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.

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

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.

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