The problem with "Cultural Marxism" as a term is that it's extremely ambiguous. Some people use this term as essentially a shorthand for Marxist cultural analysis, which broadly describes any and all Marxist approaches to the cultural sphere. Others take it to refer to a purported conspiracy involving the Frankfurt School's supposed aim to take over Western culture and subvert it from within.
What makes this an especially thorny issue is that there has been a very real fascination with cultural subversion among Western left-wing radicals since the 1960s and 1970s, on the model of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ("Destroy the Four Olds, usher in the Four News!") and quite a few of those left-wing radical groups did indeed meld these Maoist ideas with those of the Frankfurt School (for example, "Marx, Mao, Marcuse!" was a common street slogan in the French protests of the late 1960s).
So one could retrospectively surmise that not all of the descriptions one sees in the more conspiratorial accounts of "Cultural Marxism" are entirely without merit. The difference is one of scale, time frame and perhaps motive: was this a purposeful conspiracy involving the Frankfurt School itself from the outset, or just something that arose later within Western radical politics, out of deeply misguided fascination with what was going on in places like China and perhaps Cambodia? It seems clear that the former description is quite wrong, and that those who cling to it are indeed doing so in bad faith. But I can see how some of this could be quite confusing!
What makes this an especially thorny issue is that there has been a very real fascination with cultural subversion among Western left-wing radicals since the 1960s and 1970s, on the model of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ("Destroy the Four Olds, usher in the Four News!") and quite a few of those left-wing radical groups did indeed meld these Maoist ideas with those of the Frankfurt School (for example, "Marx, Mao, Marcuse!" was a common street slogan in the French protests of the late 1960s).
So one could retrospectively surmise that not all of the descriptions one sees in the more conspiratorial accounts of "Cultural Marxism" are entirely without merit. The difference is one of scale, time frame and perhaps motive: was this a purposeful conspiracy involving the Frankfurt School itself from the outset, or just something that arose later within Western radical politics, out of deeply misguided fascination with what was going on in places like China and perhaps Cambodia? It seems clear that the former description is quite wrong, and that those who cling to it are indeed doing so in bad faith. But I can see how some of this could be quite confusing!