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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

"the growing influence of US-style identity politics."

Somewhat ironic but also dystopian that something that was born out of US intelligence agencies (identity politics) is now infecting the world.

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It's been a theory of mine that US intelligence agencies are involved in pushing identity politics as well, but I haven't seen hard evidence. Do you have any articles or other links?

A pretty key element of the entire Cold War was US intelligence agencies pushing racial, ethnic, national, religious, and other identity politics — and pushing groups embracing them to violent extremism — as a tool against Communism and Soviet-aligned regimes.

Of course, another big part of that was the USSR doing to the same thing against western capitalism and US-aligned regimes.

A lot of people have made connections between the office of strategic operations and the Frankfurt school of sociology.

A lot of reading material down that rabbit hole. Very interesting.

This goes back to Soviet cold-war-era psy-ops. They planted the seeds in the US and now the US is exporting it to the rest of the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI

There are rumors that Foucault was promoted by CIA money. If it's true, it's likely because he was an anti-USSR French leftist as opposed to all the pro-USSR French leftists.

As if Foucault has had any major influence. He's literally one among thousands of philosophers and by far not the most popular one. I'm working in a philosophy institute and of all 60+ researchers there is but one postdoc who takes Foucault as a basis of his own theorizing.

Foucault has had a huge amount of influence, though mostly not in philosophy.

In my experience he's inescapable in the humanities.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault#Influence_and_...

I work in the humanities and disagree. I know plenty of people in neighboring disciplines, too, and can assure you that you won't need to read Foucault in any of them if you don't want to.

Apart from “hard” evidence, have you seen any evidence at all?

Just circumstantial:

* Politicians using it as a technique to divide people. It definitely ramps up around elections

* Bots on twitter and Reddit pushing it

* Meeting several "woke" people deployed by the state department in foreign countries

* The narratives are all usually very flawed and crafted to cause outrage rather than right previous wrongs or bring people together

“identity politics” are older than the US, not a creation of US intelligence agencies.

I think someone got carried away by the recent mention of Gloria Steinem’s relationship to the CIA.

I have never heard this claim that it was born out of intelligence agencies.

Can i get some sources on this?

It's almost as if cultural imperialism is a real thing!

Every theory (whether true or not) I've heard is this post modernist ideology came out of the French academia. Foucault, Derrida, etc. are who the American right wing blames for IDPOL

Noam Chomsky has some venomous words on French intellectual culture and post-modernism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cqTE_bPh7M

> The French intellectuals tend to be ... media stars. The French intellectuals are taken very seriously. They're on the front pages of Le Monde... If you want to be taken seriously, you have to have something exciting to say... And it's not easy to come up with exciting new ideas, so you have to come up with crazy ideas. Then they can make it to the front pages... One of the ways to have exciting new ideas is to tear everything to shreds and say everything is wrong: "The Enlightenment is wrong [etc.]"

Deconstructionism is a tragic mess. Tragic because the benefits it gave are getting overshadowed by base destruction with little to no return, and in fact a net cost as we relearn old lessons with real human consequences in the gap.

The popular thing to do in intellectual circles is to blame America for all of the world's problems, so it's no surprise to me that we're getting the blame for this one as well.

How has US intelligence agencies promoted identity politics? FoxNews, gop, news max are not us intelligence agencies.

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