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Gates is a noted philanthropist and has pledged a significant amount of money to research and charitable causes during the coronavirus pandemic. He has given more than $50 billion to charity since. Natalie McLennan, a native of Montreal, was a 24-year-old aspiring actress in 2004 when she started working for NY Confidential, a top-end escort service in New York City.

In August 1989, Poland’s parliament did the unthinkable. The Soviet satellite state elected an anti-communist as its new prime minister.

The world waited with bated breath to see what would happen next. And then it happened: nothing.

When no Soviet tanks deployed to Poland to crush the rebels, political movements in other nations—first Hungary, followed by East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania—soon followed in what became known as the Revolutions of 1989.

The collapse of Communism had begun.

‘Marx's Ideological Heirs’

On October 25, 1989, a mere two months after Poland’s pivotal election, the New York Times published an article, headlined “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges,” describing a strange and seemingly paradoxical phenomenon. Even as the world’s great experiment in Marxism was collapsing for all to see, Marxist ideas were taking root and becoming mainstream in the halls of American universities.

Dating Service That Has Been Featured In Forbes, Ny Times, Usa Today, Etc

“As Karl Marx's ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders,” wrote Felicity Barringer.

There were notable differences, however. The stark, unmistakable contrast between the grinding poverty of the Communist nations and the prosperity of Western economies had obliterated socialism’s claim to economic superiority.

As a result, orthodox Marxism, with its emphasis on economics, was no longer in vogue. Traditional Marxism was “retreating” and had become “unfashionable,” the Times reported.

'There are a lot of people who don't want to call themselves Marxist,” Eugene D. Genovese, an eminent Marxist academic, told the Times. (Genovese, who died in 2012, later abandoned socialism and embraced traditional conservatism after rediscovering Catholicism.)

Marxism wasn’t truly retreating, however. It was simply adapting to survive.

Watching the upheaval in Poland and other Eastern bloc nations had convinced even Marxists that capitalism would not “give way to socialism” anytime soon. But this would cause an evolution of Marxist ideas, not an abandonment of them.

'Marx has become relativized,” Loren Graham, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times.

Graham was just one of a dozen of the scholars the Times spoke to, a mix of economists, legal scholars, historians, sociologists, and literary critics. Most of them seemed to reach the same conclusion as Graham.

Marxism was not dying, it was mutating.

'Marxism and feminism, Marxism and deconstruction, Marxism and race - this is where the exciting debates are,' Jonathan M. Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, told the paper.

Marxism was still thriving, Barringer concluded, but not in the social sciences, “where there is a possibility of practical application,” but in abstract fields such as literary criticism.

A Strategic Shift

Marxism was not defeated. The Marxists had just staked out new turf.

And it was a highly strategic move. “Practical application” of Marxism had proven disastrous. Communism had been tried as a governing philosophy and had failed catastrophically, leading to mass starvation, impoverishment, persecution, and murder. But, in the ivory tower of the American university system, professors could inculcate Marxist ideas in the minds of their students without risk of being refuted by reality.

Yet, it wasn’t happening in university economics departments, because Marxism’s credentials in that discipline were too tarnished by its “practical” track record. Instead, Marxism was thriving in English departments and other more abstract disciplines.

In these studies, economics was downplayed, and other key aspects of the Marxist worldview came to the fore. The Marxist class war doctrine was still emphasized. But instead of capital versus labor, it was the patriarchy versus women, the racially privileged versus the marginalized, etc. Students were taught to see every social relation through the lens of oppression and conflict.

After absorbing Marxist ideas (even when those ideas weren’t called “Marxist”), generations of university graduates carried those ideas into other important American institutions: the arts, media, government, public schools, even eventually into human resources departments and corporate boardrooms. (This is known as “the long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by Communist student activist Rudi Dutschke, whose ideas were influenced by early twentieth-century Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci.)

Indeed, it was recently revealed that federal agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars on programs training employees to acknowledge their “white privilege.” These training programs are also found in countless schools and corporations, and people who have questioned the appropriateness of these programs have found themselves summarily fired.

A huge part of today’s culture is a consequence of this movement. Widespread “wokeness,” all-pervasive identity politics, victimism, cancel culture, rioters self-righteously destroying people’s livelihoods and menacing passersby: all largely stem from Marxist presumptions (especially Marxism’s distorted fixations on oppression and conflict) that have been incubating in the universities, especially since the late 80s.

As it turned out, what was happening in American universities in 1989 was just as pivotal as what was happening in European parliaments.

Especially in an election year, it can be easy to fixate on the political fray. But the lesson of 1989 is that today’s culture and ideas are tomorrow’s politics and policies.

That is why the fate of freedom rests on education.

To advance the cause of freedom for today and tomorrow, please support the Foundation for Economic Education.

Correction: This article originally stated that Gramsci coined the phrase “the long march through the institutions.”

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On Thursday, Facebookannounced the start-up in the United States of Facebook Dating, a product that allows users to search for love all without the hassle of leaving the app where your angry uncle continues to share recycled memes about “Crooked Hillary.”

The feature was first announced in 2018 and is up and running in 20 countries as of Thursday.

Most companies would consider it poor timing to roll out a feature offering to manage the love lives of its users the day after reports of a large data breach. But in defense of Facebook — which is constantly resetting its “Days Without an Embarrassing Privacy Failure” counter — there’s almost never a good time.

Yes, you absolutely deserve a lifetime of love and happiness, and yes, there’s a decent argument to be made that Facebook knows more about you than any rival dating service ever could. But even if Facebook has the kind of weapons-grade algorithms that might move fast and break your dry spell, trusting the company with your love life feels like a disaster waiting to happen.

[As technology advances, will it continue to blur the lines between public and private? Sign up for Charlie Warzel’s limited-run newsletter to explore what's at stake and what you can do about it.]

This may seem uncharitable. After all, the company is framing Facebook Dating as altruism. “Right now it’s a really feel-good mission. It’s just connecting people,” Nathan Sharp, one of Facebook’s product managers, told reporters on Thursday. “There are no plans for ads and no plans for subscriptions.”

No ads.

No revenue.

Just love.

What’s in it for Facebook? The cynical observer might notice that Dating, apart from “just connecting people,” is also a clever backdoor for Facebook to do some mingling of its own. Specifically, to help merge and integrate its legacy product with Instagram, which it acquired in 2012. Unlike Facebook proper, the dating app lets users import Instagram photos and (soon) Instagram Stories into their profiles. The feature will also allow daters to add their Instagram followers to a widget called “Secret Crush,” which will notify you if your crush also adds you to his or her crush list.

Dating apps are home to some of the most sensitive personal information we choose to disclose (locations, interests, pictures, career history and all of our tastes and personal preferences). It adds up. In 2017, a French journalist used European Union privacy laws to request her Tinder data and received 800 pages of what she described as “a trip into my hopes, fears, sexual preferences and deepest secrets.” Which is another way of saying that this is information you want protected at all costs.

Plenty of legacy dating apps aren’tmuchbetter with privacy and security. But protecting your romantic secrets is a job that Facebook seems, given its history of data breaches, uniquely unqualified for. Sensing this, the company wrote a blog post assuring users that dating profiles would be mostly separate from traditional Facebook profiles (only the user’s first name and age will automatically populate in a dating profile; the rest need to be added by the user) and that information will be secure and opt-in. “Not everyone on Facebook is interested in dating, which is why we made Facebook Dating a separate, opt-in experience,” the blog post reads. “That means we won’t create a Facebook Dating profile for your account unless you specifically choose to create one.”

How charitable!

Those assurances are no match for the company’s recent history. Since 2017, Facebook has come under fire for:

  • Wednesday’s report from TechCrunch of an “exposed server” that “contained more than 419 million records over several databases on users across geographies, including 133 million records on U.S.-based Facebook users, 18 million records of users in the U.K., and another with more than 50 million records on users in Vietnam.”

  • A security flaw that potentially exposed the public and private photos of as many as 6.8 million users on its platform to developers.

  • A different bug that exposed up to 30 million users’ personal information last September.

  • An admission that the company “unintentionally uploaded” the email contacts of 1.5 million new Facebook users since May 2016.

  • The Cambridge Analytica scandal, where data from tens of millions of users was misappropriated and shared for profiling for political campaigns (but, sure, trust it to keep your secret crush).

The voter profiling resulted in a record $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission. Would you trust your dating profile, history and all of its attendant personal data to a company that the F.T.C. chairman noted in July had “failed to live up to its commitments” to “establish a reasonable program to protect privacy” over the last seven years?

Many people will! After all, billions of people still log into Facebook and deposit personal information despite its regular privacy failures. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And for those who are fed up with Facebook but just can’t seem to quit it, abstinence from using its dating feature is a tiny, yet satisfying way to protest the brazen platform.

But don’t take my word for it. Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said it best last year in bold font newspaper ads. “We have a responsibility to protect your information,” he wrote. “If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”

Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one. For more detail please see our privacy policy and our publisher’s description of The Times’s practices and continued steps to increase transparency and protections.

Follow @privacyproject on Twitter and The New York Times Opinion Section on Facebook and Instagram.

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