Who was Antonio Gramsci?

Someone most of us would not know of, if not for Rush's 2nd book

It is not difficult to realize that the left has all the cultural power. If you doubt this, I challenge you to present one major industry where the left is not dominant. Everything from the arts, to sports, to science, to manufacturing, and on and on is owned by the left. Sure many of the people who work in these industries are conservative, but the people at the top, the people making the decisions and controlling the largest amount of cash are almost exclusively leftists. How did that situation occur? Why does the left hold all the cultural power. Turns out, the credit for that goes to an Italian Marxist named Antonio Gramsci.  And if you were listening to Rush, you knew about him in 1993.

“Gramsci succeeded in defining a strategy for waging cultural warfare—a tactic that has been adopted by the modern left, and which remains the last great hope for chronic America-basher. It is simply not possible to refocus this nation’s public-policy debate through electoral politics alone. As we saw in the 1980s, we can elect good people to high office and still lose ground in this Culture War. And, as we saw in 1992, the more ground we lose in the Culture War, the harder it is to win electoral victories. What we need to do is fight to reclaim and redeem our cultural institutions with all the intensity and enthusiasm that we use to fight to redeem our political institutions.”[1]

Gramsci was not a popular guy in his native Italy. The fascist regime sent him to jail for 20 years in an attempt to shut him up. Unfortunately, even though he died in prison, he continued to write, producing what are termed The Prison Notebooks. These were smuggled out to Moscow on his death and had an impact on Marxists throughout the world. Mao likely was familiar with Gramsci’s ideas when he implemented his Cultural Revolution. The Prison Notebooks did not make it into English in full until 1991, when they were translated into English by a team led by a professor named Joseph Buttigieg. If that last name looks familiar, it’s because that would be Mayor Pete’s dad. And you wonder why diversity hire Pete is allowing infrastructure around the country to go down the toilet? You now have an answer.