The Ideology Destroying the West | Emmet Connor

ELI5 / TLDR

Emmet Connor — Irish author of Red Pandemic — argues that Marxism never died after the Soviet Union collapsed; it just changed clothes. What we now call “globalism” (the UN, WEF, EU, NGO complex) is, in his telling, the same revolutionary project, repackaged. Peter McCormack pushes back gently throughout: maybe these people just want the Nordic model, maybe a lot of it is organic stupidity rather than Marxist plotting. They land somewhere in between — a long, sometimes circular conversation about education capture, the Fabian Society, mass immigration, the branding problem on the right, and why young voters keep drifting left.

The Full Story

The core claim

Connor’s thesis is simple and totalising: Marxism is not an economic system, it’s a “global revolutionary movement that seeks to destroy the established order and rebuild it as a sort of utopia.” Socialism is the bridge. Communism is the imaginary endpoint. Everything in between — feminism, trans rights, climate activism, mass immigration, ESG, DEI — is the same class-struggle template applied to a new pair of categories: oppressor and oppressed.

“Globalism is just global communism repackaged.”

McCormack opens with the obvious objection: aren’t we just calling everything we don’t like Marxist? Connor concedes the point as a danger but holds the line — once you know what to look for, he says, the fingerprints are everywhere.

Marxism vs leftism vs “be kind”

The most useful stretch of the conversation is McCormack trying to nail down where leftism ends and Marxism begins. His test case is a woman he argued with on Twitter that morning who said she’d “rather be poor than an asshole.” She doesn’t think she’s a Marxist. She thinks she’s a decent person who wants society to take care of people.

Connor’s answer: the movement is so big it accommodates every personality type. There are conscious Marxists at the top (the Fabians, the WEF crowd, NGO operators) and tens of millions of useful idiots underneath who’ve absorbed the vocabulary without knowing the source. The marker isn’t whether someone has read Marx — it’s whether they reach for class-struggle framing by reflex. Rich-vs-poor, man-vs-woman, white-vs-black, planet-vs-industry. Same template, different costume.

The Fabian Society

Connor returns to the Fabians repeatedly. Founded with a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing crest, designed by George Bernard Shaw, the society’s strategy was “creeping socialism” through institutions — education, media, the civil service. He claims every senior Labour figure from Attlee through Starmer has Fabian ties, and that the London School of Economics (Soros’s alma mater) was a Fabian project. The picture he paints is of a multi-decade infiltration: capture the universities, then secondary schools, then primaries, then you don’t need to win arguments because the next generation arrives pre-loaded.

Could they be wrong about themselves?

McCormack’s sharpest pushback is that the people pushing this don’t actually want communism — they’re billionaires, they like being billionaires, they have no interest in a stateless society. What they want, he suggests, is Norway. Social democracy. Tax the rich a bit, redistribute, keep capitalism, keep property rights. Connor half-concedes: “Possibly, yeah,” then redirects to the argument that intentions don’t matter because the tactics produce the same outcome regardless.

“I don’t think many of these people genuinely want communism. If you ask them if they wanted socialism, I think a lot of them would say they do. But they don’t know that socialism is the step from capitalism to communism.”

This is McCormack at his most interesting — he’s identified a contradiction in Connor’s framing and Connor mostly slides past it.

The branding problem on the right

Halfway through, McCormack pulls up a UK voting intentions chart by age. 18-24: 38% Green, 18% Labour, only ~21% voting right of centre. The pattern holds — older means more conservative — but Connor and McCormack both worry it’s not a maturation curve, it’s an indoctrination curve. The 18-24s of six years from now will have had even more years of school under captured curricula.

The right, they agree, has a branding problem. Climate strikes feel like a party. Reform rallies feel like men in suits and ties being told they’re fascists. McCormack’s diagnosis:

“It is far cooler to be pro-freedom, pro-liberty. It’s far cooler for you to have discipline over your life, to earn your own money, to not rely on the state, to be well-read, to study history.”

Whether teenagers will actually find it cooler is the open question.

The red-green alliance

The strangest stretch is on Islam. Connor argues that Marxism (atheist, revolutionary) and Islam (religious, expansionist) shouldn’t be allies but functionally are — both anti-Western, both hostile to Christianity, both with totalising ambitions. The Marxists, in his telling, accept the demographic consequences of mass immigration because the destruction of the existing order is the goal, and they assume they can manage what comes next. He doesn’t pretend this isn’t a contradiction.

Mass immigration as the load-bearing example

If there’s one issue where Connor thinks the Marxist fingerprint is undeniable, it’s mass immigration. Western nations cast as historical oppressors, third-world nations as the oppressed, therefore open borders are a moral debt. Combine that with collapsing birth rates (which he attributes to feminism, trans ideology, and abortion normalisation) and you get demographic replacement. McCormack mostly agrees the policy is destructive but is more careful about apportioning cause.

Fascism, corporatism, COVID

A digression that goes somewhere. McCormack notes that under COVID we saw small businesses crushed while McDonald’s stayed open, public-private partnerships proliferated, and large corporations got regulatory protection from the state. Isn’t that more Mussolini than Marx? Connor’s answer is that modern China — Deng-onwards — does the same thing: state-managed capitalism with the Party watching. Communism has absorbed corporatist tactics. The labels have melted into each other, which is why he prefers “global revolution” as the umbrella term.

Trump, nationalism, and the danger from the right

The most honest moment in the conversation is McCormack’s section on Trump. He explicitly says the Iran war was stupid, that Trump has become “just another neocon,” that Tucker, Megyn Kelly, and Dave Smith have all turned. Nationalism, he points out, can go bad — Mussolini was popular until he invaded Ethiopia. Connor mostly waves this off (Ireland’s not invading anyone, the real threat is from China/Russia/North Korea) but the question hangs.

Geopolitics and the new communist alliance

Connor’s strongest move is reframing what’s happening as a geopolitical struggle, not just a culture war. Russia, China, North Korea — sharing borders, military allies, all dictatorships, all with communism in the institutional DNA — are coordinating against a Western bloc that’s been hollowed out from within for decades. He cites Yuri Bezmenov (the Soviet defector) and Anatoliy Golitsyn: communism didn’t die in 1989, it just changed clothes and went underground. Whether this is true or just a satisfying framing depends a lot on whether you think Putin’s Russia is meaningfully Marxist anymore. Connor thinks the DNA is what matters, not the current rhetoric.

Solutions

Light on these, mostly. Connor wants patriotic, sovereignty-first governments. McCormack wants smaller state, lower tax, freedom of speech, a network of companies that won’t fire you for thinking out loud. Both want parents to take education seriously and not outsource their kids’ worldviews to whoever wrote the school curriculum. Both think the right needs to organise instead of fracture. Neither has a real answer for how you reverse a multi-decade institutional capture without sounding exactly like the authoritarian you’re warning about.

“We have to be very good at psychology here… when someone has that reaction to you — aggression if you challenge the belief — that’s actually fear.”

Key Takeaways

Marxism as fluid umbrella: Connor’s working definition is “international revolutionary movement to destroy the existing order and rebuild as utopia.” Wider than the textbook definition. Useful as a heuristic, dangerous as a cudgel.
Class-struggle template: oppressor/oppressed binary applied serially — economic class, race, gender, sexuality, climate. The pattern is the diagnostic, not the specific issue.
Fabian gradualism: capture the universities first, then schools, then media, then the bureaucracy. Slow, deniable, multi-decade.
Useful idiots vs conscious cadres: most leftists aren’t reading Marx — they’ve absorbed vocabulary and reflexes from a captured education system. The conscious operators are smaller in number and harder to identify.
The Nordic model question: most modern self-described socialists want Sweden, not Cuba. Whether the tactics they back actually take you to Sweden or somewhere else is the open question.
Branding asymmetry: climate protests feel cool; conservative events feel like a HR seminar. The right is losing the under-25s and the gap is growing.
Red-green alliance: anti-Western coalition between progressive movements and conservative Islam is functionally real even though their stated values are opposed.
Geopolitical layer: Russia/China/North Korea as a coordinated anti-Western bloc is treated as continuous with the cultural fight at home.
Parents as first line of defence: prevention beats cure once neuroplasticity drops in adulthood.

Claude’s Take

This is a long conversation built on a totalising frame, and the frame does a lot of work — sometimes too much. Connor’s “everything is Marxism” lens has the same shape as the woke “everything is white supremacy” lens he criticises. Both are unfalsifiable: any counter-example becomes evidence the enemy is just clever at hiding. When McCormack points out that ESG/corporatist COVID dynamics look more like Mussolini than Marx, Connor’s answer is that communism has absorbed those tactics. When McCormack says modern leftists don’t actually want stateless utopia, Connor says intentions don’t matter. The frame eats its own objections.

That said, there’s real signal underneath. The Fabian gradualism story is well-documented. The institutional capture of Western universities by a particular ideological strand is hard to argue with. The Marxist genealogy of intersectional oppressor/oppressed framing — Frankfurt School, Gramsci, the post-modernists — is a legitimate intellectual history that the left often pretends isn’t there. The branding asymmetry on the right is real and the voting-by-age chart is genuinely worrying if you don’t think it’s just a maturation curve.

McCormack is the more honest interlocutor here. He keeps trying to draw distinctions Connor wants to collapse, and his Trump section — “he’s just another neocon” — is the kind of thing a true believer wouldn’t say. The conversation is better for the friction between them.

The two biggest gaps: First, almost no engagement with the strongest version of the leftist case (some of the disparities they point at are real — Connor name-checks Grace Blakeley but doesn’t actually engage). Second, no serious answer to what authoritarianism from the right looks like and how to avoid it. “Patriotic chauvinism, not supremacy” is a slogan, not a mechanism.

Score: 5/10. Worth listening if you want the full version of this argument from someone who’s been making it for over a decade. Not a primer if you don’t already have your own pushback ready — the framing is too one-directional to absorb passively.