“Agitprop has been the method for destroying America’s culture and rebuilding it as Cultural Marxism.”
      John Harmon McElroy, Agitprop in America

Agitprop in America
John Harmon McElroy
Arktos, 2020 

“You can live with the loss of certainty, but not of belief.” So begins John Harmon McElroy’s recently-published Agitprop in America, an almost 400-page book on America’s increasing distance from former beliefs, wholesale adoption of new ones, and the methods by which this transformation was brought about. A cultural historian, McElroy is a professor emeritus of the University of Arizona and was a Fulbright scholar at universities in Spain and Brazil. I suspect Agitprop in America is an exercise in catharsis for the author. During the course of the volume McElroy is clearly, to borrow Melville’s famous words, “driving off the spleen,” by which I mean that he is dispensing with many years of excess feelings of irritation, built up over a career in decaying academia. In Agitprop in America, McElroy takes aim at a succession of modern academia’s sacred cows, with chapters covering Marxist history and propaganda techniques, “social justice” activism, mandatory diversity, political correctness, free speech, snowflake culture, government spending, and the dominance of Cultural Marxism in the American education system. One of the book’s more unique features is a 107-page lexicon of 234 terms (from Ableism to Xenophobia) explaining the invention and employment of language as a method of cultural transformation via agitprop. The book is written in a terse, urgent style reminiscent of Hillaire Belloc, and McElroy comes across confident, bullish, and confrontational, all of which contributes character to what is one of the more original and interesting books I’ve read thus far in 2020.

“Instead of overturning the U.S government by force and taking comprehensive control of the United States all at once, the Counter Culture/Political Correctness Movement has been engaged for the last fifty years in gradually but relentlessly transforming the United States from within little by little, by co-opting its institutions and destroying existing cultural beliefs slowly and methodically, and replacing them with the dogmas of Marxism. (8)”

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/04/24/review-agitprop-in-america/

For further background on Agitprop as it was formulated in China under Lin Biao in the years leading up to Chiang Kai-Schek’s  exile government in Taiwan after the Red Army took over mainland China under Chairman Mao, please check this out:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lin-biao/index.htm

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lin-biao/1965/09/peoples_war/index.htm