Frankfurt School: Charlie Kirk's Origin Story for Critical Theory

Showing 11 Frankfurt School videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

The Frankfurt School anchors Charlie Kirk's standard explanation for how Critical Race Theory developed in America. Kirk describes Herbert Marcuse, associated with the school, emigrating from Germany and concluding in the 1960s that traditional economic Marxism was failing to gain traction because the American middle class was successfully integrating into a property-owning market economy. According to Kirk's account, Marcuse's response was to recast the central conflict of Marxist theory from rich versus poor into a racial framework instead, a shift Kirk argues underlies everything from DEI programs to the 1619 Project today. At a Salem-hosted panel, Kirk joined pastor and author Voddie Baucham and commentator Eric Metaxas to extend this argument into churches specifically, framing social justice theology as a repackaged version of the same underlying ideology rather than a genuinely biblical concept. Researcher Karlyn Borysenko, drawing on years of undercover reporting inside far-left organizing spaces, argued separately that activists trained in this same theoretical tradition use language like whiteness and gender strategically to target private property and the nuclear family as their real underlying goals, tying her firsthand findings to the same intellectual lineage Kirk describes.