The “antisemitic logic” behind the conservative counterrevolution A gyrating guitar player from Tupelo and four lads from Liverpool were part of a Communist conspiracy to poison the minds of twentieth-century youth. Or that’s how conservatives saw it then and perceive how culture works now. Greg Sargent points to a thread by Seth Cotlar on the right’s perception that “woke elites” are “orchestrating liberal cultural change.” Cotlar proposes that the right’s mantra that “politics is downstream of culture” has roots in the paranoid style of politics that sees sinister forces behind prosaic cultural changes. “Antisemitic logic,” writes the Willamette University professor of history, drives the conservative mind to postulate such notions that “((Hollywood))) secretly controls American culture and politics.” “It’s the genealogical descendent of the idea from the 1960s that the anti-christian (((Communists))) must be the force behind this rock and roll music that is poisoning the minds of white children and making them sympathetic to the civil rights movement.” Cotlar tweets. It’s similar to the most recent freakout over Bud Light advertising to LGBTQ people. As if somehow Budweiser corporation is responsible for there being trans people in the world, rather than Budweiser responding to cultural changes in order to, you know, sell beer. Authoritarian leaders and followers (and evangelicals — same thing?) are predisposed to believing cultural change is not organic, but engineered by someone(s). By the Devil. By Communists. By the international Jewish conspiracy. They view events as driven from the top down. Their counterrevolution, naturally, involves top-down…