By Boyd Cathey
September 23, 2026
Over five decades ago, between grad schools, I served as the assistant to conservative writer and philosopher Russell Kirk, in Mecosta, Michigan. Being a Southern boy, the one significant thing I recall about the climate up there was that we had snow on the ground -and lots of it-from around Thanksgiving all the way until April. So, other than my secretarial duties for Dr. Kirk, I had plenty of time to read (the Kirks had no television). And with Russell's library of over 30,000 books I had a bibliophile's cornucopia at my fingertips ! Not only that, he was one of the most widely read of "teachers" a young grad student could ever have. I learned much in my conversations with "the Sage of Mecosta."
In addition to his vast collection of histories and biographies, I was able to read great literature, the classics-Sir Walter Scott, Donald Davidson and the Southern Agrarians, Jonathan Swift, Robert Lewis Stevenson, T. S. Eliot, and more ancient, Plutarch's Lives, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Norse Sagas, and, my favorites, the Spaniards Unamuno and Donoso Cortes. I mention these not to boast, but only to say that my year with Dr. Kirk was very fruitful in multiple ways that I only now appreciate.
As I reflect on those volumes, passages from many of those classics come back to me, and many times seem to speak to our times.
This morning one passage came to me. It is from Benjamin Disraeli, the great Conservative 19th century British prime minister, prominently featured in Kirk's signature work, The Conservative Mind (1953). It comes from one of Disraeli's novels, Coningsby (1844). Here it is: "So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."
Now, I am disinclined to be a "conspiracy theorist" who believes a few mysterious men have gathered in secreted, smoke-filled rooms to plot the destiny of the world. And, yet, there is something very sobering and real in what Disraeli wrote; it fits our modern age. He authored those words over 180 years ago. But today, as we survey the decaying remnants of a culture that once was proudly the "Christian West," that is, our inherited European civilization that has been with us and has shaped and annealed us for nearly two millennia-as we behold the very open, no-holds-barred attacks on this legacy, it is apparent that this decay and decrepitude has arrived not by accident, or even by frontal assault. Rather, the great success of Marxism and its successor, post-Marxist nihilism, has been to subvert and influence, to transform, the culture of the West from within, as if clandestinely.
Around the time of the First World War the Italian Communist theoretician, Antonio Gramsci, formulated a theory which was denominated "cultural hegemony." The brilliant Gramsci, viewing the failure of "war communism" to overthrow the traditional order in Europe, understood that Marxist Revolution could never be successful in its campaign against the historic Christian West through open armed conflict. Despite the ravages and debilitating effects of 19th century liberalism, an overarching, traditionalist cultural and religious template-a "cultural hegemony"-yet guided much of Western thought, set standards, and governed conduct, despite the ravages of the First World War. This cultural hegemony, Gramsci postulated, must be overturned and replaced. The West would only be conquered if its traditional cultural and religious bases, grounded in an orthodox Christian faith, were transformed.
The past century has witnessed the implementation of this strategy, and, ironically, more so by zealous post-Marxists in our midst, and far less so by the more conservative and more nationalist Soviet Communists, especially under the guidance of Josef Stalin. This "cultural" revolutionary long-march through our institutions began in earnest in the academy, in our schools and colleges. Various observers point to the tremendously wide-ranging success of the "Frankfort School" Marxist intellectuals, who, being Jewish, were driven out of National Socialist Germany in the 1930s and thereupon set up shop in the United States at Columbia University. From that secure perch they exercised incredible influence in nearly every aspect of American (and European) intellectual life.
Indeed, as a grad student I remember that various works by Herbert Marcuse (in philosophy), Theodor Adorno (in sociology and music theory), Max Horkheimer (in social psychology), Erich Fromm (in psychoanalysis), and Jurgen Habermas (in history) were all the rage-several of my grad professors enthusiastically attempted to impose them on me and my fellow grad students. What I began to realize even then was, taken as a whole, and with additional ideological support from such influential writers as Frantz Fanon (on colonialism, imperialism and "white oppression") and Michel Foucault (on the transformation of social and political structures, and critical theory), what was occurring was an immense and universal effort to alter not just thinking patterns and social and political objectives, but how we saw reality and the nature of our very language, itself.
And there was very little real opposition: the dominant intellectual force in the West through much of the 20th century was a pliant and intellectually bankrupt classical liberalism, which could not withstand the withering critiques launched against it by cultural revolution. Indeed, it can be argued that liberalism prepared the terrain for its success.
Those older "liberal" writers and professors had done their damnedest to critique and bring down an even older, traditional order, politically, socially, and religiously, but they had nothing better or more permanent to replace it with. Their theories about "liberal democracy," "equality," "civil rights," and "liberalization," advocated and implemented to take the place of fealty to inherited tradition, belief in religious orthodoxy, and the existence of social orders and the inherent recognition that inequality is a natural condition of life-those nostrums, having weakened both the political and social fabric of historic Western society, left Europe and America open to the dazzlingly seductive attractions of a revolutionary post-Marxism which was not, like the Soviet brand, stodgy and kleptocratic.
The future of the world lay not with those septuagenarian and fossilized commissars standing immobile in Red Square annually on May Day to review Soviet armed might; it was with those internationalist cultural revolutionaries who had, over the decades, revolutionized the thinking, goals, and very language of the West-and whose mindset, whose template, had not only re-recreated a new strain of Marxism, but had established its preeminence and "cultural hegemony" across the broad spectrum of all Western thought and culture.
This, then, is what those of us yet faithful to that much older tradition, that orthodox Christian and Western inheritance, face. Across the political and cultural landscape even those supposed opponents of this advancing fanatical Progressivism-and their final assault on what is left of our inherited but severely endangered legacy-those supposed opponents employ its language and tacitly accept its ultimate objectives. Thus, those so-called Neoconservatives and their Republican camp followers serve, in their own circuitous manner, to both enable and eventually sanctify the conquests of the Progressivist and neo-Marxist advances.
Still, the universal conflict, which apparently seemed lost for us, is not over. The fitful populist awakening here in the United States and the growth of a nationalist conservative and traditionalist reaction in Europe, illustrate that.
And that is precisely why we see the increased, feverish, and hysterically unbridled reactions by the multifaceted forces of the Progressivist "Deep State." That reaction takes many forms, most particularly in the United States by the open warfare waged by the Mainstream Media and its acolytes in both political parties, in academia, and in popular culture.
Among the influential, worldwide "gray eminences"-political and spiritual "godfathers"-of the Progressivist offensive is the international billionaire George Soros, whose tentacles reach into nearly every corner of the world and whose Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) work on the ground to influence and subvert any nation that may resist incorporation into a New World Order, the actual and ultimate objective of the Deep State, and, thus, the final stage and triumph of a new "cultural hegemony" envisaged by Antonio Gramsci.
Soros's bloody vision, on numerous occasions, conveniently coincides with the overall goals of Deep State/establishment American foreign policy, whether in far off Ukraine, in the Middle East, or in countless other locales. With his pyramid of pass-through funding foundations, his NGOs, and his close linkage and connections to leaders in the European Union, Washington, on Wall Street, and among "establishment conservatism," he pushes his globalist agenda. And increasingly Soros and others like him lend support to efforts domestically, as well.
If you mention him critically or his international, behind-the-scenes influence, you are immediately labeled a "conspiracy theorist nut" or worse.
Yet, Soros fits Disraeli's description of 180 years ago; if there ever was confirmation, he exemplifies it and exemplifies dozens of other like-minded figures in the world today. He epitomizes that occult face of the "blood dimmed tide" of Revolution against God and man that poet William Butler Yeats warned of in 1919-at the very same moment in time when Antonio Gramsci was authoring his theories that would prove so fatal to the West.
He who would know the truth, must then act upon it. Over the past century or so the actual character, the real face of the Revolution, has been revealed as perhaps never before. Although lacking many of the resources and weaponry of our Enemies, those of us resolved not only to defend what is left of our culture and our Western Christian civilization, and, if possible, to begin a restoration, must be as bold and as cunning as Nathan Bedford Forrest, as wise and as prudential as Marse Robert Lee, and as patient and as calculating as our Enemies who understood that to conquer the seemingly unconquerable, it would take time, and above all, persistence, intelligence and constancy. And, for us, at the foundation of it all, Faith.