, "The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology." When Herbert Marcuse argued in 1965 that true tolerance required intolerance toward the right, it seemed like fringe academic theorizing. Today, that "absurdity" has become the operating principle of major institutions.

The final, tragic irony of the Frankfurt School's legacy is its success in forging its own opposition. The illiberalism born from Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" has not created a more just society; it has created a mirror image an illiberal "New Right" that adopts the very same postmodern tactics of power it claims to despise.

This is the true, dangerous endpoint of the critical theory project. We are now trapped in an authoritarian C-clamp, where both extremes operate from the same playbook.

Both treat politics as a zero-sum war between oppressor and victim groups.

Both believe truth is a function of power and identity.

Both are convinced their opponents are not just wrong, but existential enemies to be deplatformed, disemployed, and silenced.

Both see the core institutions of a liberal society - free speech, due process, neutral standards - as obstacles to be deconstructed.

This is the real radicalization pipeline. It’s not a one-way street from a college seminar to a violent act; it’s a closed-loop system where each side's illiberalism justifies and accelerates the other's.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a horrific, but predictable, symptom of this ideological climate. When a society is saturated with the Marcusean logic that "hate" (as defined by one's political tribe) is a form of violence and that tolerance is repression, it becomes a matter of when, not if, someone will appoint themself the executioner. Tyler Robinson’s justification that he was stopping "hate" is the perfect, chilling expression of this framework.

But so, too, is the right-wing rhetoric that justifies breaking electoral or legal norms to "fight back" against a "woke" cabal. Both sides are rejecting the foundational principles of a liberal society: that individuals, not groups, are the unit of morality; that objective truth is a goal worth pursuing; and that speech is the alternative to violence, not a form of it.

The ultimate danger of the Frankfurt School's project is not that the left "won." It's that it succeeded in deconstructing the very liberal principles that protected its own thinkers from the authoritarians they fled. By convincing us that all politics is a zero-sum power struggle, this framework has locked us in a room with our enemies and told us the only way out is to fight.

Rejecting this entire framework is the essential task. This means rejecting the SPLC's "hate maps" as the illiberal, unaccountable tools they are. It also means rejecting the Christian nationalist's call for state-enforced morality and the populist's disdain for institutional norms.

The antidote to the illiberal left is not an illiberal right. The antidote is a difficult, uncompromising return to liberalism: the hard-won, uncomfortable, and non-negotiable principle that our opponents are not evil to be vanquished, but fellow citizens to be persuaded.